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My schedule doesn't allow me to watch the evening news shows much anymore, but I'm old enough to remember Walter Cronkite's last couple of years as CBS news anchor. After Cronkite left the anchor chair back in 1981, I remember watching ABC's World News Tonight with my parents. While Jennings could never take the place of Walter, he seemed like a dedicated newsman who took his job seriously and always did his best.

When Jennings died in August of 2005, I couldn't help but wonder who would fill his shoes. After nearly eight months of speculation, ABC announced that Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas would take over the anchoring duties at World News Tonight. On January 29, 2006, just 27 days after being given the coveted co-anchoring job, Woodruff was injured while reporting in Iraq. At the time of the attack, Woodruff was embedded with the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, traveling in an Iraqi MT-LB. Woodruff had his head sticking up out of the hatch when a roadside bomb exploded. Bob suffered multiple shrapnel wounds and a massive traumatic brain injury.

Sophie Dahl, granddaughter of writer Roald Dahl and actress Patricia Neal, has her second book, Playing With the Grown-ups: A Novel debuting in the United States tomorrow. Publishers Weekly describes the novel this way: "The full-length debut by the granddaughter of Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal centers on a dreamy, romantic English woman who hasn't quite escaped the thrall of her fabulous mother, Marina. When Kitty, now married, pregnant, and living cozily in New York City with her financier husband, receives the call that her mother has been hospitalized after a breakdown, Kitty flashes back to her magical youth, revolving around her Swedish grandparents' Never-Neverland of a country home, Hay House, shared by her mother and aunts. When Marina's guru insists Marina move to New York City to pursue her painting, Kitty eventually joins her on Park Avenue, and her mixed-up adolescence begins. Wearing her mother's clothes, flirting with her handsome boyfriends and swept into parties where her mother chops the cocaine, Kitty comes through a number of charming yet troubling moments, as well as foreshadowings of Marina's future breakdown. There's plenty of texture to Kitty's remembrances, but the result reads more like a fictional memoir than fully plotted novel."

Author Sophie Dahl's first book, a novella titled The Man With the Dancing Eyes was published back in 2003. The granddaughter of author Roald Dahl and actress Patricia Neal, Sophie has also had a successful career as a model with contracts with such fashion luminaries as Versace, Yves St. Laurent and Pringle.

Ms. Dahl has also done some acting, appearing in the films New York Stories and People I Know among others.

Terri Cheney seemed to have it all. She was a lawyer at a big law firm, lived in Beverly Hills and drove a Porsche. However, at times Ms. Cheney was crouched under her desk at her law firm unable to move. Other times she was deliriously happy, flying kites off the edge of a cliff in a massive thunderstorm.

Like 10 million fellow Americans, Terri Cheney suffers from bipolar disorder, characterized by deep depression and manic highs. Like many people who suffer from bipolar disorder, Terri kept her illness hidden from her co-workers and many friends. Manic: A Memoir is the story of Terri Cheney's horrifying yet hopeful fight against the disease that nearly took her life.

The studio system that produced Hollywood movies from the 1930s through the 1950s was tightly controlled by those in charge to ensure that the American people only saw the stars they wanted them to see, how they wanted them to see them. In The Star Machine, noted film historian Jeanine Basinger examines how studios worked to create movie stars, first by finding them and then putting them through a rigorous process referred to as the star machine.

When most film historians and scholars discuss the great American directors of the mid-twentieth century, names such as Billy Wilder, John Ford, and Frank Capra are often bandied about. Otto Preminger, despite over half a century in the film and theatre business and two Oscar nominations for best director, is rarely if ever mentioned. History has not been kind to the talented but volatile director.