People to know

Describes the life of Bill Cosby from his childhood in Philadelphia through his successful career as a comedian.

Includes the entire Li'l Folks by Sparky, early cartoon series drawn by Schulz between June 1947 and January 1950, the predecessor of the Peanuts comic strip, with added annotations.

Elie Wiesel has given hundreds of interviews. Yet his fame as a human rights advocate often directs such conversations toward non-literary issues. Indeed, many of Wiesel's questioners barely address the writer's role that has defined him since the 1950s. Unlike previous volumes in which he speaks with interviewers, Elie Wiesel: Conversations collects interviews which set in relief the writer at work. This book focuses on Wiesel the literary artist instead of Wiesel the Holocaust survivor or the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Beyond highlighting Wiesel's literary significance, these interviews also correct many faulty assumptions about his achievement. Few American readers know that he writes in French, that he has been favorably compared to André Malraux and Albert Camus. Not many realize that the Holocaust has been the subject of only a few of his forty books. Particularly in his nonfiction, Wiesel's scope is wide, addressing Jewish life in all its religious and historical complexity. Though most of Wiesel's books do not focus on the Holocaust, they are written against the backdrop of what he has come to term "The Event." Always, the presence of Auschwitz can be felt, always the author "lives in the shadows of the flames that once illuminated and blinded him." These interviews are reminders that the writing life is both solitary and public, interior and social. The writer must venture beyond his study and speak out against the world's traumas and outrages. -- Amazon.com.

Freidel (history emeritus, Harvard U., U. of Washington), whose four- volume biography of the young FDR concluded with the launching of the New Deal, now offers a one-volume complete biography. Although he details Roosevelt's life before his presidency, the focus is on the Depression and wartime periods. This will probably become the standard one-volume biography. Annotation(c) 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Describes the life of the newest justice of the Supreme Court from his childhood in Georgia, through the years he spent as chairman of the EEOC, to the present.