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In Print
September/October
2003
Brief
Reviews
Books Received
Braving
Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and
Other Extreme Locales
by Jake
Halpern '97
Houghton
Mifflin, $23.00
Reviewed
by Rick Bass
Rick
Bass is the author of 18 books
of fiction and nonfiction. His home is the Yaak Valley of northwest
Montana, where, though it is one of the wildest and most biologically
diverse valleys in the West, there is still not a single acre of
protected wilderness.
In Braving
Home, first-time author Jake Halpern examines the nature of community and its relationship to landscape, and the lengths -- the
extremes of inconvenience and even hardship -- to which people
will go to maintain that relationship. The book started from Halpern's
undefinable attraction to the "iron-willed, unfearing, and
utterly immovable" characters who stay in difficult places.
It developed into a wide-ranging examination of the curious nature
of the bond individuals feel with their place and, at times, the
bond entire communities feel with their place. This once-commonplace
response to the world -- connection and commitment -- has become
increasingly rare.
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"There is always the possibility of taking a bad step and falling downward into an active lava tube."
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Halpern
selected five "extreme locales" to visit -- places where
individuals have had to make calculated and emotion-filled cost-benefit
analyses of significant physical and social hardship. There is
the surreal "indoor town" of Whittier, Alaska, whose
single building is a high-rise that contains housing, post office,
laundry, and shopping center, in a way that sounds distressingly
like a jail. There is a bed-and-breakfast in a remnant of a Hawaii
suburb where most residents were evicted by a volcanic eruption;
to reach the inn, Halpern has to walk miles across the newly hardened
volcanic crust, picking his way around flows of fresh lava. ("For
the most part," he writes, the volcanic crust is stable,
"but there is always the possibility of taking a bad step
and falling downward into an active lava tube.")
Halpern
is most compelling when he writes of the three locales whose last,
elderly residents have lived in them for decades. The "underwater
town" of Princeville, North Carolina -- according to some,
the oldest incorporated black town in the United States -- was
vacated after being flooded by Hurricane Floyd in 1999. When Halpern
visited, the town council was deciding whether to repair Princeville's
leaky earthen dike or accept a federal buyout. But in the meantime,
72-year-old Thad Knight had returned to the devastated community
and remained, despite a heart attack, lack of phone and electricity,
and a five-gallon plastic bucket for a toilet. "Thad claimed
to enjoy the solitude," writes Halpern. "If he got bored,
or his bones grew stiff, he would stand up
and trudge across his small half-acre of land. He said he knew
the contours of every dip, every gentle slope -- he could see
them even with his eyes shut -- and his intimacy with the terrain
gave him comfort."
Millie
Decker, age 81, is Halpern's host when he visits fire-prone Malibu,
near Hollywood, the place he calls the Canyon of the Firefighting
Hillbillies. Wildfire here is a regular meteorological phenomenon,
as assured if not as predictable as rain or wind, and Decker grew
up fighting fires as a girl with wetted gunnysacks. She has lived
there since before Hollywood arrived, and is relatively unconcerned
by the nearly annual wildfires that rush toward her ranch, braiding
around it like, well, lava. (Hers is a homeland defense made all
the more interesting by the fact that her late husband's many
arsenals of dynamite are stored in a cave on her property.)
Dealing
with the fires, rather than panicking and running -- "firewising"
the area immediately around their home, to encourage the fires
to pass through -- "was a demanding reality to which they
had adapted," Halpern writes of the Deckers. "For them,
wildfires were a natural part of life, something to be expected,
something to be lived with, and in this way the Deckers would
always be living in this canyon."
Then
there is Grand Isle, Louisiana, a barrier island imminently imperiled
during half the year by hurricanes. The island is also sinking,
due to the fact that the channelized Mississippi River no longer
deposits the soil-building sediment necessary to keep Grand Isle
above sea level. For this reader, Grand Isle is the most poignant
chapter of the book, in that an entire culture is at risk not
so much from the occasional hurricane, but from the more insidious
encroachment of the ocean, with the residents' beloved soil vanishing
literally beneath their feet. Having survived dozens of massive
storms over the centuries, the Louisiana coast cannot survive
being cut off from the nurturing flow of the Mississippi, unless
urgent -- and expensive -- remedial measures are undertaken immediately.
