Chang-rae Lee speaks here with Claudia Cragg about his latest novel 'The Surrendered'. [See below for an extract from the book]. The Korean-American author was born in Seoul, South Korea and emigrated to the US in 1968, aged two. He grew up in the New York City area and began his university education at Yale, before moving on to the University of Oregon, where he earned an MFA. His first novel, "Native Speaker" won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the American Book Award and the ALA Book of the Year Award.

Another much acclaimed work "A Gesture Life" grew out of four years work. It originally focused on the experience of a Korean comfort woman, and was told from her perspective. Chang-rae Lee went to Korea to interview surviving comfort women. He currently directs the creative writing program at Princeton University in the US. His 2004 novel Aloft features an isolated suburbanite forced to deal with his world.

Extract:

“It was June’s decision to climb atop the overcrowded train. Since that night she had often wondered if it would have been better to wait for the next one, or to have taken their chances on foot, or else steered the twins and herself far off the main road without any provisions and simply waited for the one merciful night that would lift them away forever. The twins would not have suffered and she would not be here now. For what had surviving all the days since gotten her, save a quelled belly? She had merely prolonged the march, and now that her hunger had an altogether different face, it was her heart that was deformed, twisting with an even homelier agony.”

It was three years ago that Claudia Cragg spoke with Dr Helen Caldicott about the inherent risks (or so it would now appear) in the Japanese nuclear industry. Now following a massive earthquake and the explosions that took place at the Fukushima plant Japan's nuclear crisis has become more complex than ever. The earthquake(s) is (are) tragic enough, but the proven record of incompetence with nuclear incidentis unforgiveable? This piece was part of Cragg's coverage of an 'incident' after a large earthquake at the world's largest nuclear power plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Japan, and was first broadcast in July 2007. In this week's earthquake, no reports have (yet?) surfaced about damage at the K-K plant.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, physician and vocal anti-nuclear campaigner, comments in a phone interview from Australia with journalist Claudia Cragg on the recent 6.8 earthquake in Japan which hit the world's largest nuclear power plant at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa. Caldicott believes the problems experienced in Japan recently also hold resonance for those in California living near the Diablo nuclear power plant. According to Japanese activisit Aileen Mioko Smith of Green Action Japan, there is now concern in Kashiwazaki City and Kariwa Village that Tokyo Electric may be covering up evidence of extent of damage from the earthquake before a thorough investigation is undertaken. According to Mioko Smith, a Kashiwazaki legislator who has been inside the plant has said he is shocked at the extent of visible damage PLUS the rush Tokyo Electric is in to cover over/repair the damage before a fullinvestigation is undertaken.

In this program, Claudia Cragg speaks with prize-winning author David Vann about his work in general and about his novel 'Caribou Island'. The book was recently featured as the night-time serial on BBC Radio 4's 'Book at Bedtime'.

'Caribou Island' "is set in David Vann's native Alaska, amid the icy, glacier-fed lakes and the remote islands covered in alder and Sitka spruce. And it is on such island, far from any habitation, that Gary, a medievalist who fled to Alaska 30 years before with his young wife, Irene, in search of an unattainable idyll, is now determined to begin once again. He will build a simple cabin there and at last find peace. Irene joins him in his endeavour, understanding, unlike her husband, that there are costs." 

Caribou Island is the second major literary work from David Vann, whose ground-breaking first book, 'Legend of a Suicide' has become a best-seller around the world and has won numerous literary awards including the prestigious Prix Medicis Etranger for 2010.

KGNU Denver/Boulder is in the middle of the Spring Fund Drive to raise much-needed funds that keep the eclectic music and vital news (local, national and international) programming on air. If you feel that independent public radio deserves support (in this age of corporate, monolithic media), please consider a donation (however small) especially in the light of the potential slash and burn cuts in government subsidies. Please visit: KGNU and give if you enjoy this podcast. Even a tiny donation to the station that makes this podcast possible is very gratefully received. Thank you.

