In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. His name was Caleb, and a new novel imagines what his life was like, and who the people were that helped shape him. The new book is called “Caleb’s Crossing.” Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and journalist Geraldine Brooks is the author. She joins us in studio.

For more than thirty years, Cary Grant was one of the most bankable actors in the world, starring in such classics as “Bringing Up Baby,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “An Affair to Remember,” and “North by Northwest.” And to this day, he is the gold standard for the male movie star against whom actors like George Clooney are compared. But in 1966, at the age of 62, he hung up his hat, and focused the rest of his life on being a loving father to his only child, Jennifer Grant. Grant is the author of a new book, "Good Stuff: A Reminiscence of My Father, Cary Grant."

This spring, we’ve been sitting down with some of America’s most fascinating elder statesmen and stateswomen: older Americans, long past retirement age, who are nonetheless still working to change how we live and work in this country in a series called “In My Experience.” Today, our guest is comedian, movie star, and seven-time Emmy award winning TV legend Betty White. In addition to starring on “Hot in Cleveland,” White is also the author of a new book “If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won’t).”

Mother’s Day is just around the corner, and this week, during which all eyes are on the accomplishments of the president, we look at his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. A teenage mother, she married and divorced twice, had two children, and eventually went on to earn a PhD and work in international development. New York Times writer Janny Scott has written a new, comprehensive biography of Dunham called “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother.”

Mother’s Day is just around the corner. And aside from flowers and chocolates, what should we be giving Mom? Patrik Henry Bass, Takeaway contributor and senior editor at Essence magazine has compiled a list of books to say "thank you for not being like Mommy Dearest." Patrik calls his list “an ode to some of the moms we’re thankful we never had.”

Hip hop is filled with young artists who appear to live the Horatio Alger dream, ascending from impoverished urban neighborhoods to international fame and wealth.

But few of them have transformed themselves so often, and remained popular for so long, as Ice-T. An orphan turned family man and thief turned superstar, he famously went from singing about killing cops to playing a cop on the long-running and popular series “Law and Order SVU.”  He chronicles his rise from poverty to fame in “ICE: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption — From South Central to Hollywood.”

Until reading the first chapter of Susan Freinkel's new book, you might not realize just how many things in your life are made of plastic, from your gym clothes to your refrigerator. But what does all this new — and sometimes life-saving, or at least life-altering — material mean for how we live our lives? And what are the consequences of a single-use culture? We talk with Freinkel about her new book, "Plastic: A Toxic Love Story" and ask, "paper or plastic?"

Following a CBS "60 Minutes" report that found factual errors in the best-selling book, "Three Cups of Tea," author Greg Mortenson and his charitable work in Afghanistan and Pakistan have come under fire. In the book, Mortenson writes about stumbling into a tiny village in northeastern Pakistan and coming across a group of schoolchildren doing their lessons with sticks and dirt. It was then, he writes, that he discovered his passion to build schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But "60 Minutes'" producers found factual errors in the book and suggest that Mortenson's charity may be spending money poorly and exaggerating their accomplishments. Mortenson is denying the allegations.

President Obama's mother Stanley Ann Dunham died young, at the age of 52. Because of this, her four grandchildren never got to hear her stories, eat her cooking, or experience those other parts of the special relationship many children are able to have with their grandparents. Maya Soetero-Ng, Dunham's daughter, didn't think deeply about this until one of her kids asked her what grandma was like. That question served as the inspiration for a children’s book called “Ladder to the Moon.” The story, illustrated whimsically by Yuyi Morales, imagines a meeting between Maya’s older daughter and her own mother.

We often look at the soldiers we send off to battle as warriors. But the experience of war transforms can transform fighters into humanitarians; we hear from two young veterans for whom this is the case. U.S. Marine Rye Barcott is an Iraq veteran, and founder of Carolina for Kibera: a non-governmental organization that uses sports and health care to nurture and develop young leaders in the slums of Kenya. He’s also the author of “It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine’s Path to Peace.” Eric Greitens is a Navy SEAL, Iraq veteran, Rhodes Scholar, and founder of The Mission Continues: a non-profit that trains wounded veterans for leadership roles in their communities. He’s also the author of “The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy Seal.”

205 years ago, a lawyer-turned-textbook writer-turned-newspaper-editor published the first American English dictionary. It was 1806, and the title was “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language.” That man’s name was Noah Webster. And today, his name is synonymous with the word “dictionary” in the U.S. Joshua Kendall is the author of a new biography on Webster called: “The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture.” Joshua joins us from our partner, the WGBH, in Boston.

When David Foster Wallace took his own life in September of 2008, he left behind reams of unfinished work and a veritable young generation of readers still hungry for his work. This week, posthumous novel "The Pale King" is released from Wallace's long time publisher Little Brown. The book is unfinished, but was assembled from DFW's raggedy genius by longtime editor Michael Pietsch. Peitsch talks about how emotional it is for an editor to bring a book into the world when it's author is gone.

Every day between April and August, Philip Connors climbs a 55-foot tower and settles into a 7-by-7 foot enclosed platform for the next eight hours. The tower is in the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, and his duty while there, is to look out for fires. But while Gila receives more than thirty thousand lightening strikes per year, Connors’s job is actually closer to Walden Pond than reality TV. Alone with nature, and his thoughts, he enjoys solitude, freedom and independence — independence which surely helped him complete a new book called “Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout.”

Before Julia Child was a famous cookbook author, before she became television’s first iconic television chef, and long before she was played by Meryl Streep in the Nora Ephron film “Julie and Julia,” Julia Child worked for the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The OSS was a spy organization formed during World War II and was a predecessor to the CIA. Julia met Paul Child while they both served in the OSS in the 1940s.

Between the powerful days of the Roman Empire and the intellectually vibrant era of the Renaissance, there was a time that we often refer to as Early Middle Ages, or more pejoratively, as the Dark Ages. During these centuries, literature, written history, and cultural achievements were on the decline in the western world. But just a bit further east, in the Arab world, a golden age of enlightenment was taking hold.

Born in what is now Zimbabwe, best-selling Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith has shown millions of Americans a lighter, more human side of Africa. Best known for the "No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency" series of novels, Smith is also emeritus professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh, and a world renowned expert on bio-ethics. Celeste sat down with Smith to discuss his newest novel, "The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party," at the Great Hall of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Remember the periodic table? With its 92 elements and perplexing abbreviations? No doubt, you had to memorize portions of the table back in high school. But beyond high school classes and chemistry jobs, why should we care about the elements?

All teenagers have been warned: “don’t give into peer pressure.” We hear that peer pressure can do things like lead to drugs and binge drinking and unplanned pregnancies. Maybe peer pressure will make you drop out of school and join a gang. But in Tina Rosenberg’s opinion, peer pressure isn’t all bad. The Pulitzer Prize-winner is the author of a new book called “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World.” She argues that peer pressure is a very versatile tool.

The history of slavery is interwoven with the history of America, but what most of us learn about in school is the history of white settlers. And even in that white history, there are particular characters — mostly Dutch and Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Not Catholics, and certainly not Jews. But that may be about to change. A new novel called “Song of Slaves in the Desert” centers on a slave family and its owners, who are Jewish. It’s written by Alan Cheuse, the novelist and George Mason University professor who you might know as the books reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered.

We often hear debates about whether porn exploits women in the industry or plants seeds of immorality in the children who so easily access it online. But Cindy Gallop is more concerned with another question: What does porn do to both men and women – in terms of how they think about intimacy? Cindy is the creator of the website “Make Love Not Porn" and the author of “Make Love, Not Porn: Technology's Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior.”