Night+Day

Tonight's Top Story Walter Cronkite can, with some measure of authority, claim to have seen it all. In his 60-plus years as a journalist, Cronkite covered major world events like the Normandy beach blitz of 1944 and the Nuremberg Nazi trials as a reporter, anchor, editor, and correspondent for United Press International and CBS News. Cronkite, whose autobiography, A Reporter's Life, is forthcoming, recounts his experiences to UC Berkeley's incoming journalism grad school dean, Orville Schell, in an onstage conversation as part of a lecture series named for columnist Herb Caen. The talk begins at 8 p.m. in Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft & Telegraph, UC Berkeley campus. Admission is $3-5; call (510) 642-9988.

Departure Points Author Louise Erdrich set her eloquent, award-winning 1984 novel Love Medicine against some of the bleakest landscapes in America's heartland, while novelist Martin Cruz Smith's best-known work, the thriller Gorky Park, took place in Moscow. However divergent their settings, both authors are of American Indian descent, and both will be speaking at a benefit for Honor the Earth, a public education campaign uniting indigenous communities, at 8 p.m. at the Herbst Theater, 401 Van Ness, S.F. Admission is $16; call 392-4400.