FOLLOW on Twitter @KGNUITEClaudia

The Homelessness Marathon is an annual 14-hour radio broadcast featuring the voices and stories of homeless people from around the United States. It features live call-ins all night long via a national toll-free number and the programming is made available for free to all non-commercial radio, and some TV stations around the USA, on the internet and even internationally. Jeremy Weir Alderson is both founder and prime mover of the Marathon.

On the Homelessness Marathon, the producers talk to many different kinds of people who hold any number of  different views about how to end homelessness. In so doing, a wide diversity of opinion is presented, as well as the stand of the organizers themselves.

Behind the effort is at core the idea that the elimination of poverty is a moral duty for society. They believe that fulfilling this duty makes for a better society and that there are many ways to fulfill this duty, but that all of them should be guided by these principles.

The archives of this year's event - and of all preceding years' events back to 1998 - can be found HERE. If you are unable to listen in real time, there is a wealth of downloadable audio available right there for when you are. 

The interview attached here in this podcast is only one very tiny part of this year's event, an interview with two guests at Denver's daytime residence for the homeless, The St. Francis' Center, and with that entity's Executive Director, Tom Luehrs.

It was back in 1981 that Claudia Cragg fell, by chance as the journalist that she had then been since 1975  (and at that point as a feature writer with the Hong Kong South China Morning Post) into the unbelievably happy position of interviewing interesting people as a profession. And, since that time, she says she has had to pinch herself repeatedly when sitting talking with someone fascinating one on one.

In all that time, though, few people stand out for her as much as the subect of this radio interview, the author Azar Nafisi.

This interview was conducted at the beginning of 2009 but still strikes a profound chord so it is now being shared here on this blogcast. Sadly since then, little has changed in Iran or in Iran-US relations.

Azar Nafisi is a best-selling author, an English Literature professor, and the daughter of Ahmad Nafisi, a former mayor of Tehran (1961–1963) who was the youngest man ever appointed to the post up to that time. She was born in Iran in the late 1940s and speaks here with Claudia Cragg about her autobiography, 'Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter (2008) which discusses her relationship with her parents intermingled with the decades of political upheaval in Iran, including her father's incarceration under the Shah on trumped-up charges of financial irregularities. 

After her education abroad, Nafisi returned to her home in Iran in 1979 where for a brief time she taught English Literature at the University of Tehran. But, in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the subsequent rise to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Nafisi became increasingly restless with the stringent rules imposed upon women by her country's new rulers. She longed for the freedom that she believed women in some countries took for granted, which women in Iran had now lost as the Khomeini regime enacted laws curtailing women's rights.

So it was that, in 1995, that she found herself in Iran no longer able to teach English literature properly without attracting the scrutiny of the faculty authorities, so she gave up her post at the university, and instead invited seven of her female students to attend regular meetings at her house, every Thursday morning. They studied literary works including some considered controversial in post-revolutionary Iranian society such as Lolita alongside other works such as Madame Bovary. She also taught novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen. But then, on June 24, 1997 Nafisi felt compelled to leave Iran, once again. She moved to the United States, where she wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, (2003), a book where she describes her experiences as a secular woman living and working in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the book, she declares "I left Iran, but Iran did not leave me."

This book that came out of these teaching experiences in The Islamic Republic has been translated into 32 languages. It was on the New York Times Bestseller list for 117 weeks, and has won numerous literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense, and the Europe based Persian Golden Lioness Award for literature.

For some time  now, Nafisi has been a visiting fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and serves on the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, a United States nongovernmental organization (NGO) which conducts research and advocacy on democracy.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with Simon Winchester about his latest work of non-fiction, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. In this interview, he discusses those facets of the book that deal with climate change and global warming, ecology, the United States before Columbus, the parallels with space exploration and the Human Genome project, all as they relate to The Atlantic.

"Atlantic is a biography of a tremendous space that has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists, and warriors, and continues profoundly to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams. Spanning the ocean's story, from its geological origins to the age of exploration, from World War II battles to today's struggles with pollution and overfishing, Winchester's narrative is epic, intimate, and awe inspiring".

