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Rock and Roll Hall of Fame artist Carlos Santana has won 10 Grammys and sold more than 100 million records. He has become one of the world's most celebrated musicians, a destiny that was difficult to imagine during his childhood in a small Mexican town. His father, also a musician, was Santana's first teacher, but he really learned his craft playing on the street and in strip clubs in Tijuana.

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Carlos Santana's mother Josefina B. Santana Santana archives hide caption

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Carlos Santana's mother Josefina B. Santana

Santana archives

Carlos Santana shares his journey from Autln, Mexico, to international stardom in his new memoir, The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light. The book is dedicated to his mother, Josefina. "I think she probably prayed for me more than anyone to keep me from getting lost," he says. "I dedicated it to her because she deserves to know that her prayers worked. I am a good man."

Despite their fraught relationship, Santana thanks his mother for instilling a "will for excellence" early on in life. "My mom would say 'OK, we're poor, but we're not dirty and filthy, clean the house,'" Santana tells Michel Martin. "She would say, 'What are you doing?' And if you say 'nothing,' 'I know! Make yourself useful. Don't just sit there like a lump. Do something.'"

Interview Highlights

"I Just Want To Be Adored"

I was drawn to music just by watching everybody, children, older people, and especially women looking at my dad. Every time he played, women were like, 'Oh Don Jose,' you know? And I'm like 'Ooh, Don Jose?! I want some of that.' I didn't know what to call it, but I know that now we call it 'being adored.' I love that dimension of music more than anything, you know? To adore supreme integrity and elegance, I want that. Even though I grew up in Tijuana, in the poorest part, but I want integrity and elegance and I want to carry myself like I got more money than anyone in the world...I just want to be adored like my dad.

Surviving Sexual Abuse

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Carlos Santana at one of his first gigs with his father, a 50th anniversary party in Tijuana in 1958. Santana archives hide caption

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Carlos Santana at one of his first gigs with his father, a 50th anniversary party in Tijuana in 1958.

Santana archives

For a long time it made me feel like everybody woke up to screw me, to mess with me, just to put me down, or to take advantage of me. You grow up with a lot of guilt. You grow up with a lot of shame, and a lot of anger. However, the main thing that I learned from this is that I am not what happened to me. I am still with purity and innocence. No one can take that away from me.

Frustrations In The United States

For me, when I used to get angry is when I was in Mission High School and they give me like, some kind of test. And that test was assigned and designed to make me fail, because I'm Mexican. I don't know the things that really don't matter to me. So I said, 'I'm not doing this. If I give you a test of what I know, you're gonna fail it.' I went to the principal a lot of times, but I come from a generation like, question authority. You know, because, this is what's wrong with the world: white people think that they're better than blacks; men think they're better than women; Christians think they're better than somebody else; straight thinks they're better than gay. See, this is the problem with the world.

Living Beyond Labels

I'm not Latino, or Spanish; what I am is a child of light. I want this book for people to understand that you don't have to be the Dalai Lama, or the Pope, or Mother Teresa, or Jesus Christ to create blessings and miracles. Keep repeating, 'I am that I am; I am the light.'

A new United Nations report is warning that fossil fuels must be entirely phased out by the end of the century in order to avoid dangerous and irreversible damage to the Earth's climate.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says the world faces "severe, pervasive and irreversible" consequences if greenhouse gas emissions are not cut to zero by 2100.

Examples of "irreversible" change include a runaway melt of the Greenland ice cap that would trigger devastating sea-level rise and could swamp coastal cities and disrupt agriculturally critical monsoons.

"Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts," the report says, adding that some effects of climate change that have occurred already will "continue for centuries."

"Science has spoken," U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, presenting the IPCC's Synthesis Report.

"There is no ambiguity in the message," he said. "Leaders must act, time is not on our side."

Acting quickly, he said, the problem could be tackled at a reasonable cost. The U.N.'s goal is to limit average temperature rise to 3.6 degrees F above pre-industrial times. Temperatures are already up by 1.4F.

The Washington Post says:

"The report is the distillation of a five-year effort to assess the latest evidence on climate change and its consequences, from direct atmospheric measurements of carbon dioxide to thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies. The final document to emerge from the latest of five assessments since 1990, it is intended to provide a scientific grounding for world leaders who will attempt to negotiate an international climate treaty in Paris late next year.

