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U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke returns to his ancestral village in southern China for the first time since his appointment. The Chinese-American was criticized as "a fake foreign devil who can't speak Chinese." But his humble behavior — flying economy, carrying his own bag — has won him many fans.

It's a simple mission that guides the volunteers on the No One Dies Alone team at Carle BroMenn Medical Center.

Statistically speaking, Kendra and Brian Cosom were unlikely candidates for marriage. The 2000 census reports nearly double the number of unmarried African-Americans as compared to whites. Marriage rates are even lower in low-income, black neighborhoods like theirs. Married a year, the couple is learning that staying together takes much more than love.

Smiley used to live in Iowa and says something about the place still pulls on her imagination. Her new book, Some Luck, begins on a family farm in 1920.

Sen. Ted Kennedy came from a family whose siblings "loved each other with a vengeance," dictated notes for a future memoir after his first Communion, and faced the illness that killed him with his distinctive mix of optimism and pragmatism. So says Victoria Reggie Kennedy, his widow, in her first news broadcast interview since the senator's death.

At a notorious federal prison, inmates with mental illness are taken off their medications and given coloring books and crossword puzzles for therapy, according to a lawsuit filed this month.

NPR's Scott Simon talks with opera singer Charity Tillemann-Dick, whose new memoir chronicles her double lung transplant, her recovery and how it feels to sing with someone else's lungs.

In 1979, Gary Shteyngart's family moved from Leningrad to Queens. Three decades later, he wrote a memoir about growing up in a Russian immigrant family in New York. Reviewer Meg Wolitzer says the book is full of rich, gratifying writing as well as pride, exuberance and sophisticated humor.

Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chair of his media empire, which includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post. He is handing the reins to his son Lachlan.

"I think there's only one interesting story ... and that's struggle," says writer Thomas McGuane. Loners, outcasts and malcontents fill the pages of his new short story collection Crow Fair.