Search results for

Host Bob Edwards speaks with Noah Adams, a host of NPR's All Things Considered and author of a new book, Far Appalachia: Following the New River North. Adams spent a year travelling the course of the New River through North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, and writes of its people, history, and the $5 plane rides one old-timer offered over the rivers' deep gorge.

His book The Human Stain about a classics professor accused of racism has just won the PENN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It's his second such award. He won his first in 1994 with Operation Shylock. The Human Stain is the third of a trilogy which includes his American Pastoral and I Married a Communist.

There are signs that the epidemic of foot and mouth disease in Britain may be leveling off. But that doesn't mean the threat to U.S. livestock will go away. NPR's Joe Palca reports that the possibility of foot and mouth disease entering America is a constant one - and that recent events give cause for some optimism that the disease can be kept out.

NPR's Kate Seelye in Beirut reports sectarian tensions are rising again in Lebanon as the country marks the 26th anniversary of the start of its long and bloody civil war. A debate over Syria's continued military presence has exacerbated tensions between Lebanon's Christians and Muslims.

Robert Siegel speaks with Daoud Kuttab, director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University, and columnist for the Jordan Times and the Jerusalem Post. Also joining the conversation is David Landau, senior editor of Ha'aretz newspaper in Tel Aviv. They discuss how Israelis and Palestinians view the political stances of the two sides, and why there has been such a failure in negotiations.

NPR's Barbara Bradley reports on a federal judge's ruling that felons have a constitutional right to DNA evidence testing. The Virginia case involves James Harvey, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence for a 1990 rape he says he did not commit. He asked the state to do DNA testing on items of evidence, but Virginia refused. The judge ruled that the state must do the tests, as part of Harvey's right to due process. The ruling is believed to be the first of its kind in the federal courts.

NPR's Nina Totenberg reports on today's oral arguments before the Supreme Court on mushroom ads. A mushroom grower is trying to get out of paying a share of the cost of a national ad campaign organized by the government. United Foods says it can promote its product better with its own ads.

NPR's Adam Hochberg reports that the 2000 census reveals a boom in growth in America's coastal areas. Demographers say the population explosion is driven by relatively cheap housing prices, desire to live near water, and technological advances that allow telecommuting. Environmentalists worry that the development boom threatens fragile coastal ecological systems.

Reviewer Alan Cheuse tells us about a new novel by Allegra Goodman: Paradise Park.

Grace Spruch has a thousand stories about the squirrels she's been inviting into her fifth floor Greenwich Village apartment. She shares some of those stories -- and squirrel time -- with NPR's Margot Adler. (6:00) Squirrels at My Window: Life With a Remarkable Gang of Urban Squirrels, by Grace Marmor Spruch, is published by Johnson Books. ISBN # 1555662579.