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In Print
December
2000
Brief
Reviews
Books Received
David
Hays '56DRA
Today I Am a Boy
Simon and Schuster, $23.00
David Hays is a world-class
traveler. Well-known for his work as a set and lighting designer on Broadway and
for the New York City Ballet, Hays embarked on a second career path when he helped establish the National Theater for the Deaf in 1967. After more than 25 years
as its artistic director, he retired, built a small sailboat, and, with his son,
sailing partner, and co-author, Dan, set off on a 17,000-mile transoceanic voyage
(including a harrowing trip around Cape Horn) chronicled in the 1996 bestseller, My Old Man and the Sea.
The latest travelogue
by the "old man" is a tale of another kind of journey: one that covers fewer physical
miles, perhaps, but is no less demanding. In 1996, the then-66-year-old Hays,
who had been raised in a nonobservant Jewish household and hadn't practiced the
religion very much as an adult, decided to study for his bar mitzvah, the ceremony
that marks the transition from childhood to adult status in the religious community.
This event, which involves reading or chanting the Torah and other parts of the
Sabbath service in Hebrew, traditionally occurs when a boy (and, in the more liberal
brands of Judaism, a girl) reaches the age of 13, and while Hays could probably
have opted for private lessons, he chose instead to join a class of pre-teens.
"If nothing more will come from this enterprise than to sit with these kids, to
learn again with young people, even if they are ahead of me and smarter to boot,
why, that would be enough," he writes.
The result of his
year with Rabbi Doug and the "Hormone Hurricanes" is a rich and delightful memoir
in which the bar mitzvah "boy" comes to terms with the past. "I am aging without
grace, a cranky man," he says. "I was steering on a fast road and barely looked
around at the passengers, and this failure to catch time and slow it is the most
haunting failure in my memory."
This "journey of
the spirit" may be a second chance. "Can I pick up, once again, that understanding
of creation as a child understands it, even as I wear my barnacles and carry my
lifetime baggage? Can we cut out those middle years and hear the bells again,
in the quiet evening air?"
The author is not,
however, simply out to turn back the clock. "No elixir salesman could lure me
back to the pain of youth," he says. Besides, neither the ever-present ghost of
his mother, nor his wife Leonora, whose masterful malapropisms enliven the narrative,
would allow such delusions to take root.
"You have to see
it from both sides of the speculum," Leonora tells him when he ponders the contradictions
of life, learns Hebrew, and grapples with "the great mysteries" -- the primary one
of which is "Why am I in this classroom?"
As he prepares, Hays
looks back over his life and decides, "I've done enough big things
. the trick is to choose your small battles carefully, and one
at a time, and blaze away with humor." It is a message that resonates
deeply with the congregation at the ceremony. As Leonora recounts,
"there wasn't a dry seat in the house."
--Reviewed by Bruce Fellman
Grenville
Goodwin and Neil Goodwin '62, '65BArch
The Apache Diaries: A Father-Son Journey
University of Nebraska Press, $29.95
"Imagine this," writes
Neil Goodwin, as he sets the scene of his account of a journey he made in search
of a father he never knew. "Imagine that you live in Pinos Altos [a small town
in northern Mexico] and that it is 1927. The Sierra Madre rises all around you.
The mountains are said to be safe now, but it was not always so. Until 1886, when
the Apache Geronimo finally surrendered, the mountains were places of fear. Now
almost all the Apaches are gone."
But about 70 years
ago, a few "wild" and completely unassimilated Indians remained to haunt the Sierra
Madre and carry on a bloody, centuries-old war against Mexican settlers. One of
the last acts in this gruesome play occurred in 1927, when a band of Apaches shot
a Mexican woman and kidnapped her son.
News that a group,
led by the murdered woman's husband, had been organized to hunt down the Indians
and get back the boy reached a freshman at the University of Arizona, and promptly
Grenville Goodwin decided to find and study these Indians before they were wiped
out for good.
"Grennie," as he
was known to his family and friends, would go on to write an important ethnographic
study, Social Organization of the Western Apache, but while he was tracking the
"phantoms" of the Sierra Madre, he also kept a journal, rich, said Neil, "with
drama and the promise of adventure . . . Beginning in 1976, I began to follow in
my father's footsteps."
