History

Leo Litwak is a retired San Francisco State University professor of English. He's the author of the new memoir, The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of World War II (Penguin Books). Litwak was a 19-year-old medic. One reviewer writes, "[A] book that should be given to every schoolboy in the country at the age of 13... the Medic teaches us so much, makes clear that sometimes the monsters in war are not only the enemy."

Dr. David Zangen, senior pediatrician, and Dr. Radgonde Amer, an ophthalmologist at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. They are part of the group of Arab and Jewish doctors who work side by side at the hospital treating casualties of the conflict in the Middle East.

Writer Gary Shteyngart. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, is receiving critical acclaim. The main character of the book, like Shteyngart, is a Russian-American Jew who emigrated to the United States as a child. In a New York Times Magazine cover article, Daniel Zalewski wrote, "Gary Shteyngart has rewritten the classic immigrant narrative — starring a sarcastic slacker instead of a grateful striver. And after all his parents have done for him!"

Retired Navy Capt. Peter Huchthausen wrote the book K19: The Widowmaker: The Secret Story of the Soviet Nuclear Submarine. This true story of a barely averted catastrophe aboard a nuclear-powered submarine has been adapted into a film of the same name starring Harrison Ford. Huchthausen served as technical director on the film. On July 4, 1961, the sub was taking part in a military exercise in the North Atlantic. A pipeline in a reactor's cooling system ruptured. In a race against time, the crew worked to improvise a repair. Until now, the story has been kept secret.

Arab-American stand-up comics Ahmed Ahmed and Maz Jobrani. They've changed their routines since Sept. 11, cracking jokes about attending flight school and the like. Both have had small parts as terrorists in action films. Jobrani was in a Chuck Norris film and Ahmed was Terrorist #4 in Executive Decision. They live in Los Angeles.

Film critic Henry Sheehan reviews Windtalkers, directed by John Woo and starring Nicolas Cage.

National security expert Loch Johnson. Hes written several books about intelligence and the trade-off of personal freedom, including Bombs, Bugs, Drugs and Thugs: Intelligence and Americas Quest for Security. Johnson is a professor of political science at the University of Georgia. He has served on several US Senate committees on Intelligence.

The Rev. Roy Hawthorne is one of the original windtalkers. They were a group of Navajo men who developed a secret code for American World War II fighters. The Japanese were able to break every other code the military developed. The Navajo code was the only one never solved by the Japanese and is considered the key tool in winning that war. The code was declassified in 2001, and the code talkers received Medals of Honor from President Bush. The new film Windtalkers is based on the story of the codemakers. Hawthorne gives talks about the codemaking process to schoolchildren nationwide.

Raha Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and writer whose latest book is Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine. (Steer Forth Press) He is a founder of the nonpartisan human rights organization Al-Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, and author of several books about international law, human rights and the Middle East. Shehadeh lives in Ramallah. He was a guest on Fresh Air in February of this year and returns to talk about the latest news from the occupied territories.

Writer Michael Oren's new book is Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. (Oxford University Press) Oren was raised and educated in the United States, and emigrated to Israel more than 25 years ago. He is a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based institute for Jewish social thought and public policy. He is also the head of the Middle East history project.

Photographer and reporter Scott Peterson of The Christian Science Monitor has been covering the war on terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks. He is also the paper's Moscow bureau chief, and a former Middle East correspondent. Peterson recently attended a training camp for journalists to learn how to deal with kidnappers and gunmen. He was also a friend of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl. Peterson is the author of the book Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda.

David Newman is a political columnist for The Jerusalem Post. He is also chairman of the department of politics and government at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and editor of The International Journal of Geopolitics. He'll discuss the history of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. He's written about the settlements in The New York Times. Newman is also author of the book, Population, Settlement and Conflict: Israel and the West Bank.

Foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, Thomas Friedman. He's just won his third Pulitzer Prize, this time for his "clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat." Friedman was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for his international reporting from Lebanon and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting from Isreal. He's also the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem, and The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization.

Producers, writers, directors Justine Shapiro and B.Z. Goldberg. Their new documentary film Promises takes a look at the Palestinian-Isreali conflict thru the eyes of seven children living in or near Jerusalem. It was filmed between 1997 and the summer of 2000. SHAPIRO grew up in Berkeley, California and hosts and co-writes the award-winning travel series, Lonely Planet. Goldberg was born in Boston and grew up outside of Jerusalem and has been a television journalist. Promises was broadcast on PBS last December as part of the P.O.V. series.

Journalist Scott Anderson. He traveled with a platoon of elite Isreali commandos into the West Bank and wrote about it in the article "An Impossible Occupation" which was the cover story of last Sundays New York Times Magazine.

Since September 11th, Joel Meyerowitz has taken over 7000 photographs of Ground Zero. He gained unlimited access to the site and did so in conjunction with the Museum of the City of New York. A selection of those pictures can been seen in the May 20th issue of The New Yorker.

Architecture critic for The New Yorker Paul Goldberger discusses the different ideas for what to do with the site of the World Trade Center.

Journalist John Burns is the Islamabad Bureau Chief for the New York Times. He will talk about reporting on Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the past, Burns has been posted in China, Bosnia, South Africa and Russia. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, one of them in 1997, for his reporting on the Taliban.

Director, co-writer Stacy Peralta of the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. The film is about the community of skateboarders in California in the 1970s who originated extreme skateboarding. They did so in rundown urban beach neighborhood near Santa Monica and Venice called Dogtown. They became international stars. Peralta was one of the Z-boys and is considered one of the founding fathers of modern skateboarding. The film won the Audience Award and Directors Award at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Theres also a companion book, Dogtown The Legend of the Z-Boys (Burning Flags Press).

Mark Malloch Brown heads the United Nations Development Program. He'll discuss their efforts in Afghanistan, the West Bank and Gaza to help with reconstruction. Brown is also the chair of the United Nations Development Group, a committee of the heads of all U.N. development funds, programs and departments.