Here,
as with the other places he visits, Halpern hooks up with one
of the most durable of the locals, Ambrose Besson, and
hangs out with him for days, observing the way in which he moves
through his community, and listening. In this chapter, there's
a stronger sense of pathos. Catastrophes loom in all the other
chapters, but they are one-shot deals, each its own individual
chance, whereas Grand Isle's fate seems all the more cruel for
the little daily deaths it must face as it sinks -- if remediation
does not take place. Often, Halpern's role in this chapter is
as much that of oral historian as journalist, and the chapter
is strong because of Halpern's recognition of that need. It reads
as bittersweet irony indeed to learn that the "storm riders" on Grand Isle -- old-timers who don't leave the island, even when
a big hurricane is coming, one that threatens severe flooding
-- don't really fear those one-time events at all.
"It's
no big deal," said Ambrose. "When a hurricane comes
through, the road just kind of goes under. Sometimes the water
connection goes, almost always the power goes, and then it's back
to kerosene lanterns. So we light our lanterns, strap stuff down,
sit around, maybe cook a meal." Instead, the real worry --
the albatross that comes up in every conversation -- is the steady
sinking, and the associated feeling of abandonment by the rest
of the country. That feeling is made more frustrating by the knowledge
that the rest of the country needs the barrier island of Grand
Isle to absorb storms' forces before they wreck the highly-developed
coastlines.
It's
been lamented long and loud that our country is becoming homogenized
-- super-sized and yet at the same time blanded-down. ("We
prefer to be stunned rather than overwhelmed," the poet Jim
Harrison wrote recently.) Some say that the American landscape
-- so altered, marginalized, neutered, and exploited -- is no
longer relevant in forming or even affecting the American character.
Halpern himself writes sparingly but effectively of his own rootlessness,
not so much as a response to any particular place, but simply
as a cultural side effect of this country.
If
it's true, Halpern's book shows what we've lost. "Despite
the overwhelming drawbacks," he writes, "home still
held some transcendent value for these people, and I couldn't
help but feel moved by their will to hold fast . . . Home was not
just a place but a way of life, a work in progress, something
you built and rebuilt over the course
of a lifetime, until at last, like the old-timers who went by
geographic names -- Francis of Middlebury or Jeremiah of Ipswich
-- home was simply who you were."
City:
Urbanism and Its End
by Douglas
W. Rae,
Richard Ely Professor of Management and Professor
of Political Science
Yale
University Press, $30.00
Reviewed
by Randall Beach
Randall
Beach is a longtime New Haven resident and a staff columnist for
the New Haven Register.
In
1966, Richard C. Lee, then mayor of New Haven, wrote a letter
to Yale art historian Vincent Scully. Lee, who ran New
Haven from 1954 to 1970, was the most charismatic and ambitious
mayor in the city's history -- an aggressive exploiter of federal
funds, a visionary bent on turning New Haven into a model city,
and an energetic proponent of asphalt, grand building projects,
and other hallmarks of the '60s version of urban renewal. But
Scully had criticized the program, saying Lee overlooked the need
for preservation of urban architecture and protection of the urban
fabric.
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"If New Haven is a 'model city,'" mayor Dick Lee often said, "then God help America's cities."
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"You
know I have given my life to my city, and, indeed, most of my
health," Lee replied in the letter, recently unearthed by
Douglas Rae and published in his new book, City: Urbanism and Its End. "New
Haven was a mess when I became
mayor on January 1, 1954 -- a rotten, stinking, decaying mess . . .
Vince, for the life of me -- and I say this in the kindest way
I can -- I cannot understand your constant posturing as a critic
of New Haven, as a critic of redevelopment, and as a critic of
Dick Lee (and I say this very sorrowfully)."
But
by the time Lee left office, he was discouraged that his efforts
at social engineering had not turned the city around. "If
New Haven is a 'model city,'" he often said, "God help
America's cities."
City is
a history of New Haven in the twentieth century, chronicling its
rise as an industrial and manufacturing center and then its steady
decline in the second half of the century, when market forces
and the automobile -- which led both to car-centered roadbuilding
projects and to a flight to the suburbs -- sucked out its vitality.
It is a tale common to cities across America. Syracuse, Pittsburgh,
Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, St. Louis, and others were all victimized
by the rush to the suburbs and by federal programs such as urban
renewal, which were supposed to help urban neighborhoods rather
than destroy them. People who care about the survival of our cities
will be drawn to the book.
Rae,
64, is a Yale professor of management and political science, but
he does not write solely as an academic. He came to New Haven
in 1967, and as a longtime resident of New Haven's East Rock neighborhood,
he treasures its small grocery stores and coffee shops -- the
kind of urban amenities Lee sometimes ignored. Rae has also experienced
city government firsthand. From 1990 to 1991 he worked as chief
administrative officer for New Haven mayor John Daniels, when
the city was in horrendous financial condition. Struggling to
cut the budget, Rae saw up close the limitations of governance
and the decline of urbanism -- and found his job stressful, to
say the least, as he recounts in the book's preface: "The
work was better than any diet for my corpulent midsection. In
the first six months of the job I lost 40 pounds, yet the city
achieved only a modest reduction in spending."
To
put a human face on his history, Rae uses the story of 88-year-old
Joseph Perfetto, who ran a typewriter and stationery store on
Crown Street for seven decades but is going out of business when
Rae visits. "Perfetto must close his shop not because of
his advanced age, not because of his store's decrepitude, and
not because his building has lost some of its roof," Rae
writes. "Perfetto has to close his doors because the city
in which his business was designed to operate is gone -- having disappeared
little by little in fits and starts."
Rae's
in-depth evaluation of Mayor Lee is one of the most interesting
parts of his book, partly because Lee frequently escapes
blame for the failures of urban renewal in the city. Rae has bravely
analyzed the shortcomings of the mayor and his squadron of "elite
bureaucrats," and reached the painful conclusion that "in
the goals of governance, of revitalizing the city, he was in the
main unsuccessful."
Rae
is judicious and fair, noting along the way that "the underlying
problems faced by Lee's New Haven were so deeply rooted in its
history, so powerful and complex, that no mayor and no mayoral
administration lasting a mere 16 years could have overcome them." But he is forthright about Lee's attempt to circumvent the city's
democratic process by importing 50 technocrats who thought New
Haveners would be better off if their neighborhoods were leveled
and they were relocated to massive housing developments. Rae shows
how the thousands of residents and small shopkeepers in the city's
vibrant Oak Street district were scattered and replaced by a series
of parking lots and a short highway to nowhere -- the Richard
C. Lee Connector -- that was designed to funnel traffic in and
out of downtown, but succeeded mostly in splitting the city and
making much of it unfriendly to pedestrians. Today, some residents
call it the Disconnector.
While
working on this book, Rae repeatedly interviewed Lee, who was
in failing health but still of sound mind. (He died last February.)
Lee contributed many colorful anecdotes about his rise to power.
For instance, there was the night when, as a young alderman, Lee
made sure the large crowd gathered outside his house all got "snow
tickets" -- good for a free shovel and some decent wages
from shoveling snow for the public works department. The image
of the genial young populist contrasts sharply with the bureaucrat
Lee would become, patron of many projects that were hostile to
the person in the street.
Yale
became an increasingly important player in the city as its manufacturing
economy collapsed, and Rae details the inevitable friction that
accompanied the university's expansion -- in particular the acerbic
relationship between Mayor Bartholomew Guida and Yale president
Kingman Brewster in the early 1970s. Fighting to preserve the
city's tax base, Guida kept the university from building two new
residential colleges at the corner of Church and Grove streets.
Rae quotes Arthur T. Barbieri, the powerful Democratic chair of
the Town Committee: "[Yale's leaders] are going to have to
realize that we are not peasants and they are not the manor on
the hill. They are going to come down off their high horse and
change their relationship with us."
But
today Rae is optimistic about New Haven's relationship with Yale, and about New Haven's future. He sees a solid partnership between
Yale president Richard C. Levin (a longtime New Havener) and Mayor
John DeStefano Jr. He also believes the city's mayors now realize
they must stop looking backward to New Haven's past as a center
of manufacturing and large department stores, and instead build
upon its lure as a cultural arts center and the home of Yale.
Rae concludes his book by alluding to Yale as the city's only
important large export industry. That new tale, he says in the
final sentence, is the subject of his next book.
How
Koreans Talk: A Collection of Expressions
by Sang-Hun
Choe and Christopher Torchia '89
UnhengNamu,
Seoul, 8,000 won (about $6.80)
Reviewed
by Hugh Rawson
Hugh
Rawson '56 is author or co-author of
ten books, including Rawson's Dictionary
of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk and the New International
Dictionary of Quotations. He
writes a column about American words and sayings for American
Heritage magazine.
This
collection of more than four hundred proverbs, idioms, and
other common expressions shows the truth in the old
English saying that "the proverbs of a nation are the
great book out of which it is easy to read its character."
The
expressions in How Koreans
Talk are
arranged into 16 categories, centering on such topics as
anatomical terms, grit and hardship, money, and family relationships.
Each of the sayings is given in Korean characters and English
transliteration, then translated and, in most cases, accompanied
by a capsule essay explaining its origin, setting it in
cultural and historic context, and giving variants. The
authors -- Sang-Hun Choe was a member of an Associated Press
team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000, and Christopher
Torchia is chief of the AP's Seoul bureau -- also have provided
sidebars throughout the text on such diverse subjects as
the kisaeng (the Korean counterpart
of the Japanese geisha), Konglish
(slang that combines Korean and English), and Korea's "envelope" culture (the envelopes being filled with cash, sometimes
just tips or bonuses but in other instances outright bribes).
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Food -- rice, especially -- looms large in Korean talk.
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Food
-- rice, especially -- looms large in Korean talk.
"The other man's rice cake always looks bigger"
is similar to the English "The grass always looks greener
on the other side of the fence," and "Packed like
bean sprouts" translates as "Packed like sardines."
The meanings of other expressions are less obvious. Someone
wishing to offer praise for a delicious meal might say,
"You wouldn't notice even if your friend at the same
table dies."
Korea's
geography and history also are reflected in common folk
expressions. A long, difficult journey is like going over "ninety-nine hills." Other sayings are vivid,
earthy, or humorous. There's the charming "I laughed
so hard that I thought my belly button would pop out."
Of a man who goes to a concert but forgets his tickets at
home, one might say, "He left his testicles behind
when he went to his wedding." An expression of real
contempt is "You are worse than the dirt between my
toes."
Some common
sayings are quite new.
"My film stopped rolling at some point last night,"
meaning "I drank so much last night that I don't remember
what I said or did," is a way of dodging responsibility
for whatever one might have done under the influence --
insulting the boss, say, or throwing up in a colleague's
lap. To refer to a person as a "a fluorescent light"
is to imply that he or she is slow to understand, like a
bulb that flickers a few times before turning on fully.
"Military adviser" (originally referring to Americans
in the post-World War II period) is no compliment; it means
"oaf" or, in an extended sense, anyone whose incompetence
undermines teamwork. "A Soviet submachine gun"
is a non-stop talker, one who spews out words like bullets
-- a reference to the guns North Korean soldiers carried
during the Korean War. A phrase that is widely used to ridicule
authoritarian leaders and their underlings, "Your highness
must feel relieved now," comes from a remark that a
cabinet minister reportedly made when President Syngman
Rhee interrupted a cabinet meeting with a loud fart.
In
sum, How Koreans Talk makes entertaining and informative browsing, providing
many new insights through the lens of language into the
mindset of a culture that we would do well to understand
better than we do.
Brief
Reviews
Charles
Seife '95MS
Alpha & Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the
Universe
Viking, $24.95
In this accessible, elegant book, a science journalist surveys the "galaxy hunters, microwave eavesdroppers, gravity theorists,
and atom smashers" seeking cosmological truths about Mother
Corn and Genesis, fire and ice.
Sam
Rubin '95
Baseball in New Haven: Images of Baseball
Arcadia/Tempus, $19.99
From 1865, when Yale beat Wesleyan 39-13, to the present, baseball
has been dear to New Haven. The author has assembled a story in
pictures of the Elm City evolution of the sport, much of which
took place on Yale Field.
Traci
Maynigo '03
A Girl's Guide to College: Making the Most of the Best Four
Years of Your Life
Rabbit's Foot Press/Blue Mountain Arts, $10.95
"Every year of college will find you changing, and always for
the better," writes the author, a new Yale graduate. In this
guide, she offers down-to-earth advice for young women.
Laura
Morelli '98PhD
Made in Italy: A Shopper's Guide to Italy's Best Artisanal Traditions
from Murano Glass to Ceramics, Jewelry, Leather Goods, and More
Universe/Rizzoli, $24.95
While doing research for her PhD, the author scoured Italy for
artisans who use age-old techniques. Her book tells tourists how
to find the good stuff.
