Celebrity Q and A

If you like the question-and-answer format for celebrity interviews, you might want to check out, All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians and Artists, by Terry Gross.
Gross hosts "Fresh Air," a wonderful radio show on National Public Radio, where she interviews whoever she likes, typically in an hour-long format. Her choice of topics pretty much defines eclectic: comedians to politicians to religious leaders to jazz musicians.
In this book, published in September, her interview subjects include Michael Caine, Isabella Rossellini, Conan O'Brien, Chris Rock, Jodie Foster, John Updike, Mary Karr, George Clinton, Nick Hornby, Mario Puzo, Chuck Close, Samuel L. Jackson, and Johnny Cash, among others.
Her book is OK, not great. I've listened to a lot of the interviews she included in the book, and it's so much nicer to hear the people talk on the radio. Inflection and tone from the human voice can add an entirely different shade of meaning to a sentence. It really hits home the fact that as magnificently expressive as the written language is, it still takes second place to the vividness of spoken language. The written word requires parsing. That's why it's so important to read carefully and critically. I remind myself of that, because I like to speed through some books like a locomotive barreling down the tracks. Slow down there, I tell myself.