"While the IPCC is barred from endorsing policy, the report lays out possible scenarios and warns that the choices will grow increasingly dire if carbon emissions continue on their current record-breaking trajectory."

Despite continued skepticism over climate change among the general public, politicians and business, an overwhelming number of scientists who study the subject believe that human activity is contributing to a rise in average global temperatures.

United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

climate change

There are people who have no idea what they would do with themselves if they had a little under two weeks with no commitments, a car, a duffel bag, and a series of motel reservations making a loop around New England with a spur up into Maine.

I am not one of those people.

A cove ... somewhere. Near Camden? Probably near Camden. Linda Holmes/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Linda Holmes/NPR

On my Late Fall Foliage Solo Tour, of all the anxieties that occasionally gripped me, not knowing what to do with myself — by myself — was not among them. I examined racks of jewelry and adjusted room thermostats and had chocolate chip ice cream at a place my family used to go when I was a young teenager. (It's the same, except that now it's next to an enormous Walmart.) I read books. I had clam chowder four times and had breakfast at a little place right by Amherst populated by students, and I eavesdropped on a Rocklandite in a laundromat explaining that he'd gone mudding that weekend and needed a story to give his girlfriend about why the truck was all scuffed up. I walked a trail at Wolfe's Neck Woods State Park near Freeport and heard total, hum-less, fan-less silence, which I rarely do. I visited a cemetery where some of my relatives are buried. I dropped the valve cap into the wheel of my car while putting air in my tires, got distracted enough battling the air hose that I forgot to dig it back out, and happily found it peacefully hanging out inside the wheel cover many, many miles later when I remembered.

I spent Halloween on Cape Cod, where behind me, the door to wandering tourists was swinging shut for the season. I spent an evening in a Ramada with the power out, and I chatted with the Banana Man at the Kennebunk service plaza, and I managed to keep my composure and not crack up when I overheard a discussion at a Rockport Denny's in which a woman said, with a certain guilty, gossipy glee, "She worries so much about havin' lines on her face, but what about that mouth full of choppers? That's all I could see." ("Choppers," of course, was "chaw-pahs.") I walked down a steep trail at a botanical garden where, at the bottom, a nice lady comes and picks you up in a golf cart to haul you back up the hill. I tipped 50 percent to servers to whom I said "Just me!" when I asked for a table, who filled my coffee over and over because they had plenty of tables and it was foggy and gray outside. I took a picture of a butterfly I suspect has been photographed by thousands of tourists before me.

A butterfly takes it easy on some daisies at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. Linda Holmes/NPR hide caption

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We have a certain cultural mistrust of solitude, I think. It is for weirdos and lost souls, spinsters and misfits. But in truth, I can't tell you what a luxury I think it is to be entitled to it. Most of the time, I want good company, like most people do. But the experience of earned, voluntary aloneness is, among other things, instructive. I don't think you can really understand how accustomed you are to being scheduled and operating off an internal to-do list at almost all times until you think to yourself, "My goal will be to get to Providence by 4," and then you think, "Why is there a goal?"

And then it begins to make you internally rebellious: What if I drove with no goal? What if I had nowhere to be all day until it was time to sleep and I discussed with no one where to stop and take a picture, where to have lunch, what shop to go in, or which way to turn on the trail? What would I do if I could do anything — in this micro-environment, in this moment, at the point of this particular pause, what is my wish?

Wolfe's Neck Woods State Park. Linda Holmes/NPR hide caption

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Because the experience of good company is in part the experience of matching your wishes to someone else's; that's part of what makes it great. You build a common wish with another person: to go somewhere, to meet, to have sushi instead of steak. And those shared wishes are profound.

But if you collaborate constantly, both professionally and personally, it's easy to forget what undiluted self-determination feels like, and there's something to be said for remembering.

While I was staying in Freeport, I realized that the clouds and rain that had accompanied the first few days on the road had broken, and I started to wonder if I could see stars. I don't see a lot of stars in my day-to-day; there's an awful lot of light pollution in my section of the East Coast, and if I'm being honest, I doubt I'd take the time to stare at them anyway. But on this particular night, I went out and waited for my eyes to adjust, and when they did, there were many, many, many stars. I decided to try to take a picture.

