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The Olympic torch has reached the top of Mount Everest, the climax of a massive publicity campaign leading up the Olympic Games. China hopes the spectacle of the flame atop the world's highest mountain will erase the memory of ugly protests. But some activists say that by taking the flame up Everst, China is trying to show its dominance over Tibetans.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez commanded ground troops in Iraq from 2003 to 2004; it was on his watch that the Abu Ghraib prison scandal took place. Subsequently, Sanchez has vocally criticized the conduct of the Iraq war — especially the Bush administration's "catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan." His new book is Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story.

In her new book, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of A Great Victorian Detective, Kate Summerscale revisits the gruesome 150-year-old murder that helped catapult British mystery fiction into being. Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan offers a review.

The veteran television journalist reflects on her glamorous — but unhappy — childhood, and her storied career interviewing notable celebrities, presidents and even murderers.

Four years ago, Army Ranger Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan. The military initially reported that the former NFL star died a heroic death in an insurgent strike, before admitting he was killed by friendly fire. Mary Tillman has continued to investigate her son's death and has written a book about him.

Three renowned women writers have books of fiction out this spring, and each one asks the reader to take a leap of imagination. The resulting novels, says reviewer Alan Cheuse, are a thrill and a privilege to read.

In his new collection, Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems, poet Cornelius Eady writes of his transition from urban renter to rural homeowner and the encroachment of middle age.

Author Charles Ardai is founder of Hard Case Crime, a publishing group that reprints classic crime fiction and publishes new pulp fiction in paperback editions. Ardai, who writes under the pen name Richard Aleas, has won the Edgar Award for mystery writing.

Author Junot Diaz won a Pulitzer Prize this year for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Set in both the United States and the Dominican Republic, the novel explores the complexities of living in two cultures at once, with prose that frequently mixes Spanish and English in the same sentence.

Fuchsia Dunlop was the first Westerner to study cooking at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine in the western Chinese city of Chengdu, back in the 1990s. She has written a food memoir of her time in China, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper.