From the world we see, to the Unseen World we sometimes see, that makes us stand in awe of God's Universe, this is Betsy Balega, welcoming you From Cape Washington in the South, to Nunavut and the Northern Lights in the Arctic Circle.From the White House Gates to Lions Gate, from Casablancato everyone listening around God's Globe, Hi Gigi Bonjour , Montreal,this is Tuning in With Betsy on Blog Talk Radio fromMarvelous Manhattan,Before we begin to tnight i would like to express my condolencesto everyone at Virginia Tech, to the students, friends, and families, faculty,our love prayers and thoughts are with you. There are no wordssufficient to express how the country grieves with you. Everyone in Canada sends their support.Another special person, I would just like to acknowledge a wonderful actress and woman, Kitty Carlisle Hart, who Passed away yesterday at age 96.Many of you may remember her from the television show To Tell the Truth.Ms. Carlisle Hart was the wife of the Moss Hart, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who wrote "You Can't Take It With You" and "The Man Who Came to Dinner" with George S. Kaufman.She was truly one of a kind and we will miss her.Tonight my Very Special Guest is Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist and AuthorWilliam Dietrich
Wm. Dietrich was born in 1951 in Tacoma, WA,. He graduated from Mount Tahoma High School and attended Fairhaven College, an experimental liberal arts division of Western Washington University. His interest in writing led him to journalism at Western.
From Bellingham in 1974, he was sent to report from the state capital in Olympia and then covered Congress for Ga net News Service in Washington, D.C. He returned to the Northwest to write for the Vancouver Columbian in time to cover the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. In 1982 he took a job at the Seattle Times, where he has worked, on and off, ever since. He presently writes part-time for that paper’s Sunday magazine, Pacific Northwest.
Times assignments provided wonderful opportunities to report from the Arctic and Antarctic and to circle the globe, covering subjects ranging from the military to the environment. In 1987-88 he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and in 1990 was part of a four-person team that won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on the Exxon Valdez oil spill. He won reporting and study fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Woods Hole Microbiological Institute, and Scripps.
His first book, The Final Forest, (1992) grew out of his reporting on the spotted owl and old growth forest debate. Northwest Passage (1995) is an environmental and cultural history of the Columbia River.
A 1994 fellowship to Antarctica helped him to take a stab at a lifelong goal of writing a novel by producing the World War II bio-terrorism thriller Ice Reich (1998). Its first draft was finished during a second reporting trip to Antarctica.
He followed this with an Orwellian view of stultifying globalization and wilderness release in the Australian eco-fable Getting Back (2000) and then returned to Antarctica and the South Pole for the claustrophobic murder thriller Dark Winter (2001).
Dietrich has loved history since childhood. A 1996 visit to Great Britain led to the ancient Roman fortification across northern England known as Hadrian’s Wall. Even before his first novel was published he was determined to write a story about this evocative place, the result is a war and romance novel set in Roman Britain called Hadrian’s Wall (2004).
some of the essays he has written about nature for the Seattle Times were collected to create Natural Grace (2003). Royalties are donated to land preservation and environmental education.
Dietrich’s fascination with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire continued into a novel about Attila the Hun called The Scourge of God (2005).
Dietrich is married and, has two grown daughters.