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Sad news arrived this morning from Barcelona: Monserrat Figueras, a marvelous Catalan soprano with a luminous voice that helped generations of listeners discover hidden early music treasures, passed away yesterday at age 69 after a year-long battle against an unnamed illness.

"I was born inside the movie of my life."

Those words open the new memoir Life Itself from the film critic Roger Ebert, who has made movies his life for more than four decades now. He and his sparring partner, the late Gene Siskel, had the most famous thumbs on television. Now, at age 69, Ebert depends on the same thumbs-up that he and Siskel made famous to help him communicate in daily life. Five years ago, after multiple cancer surgeries, he lost the ability to speak.

Sept. 29 marks the beginning of the American Library Association's annual "Banned Books Week," a commemoration of all the books that have ever been removed from library shelves and classrooms. Politics, religion, sex, witchcraft — people give a lot of reasons for wanting to ban books, says Judith Krug of the ALA, but most often the bannings are about fear.

"They're not afraid of the book; they're afraid of the ideas," says Krug. "The materials that are challenged and banned say something about the human condition."

As an American teenager, whenever I asked grown-ups about the Vietnam War, few wanted to discuss it. As an adult, it was just as hard to talk about the war. That's why I never told friends and neighbors about my family's history.

You see, the Vietnam War took place in my family's backyard. My family lived in northeastern Laos, in Nong Het, right on the border with Vietnam. When the CIA needed an ally, they found a charismatic, passionate young man not afraid to die.

That man was my great-uncle, the late Gen. Vang Pao.

Transcript

NOAH ADAMS, host:

From NPR News, this DAY TO DAY. A message from World War II encoded by the infamous Nazi Enigma machine has finally been cracked. It's one of three such messages left over from the war that has never been read until now. The code-breaking was pulled off by a vast team of computers working together by way of the Internet. And here to tell us how this was done is Ira Flatow, host of Science Friday, a regular Thursday contributor to DAY TO DAY.

First of all, what, Ira, does the message say?

IRA FLATOW reporting: