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From ads to music, the airwaves and circuits are filled with messages and images about sex. Tweens -- kids roughly between the age of 8 and 12 -- are especially vulnerable to these suggestions, since they are what marketers call "age aspirational."

NPR's Neda Ulaby compares the two very different versions of Swept Away -- a politcally charged tale of a rich, haughty socialite and a working-class fisherman stranded together alone on a deserted island. The 1974 version had sass and a message -- the Madonna re-make just falls flat.

Eighties absurdo-disco band Was Not Was has a new album. David Was shares some of his thoughts about embarking on a rock and roll odyssey at a time when he should be figuring out how to stretch his Social Security check.

During the summer of 1896, a 10-day heat wave killed nearly 1,500 people across New York City — many of them tenement-dwellers. In Hot Time in the Old Town, historian Ed Kohn describes the disaster — and how a little-known police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt championed the efforts to help New Yorkers survive the heat.

Kelly Braffet's Last Seen Leaving follows a mother's search for her daughter, a twentysomething drifter who doesn't really want to be found. But that's just one of the stories being told in this novel.

Sebastian Mallaby's book is an expert primer on hedge funds — the "Ferraris of finance" — and a detailed portrait of Wall Street's daredevils. Reviewer Susan Jane Gilman says More Money Than God is illuminating ... and infuriating.

It's hard to imagine that people used to die from things as small as a scratch on the knee — but that's what life was like before penicillin. Author Lauren Belfer's new novel, A Fierce Radiance, follows the intrigue as pharmaceutical companies race to mass-produce lifesaving drugs during World War II.

Sportswriter Frank Deford's historical novel, Bliss Remembered, tells the story of a young American swimmer at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Deford explains why he was drawn to this particular historical setting — and what it's like to write a novel from the perspective of a woman.

In 1975, the Lutz family moved into their dream home on Long Island — and barely lasted a year. Jay Anson chronicles their paranormal experiences in a 1977 pulp horror classic. Josh Kilmer-Purcell says Amityville's hyperbole and hackneyed plotlines keep his mind off of his own anxieties.

Ever wonder why supermarket tomatoes taste like nothing? Food writer Barry Estabrook's new book traces the troubled history of the modern commercial tomato.