by Karen D. Brown, Globe Correspondent  JULY 30, 2012

Matthew Cavanaugh/Globe

There is one voice, other than his parents’, that makes 10-month-old Brady Zoll’s eyes grow wide.

“Hi big boy,” coos Diane Kieras-Ciolkos. “Do your teeth hurt?” She holds the fussy baby while his mother, Meghan Hukowicz, looks for Tylenol.

It’s not surprising that Brady is comforted by Kieras-Ciolkos’s voice. After all, he heard it for nine months, from deep inside her belly, up until the moment Kieras-Ciolkos handed him over to her best friend, who would raise him.

Kieras-Ciolkos, a tall and gregarious 41-year-old, was Brady’s gestational carrier; Hukowicz, 36, blond and petite, is his biological mother. A surrogate pregnancy between friends is unusual in the world of reproductive technology, but for these women, it’s a natural extension of the bond they have shared since childhood, when they built forts and played kickball together in the farmlands of Hadley.

Back then, Huckawicz was not a healthy child. She was diagnosed at 5 weeks old with Cystic Fibrosis….

To read the entire story, click here here

Kathy Picard

The recent sanctions against Penn State have focused attention on the institutional fallout of the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal. But they also come as scientists in Massachusetts are delving deeper into the longterm effect of abuse on its victims – and on their brains. New England Public Radio’s Karen Brown reports. (Aired on WFCR 7/27/12.)

To download audio, right-click here

Folk icon Woody Guthrie would have turned 100 on July 14. To celebrate, the “Guthrie Family Reunion” will sing Saturday at the Green River Festival in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The group includes three generations of Woody’s descendants, including his son Arlo — famous for the sixties anthem ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ — and Arlo’s daughter Sarah Lee Guthrie. Sarah Lee recently met New England Public Radio’s Karen Brown at the Guthrie center in Great Barrington to talk about her grandfather’s legacy.

A rock’n'roll revival is coming up in Western Massachusetts. In the 1970s and early 80s, the Rusty Nail bar in Sunderland was the go-to place for live music in the area. This Sunday, some of the key players from that era are reuniting for a sold out gig at the Northampton Academy of Music. New England Public Radio’s Karen Brown invited three of them into our studio to talk about old times.

(Music in this piece: Mitch Shakour Band, Fat, John Lee Hooker, James Brown)

http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/2012/06/10/recognizing-delayed-ptsd-holocaust-survivors/NmVaT4wUO3GZj0czLYab0L/story.html

By Karen D. Brown

The first time Sonia Reich was hunted by the Nazis, she was an 11-year-old orphan, seeking refuge in the Polish countryside.

The second time was almost 60 years later, on a quiet street in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill. That time, however, the pursuit was happening solely in her head.

“I received a call at midnight saying that my mother had run out of her house and been picked up by the Skokie police,” said her son, Howard, a Chicago arts critic. Sonia had been screaming that someone was trying to kill her. “I couldn’t even comprehend that,” he recalled. “I thought it was a dream.”

Like many Holocaust survivors, Sonia Reich was not offered therapy after the war, and she never talked about her experiences. She spent five decades as an active suburban mother and wife. But as Sonia entered her 60s, after her husband died, her children began to notice some odd survivalist behavior, such as sleeping with an ax under her pillow and bringing her own water to restaurants. “But we did not connect those behaviors with what she went through as a child in the Holocaust,” Howard Reich said……

(to read entire Boston Globe story, please click here)

A montage of voices and sounds from the June 1, 2011 tornados in Western Massachusetts. I produced this as part of WFCR’s coverage of the one-year anniversary. Thanks to interns Andy Locke and Josh Ernst for production assistance.

Every week, it seems, there’s a new medical study in the headlines that contradicts last week’s medical study. Epidemiologist Marya Zilberberg  – a professor at UMass-Amherst — tries to put all that information in context in her new book, “Between the Lines: Finding the Truth in Medical Literature”. Zilberberg starts by explaining why people need help figuring out which medical discoveries are worth heeding. (Aired on New England Public Radio 6/4/12)

An estimated 200,000 Holocaust survivors are still living. Many were only children during the Nazi terror.

Today, the world relies on their memories as testimony against genocide. But for survivors themselves, memory can also represent a present danger. They fear memory loss….as many elderly do….. but they also risk becoming overwhelmed by the memories they’ve worked so hard to control.  (Aired WFCR, 4/19/12)

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This report was produced in collaboration with Vox Tablet, the weekly podcast of Tabletmag.com.http://www.tabletmag.com/author/vox-tablet/

To download audio, right click here

The mild New England winter means that more bears are up and about…..looking for food….and not just inthe woods. They’re also exploring urban backyards and residential streets. Karen Brown of New England Public Radio lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, a small town with more than its share of furry visitors. (First aired on NPR’s Morning Edition, April 6, 2012.)

To hear on the NPR website:

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/06/150079405/bears-stuffing-themselves-near-massachusetts-homes