Howard Blue:  

Life Howard Blue, the author of WORDS AT WAR, has lived most of his life on Long Island where he taught high school Social Studies for 32 years. His interest in the Golden Age of Radio was revived while listening to BBC radio drama every evening during a 1973 sabbatical leave in London. While teaching, he involved his students in interviewing witnesses to history, including a cousin of Ann Frank, a former German World War I U-boat sailor, and a local veteran of the Spanish Civil War. To enable his students to interview a Canadian World War I veteran of trench warfare and the copilot of the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, both of whom lived far from Long Island, he set up telephone interviews using a speakerphone. Blue is fluent in Russian and speaks some Polish, Spanish and German. His translations of two stories: including one by Leo Tolstoy have been published in an anthology of Russian literature. In 1982, a sabbatical brought Blue to Warsaw where one afternoon, he got a strong dose of tear gas during a political demonstration. Four years later, he spent a summer in Israel participating in a Fulbright program for teachers, which had him hiking on the Negev Desert, listening to speakers from a cross-section of Israeli society, and writing a study about the political future of the West Bank. In 1989, Blue found himself teaching in a Soviet high school in Moscow on a semester long exchange. When a friend invited Blue to the funeral of human rights activist, Andrei Sakharov, but police tried to severely limit the number of mourners, Blue passed through a...Expand for more