Painting, above: The Victory of Alexander the Great, 1529, by Albrecht Altdorfer.  See: Hour 4, Block D: Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the Bloody Fight for His Empire by James Romm  

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 1, Block A: Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian... by Monte Reel (1 of 4)

In 1856, the French adventurer Paul Du Chaillu trekked deep into the interior of Gabon in West Africa with guides and porters from the local Mbondemo tribe. Sometimes walking as many as 20 miles a day through dense forest, carrying quinine to fight off malaria and weapons to shoot wildlife, the party often stopped to listen for large animals. It was the age of European exploration of Africa, and in the same year, Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke began their search for the source of the Nile. But it wasn’t geography that compelled Du Chaillu — it was the mysterious gorilla.

     Du Chaillu’s ardor was rewarded. As former Washington Post correspondent Monte Reel recounts in “Between Man and Beast,” one day in the forest Du Chaillu and his hunters heard “a terrifying bark.” A huge animal rose up on two legs, standing nearly six feet tall: “The forearms bulged with the promise of strength, its neck a massive pillar of solid muscle. The animal must have weighed nearly four hundred pounds.” The ape charged, then stopped about six yards ahead of Du Chaillu. A gunshot rang out, and the adult male gorilla fell. Using extensive historical research, Reel brings alive this expedition and a later one and describes what happened between the two journeys. In New York and London, Du Chaillu thrilled audiences with his exotic tales, became enmeshed in the uproar over Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and suffered from scathing attacks by his rivals, who accused him of faking many of his scientific claims.   Du Chaillu did, in fact, experience close-up encounters with gorillas.  . . . 

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 1, Block B: Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian... by Monte Reel (2 of 4)

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 1, Block C: Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian... by Monte Reel (3 of 4)

. . . AFTER we reached Ndiayai, I went back to my little hut, and found every thing I had left there. I had hidden my powder and shot in different places, and had dug holes in which to hide my beads.   The news had spread among the surrounding Cannibal villages that the spirit, as they called me, was still in the village of Ndiayai, and the people flocked to see me. Among those who came to see me was a chief of the name of Oloko. He gave me the long war-knife, of which you have seen a drawing, and explained to me how it had several times gone right through a man.   Mbéné went away for a while, and left me entirely [89] alone with these Cannibals. During his absence I studied the habits of these strange people, and you may be sure that wherever I went I kept my eyes wide open.

      By the way, I see I have omitted to give a description of the town of King Ndiayai. It was a very large town, composed of a single street. When I say a large town, I do not mean, of course, that it could bear any comparison as to size with London, Paris, or New York. I mean that it was a large town for this part of Africa. It contained five or six hundred men. The houses were quite small, and were all made of the bark of trees; none of them had windows. They were nearly all of the same size. Strange to say, these Fans seemed to be very fond of music, and very funny instruments they make use of! To hear some of their music . . . 

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 1, Block D: Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian... by Monte Reel (4 of 4)

Hour Two

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 2, Block A: Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni  (1 of 4)     

     Marcus Porcius Cato, known as Cato the Younger, was a Stoic philosopher and a Roman senator — and the last man standing when Rome's republic fell to tyranny. His blood feud with Caesar began in the chamber of the Senate, played out on the battlefields of a world war, and ended when he took his own life rather than live under a dictator. Centuries of thinkers, writers, and artists have drawn inspiration from Cato's example. Saint Augustine and the early Christians were moved and challenged by his example. Dante, in his poem The Divine Comedy, chose Cato to preside over the souls who arrive in Purgatory. George Washington so revered him that he staged the play Cato to revive the spirits of his troops at Valley Forge. And of course his defense of the republic against the coming of tyranny inspired the 18th-century authors of Cato's Letters, which in turn were read by many of the American Founders and provided the name of the Cato Institute. Now, in Rome's Last Citizen, Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni deliver the first modern biography of this stirring figure.

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 2, Block B: Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni  (2 of 4)

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 2, Block C: Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni  (3 of 4)

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 2, Block D: Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni  (4 of 4)

Hour Three

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 3, Block A: Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization by Richard Miles  (1 of 6)

       When most people think of Carthage, they picture Hannibal and his elephants or Dido, the suicidal queen, cursing her perfidious lover, Aeneas. But as every schoolboy used to know, Carthage is inextricable from the Punic wars – its very own 100-year conflict with Rome (264-146 BC). Almost all our stories of this once-great north African empire, says Richard Miles, come to us through a biased Roman filter. Carthage never had a chance to tell its own tale – its library was lost to its Numidian neighbours. But drawing on archaeological and written sources, Miles helps to fill in the blanks with this thoughtful and meticulous book. Carthage was rather more sophisticated than history gave it credit for, and its people were certainly no more war-mongering than their regional neighbours.  

     The first Carthaginians were Phoenicians from the Lebanese coast, who had dominated Mediterranean trade in the pre-classical age, giving the world interest-bearing loans, maritime insurance and an alphabet. But Carthage would soon outshine its motherland. Built on a natural harbour amid rich agricultural land, Carthage became . . .

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 3, Block B: Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization by Richard Miles  (2 of 6)

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 3, Block C: Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization by Richard Miles  (3 of 6)

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 3, Block D: Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization by Richard Miles  (4 of 6)

Hour Four

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 4, Block A: Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization by Richard Miles  (5 of 6)

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 4, Block B: Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization by Richard Miles  (6 of 6)

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 4, Block C:  Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the Bloody Fight for His Empire by James Romm  (1 of 2)

     Alexander the Great’s life ended abruptly, leaving in his wake a power vacuum that his generals and other high-ranked rivals tried to fill during a long struggle for power. At stake was the world’s largest empire, straddling three continents, an unfinished project whose ultimate fruition would see the creation of an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. No one was ready for the eventuality of Alexander’s death, including Alexander himself, for even as he became mysteriously ill, Alexander was planning an assault on the Arab world. But the campaign as well as his dream of a world state spanning continents would die with him, victim of a power struggle among lesser men. It is this power struggle, its characters and political machinations, that is the subject of James Romm’s Ghost on the Throne. Romm’s history of the years immediately following Alexander the Great’s passing presents a panoramic look at the effects of the death of a great king upon the political order of his great kingdom. We are privy not only to the plots among the top generals but also the events in distant places such as Athens and Egypt, having a first row seat on the struggles that Alexander’s death unleashed near and afar. And we get the stories of men like Aristotle whose lives are upturned by a changing political landscape. Romm also recovers the fates of the women in his story, and an unhappy lot theirs was: wives were murdered or starved themselves for their existence depended entirely on the fate of their men. But the world of Alexander was unenlightened in many ways, not merely in its treatment of women, which made Alexander’s vision of a new world order, one defined by a culturally homogeneous world state, so startling.  . . . 

Saturday 8 June 2013 / Hour 4, Block D: Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the Bloody Fight for His Empire by James Romm  (2 of 2)

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