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Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley’s celebrated Vera Wright trilogy, available here in its entirety for the first time, memorably explores the infinite intricacies of the human heart.
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The wounds of World War II are still deeply felt in the Baltics. That was evident in Latvia today where veterans gathered to commemorate troops who had died defending Latvia against Stalin’s Soviet invaders. The annual ceremony angers some in Latvia because the troops being commemorated fought in two Waffen SS divisions on the side of Nazi Germany. The BBC’s Damien McGuiness is in Latvia’s capital Riga. Download MP3 (Photo: German Bundesarchiv)Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The Alhambra in Grenada, the crowning glory of Moorish Spain, has more than 10,000 prayers and poems in Arabic inscribed on its walls. We hear about an effort to catalog the inscriptions. Then it’s the second part of the BBC’s documentary on Yiddish. Reporter Dennis Marks takes us to New York, where the language is undergoing a modest revival: among Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights, with a family who text message in transliterated Yiddish, and with a musician a novelist who are re-interpreting the old language of Eastern Europe’s shtetls for new generations. Download MP3
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We take you back to World War II for today’s Geography Quiz. We’re looking for the first nation to put female pilots into combat. This nation had three regiments of female pilots, and during the war they flew more than 30,000 missions. Their enemies called them the Night Witches, and they are the subject of a new documentary by the BBC’s Lucy Ash. Download MP3Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Students at the University of Nagasaki are attempting to recreate a community that a nuclear weapon destroyed. The Urakami neighborhood in Nagasaki was ground zero for the second atomic bomb the U-S dropped on Japan in World War Two. That attack killed 39-thousand people. And it destroyed most pictures of life in Urakami before the war. The students are recreating pre-war Urakami, with the help of memories and 3D technology. Akiko Fujita has our radio story.
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attended ceremonies in Poland today marking the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II and rejected claims that Russia had a role in sparking the conflict. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Svetlana Savranskaya director of Russian programs at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. >>>BBC coverage
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Jason Margolis assumes command of the podcast this week. We take you north to Canada to hear about an effort to “green” a million wartime-era homes. Then, we offer a global assessment of the new fuel efficiency standards announced by the Obama Administration. Listen
In his four-part series “Hiroshima’s Survivors: The Last Generation,” The World’s Patrick Cox introduces listeners to some of the over 250,000 “hibakusha,” or A-bomb survivors still living.
