Show Producer’s Blog

Just to say I’m not using this page much right now but I am blogging at The World if you want to check out those posts. Thanks!

The Fear by Peter Godwin

Marco Werman interviewed Peter Godwin about his new book The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe today.  It’s a riveting conversation about a riveting book. I’ll put the longer unedited version on the history podcast as soon as I get a chance.

Here’s that long version I promised.

Richard Holbrooke

My piece today on what Holbrooke did and didn’t accomplish as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan:

And here’s a piece from a 2008 series on “How Wars End” about Holbrooke and the Dayton Peace Accords for Bosnia.

And reminiscences from the press corps:

David Rohde Interview on PRI’s The World

Hendrik Hertzberg The Envoy

George Packer In the Company of Holbrooke

John Burns Thirsting for a Role in History

Roger Cohen The Unquiet American

My Prison, My Home

An amazing book by an amazing woman. Here’s my interview with Haleh Esfandiari on PRI’s The World today. A longer version will go in the next episode of my How We Got Here podcast which I hope to get out by the end of the week.

www.theworld.org

Some good stuff on the show today; here’s the audio.

Pictograms

Yesterday’s fun piece on the pictograms on the Afghan election ballot (and other signifiers).

Don’t miss Lisa Mullins’s interview with Charlie Sennott either.

For that matter, listen to the whole show:

Fresh Congo Horrors

Latest campaign against Rwandan Hutu rebels inside eastern Congo fuels fresh atrocities. This is from a Washington Post piece by Stephanie McCrummen:

The mission, backed logistically by U.N. peacekeepers and politically by the United States, aims to disband the remaining 7,000 or so Rwandan Hutu rebels who fled into eastern Congo after the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

But since the operation began in January, villagers have recounted nightmarish stories that raise questions about whether the military action will ultimately cause more destruction than it prevents.

At least half a million people have fled a rebel campaign of village burnings and retaliatory killings, including a massacre of more than 100 people in which several civilians were decapitated. At the same time, people are also fleeing the advance of their own predatory army — a toxic mishmash of mostly unpaid, underfed, ill-trained former militiamen churned into the military after various peace deals.

Read the whole thing.

Backstory

…while I’m on the history topic and in case I haven’t mentioned it recently, I

LOVE this new radio show and podcast:

BackStory -  With the American History Guys.

This episode on death and mourning is especially good.

Update to State Department Office of Historian story

You might remember the brouhaha late last year over trouble in the Office of the Historian at the State Department which writes the highly regarded FRUS series or Foreign Relations of the United States. The historians in the office were up in arms over the alleged mismanagement of the office by the then-director Marc Susser. Well now an internal investigation has confirmed the seriousness of the problem and Susser has apparently been removed from the post. Stephen Aftergood at Secrecy News has been following the story and there’s also a report in today’s Washington Post by Walter Pincus.

How We Got Here #18

On this week’s podcast: Cars, China, Czechs

There were so many good history pieces on the “big” show this week (PRI’s The World) that I’m giving you a compilation. First Lisa Mullins interviews Giles Chapman on what happened to British automakers four decades ago, and lessons for GM which declared bankruptcy this week. Next a fantastic piece from The World’s Mary Kay Magistad about Chinese efforts to suppress the Tiananmen story.  Mary Kay has a real feel for the politics of historical memory and the implications of letting the story fester untold and she also conveys the ambivalence and uncertainty surrounding the silence in China. Lisa interviews Mary Kay as well which frames the radio story really nicely. And finally a masterful radio story from The World’s Alex Gallafent who’s been venturing way off the beaten path in and around New York City lately. Here he takes us into the heart of the Czech immigrant experience in Manhattan with memories of Bohemian National Hall on the Upper East Side. HERE’S HOW 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.