Over the next 23
years, Neil would return again and again to the Southwest, the diary
as a guidebook, to compare notes (literally, Neil also kept a journal,
the text of which becomes the book's narrative), to try to finish
work left undone, and to attempt to discover the spirit of the man
who died in 1940, the same year Neil was born."I imagine my father
talking directly to me," writes Neil about their shared journey.
--Reviewed by Bruce Fellman
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
'71PhD, Chace Family Professor of English
Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature
Yale University Press, $35.00
In the 17th and 18th
centuries, when Europeans began to visit Constantinople and other cities in the
Turkish empire, western travelers brought back an array of exotic stories. Perhaps
the strangest and most gripping tales of all dealt with the persistent rumor that
there were rooms in the sultan's palaces which were said to be filled with women
who existed solely to provide pleasure for the ruler.
The fact that no
western male had actually been allowed inside a harem didn't seem to matter. "Few
could resist describing at length what they had not seen," said Ruth Bernard Yeazell
in her engaging and scholarly examination of the hold the seraglio came to have
on the western mind. "And few could resist claiming to be more in the know than
their predecessors."
These claims were expressed in the cantos of Byron, the operas of Mozart and Rossini, the writings
of de Sade and Wollstonecraft, and the paintings of Ingres and Delacroix, among
others. But in almost all cases, the artists were exploring what Yeazell terms
"harems of the mind" -- a mythology, and a very instructive one.
"I take for granted
that all viewing is shaped by preconceptions," says Yeazell. "As imaginative projections,
such harems tell us more about the Europeans who created them than they do about
the domestic reality of the East."
Through nuanced readings
of the literature and the artwork for which the harem served as
a focus, Yeazell shows how these preconceptions played out in the
creative process, as well as how consumers reacted to the material.
The author also demonstrates how the intrusion of 19th and 20th
century realism, which "certified itself by the rejection of romance,"
served to lift the proverbial veil and relegate the harems of the
mind to genuine fiction.
--Reviewed by Bruce Fellman
Tom
Perrotta '83
Joe College
St. Martin's Press, $23.95
In one of the more enduring images of the H-Y-P axis of the Ivy League, every student is brilliant,
accomplished, and, as befits the scions of upper-crust parents, completely sure
of which direction to take in life. This picture might have been at least partially
true in the halcyon days recounted by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it's hardly an
accurate depiction of today's Yale, where nearly half the undergraduates receive
some form of financial aid and references to the delights of cognac, cigars, and
billiards are more likely to prompt derision than envy.
Novelist Tom Perrotta's
modern Yale -- the College in the early 1980s -- takes its cue from Bruce Springsteen
rather than Jay Gatsby, and in this funny and bittersweet account of protagonist
Danny's spring semester in his junior year, the writer deftly moves a cast of
well-drawn characters between gritty north Jersey, where Danny's father drives
a lunch truck, and New Haven. Danny has a hard-hat sensibility, and when he goes
home, he finds it easy to fill in for his dad on "Dante's Roach Coach." He also
has no trouble washing dishes in a residential college dining hall where Nick,
the cook, "made me wonder if I was a fool for thinking I had some kind of God-given
right to satisfying work and personal happiness, for believing that what separated
me from him was anything more that a few points on a standardized test and a little
bit of luck that was bound to run out long before I reached the finish line."
Fool or not, Danny
sees Yale as a ticket to a different kind of life, but as he wrestles with issues
of social class, upward mobility, and his place in the college universe, his luck
starts heading south. A girlfriend from home turns up pregnant, his current love
interest at Yale is sleeping with a professor, he can't get through Middlemarch,
and when the Jersey mob tries to muscle him out of the lunch route business while
his father recuperates from hemorrhoid surgery, Danny responds to the leader of
the "Lunch Monsters" by asking him if he had a dentist. When the muscleman doesn't
answer, Danny replies, "Make an appointment. tell him you're gonna be missing
a whole bunch of . teeth."
