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Faces
April
2001
In an
address at the Law School Auditorium on February 2, Stanford
historian David
Kennedy '68PhD recounted the strategic decisions
that won the war for the United States. By slowing down war
mobilization in the midst of the conflict in order to protect
the economy, he said, the U.S. ended the war "at the summit
of the world." Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize last year for
his book Freedom from Fear. His talk was part of the
Graduate School's "In the Company of Scholars" Tercentennial
lecture series. |
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Acclaimed
writer Edwidge
Danticat visited the Beinecke Library on February
7 to read from her most recent work, The Farming of Bones. Danticat said that some people have expressed anger over her
representation of Haitians and her dealing with subjects that
are taboo in the West Indies. "Many people treated my first
book, Breath, Eyes, Memory, as anthropology instead of
as fiction," said Danticat. The experience led her to think
more about what to tell and what not to tell. "If you do tell,"
she said, "you have to prepare yourself for the consequences." |
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Cesar
Pelli has
designed the tallest buildings in the world (the Petronas Towers
in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), but his latest work for Yale will
be a bit more down to earth. The architect and former dean of
the School of Architecture has been commissioned to design the
new engineering building at the corner of Prospect and Trumbull
streets. Pelli's previous works at Yale include the Boyer Center
for Molecular Medicine, the Yale University Press building,
and the Lanman Center at Payne Whitney Gymnasium. |
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Among
the panelists at a film studies conference on "The Theater of
Irish Cinema" on February 2 was Stephen Rea, the Irish actor best known for his
Oscar-nominated performance in The Crying Game. Rea discussed
his low-key approach to acting and his unwillingness to soften
his Irish brogue to get more commercial roles. "I'm a stubborn
Belfast git," said Rea. "I want to do something where I feel
comfortable. I don't want to pretend to be someone else." |
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The
new director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
should feel right at home when she takes office this summer. Barbara Shailor, the dean of Douglass College at Rutgers University, has spent
several summers and two sabbatical leaves at the Beinecke working
on a three-volume catalogue of the library's medieval and Renaissance
manuscripts. Shailor, who is a specialist in Latin manuscripts,
is also a native of New Haven and a graduate of Hamden High
School. At the Beinecke, she succeeds Ralph Franklin, who retired
last year after 18 years as director. |
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It couldn't hurt for a residential college master to know
something about Paradise (lost or not), and Milton scholar John Rogers '84, '89PhD surely fits the bill. Rogers, an associate professor
of English, will succeed Harry Stout as master of Berkeley
College this fall. Roger's wife, Cornelia Pearsall '84, '91PhD,
an assistant professor of English at Smith College, will be
Berkeley's associate master. |
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Close-Up:
Sandra Boynton
Sandra
Boynton '74 remembers her penchant for brevity posing
a problem when she was at Yale. "Whenever I was assigned a five-page
paper," she says, "I always said what I wanted to say in three paragraphs."
But while still a student Boynton found her ideal medium in the
greeting card, building a career on the strength of a menagerie
of nameless cats, pigs, and hippos who offered warm, wry observations
on the human condition -- or just plain silliness, as in the famous
"hippo birdie two ewes" birthday card. Boynton made a rare public
appearance on January 29 and 30 as the first Eustace D. Theodore
'63 Fellow.
Boynton lives in
Litchfield County with her husband, Jamie McEwan '75, and four children, including
a daughter who is a sophomore at Yale. Calling her talk "The Curious Misuse
of a Yale Education," Boynton talked about her work not just in greeting cards
(which she stopped making four years ago even as sales reached 80 million cards
a year) but also books, songs, and theater. A group of Glee Club alumni under
the direction of Fenno Heath performed selections from Grunt, a 1996
Boynton project featuring Gregorian chant in pig latin.
Boynton also spent
a year and a half at the School of Drama, and she says that theater and cartooning
aren't all that different. About an illustrated book she is working on now called Consider Love, she says "It's very much like directing a play, in that
gesture has to stand for a lot. I was just working on a sequence with a rooster
and a chicken, and while it sounds funny when I step back and get some perspective,
it's hard work figuring out what the expression on that chicken should be."
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