On Grief What to Expect When the Unthinkable Happens

The Very Strange History of Eyeglasses

Historians rank eyeglasses as one of the most important inventions in human history, but why did the Catholic church throw the inventor in a dungeon for 13 years? What did people do before glasses? Why was wearing glasses equated with devil worship? Why are they so expensive? Historian David King Dunaway answers all these questions and more as we talk about his book The Four Eyed World.

The Mystery of Blue and White

When Genevieve Wheeler Brown, a decorative arts expert from The Antique Road Show, was asked to evaluate a collection of blue and white pottery, hidden away for decades in an exclusive Manhattan townhouse, she had no idea that it told the centuries-old story of women's role in a ceramic that travelled from the Middle East to China to Holland and then to Gilded Age New York and eventually the China cabinets of ordinary New Englanders. This is fantastic story of Delftware.

A Most Unlikely Family

Brad Gooch is an award winning biographer of such gay iconic gay artists as Keith Haring and Frank O'Hara. Having lost his first love to the AIDs epidemic, he was lucky to fall in love again, with a guy who desperately wanted kids and a family. His new book Good Morning Moon tells the story of their quest, in late middle age, to make two kids through in vitro fertilization and his own discovery that, like his own kids, his own parentage is not what is considered 'normal' in our society.

The Secret War Against Hate in America

After World War Two, 'The Greatest Generation' returned to America determined to enjoy the freedoms of a world liberated from fascism but another group of Americans were equally determined to finish the job Hitler started by annihilating Jews and relocating Blacks to Africa. In his book The Secret War Against Hate, USC Professor of History tells the largely hidden story of those who risked their lives to fight homegrown fascism in America and how its roots still flourish today.

On Grief What to Expect When the Unthinkable Happens

Journalist Danielle Crittenden lost her 32 year-old daughter to a sudden brain tumor and with that death life as she knew it. She talks with Ira about her new book, Dispatches from Grief, in which she describes how she, and all those who lose a loved one, are dropped into a unfamiliar new landscape without a map.