What follows are
twists and turns that would, like Perrotta's previous novel-turned-hit-film
Election, translate well to the screen. And there is even an ending -- filled with the Whiffenpoofs, grain alcohol, and a hot townie
with overly protective brothers -- that screams out "Sequel!" The
novelist has created people to care about, to wonder how Danny and
his friends will get through their senior year and beyond.
--Reviewed by Bruce Fellman
Brief Reviews
Christine Andreae
'67MAT
When Evening Comes: The Education of a Hospice Volunteer
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press, $23.95
Ten years ago, the author began volunteering to provide care to dying patients
at a local hospice. In a touching account of her work, Andreae learned to see
terminal illness as an "everyday" reality and help people live as much as possible.
T. Berry Brazelton,
MD, and Stanley I. Greenspan '66MD
The Irreducible Needs of Children: What Every Child Must Have to Grow, Learn,
and Flourish
Perseus Publishing, $24.00
A leading pediatrician and child psychiatrist identify the most important and
basic needs of children and set out a program to ensure these needs are met.
David Manuel '58
A Matter of Diamonds
Paraclete Press, $23.00
Brother Bartholomew was blessing the animals when his pager went off. The body
of a woman had washed ashore in Cape Cod, $10 million in diamonds she had with
her was gone, and the local police chief needed help from an unlikely gumshoe.
Bruce Ross-Larson
'66
Effective Writing: Stunning Sentences, Powerful Paragraphs, Riveting Reports
W.W. Norton, $29.95
Whether creating content for the Web, writing an interoffice memo, or developing
a great novel, the goal is to craft prose that is clear, accurate, and memorable.
Ross-Larson, a veteran teacher and editor, offers sound basic training for authors.
Sherwin Nuland
'55MD
Leonardo da Vinci: A Penguin Life
Viking Press, $19.95
Best known as the creator of the Mona Lisa, da Vinci was also an architect, engineer,
philosopher, and scientist. Nuland, a surgeon and a premier writer on medicine
and history, examines Leonardo's insatiable curiosity.
Harlow Giles Unger
'53
John Hancock: Merchant King and American Patriot
John Wiley and Sons, $30.00
The most recognizable signature on the Declaration of Independence belonged to
the least likely man to take part in a rebellion. Journalist Unger reveals Hancock's
revolutionary transformation.
Books
Received
Marc Ian Barasch
'71
Healing Dreams: Exploring the Dreams That Can Transform Your Life
Riverhead Books/Penguin Putnam, $26.95
Sarah E. Chinn '89
Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body
as Evidence
Continuum, $24.95
Charles Harrington '81
Verbal Advantage: 10 Easy Steps to a Powerful Vocabulary Random House,
$15.95
David S. Goldstein '70
The Autonomic Nervous System in Health and Disease
Marcel Dekker, $195.00
Marie Gottschalk '98PhD
The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care
in the United States
Cornell University Press, $45.00
David Katz, Associate Clinical Professor
of Epidemiology and Public Health
Nutrition in Clinical Practice
Lippincott, Williams, and Wilkins, $42.95
Christopher Krentz '89, Editor
A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing, 1816-1864
Gallaudet University Press, $45.00
Ralph Lopez '82
The Golden Donut and Restaurant
Writers Club Press, $12.95
Bruce L. McClennan, Professor and
Chairman, Diagnostic Radiology, and Howard W. Pollack, Editors
Clinical Urography, 2nd Edition
W.B. Saunders, $495.00
Leah Price '98PhD
The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot
Cambridge University Press, $54.95
Mark Salzman '82
Lying Awake: A Novel
Alfred A. Knopf, $21.00
Susan M. Schultz '80
Aleatory Allegories
Salt Publishing Co., $12.95
Lyde Cullen Sizer '84
The Political Works of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872
University of North Carolina Press, $18.95
W. Royal Stokes '65PhD
Living the Jazz Life: Conversations with 40 Musicians about Their Careers in
Jazz
Oxford University Press, $27.50
G. Edward White '67PhD
The Constitution and the New Deal
Harvard University Press, $45.00
Bob Woodward '65
Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom
Simon and Schuster, $25.00 |
