Time To Eat The Dogs

In Part II, Ruth Gruenthal continues her story of her family's escape from France in 1940. She also discusses the challenges of living in the United States after the war.

Joyce Ashuntantang talks about her experiences as a traveler and a poet, from her childhood Cameroon to her years studying in Great Britain and the United States. Ashuntantang is a professor of English at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. She is the author of many works of poetry, including Beautiful Fire, published this year with Spears Media Press.

Ruth Gruenthal talks about her life in Germany as the Nazi Party came to power in the 1930s. Gruenthal and her family – along with thousands of Jewish refugees -- raced to escape France when the Germans invaded in the summer of 1940. Gruenthal is a practicing psychotherapist in New York City. She’s also the daughter of the publisher Kurt Enoch who co-founded the New American Library in the United States after World War II.

Anthropologist P.J. Capelotti discusses the role of exploration archaeology in understanding the Pacific voyage of Kon-Tiki, the Arctic airship expeditions of Walter Wellman, and the fate of Orca II, a fishing boat used in the film Jaws.

Bruce Strickrott talks about the value of human exploration of the deep sea. Strickrott is the Program Manager and Senior Pilot of the United States’ deepest diving science submersible, the DSV Alvin which is owned by the US Navy and operated out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He has participated in over 60 science expeditions and piloted over 365 dives in Alvin, spending over 2000 hours underwater.

Emily Gibson talks about women, aviation, and global air travel. Gibson is an associate historian at the National Science Foundation.

Max Edelson talk about the British Board of Trade’s ambitious project to explore and survey British America from the St Lawrence River to the islands of the Caribbean. Edelson is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. He's the author of The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence.

Anthropologist Lisa Messeri talks about planetary scientists and the way they use data to bring these places to life. Messeri is the author of Placing Out Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds.

Michael Benson talks about the making of 2001, a movie inspired by the collaboration of American director Stanley Kubrick and the British futurist Arthur C. Clark. Benson is the author of Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece.

Jason Smith discusses the U.S. Navy’s role in exploring and charting the ocean world. Smith is an assistant professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University. He’s the author of To Master the Boundless Sea: The U.S. Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire.  

Catherine Newell talks about the religious roots of the final frontier, focusing on the collaboration of artist Chesley Bonestell, science writer Willy Ley, and the NASA rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. Newell is an assistant professor of religion and science at the University of Miami. She’s the author of Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier.

Bill Rankin talks about the changes brought about by GPS and other mapping technologies in the twentieth century. Rankin is the author of After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century.

Laura Waterman talks about her novel, Starvation Shore, which relies upon memoirs, letters, and diaries to reconstruct the life of the Greely Party as it attempted to survive impossible conditions. Waterman is a climber, conservationist, and author who has written many books with her husband Guy Waterman about mountain history, climbing and environmental ethics. Her memoir Losing the Garden tells the story of her marriage to Guy and his decision nineteen years ago to end his life on the summit of Mt Lafayette.

Andrea Pitzer talks about her book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, one of the Smithsonian’s Ten Best History Books for 2017.

Matthias Determann talks about the importance of the space sciences in the Arab World. Determann is an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. He is the author of Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East.

Astronaut Garrett Reisman talks about life aboard the International Space Station. Reisman flew on two shuttle missions to the station and conducted three seven-hour spacewalks during his 107 days in space.

Rachel Walker talks about physiognomy -- the study of the human face -- and why it was so popular among scientists and the general public. Walker is an assistant professor of history at the University of Hartford. She is completing a book based on her dissertation, "A Beautiful Mind: Faces, Beauty, and the Brain in the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1780-1860."

Maria Nugent talks about Aboriginal Australians' first encounter with Captain Cook at Botany Bay, a violent meeting has come to represent the origin story of Australia’s colonial settlement. Nugent is a Fellow in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History in the School of History at the Australian National University. She is the author of Captain Cook Was Here.

Radio host Kevin Fox interviews me about the history of American Arctic exploration. The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition in 1845 turned the Arctic into an object of fascination. By the end of the century, it had become an 'Arctic Fever.'

Stewart Gillmor -- the sole American at Mirny Station in 1961 and 1962-- continues his discussion of life at the Soviet base: how communism plays out 10,000 miles from Moscow, the problems with planes in Antarctica, and what to do when the diesel generator dies at the coldest place in the world.