Winchester's book relates that, tilll a thousand years ago, few humans ventured into the Atlantic or imagined traversing its vast infinity. But once the first daring mariners successfully navigated to its far shores—whether they were Vikings, the Irish, the Basques, John Cabot, or Christopher Columbus in the north, or the Portuguese and the Spanish in the south—the Atlantic swiftly evolved in the world's growing consciousness of itself as an enclosed body of water. Soon it became the fulcrum of Western civilization. More than a mere history, Atlantic is an unforgettable journey of unprecedented scope by one of the most gifted writers in the English language.

It was in 1969 that Simon Winchester started his writing career when he joined The Guardian, for whom he was Northern Ireland Correspondent during The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast Hour of Terror. He was then briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming American correspondent in Washington, D.C., where he covered stories from the end of Richard Nixon's administration to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency. In 1982, while working as the Chief Foreign Feature Writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falklands Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held as a prisoner in Tierra del Fuego for three months. You might also like to listen to the 'Chatting Up a Storm' Claudia Cragg interview for KGNU with Simon Winchester on an earlier book 'Joseph Needham: The Man Who Loved China'. 

(Apart from being made universally available, free, in this podcast, many of these interviews are conducted for and are broadcast on KGNU Denver-Boulder. This is a public radio station, like all public radio stations in these hard economic times, in need of listener funding and support. Kindly consider making a donation to KGNU, however small, to the station (NOT to Claudia Cragg) to continue to make air broadcast  of this work possible).

His best known works prior to this include the best-selling Stalingrad and Berlin - The Downfall 1945 and recount the World War II battles between the Soviet Union and Germany. They have been praised for their vivid, compelling style, their treatment of the ordinary lives of combatants and civilians and the use of newly disclosed documents from Soviet archives.Beevor's works have been used as sources and credited as such in many recent documentary films about World War II. Another one of his best known works is Crete: The Battle and the Resistance for which he won the Runciman Prize, administered by the Anglo-Hellenic League for stimulating interest in Greek history and culture.

Beevor is a visiting professor at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. He is descended from a long line of women writers, being a son of "Kinta" Beevor (born Carinthia Jane Waterfield, 22 December 1911 – 29 August 1995), herself the daughter of Lina Waterfield, and a descendant of Lucie Duff-Gordon (author of a travelogue on Egypt). Kinta Beevor wrote A Tuscan Childhood. Antony Beevor is married to Hon. Artemis Cooper, daughter of Duff Cooper, granddaughter of Lady Diana Cooper. He was educated at Winchester College and Sandhurst. He studied under the famous military historian John Keegan. Beevor is a former officer with the 11th Hussars who served in England and Germany for five years before resigning his commission. He has published several popular histories on World War II and the 20th century in general.

Professor Beevor has encountered criticism on his work in Russia. The Russian ambassador to the UK denounced the book as "lies" and "slander against the people who saved the world from Nazism". O.A. Rzheshevsky, a professor and President of the Russian Association of World War II Historians, has charged that Beevor is merely resurrecting the discredited and racist views of Neo-Nazi historians, who depicted Soviet troops as subhuman "Asiatic hordes"In an interview with BBC News Online, Rzheshevsky admitted that he had only read excerpts from Berlin: The Downfall 1945 and had not seen the book's source notes. He claimed that Beevor's use of phrases such as "Berliners remember" and "the experiences of the raped German women" were better suited "for pulp fiction, than scientific research." Rzheshevsky also defended Soviet reprisals against Germans, stating that the Germans could have expected an "avalanche of revenge".

Beevor responded to Russian criticism on his book Berlin: The Downfall 1945.  This criticism centres on the book's discussion of atrocities committed by the Red Army against German civilians – in particular, the extremely widespread rape of German women and female Russian forced labourers, both before and after the end of the war. Beevor stated however that German women were part of a society that supported Hitler and thus can't be seen as victims in the same way than Jews, Poles and Russians.

