About Howard Blue

Howard Blue has lived most of his life on Long Island where he taught high school Social Studies for 32 years. Howard is the author of WORDS AT WAR*, (Scarecrow Press, 2002). see www.Howard Blue.com -- Howard is currently completing his own memoir. 
 
Howard 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.

Howard has a lifetime of interest in stories about people's lives. While teaching, he had his students interview 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 them 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.
In connection with his research for WORDS AT WAR, and various other writing projects, Howard has interviewed Arthur Miller, Art Carney, Nobel prize-winning authors Wole Soyinka, and Sean MacBride, the late Howard Fast, Sergei Khrushchev, John Eisenhower among others.

In 1982, a sabbatical brought Howard 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, Howard found himself teaching in a Soviet high school in Moscow on a semester long exchange. When a friend invited Howard to the funeral of human rights activist, Andrei Sakharov, but police tried to severely limit the number of mourners, Howard passed through a checkpoint by flashing his American public library card. In 1991, again in Moscow, Howard was an eyewitness to the coup attempt which resulted in the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Howard's first major writing project was a Master’s thesis about former Soviet Cold War leader Nikita Khrushchev. Ironically, thirty years later he was able to donate a copy of it to a scholarly institute at Brown University, where Khrushchev's son is currently a scholar in residence. Howard's genealogical research resulted in his reuniting relatives in Russia with whom there had been no contact for 60 years, with his family in the U.S. In the 1970s, he established the first Amnesty International group in an American high school. Howard also served as a board member of Amnesty's American affiliate and he wrote an unpublished history of the human rights organization.


* Paul Buhle of Brown University (author of Popular Culture in America, etc.) wrote about WORDS AT WAR: "This may well be the best book on American radio ever written,"  and Prof. Tim Crook (Goldsmith' s College, University of London) described it as  ". . . a tour de force of research and writing, . . . "