The John Batchelor Show

Sunday 21 July 2013

Air Date: 
July 21, 2013

 

Photo, above: Sarah Bernhardt as Theodora   

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 1, Block A: Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman... by Leigh Eric Schmidt (1 of 2)   Ida C. Craddock was a 19th-century American advocate of free speech and women's rights. [See: Hour 1, Blocks A & B, Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman... by Leigh Eric Schmidt]

      Ida Craddock was born in Philadelphia; her father died when she was four months old. Her mother homeschooled her as an only child and provided her with an extensive Quaker education. In her twenties, Craddock was recommended by the faculty for admission into the University of Pennsylvania as its first female undergraduate student after having passed the required entrance exams. However, her entrance was blocked by the University's Board of Trustees in 1882. She went on to publish a stenography textbook, Primary Phonography, and teach the subject to women at Girard College. . . . 

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 1, Block B: Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman... by Leigh Eric Schmidt  (2 of 2)

In her thirties, Craddock left her Quaker upbringing behind. She developed an academic interest in the occult through her association with the Theosophical Society beginning around 1887. She tried in her writings to synthesize translated mystic literature and traditions from many cultures into a scholarly, distilled whole. As a freethinker, she was elected Secretary of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Secular Union in 1889. Although a member of the Unitarian faith, Craddock became a student of religious eroticism and declared herself a Priestess and Pastor of the Church of Yoga. Never married, Craddock eventually claimed to have a blissful ongoing marital relationship with an angel named Soph. . . .   [more]

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 1, Block C: Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris (1 of 2)

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 1, Block D: Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris (2 of 2)

Hour Two

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 2, Block A:  James Nelson, Sea History Magazine, in re: the Battle of Cape Henry (1 of 2)

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 2, Block B: James Nelson, Sea History Magazine, in re: the Battle of Cape Henry  (2 of 2)

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 2, Block C: Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World by Nir Rosen (1 of 2)   

        Rosen—who, the Weekly Standard once bitterly complained, has “great access to the Baathists and jihadists who make up the Iraqi insurgency”— has spent nearly a decade among warriors and militants who have been challenging American power in the Muslim world. In Aftermath, he tells their story, showing the other side of the U.S. war on terror, traveling from the battle-scarred streets of Baghdad to the alleys, villages, refugee camps, mosques, and killing grounds of Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and finally Afghanistan, where Rosen has a terrifying encounter with the Taliban as their “guest,” and witnesses the new Obama surge fizzling in southern Afghanistan.  Rosen was one of the few Westerners to venture inside the mosques of Baghdad to witness the first stirrings of sectarian hatred in the months after the U.S. invasion. He shows how weapons, tactics, and sectarian ideas from the civil war in Iraq penetrated neighboring countries and threatened their stability, especially Lebanon and Jordan, where new jihadist groups mushroomed. Moreover, . . .

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 2, Block D: Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World by Nir Rosen (2 of 2)

       . . . he shows that the spread of violence at the street level is often the consequence of specific policies hatched in Washington, D.C. Rosen offers a seminal and provocative account of the surge, told from the perspective of U.S. troops on the ground, the Iraqi security forces, Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents that were both allies and adversaries. He also tells the story of what happened to these militias once they outlived their usefulness to the Americans.   Aftermath is both a unique personal history and an unsparing account of what America has wrought in Iraq and the region. The result is a hair- raising, 360-degree view of the modern battlefield its consequent humanitarian catastrophe, and the reality of counterinsurgency.

Hour Three

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 3, Block A: Upper Cut: Highlights of My Hollywood Life by Carrie White  (1 of 2)

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 3, Block B: Upper Cut: Highlights of My Hollywood Life by Carrie White  (2 of 2)

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 3, Block C: Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt (Jewish Lives) by Robert Gottlieb (1 of 2)

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 3, Block D: Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt (Jewish Lives) by Robert Gottlieb (2 of 2)

Hour Four

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 4, Block A: Tough Without a Gun (Vintage) by Stefan Kanfer (1 of 2)

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 4, Block B: Tough Without a Gun (Vintage) by Stefan Kanfer (2 of 2)

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 4, Block C: Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman... by Leigh Eric Schmidt (1 of 2)

Sunday 21 July  2013 / Hour 4, Block D: Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman... by Leigh Eric Schmidt (2 of 2)

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Music

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