Beevor, though, stated that he was accused by the Russian media of being the "chief slanderer of the Red Army" for describing repeated and relentless rape by the Red Army of young women taken from the Soviet Union by the Nazis for slave labor. Beevor states that he used excerpts from the report of General Tsigankov, the chief of the political department of the 1st Ukrainian Front, to cite the incident. He responded to Rzheshevsky by saying, "Professor O.A. Rzheshevsky even accused me of repeating Nazi propaganda, when in fact the bulk of the evidence on the subject came from Soviet sources, especially the NKVD reports in GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), and a wide range of reliable personal accounts." Beevor hopes Russian historians will take a more objective approach to material in their own archives which are at odds to the heroic myth of the Red Army as "liberators" in 1945.

"Other historians such as Richard Overy, (see here also an interview with Richard Overy on his latest book) a historian from King's College London, have criticised Russian "outrage" at the book and defended Beevor. Overy accused the Russians of refusing to acknowledge Soviet war crimes, "Partly this is because they felt that much of it was justified vengeance against an enemy who committed much worse, and partly it was because they were writing the victors' history.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with Professor Richard Overy about his book '1939 - Countdown to War'. The Washington Post describes it as "an exceptionally lucid, concise and authoritative book which publishes tells the story of "the extraordinary ten days of drama that separated the conclusion of the German-Soviet [non-aggression] pact early in the morning of 24 August [1939] and the late afternoon of 3 September when France joined Britain in declaring war on Germany." On the day of the interview, the Professor had a very heavy cold but insisted most graciously in going ahead.

In the late 1980s, Overy was involved in a historical dispute with the Timothy Mason that mostly played out over the pages of Past and Present journal over the reasons for the outbreak of World War Two in 1939. Mason had contended that a "flight into war" had been imposed on Adolf Hitler by a structural economic crisis, which confronted Hitler with the choice of making difficult economic decisions or aggression. Overy argued against Mason's thesis, maintaining that though Germany was faced with economic problems in 1939, the extent of these problems cannot explain aggression against Poland and the reasons for the outbreak of war were due to the choices made by the Nazi leadership. For Overy, the problem with Mason's thesis was that it rested on the assumption that in a way not shown by records, information was passed on to Hitler about the Reich's economic problems. Overy argued that there was a difference between economic pressures induced by the problems of the Four Year Plan and economic motives to seize raw materials, industry and foreign reserves of neighboring states as a way of accelerating the Four Year Plan. Overy asserted that the repressive capacity of the German state as a way of dealing with domestic unhappiness was somewhat downplayed by Mason. Finally, Overy argued that there is considerable evidence that the German state felt they could master the economic problems of rearmament; as one civil servant put it in January 1940 "we have already mastered so many difficulties in the past, that here too, if one or other raw material became extremely scarce, ways and means will always yet be found to get out of a fix". 

Professor Richard Overy is a graduate of Caius College, Cambridge and was awarded a research fellowship at Churchill College, Overy taught history at Cambridge from 1972 to 1979, as a fellow of Queens' College and from 1976 as a university assistant lecturer. In 1980 he moved to King's College London, where he became professor of modern history in 1994. He was appointed to a professorship in Exeter University in 2004.

According to Bill Peschel, the world’s greatest authors are often canonized, raised up on pedestals and revered not only as artists, but people.  Certainly every true writing genius must have lived up to their great name, right?  

Peschel says that most of them did not. Writers Gone Wild, The Feuds, Frolics and Follies of Literature’s Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Lovers, Iconoclasts and Misanthropes is a revealing book about some of the world’s greatest writers behaving badly, including such bizarre, but true tales as:

·       The night Dashiell Hammett hired a Chinese prostitute to break up S.J. Perelman’s marriage (and run off with his wife!)

·       The night a drunken Dylan Thomas dodged machine-gun bullets

·       Why Earnest Hemingway fought a book critic, a modernist poet, and Nazi subs (but not at the same time)

·       The near-fatal trip Katherine Anne Porter took while high on marijuana in Mexico

·       The day Virginia Woolf snuck onto a Royal Navy ship disguised as an Abyssinian prince

·       And much more!