Places & Travel

Former fire commissioner of New York City, Thomas Von Essen. He led the department through the Sept. 11 attacks and during rescue and early recovery efforts. During the attacks, the department lost 343 men, many of them Von Essen's friends and colleagues. Von Essen stepped down as fire commissioner on December 31, 2001. He's written a new memoir with Matt Murray, Strong of Heart: Life and Death in the Fire Department of New York.

Journalist Thomas Ricks covers the military for The Washington Post. Last week the Senate held hearings about Iraq. Ricks will discuss possible scenarios for a U.S. attempt to topple Saddam Hussein, and the likelihood of such an action. Ricks has also reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Kuwait, the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. Prior to joining The Post, Ricks wrote about the military for The Wall Street Journal. He's also the author of the novel A Soldier's Duty, about a U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan.

Doctor Elaine Abrams and Doctor Stephen Nicholas are pediatricians who work with babies born with HIV. While many children have died, some have survived into adolescence. Abrams is the director of the Family Care Center at Harlem Hospital Center, and Dr. Nicholas is the director of pediatrics there. They treated the first wave of babies infected with HIV at the height of the epidemic in Harlem in the 1980s. They have studied the effects of the virus on the children's physical and mental health as well as the toll on the community. Some of the children spent years in the hospital.

Film critic Henry Sheehan reviews Full Frontal, the new Steven Soderbergh film starring Julia Roberts, Blair Underwood and David Duchovny.

The HBO hit series Sex and the City, begins a new season July 21. We'll hear from two people involved with the show: Actress Sarah Jessica Parker was just nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. She's been acting for most of her life, including playing Annie on Broadway, the young bimbo in L.A. Story, and a fed-up fiancee in Honeymoon in Vegas. This is her fifth season starring in Sex and the City, as Carrie, a columnist who writes about the sexual mores of New Yorkers.

Journalist Matthew Brzezinski wrote about the global narcotics industry in the June 23, 2002 issue of the The New York Times Magazine. His cover story is, "Heroin: The Sleek New Business Model for the Ultimate Global Product."

Terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna. His new book is Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror. Gunaratna spent five years conducting interviews with al Qaeda members, doing field research and monitoring the group's infiltration in communities in North America and Europe. He is the author of six books on armed conflict and a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He's lectured worldwide on terrorism and served as consultant to many governments.

Rock historian Ed Ward tells the story of Frisco Records, a New Orleans soul label run by a female fry-cook.

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.

Film critic John Powers reviews Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

Gino Yevdjevich is the lead singer of the Bosnian-Bulgarian punk rock band Kultur Shock. He was a rock musician in Sarajevo when the Bosnian War broke out. During the war, he played a major role in rewriting the musical Hair into a new version called Hair: Sarajevo, AD 1992 which played in Sarajevo for three years to standing room only crowds. Yevdjevich now lives in Seattle; he moved there in 1996 when a theatre produced his play Sarajevo: Behind Gods Back. His band Kultur Shock has a new CD called F.U.C.C. the INS

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.

Rock historian Ed Ward reviews The Stiff Records Box Set

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.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the debut novel Everything is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin) by Jonathan Safran Foer.

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

Maria Rosa Menocal is a R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She is also the author of the new book: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a culture of tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown). Menocal details Andalucia, Spain from 786 to 1492 where literature, science, and tolerance flourished.

Film critic John Powers reviews Lagaan, the new film from India made in Bollywood which he says may be one of the few Indian films to make it big over here. Its already been released in England and is also released on DVD.

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.

Mexican film director Alfonso Cuaron. His new film Y Tu Mama Tambien is set in Mexico and is about two teenage boys and an 'older' woman who set out on a journey. The film has been described as a 'smart and sexy new road movie' and one that transcends the usual teen road-trip genre. Cuaron previously directed two Hollywood movies, A Little Princess, and Great Expectations.