Jung Chang, author of the bestselling Wild Swans, talks with BBC Radio 4’s Today show about media censorship and the lack of freedom of the press in her native China, despite the country’s economic growth and opening of its society. Chang’s biography of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, is still banned in China, but Chang is best known around the world for Wild Swans, a story about Chang, her mother, and her grandmother detailing their lives in 20th-century China.

Check out Chang’s BBC interview here (Real Player required).

When it comes to Japan’s contribution to modern arts, there’s nothing more Japanese than manga. What most Americans see as comic books, manga is more of an art form. In this month’s Wired, Daniel H. Pink reports that manga sales in the United States have tripled in the last four years, and it has also become popular in Europe. (Still don’t see why manga is popular? Just turn on your TV to any network showing cartoons, and chances are it’ll be an anime program that was spawn from manga, like Naruto and Dragon Ball). But despite the growing popularity on our shores, the magazine also finds that manga readership is falling in Japan. The article explores the complexity of the genre, and where it’s headed.

Check out the article here, which includes additional online features, like a quick guide to manga.

Imagine living life as one person, and then being told you aren’t exactly who you think you are. That’s what Bliss Broyard endured, and she discusses the experience and her book One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer. Before he passed away from cancer, the author’s father, Anatole, revealed to his children of his true racial identity, that he is black. (Anatole Broyard, as many may know, was a book critic at the New York Times and a columnist at the New York Times Book Review.) In the book Broyard writes about what came after her relevation, and “chronicles her own evolution from privileged WASP to a woman of mixed-race ancestry.”

You can listen to the interview above, and read a chapter of the book here.

Roz Chast, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and Steve Martin teamed up to put together a children’s alphabet book that, from the sounds of their interview this morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, should be a good time for parents as well as children.

“The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z” is a book of rhyming couplets–one for each letter of course–written by Martin and playfully illustrated by Chast. M, for example, features a crazed-looking floating fat kid with the couplet “Maniacal Marvin munched many a macaroon, Making his middle a mini hot air balloon.”

You can read more of the couplets, including a couple that didn’t make it in, see illustrations and listen to the interview here.

Bad leadership in Washington made retired four-star General Wesley Clark write a book called A Time To Lead: For Duty, Honor And Country and though he claims it’s not a candidate’s memoir, it sounds like it sure reads like one. Stephen Colbert recently had Clark on to discuss the book, hence the video clip above. Unfortunately, Clark doesn’t get a lot of time to talk about the book, but at least he’s got a good sense of humor. Many more in-depth interviews about the book and Clark’s ideas are available online at Clark’s Web site, SecuringAmerica.com.

Alec Klein went to a high school better than yours. Every year, 28,000 kids apply to Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, and only 850 are accepted. Among those that do make it, there is a 25% acceptance rate to Ivy League schools. The alumni include Nobel laureates, Academy Award winners, and business luminaries. Stuyvesant kids are far smarter, wittier, more successful and maybe even prettier than those that went to your high school.

But Alec Klein wants to know the reasons why? He graduated in the class of 1985, and now he has gone back to try and figure out what makes his school so special. His book, A Class Apart, follows several students — the ten-year-old prodigy, the captain of the football team, the jaded poet — and several faculty members through a year at “Sty High”, and finds in equal parts the fulfillment of the American dream and vicious educational elitism.

Klein was featured on the Diane Rehm show on Tuesday. Check out the interview.

Come Monday, summer will be over, and you’ll have to put away those white linen pants, and that little skirt with the whales one it. Or will you…? Thanks to the magical world of books, you might be able stave off fall responsibilities a little while longer. That Night, Alice McDermott’s 1987, involves two star-crossed lovers and a 60s Long Island summer. Told from the perspective of a ten year old neighbor, the reader meets Rick and Sheryl, follows them through their courtship, an unplanned pregnancy and what reviewer Alice Leccese Powers calls, “serio-comic rescue attempt gone awry”.

“In That Night,” Powers writes. “McDermott lovingly bares the suburban soul — no, she bares the American soul — hidden behind metal Venetian blinds and crisply manicured hedges. In the end we glimpse her characters - the lovers and the child narrator — all grown and transformed by one summer night. That Night.”

Intriguing, no?

Read the full NPR review, and an excerpt of the story here.

I suppose its been around four years or so since Johnny Cash died. There have been a few books out, countless articles, a big-name movie that got an Oscar nod or two, all of them claiming to have the inside scoop, the real story on the real Man in Black. None, I repeat, none of them are as surprising as I Walked the Line.

The name on the cover reads Vivian Cash — Johnny’s first wife — but the book is comprised almost entirely of love letters to her, from him. The book traces the rise of their romance, when they met at an ice rink in 1951; his letters while overseas in Germany, during which time he promised her “oceans and oceans of love and devotion,” and encountered alcohol seriously for the first time; and their inevitable downfall, their relationship a victim of Johnny’s increasing fame and substance abuse.

This is a part of Johnny’s life that is routinely glossed over, and as The New York Times points out, the 2005 Cash movie Walk the Line ” presented [Vivian] as a nagging, ever-pregnant obstacle to his storybook romance with June Carter.” Vivian went on record saying once “[there are] people of the Nashville mind-set, who prefer that I be written out of Johnny’s history altogether.” The similarities between that story and this extend only to the names, and the side of Johnny shown here is a fiercely romantic one that is rarely, if ever, acknowledged.

Read The New York Times review of the book here.

Think back to your high school days. And now think about all the terrible things that happened to you then. A curse would explain all of that, wouldn’t it? Like the fact that your voice uncontrollably cracked every day for three years, or that you had hair, lots of hair, where other kids didn’t? A curse, when you think about it, is really the only logical explanation. For Oscar Wao, the curse has a name —Fukú — and it’s billed as the “the Curse and Doom of the New World”. The Wao family has endured five hundred years of tragedy, premature death, torture and star-crossed love, and that has all fallen down on little Oscar’s pubescent shoulders.

And all he wants to do is be the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien! And have a girlfriend! But so it goes in Junot Diaz’s first novel The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. Reminiscent of Jonathan Safran Foer at his best, Diaz plumbs the depths of the Wao family, bringing to light every instance of Fukú and how it has shaped Oscar’s life.

Listen to Alan Cheuse’s review on NPR, and expect to see this book again.

Al Roker’s Today book club returns from months of dormancy to promote a book that perhaps needs no promotion: Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, the first of the His Dark Materials trilogy. The book has all the trappings of a children’s fantasy novel: orphaned English child; ambiguously ominous uncle; giant animal ally, and so on.

The book’s protagonist is Lyra Belacqua, whose pleasantly unfettered life is shattered by the arrival of her uncle, Lord Asriel, who talks crazy talk of a natural phenomenon called “Dust”, and the outlines of a city in the Aurora Borealis that he has surmised is part of an alternative universe. Meanwhile, children have begun to disappear, the victims of “Gobblers”, a bizarre race that uses the kids for terrible experiments. When Lyra’s playmate Roger goes missing, Lyra runs away to find him, heading North into a dangerous land where she’ll meet up with mercenary polar bears, a vagabond troop of gyptians (gypsies), witches and a Texan in a hot air balloon.

Somehow, her uncle is involved.

Sound like your cup of tea? Read the excerpt, and don’t forget to watch the trailer for a movie adaptation staring Nicole Kidman and that hottie Daniel Craig.