It was billed as a master's tea, but there wasn't a china cup to be found in the Silliman College common room on December 8, when 400 students and journalists jockeyed for space in order to hear presidential candidate John McCain make a brief speech and answer questions. Senator McCain made a tongue-in-cheek bid for the youth vote by saying he was "the only candidate who has been to the MTV music awards."
On November 19, actor-director Al Pacino conducted a master class for the Yale Dramat and answered questions following a screening of Looking for Richard, a documentary in which he works with actors in a rehearsal of Richard III and talks to ordinary people about Shakespeare. "It was always communicated to me that you needed a certain education to do Shakespeare -- that it wasn't for a kid from the South Bronx," said Pacino.
"I never waste my sympathy on presidents," said veteran White House journalist Helen Thomas in a Poynter Fellowship lecture on November 17. "They have the greatest honor that can come to anyone: the trust of the American people." Asked about the current crop of presidential candidates, Thomas said "Whoever wins, I hope he doesn't jog. Getting up at the crack of dawn to watch the President in his running shorts is not my idea of fun."
President Levin announced in December that former School of Nursing dean Judith Krauss '70MSN will become the new master of Silliman College on July 1. Krauss, who continues to teach in the School of Nursing, is a noted authority on nursing care for people with mental disorders. She is married to Ronald L. Krauss '71MAR '79MSN, a practicing nurse midwife; they have two adult daughters.
Former U.S. senator Gary Hart '61BD, '64LLB warned of security threats in a changing world in a December 6 talk at Luce Hall. Hart said the most important issue of the next century will be sovereignty and the erosion of the concept of the nation-state. Hart proposed an international "peacemaking force" to deal with conflicts around the world and called for retooling the American armed forces to deal with the threat of terrorism.
Sterling Professor Emeritus of History C. Vann Woodward died on December 17 at his home in Hamden. He was 91 years old. Woodward, a native Southerner, caused Americans to rethink their perception of his home region, most notably with his 1955 book The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Woodward, who came to Yale in 1961, won the Pulitzer Prize, among other honors.
"I've never written about myself," said author Tracy Kidder as he began a lecture in Linsly-Chittenden on December 1. "But like most writers I know, I'm interested in the subject." Kidder, who was at Yale for three days as a John-Christophe Schlesinger Visiting Writer, spent much of his time talking about how he researches and writes his nonfiction books, which offer extreme close-ups of Americans living their lives. Kidder gave a master's tea, visited writing classes, met with student journalists, and fielded a number of questions about how he gains the trust of his subjects. "I rely on longevity," he explained. "People get used to me. I often get the feeling when they fight in front of me that they forget that I'm there." |
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Kidder, who fell in love with writing as an undergraduate at Harvard, has won acclaim for nonfiction storytelling that reads like fiction. The Pulitzer Prize-"winning Soul of a New Machine told of the effort to design and build a computer, and House was a compelling drama about the interactions among an architect, a builder, and a married couple over the couple's new house -- a "menage a trois without sexual connotations," as Kidder describes it. His latest book, Home Town, weaves in and out of the lives of a handful of residents of Northampton, Massachusetts. Kidder says that after he finishes reporting and begins writing, the material becomes his own -- so much so that it is sometimes startling to encounter his subjects in the flesh. "They start to feel like creations of mine," he says. "I want to tell them to go back." |