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In his new book, Talking Right, linguist Geoff Nunberg examines the parlance of the American political right. Conservatives, Nunberg notes, have been remarkably effective at creating a language through which to convey their agenda.

Daniel Okrent was the first ombudsman of The New York Times. His new book is a behind-the-scenes look at the art and politics of America's most respected newspaper. Okrent has spent more than 25 years in the print-media business, with writing and editing jobs at Esquire, Time and Life magazines.

Pizza, one of the world's most popular foods, comes in many styles — from New York to Chicago to artichokes and free-range chicken. Food writer Ed Levine's new book, Pizza, a Slice of Heaven, gathers fact and opinion on an American staple.

Boston Herald sports columnist Howard Bryant is author of Juicing the Game. Baseball in the '90s — with greater profit and more record breakers than ever — has come to be known as "The Juiced Era." But the dark side has been the use of performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids.

Author and actor Martin Moran's new memoir is The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace. As a boy, he was sexually abused by a male counselor at a Catholic boys' camp. Nearly 30 years later, Moran went to see the man again at a convalescent home.

Comic and journalist Stephen Colbert is the fake senior correspondent on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. We talk with Colbert about his reports, from "Rathergate" to "This Week in God."

Novelist and screenwriter Richard Price discusses his new novel, Lush Life, about the repercussions of a shooting on the Lower East side. Price has written extensively about the realities of inner city life; he is a writer for HBO's The Wire which ends a five-year run on Sunday.

Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches With Teach for America, by Donna Foote.

If a child's parents are of two races — particularly if the mother is a former Black Panther member and the father is white — growing up can be a unique experience. Writer Angela Nissel mines those experiences in her memoir, Mixed. Nissel is a writer and consulting producer for the NBC TV show Scrubs.

The chairman of the Sept. 11 Commission, Tom Kean, and vice-chair Lee Hamilton have written the new book, Without Precedent: the Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission. The two write about the challenges of completing their work on the commission with little money, a tight timeline, constant wrangling to gain access to classified documents, and the necessity of forging a consensus among Republican and Democratic commissioners.

Underground comic book artist Robert Crumb has drawn comics for more than 40 years. Crumb, creator of Zap Comix, is the artist behind such 1960s and '70s icons as Fritz the Cat and Keep-on-Truckin. The new The R. Crumb Handbook is a visual biography of Crumb's life.

Author and historian Robert Satloff discusses his book Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands. Satloff recounts the stories of Arabs who protected or aided Jews in North Africa during World War II.

Journalist Wayne Slater has written extensively about the influence of Karl Rove on President Bush. His new book is The Architect: Karl Rove and The Master Plan for Absolute Power. Rove has been involved with the Bush family for nearly 30 years and worked with George W. Bush on every one of his campaigns.

In his new biography, Kirby: King of Comics, TV and comics writer Mark Evanier details the life and career of noted comic artist Jack Kirby, the co-creator of the Marvel Comics characters the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk and X-Men.

Female athletes suffer a higher rate of injuries than males, particularly to their knees. But some people are reluctant to talk about this "injury epidemic" out of fear of jeopardizing Title IX. Warrior Girls author Michael Sokolove discusses injury risk and prevention.

Religious studies professor Bart D. Ehrman joins Fresh Air to discuss human suffering as it is addressed in the Bible. If there is an all-powerful and loving God, he asks, why do human beings suffer?

In 2005, The New York Times revealed that the National Security Agency had performed wiretaps and other surveillance without court orders. It was a story the Bush administration hoped to keep under wraps, says reporter Eric Lichtblau. Lichtblau's new book is Bush's Law.

In Blake Nelson's novel, Paranoid Park, a 16-year-old skateboarder is implicated when a transit cop is killed at the local skate park, and withdraws into silence as a way of dealing with it. Director Gus Van Sant recently released a film version of the novel.

Journalist Pico Iyer has a long history meeting with the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet who lives in exile in India. Iyer joins Fresh Air to discuss how the Dalai Lama is responding to the current Tibetan uprising and protest against Chinese rule.

In The Israel Lobby, which grew out of a controversial 2006 article in the London Review of Books, Stephen Walt and co-author John Mearsheimer examine the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. They argue that American support for Israel cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds.

David Steinberg was big on the stand-up circuit back in the 1960s and '70s; he appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson more than a hundred times. Now he's host of TV Land's Sit Down Comedy with David Steinberg, on which he interviews other comedians. His new memoir is called The Book of David.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike died of lung cancer on Jan. 27. Fresh Air remembers the writer with archival interviews from 1988, 1989 and 1997.

After 44 years as a newspaper man, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. makes his debut as a fiction writer. His new novel, Rules Of The Game, features an investigative reporter on the beat of a hotly contested presidential election.

Sarah Chayes has been living and working in Afghanistan since she covered the fall of the Taliban government for NPR. She joins Fresh Air to explain how the hard-line religious movement is using both fear and persuasion as it works to once again expand its power in Afghanistan.

The rate of home foreclosure is now three times its historic rate — "so large that it threatens the entire economy." Congressional Oversight Panel chair Elizabeth Warren discusses the problem — and possible solutions.