How We Got Here #17

On the podcast this week a documentary from James Miles called The Lost Voices of Tiananmen Square. Miles was the BBC’s China correspondent when the student protests and subsequent crackdown unfolded back in 1989.  Twenty years later he takes stock and searches for meaning. Lots of ways to listen:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=303864789

or by RSS
http://www.theworld.org/rss/history.xml

or listen here.

Diego Garcia

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed David Vine for my podcast “How We Got Here.” He’s an anthropologist at American University and the author of Island of Shame: The Secret  History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia.  I wrote a radio story as well which aired on today’s show. Here’s the link:

Drones

Here’s a link to yesterday’s story on drones over Pakistan. You’ll hear from former RAF pilot Andrew Brookes, counterinsurgency expert Dave Kilcullen, Stanford History Professor Priya Satia and Georgetown’s Daniel Byman.  There’s much more to say and I’ll try to get to it one day soon.

How We Got Here #16

Something different on the podcast this week–

The World’s Clark Boyd tells us about a new graphic novel The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan With Doctors Without Borders.  It’s the tale of Didier Lefèvre, a photojournalist who accompanies a Doctors Without Borders mission into Afghanistan in 1986.  The book is a mesmerizing combination of graphic novel, photojournalism and reported memoir that takes you back in time and deep inside the culture and landscape of a particular region of Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation.  As Clark and I discuss in the podcast, sometimes a graphic novel makes for a more powerful history lesson than any number of academic tomes.   Here are lots of ways to listen:

Subscribe on iTunes
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=303864789

or by RSS
http://www.theworld.org/rss/history.xml

or listen here.

And don’t miss Clark’s slideshow on the book:

http://www.theworld.org/images/slideshows/photographer/index.html

How We Got Here #15

This week I speak with David Vine of American University about his book Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia.

It’s an amazing tale about how a U.S. base came to be located on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Turns out all the inhabitants were expelled to make way for the base and they’ve been fighting to go home ever since. They’re known as Chagossians.  Vine and other advocates are hoping the Obama Administration might take a fresh look at the issue.  I’ll have a story about the book and the U.S. government’s response to it on the radio show too.

Subscribe on iTunes
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=303864789

or by RSS
http://www.theworld.org/rss/history.xml

or listen here.

How We Got Here #14

NYU professor Marilyn Young talks about her book Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History.  The first bombs were dropped from hot air balloons in the 19th century.   Bombing from planes began early in the 20th. Young takes us through a hundred years of air power and argues that it doesn’t work, at least not the way it’s supposed to.

Subscribe on iTunes
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=303864789

or by RSS
http://www.theworld.org/rss/history.xml

or listen here.

Seals

In the “and now for something completely different” category, I recently produced a half-hour radio show on harp seals in the Gulf of St. Lawrence for the public radio series Encounters, one of the hidden jewels of public broadcasting. Listen here:

And here’s a shorter, slideshow version I did for PRI’s The World.