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The appeal of soccer's quadrennial World Cup tournament baffles many Americans. With the world's greatest soccer players convening in Germany for the monthlong FIFA World Cup 2006 — where the United States team has hopes of contending for a top spot — we have tips for potential Cup viewers.

Babe Ruth gave the home run its status as a potent weapon in the game of baseball, the author of a new biography says. "Before [he] came along, the home run was kind of a mistake...," Leigh Montville says.

In the past month, authorities have uncovered at least four apparent plots to stage Columbine-style rampages in schools. Police arrested students in Kansas, Alaska, and Washington state after the students sent messages to friends about their intentions.

Blind allegiance to the Republican Party has led politically active evangelicals to adopt misguided positions on issues such as abortion and homosexuality, says Randall Balmer. In Thy Kingdom Come, the prominent evangelical argues the religious right could ruin the faith.

The first section of an 1,100-mile oil pipeline officially opened Wednesday in Azerbaijan. It will eventually carry oil from the Caspian Sea through Georgia and on to the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Writer Thomas Goltz has traveled the route of the pipeline by motorcycle and tells Melissa Block about the project.

For 34 years, Bob Woodward has been a reporter and editor at The Washington Post. His new book is about the confidential source he and reporting partner Carl Bernstein relied on in the Watergate story, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat.

For some, the summer is a time to indulge in frothy beach reading: the latest chick lit or globetrotting, highly unbelievable thriller. But book critic Maureen Corrigan has taken a different tack this year: She's catching up on more substantial reading that she hasn't had time for yet.

Cultural historian Christopher Frayling's new book Once Upon A Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone is a large-format, beautifully illustrated book that chronicles the history of the spaghetti western through researched text and interviews with Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese and Eli Wallach.

After soaring to fame with Saturday Night Live, Dan Aykroyd built a solid film career. But he's still capitalizing on his early hit, The Blues Brothers (now available in a 25th-anniversary DVD). He serves on the board of the "House of Blues" restaurant and concert-venue franchise, and last year he published a book as his Blues Brothers alter-ego, Elwood, interviewing blues greats. (This interview was first broadcast on Nov. 22, 2004.)

A new book uncovers the research of John Work, who accompanied folklorist Alan Lomax on a trip to the Mississippi Delta in the early 1940s. They documented the music heard in churches, blues joints and cotton fields of the South.