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How will this all end? Host Lisa Simeone asks Florida crime writer Edna Buchanan to write a final scene for "The Election That Won't End."

After a seven-year prison term, James went through a rigorous education process including job training, drug counseling and support meetings. James watched others in the program drift back to crime while he struggled to overcome the obstacles that ex-offenders face when trying to re-connect to family and society.

Scott talks to writer Hampton Sides about his new book Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission. It tells of the perilous rescue of American and British Prisoners of War held at the Cabanatuan camp in the Philippines following the Bataan Death March. (11:45) The book is published by Doubleday.

As part of NPR's Changing Face of America series, a report on how the practice of adoption is changing. Traditionally, adoptions have kept the identities of both biological and adoptive parents secret from each other. But increasingly families are entering into so-called "open adoptions" where they remain in some degree of contact with the birthmother as the child grows up. NPR's Neva Grant profiles a family in Portland, Oregon, that has two openly adopted children.

Commentator Bob Sloan talks about his strong ties to both his family and his Appalachian home.

Mark Pachter, director of the National Portrait Gallery, finds a donor to help the Smithsonian Insitution purchase Gilbert Stuart's 1796 portrait of George Washington. His ability to raise more than $20 million for the effort is a tribute to the lasting appeal of an iconic image.

Noah Adams talks with Emmanuel Madan and Thomas McIntosh about their sonic project, the Silophone. The two artists, who call themselves The User, have given an old grain silo in Montreal a new function by rigging it with broadcast lines and microphones. People can call into the Silophone or submit sounds over the Internet. (5:30) See www.silophone.net

Scott talks with Lucinda Williams about her new CD, Essence (Lost Highway, 088 170 197-2). This is Ms. Williams' sixth major label recording. Her last release, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, won a Grammy in 1998 for Best Folk Album.

Writer William Loiseaux faints -- frequently. He has done quite a bit of scientific, linguistic, cultural and historical research on the act of fainting, and has come to feel proud of his "gift." He's written a treatise of sorts on the topic. It's called In Defense of Fainting. William Loizeaux's essay was originally published, in a much longer version, in The American Scholar.

The former President gives us a walking tour of his family's farm near Plains, Georgia, now a national historic site, and talks to Lisa about what it was like to grow up there in the 1930s. Mr. Carter's latest book is called An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood.