Ken Burns' award-winning documentaries include The War, Jazz, Baseball, and The Civil War, which was the highest-rated series in the history of American public television. His most recent film is The National Parks, which he discussed at Boston Book Festival 2009's Documenting History session.

Novelist Tom Perrotta made his reputation through attention to craft, with novels including Election, Little Children, and The Abstinence Teacher. John Hodgman took a more improbable route to fame: by depicting a PC in Apple's "Get A Mac" ads, providing commentary as a "resident expert" on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and writing the books The Areas of My Expertise and More Information Than You Require. At Boston Book Festival 2009, Tom interviewed the man whose irresistible humor begat Hodgmania.

Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006 and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for My Name Is Red in 2003. His new novel, The Museum of Innocence, his first since winning the Nobel, is described as "a stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and the mysterious allure of collecting." At Boston Book Festival 2009's keynote presentation, Orhan Pamuk read from and discussed his new work. Co-sponsored by PEN New England and The New York Review of Books.

Richard Russo is the bestselling author of seven books and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2002 for his novel, Empire Falls. His newest, That Old Cape Magic, follows two generations of academics on trips to Cape Cod. He examines this work, as it relates to family, at Boston Book Festival 2009's Ties that Bind session.

Michael Thomas won the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, second only to the Nobel in prize and prestige, for his debut novel, Man Gone Down. At Boston Book Festival 2009, he spoke about this work, which plumbs the brilliant mind of an African-American man from Boston having an existential crisis, as part of the festival's Ties That Bind session.

Scout Tufankjian has had photographs published in every major newspaper and news magazine. Her new book, Yes We Can, chronicles President Obama's historic campaign. At Boston Book Festival 2009's Documenting History session, Scout tells how she became the only independent photojournalist to cover the entire campaign - from New Hampshire in 2006 to Grant Park in 2008.

David Pogue is the personal technology columnist for the New York Times and the Emmy Award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News - and he's been known to sing - as he did at Boston Book Festival 2009's The Future of Reading session.

David Pogue is the personal technology columnist for the New York Times and the Emmy Award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News. His new book is The World According to Twitter. At Boston Book Festival 2009, David Pogue introduced The Future of Reading session with Google's Jon Orwant, digital librarian Brewster Kahle, Steve Haber of Sony, Neil Jones of Interead, and Pixel Qi founder Mary Lou Jepsen.

Be inspired by Nicholas Negroponte, whose One Laptop per Child aims to give a laptop to the world's poorest children, and by Iqbal Quadir, who connected millions of the rural poor in Bangladesh through Grameenphone cellphones. This Boston Book Festival 2009 session on digital inclusion was hosted by Calestous Juma, Professor of the Practice of International Development at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Sponsored by Verizon.

Cornel West is one of America's most gifted and provocative public intellectuals, and the author of the new memoir, Brother West. Harvey Cox is the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard and the author of the bestselling The Secular City, and, most recently, The Future of Faith. Acclaimed novelist Mary Gordon leads the reader on a personal journey through the Gospels in her new memoir, Reading Jesus. At Boston Book Festival 2009, Christopher Lydon hosted a conversation on life and faith with these distinguished guests.

At Boston Book Festival 2009's The Obama Year session, Harvard economist and business guru Michael E. Porter, pundit and advisor to presidents past David Gergen, Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier, and Atlantic Monthly senior editor Jack Beatty gave a frank assessment of President Barack Obama's progress during his first year in office. NPR and WBUR's Tom Ashbrook moderated the discussion.