Nina
Revoyr '91
Southland
Akashic Books, $15.95
When her grandfather dies unexpectedly, Jackie Ishida, the protagonist
of this second novel, inherits a challenge. She must unearth
long-hidden family secrets about race, love, World War II, and
the unsolved murders that took place during the Watts riots
of 1965.
Warren
Lehrer '80MFA and Judith Sloan
Crossing the Blvd: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America
W. W. Norton, $19.95
These documentary artists trekked the streets of Queens -- one
of the most ethnically diverse places in the U.S. -- to paint
an intriguing portrait of 79 immigrants who make up the new
New York.
Books
Received
Joseph H. Astrachan 1983, 1989PhD and Kristi S. McMillan
Conflict and Communication in the Family Business
Family Enterprise Publishers, $18.95
Edward L. Ayers 1980PhD
In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863
W.W. Norton, $27.95
W. Y. Boyd 1950
A Rendezvous with Death
Elton-Wolf Publishing, $21.95
Susan Choi 1990
American Woman
HarperCollins, $24.95
Joshua Clark 1998, Editor
French Quarter Fiction: The Newest Stories of America's Oldest Bohemia
Light of New Orleans Publishing, $16.95
Andrea Darif 1973, 1974MFA
The Tiger's Mistress
Pocket Books, $6.99
Kenneth Davidson 1967LLM
Megamergers: Corporate America's Billion-Dollar Takeovers
Beard Books, $34.95
David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus
Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery
Harvard University Press, $18.95
Brent Hayes Edwards 1990
The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism
Harvard University Press, $24.95
James N. Gardner 1968, 1974JD
Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution-Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe
Inner Ocean, $29.95
Rufus Goodwin 1957
Mr. President
Market House/Educare Press, $24.95
David Greenberg 1990
Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image
W.W. Norton, $26.95
Jay Grossman 1985
Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation
Duke University Press, $59.95
Sue Halpern 1977
The Book of Hard Things: A Novel
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $22.00
Bernice L. Hausman 1985
Mother's Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture
Routledge, $24.95
Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture and American Studies
Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000
Pantheon, $26.00
Julie Hilden 1992JD
3: A Novel
Plume/Penguin, $13.00
Suji Kwock Kim 1989
Notes from the Divided Country
Louisiana State University Press, $22.95
John B. Letterman 1989, Editor
Survivors: True Tales of Endurance
Simon and Schuster, $26.00
Hilary Lifton 1991
Candy and Me: A Love Story
Free Press, $22.00
Katherine K. Loucks 1996 and Robert H. Miller 1993
Business School Confidential
Thomas Dunne/Griffin/St. Martin's Press, $17.95
Krista Madsen 1995
Degas Must Have Loved a Dancer
Livingston Press, $26.00
Michael McGerr 1976, 1984PhD
A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920
Free Press, $30.00
Richard M. Merelman 1965PhD
Pluralism at Yale: The Culture of Political Science in America
University of Wisconsin Press, $26.95
Leslie Page Moch 1967MAT
Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650
Indiana University Press, $54.95
Jeffrey K. Olick 1993PhD, Editor
States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection
Duke University Press, $24.95
Julia K. O'Neill 1982 and Hugo Barreca
The Entrepreneur's Internet Handbook: Your Legal and Practical Guide to Starting a Business Website
Sphinx Publishing, $21.95
Mark Oppenheimer 1996
Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture
Yale University Press, $30.00
K. K. Ottessen 2000MBA
Great Americans: Famous Names, Real People
Bloomsbury, $24.95
Carlo Rotella 1994PhD
Cut Time: An Education at the Fights
Houghton Mifflin, $24.00
Roger C. Schonfeld 1999
JSTOR: A History
Princeton University Press, $29.95
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong 1982PhD and William Lane Craig
God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist
Oxford University Press, $19.95
Jane Stern 1971MFA
Ambulance Girl: How I Saved Myself by Becoming an EMT
Crown Publishing, $23.00
Bryant F. Tolles Jr. 1961, 1962MAT
Resort Hotels of the Adirondacks: The Architecture of a Summer Paradise, 1850-1950
Unversity Press of New England, $55.00
Erica Simone Turnipseed 1993
A Love Noire: A Novel
Amistad/HarperCollins, $19.95
Adir Waldman 1997, 2002JD
Arbitrating Armed Conflict: Decisions of the Israel-Lebanon Monitoring Group
Juris Publishing, $70.00
Karl Zinsmeister 1982
Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq
St. Martin's Press, $24.95 |
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