I am a casual hobbyist at best when it comes to complicated pictures of any kind. I play around — enough that I had a tripod and a remote shutter release in the car — but I didn't really have the right lens for this, and I wasn't really in the best place (hunkered down between two big evergreens in the darkest corner of the motel parking lot). I just wanted to see if I could do it. Had I had to explain it to someone else how long I was out there fiddling and turning dials and pushing buttons and counting seconds in my head, I would have felt silly. There is a diabolical internal voice that feels external and belongs to no one that says, in moments like this, "What are you doing? You are bent over a camera on a tripod in the dark, and you're all in black, meaning you really, really do appear to be skulking around like a crazy person, and this picture is going to have power lines in it anyway, and it won't be in focus because that's the part you haven't figured out, so it's not going to be a good picture anyway, so what are you doing?"

The luxury of solitude lies in hearing that, and training it to settle down. "I am taking a picture of these stars, and it's going to take me a bunch of tries, but eventually, I'm going to make it work because I have absolutely no responsibilities on this particular evening and I can stay out here until 3 in the morning if I feel like it."

It did not take until 3 in the morning. And it's not a good picture, but when I look at it, I remember in my fingers the precise temperature of the air, dropping the lens cap in the grass and feeling around for it, and wondering whether people in passing cars thought I was crazy. "Just me," I would have said with a wave.

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Stars in Freeport. Linda Holmes/NPR hide caption

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Stars in Freeport.

Linda Holmes/NPR

Betty White is a television pioneer. She's played everything from the star of the '50s sitcom Life with Elizabeth to the sweetly naive Rose from The Golden Girls.

More On Betty White

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Monkey See

Betty White Gives 'Saturday Night Live' Its Money's Worth

Sixty years later, she's still in show business, on the cast of TV Land's Hot in Cleveland — as well as innumerable guest appearances.

White's show-biz career blossomed just as television began to take off in Los Angeles, where she went to high school. She happened to be in the right place at exactly the right time.

"I was in the graduation play from high school, and the president of our senior class and I sang The Merry Widow and did a little dance," Betty White says. "I think that's when the show biz bug bit me — and they haven't been able to get rid of me since."

'People Either Sell Their Television Sets or Tune You In'

White's big break came when a Los Angeles disc jockey named Al Jarvis asked if she wanted to be his "Girl Friday" on his new talk show, Hollywood on Television.

"Sure, Friday, that's great," White says. "Well, what he meant, and I didn't realize was, Friday, Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday."

She was on TV for 5 1/2 hours a day, six days a week.

Every broadcast was live.

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Betty White (left) stands alongside actor Eddie Albert in front of the a KLAC-TV camera during a broadcast of the live talk show, 'Hollywood on Television,' in 1952. Nigel Dobinson/Getty Images hide caption

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Betty White (left) stands alongside actor Eddie Albert in front of the a KLAC-TV camera during a broadcast of the live talk show, 'Hollywood on Television,' in 1952.

Nigel Dobinson/Getty Images

"Whatever happened, you had to handle it. There was never any rehearsal or script or anything," she says. "Whoever came in that door was on, and you were interviewing them."

She first started appearing on Hollywood in Television in 1949. Three years later, White co-founded Bandy Productions, becoming one of the first female producers in Hollywood.

With her production company, she went on to star in her sitcom Life with Elizabeth, and her own daytime show, The Betty White Show.

On The Betty White Show, just like on Hollywood in Television, White had to work with whatever she got. In one of her live interviews, she talked with a 10-year-old boy named Ralph; he responded to her questions with grunts or one-word answers.

CaptainBijou.com / Youtube/YouTube

White promoted a supplement called Geritol on The Betty White Show in the '50s.

"The beauty of it," she says, "was if it didn't go well, it was over."

"People either sell their television sets or tune you in."

Still In The Business

White says every now and then, she'll catch one of her old programs being rebroadcast on TV.

"You think, 'My God, I had hair then!' " she says.

At 92 years old, she says, there are so many memories to relive.

"To be able to talk to that camera — the camera became your best friend," White says. "You're looking into that little camera lens and they're looking into your soul, because they're right into your eyes. You can't be phony. You can't fake it."

"I'm so lucky to still be blessed to be working in it," she says. "I love television."

Betty White

Los Angeles

TV