During World War I, thousands of soldiers suffered catastrophic facial injuries. If these soldiers survived their injuries, they were often shunned once they got back home. Some were forced to sit on brightly painted blue benches so that the public knew not to look at them. Many became isolated — sometimes their fiancées broke off their engagements, or their families rejected them — and came to feel that their lives were no longer worth living. But then a daring surgeon entered the picture — one who was determined to repair and even rebuild these men’s injured faces: Harold Gillies. On this episode, we talk with medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris about her new book “The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I,” which traces Gillies’ pioneering mission to reconstruct faces. We hear about how he gathered together artists, radiographers, dental surgeons, and more for novel collaborations, their miraculous results, and how Gillies’ efforts led to the birth of modern reconstructive surgery.

Ozark Highlands Radio is a weekly radio program that features live music and interviews recorded at Ozark Folk Center State Park’s beautiful 1,000-seat auditorium in Mountain View, Arkansas.  In addition to the music, our “Feature Host” segments take listeners through the Ozark hills with historians, authors, and personalities who explore the people, stories, and history of the Ozark region.

This week, songs about saying goodbye performed by a variety of artists recorded live at Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View, Arkansas.

Farewells have produced some of our most powerful and emotional works of art.  Goodbye is a theme endlessly explored in paintings, sculpture, literature and film.  Music is no different.  In this episode, we’ll hear songs of farewell written for everything from beloved people, to places, careers, innocence, life, and even a horse.  Featured are experimental folk ensemble Jayme Stone & the Lomax Project with Moira Smiley, renowned cowboy singer Don Edwards, the Paul Brock Band with Dennis Carey & Dave Curley, Smithsonian Folkways artists Anna & Elizabeth, Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser with cellist Natalie Haas, Texas swing and bluegrass phenomenon The Purple Hulls, John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Smithsonian Folkways artists Lula Wiles, traditional fiddler Bruce Molsky, folk singer and actor Joe Purdy & friends, and ubiquitous cowboy cadre Riders in the Sky.

In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, musician, educator, and country music legacy Mark Jones offers an archival recording of Ozark original Bob Blair performing the traditional song “Who Will Sing?” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives.

Renowned folk musician Aubrey Atwater presents songs about home.  Leaving home, missing home, and going home are all themes of Aubrey’s segment this week.

Eight months after Reveal’s three-part series about the disappearance of 43 Mexican college students in 2014, the government’s investigation is in high gear. But parents of the missing still don’t have the answers they want. There have been arrests and indictments of high-profile members of the military, and even the country’s former attorney general. But no one has been convicted, and the remains of only a handful of students have been identified. 

In the first segment, we relive the night of the attack on the students, and chronicle the previous government’s flawed investigation into the crime. We meet independent investigators who succeeded in getting close to the truth, then fled the country for their safety. 

Then we explore how the election of a new Mexican government led to a new investigation led by Omag Gomez Trejo, a young lawyer who pledged to expose the truth about the crime. 

We end with a conversation with Reveal’s Anayansi Diaz Cortes and Kate Doyle, from the National Security Archive. They bring us up to date on what’s happened with the investigation since we aired our three-part series, After Ayotzinapa.

We are less than a week from the DART spacecraft’s impact on asteroid moonlet Dimorphos as this episode is published. Mission Coordination Lead Nancy Chabot gives us a status update and a preview of what to expect during the September 26 encounter. Bruce Betts’ new What’s Up space trivia contest reminds us of another cosmic impact back in 2005.  Hear and discover more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-dart-impact-preview-nancy-chabot

ClassicalWorks (Episode 182)

H. P. Lovecraft’s frightful horror fiction—dated between Edgar Allan Poe’s and Stephen King’s—is the weirdest of the weird. Lovecraft found ravenous, man-eating rats in the walls and foundations of our houses, and in our hearts and dreams just as creepily. For Halloween readers, he gave us ocean monsters the size of mountains; also, slippery scaly fish-people, flipping, flopping, and talking their way down the streets of Lovecraft’s favorite coastal towns near witchy Salem and the north of New England. There’s an idea in these stories—about human ignorance in an evil sea of telepathic enemies. There’s an open landscape, too, where horror fiction is growing a new crop.

If you’re sensing something ancient, cosmically vast, inescapable and frightening this Halloween season, you may be catching a Lovecraftian breeze. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a lonely, near-reclusive child of Providence, Rhode Island, who felt intimations of mind-melting infinity in New England of the twenties and thirties. The coast north of Boston inspired him with Gothic ideas, which he dished out in stories long and short for pulp magazines, thrilling readers who visited his mythical sites like Arkham, Miskatonic University, and Innsmouth—a fictional universe terrorized by creatures like Cthulhu, the ocean monster so complexly described that he cannot be pictured. Lovecraft specialized in such things: colors of no color, minerals not found on earth, languages that can’t be pronounced, and of course an unreadable and uncaring universe, “formed in fright,” as Melville put it speculatively. 

Like father, like son – or so the saying goes. But how true does this hold for Johann Sebastian Bach and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel? The opening concert of the 2022 Leipzig Bach Festival presents cantatas and passions by the two composers, and while Johann Sebastian may be more famous today, Carl Philipp Emanuel was actually better known in his time. Andreas Reize, the new music director at St. Thomas Church, leads the St. Thomas boys' choir and the world-renowned Gewandhaus Orchestra in a performance that gives the audience a unique chance to hear what unites Bach father and son, but also what sets them apart.