Rubin on 'Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing'
BOOKS: 'It should have been Isaac'
WASHINGTON TIMES | Friday, April 24, 2009
FAME, OBLIVION, AND THE FURIES OF WRITING
By Steven J. Zipperstein
Yale University Press, $27.50, 288 pages, illus.
Reviewed by Martin Rubin
. . . "And so we come to Isaac Rosenfeld, who was unlucky enough to suffer the slings and arrows of both fortune and misfortune, success and failure, making him perhaps the most promising of American writers who came to, well, if not nothing, the following, as Steven J. Zipperstein writes in this profoundly empathetic study:
"'His life was reduced to a cautionary tale: all the promise, the sincere expectation engulfing him (all the more striking in a circle known for anything but selflessness), tended to be put aside. What remained was a story of waste. Time and again, it has been related in much the same terms: directionless charm, genius unachieved. "Charm and Death" is what Saul Bellow titled his unpublished novel about Rosenfeld.'" . . .
"Even his funeral achieved a kind of immortality in his friend Wallace Markfield's novel 'To an Early Grave' and in the beguiling cult classic movie based on it, 'Bye, Bye Braverman.'
"'Charm and Death,' that roman-a-clef about Mr. Rosenfeld, was never published, but Mr. Zipperstein tells us that 'Bellow readily admitted that Rosenfeld is pictured throughout the ribald "Henderson the Rain King," published in 1959, where he permitted himself his wildest, most fanciful reconstruction of his childhood friend.' . . .
"When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976, Mr. Bellow reportedly said, 'It should have been Isaac.' It is a testament to Mr. Rosenfeld that, despite everything he did not manage to do in life and in art, such esteem never wavered."
For Martin's full review, click here or visit www.washingtontimes.com.
Ron Kell on 29-29
Andy Sherman's daughter spotted a San Francisco Chronicle article on the new documentary "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29" by Kevin Rafferty, who saw The Game as a Harvard student in 1968. The article profiles four players including our classmate Ron Kell:
"Ron Kell didn't remember anything specific about the Game until he watched the DVD. Then he remembered it too well. If he'd been just a step closer in defending one late pass he would have had a goal-line interception, and the morning headline would have been what it should have been: 'Yale Beats Harvard 29-16.' . . .
"'The whole tone of the movie was "here are these enlightened Harvard guys and the Yale aristocrats,"' says Kell, a Navy brat who had never lived anywhere longer than the four years he spent at Yale. 'It was not a bunch of elitists by any stretch of the imagination.' . . ."
For the full article, "A toss back in time: 'Harvard Beats Yale 29-29' by Chronicle staff writer Sam Whiting (Mar. 6, 2009), click here or visit SFgate.com.
Martin Rubin review: Man who created L.A.'s economy
Man who created L.A.'s economy
Washington Times, Sunday, March 1, 2009
Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California
By Frances Dinkespiel
St. Martin's Press, $29.95, 376 pages, illus.
Reviewed by Martin Rubin
"By telling the now largely forgotten story of her great-grandfather, Isaias Hellman, California journalist Frances Dinkelspiel has managed not only to illuminate a prime example" of financial risk-taking that turned out well, not badly, but also "to do so at just the time when the values he personified need urgently to be emulated," Martin Rubin writes. He goes on to say:
"This author has an understandable familial pride in the ancestor of whom she knew relatively little before she started researching 'Towers of Gold.' But her research has indeed been prodigious and her text is thoroughly convincing to the reader; indeed by the time one has finished reading her account, bolstered by a wealth of footnotes, even her book's subtitle, with its seemingly hyperbolic claim that one Jewish immigrant 'created California,' seems astonishingly justified and surely apt. . . .
"It is only just that some attention be paid to the man whose banking skills lay behind many of the actual achievements of these terrible titans," the much written-about robber barons. "One example is Hellman's involvement in financing Henry Huntington's Pacific Electric network of trolley cars crisscrossing greater Los Angeles. Huntington based his scheme on 'the hopes [for] the rapid development of property and corresponding increase in value [that] are very high.' . . . But Hellman was a tough-minded skeptic. Not for him ever increasing velocity without due care: He sold off his investments in the ultimately doomed network, citing his estimable lifelong credo:
"'I am not a speculator. I am strictly an investor, and I have all my life paid for things as I go along. I never borrow money. It is against my principles, and that is the reason that I could not stay with all those rich fellows that are building railroads all over Southern California.'"…
For Martin's full review, click here or visit www.washingtontimes.com.
Calvin Hill Feb 09 newsletter
The early-spring 2009 edition of the Calvin Hill Day Care Center newsletter is especially moving as the kids and their teachers respond to Martin Luther King Jr. Day and President Obama's inauguration. Click on the link below to read this issue of the newsletter in PDF format.---KH
Calvin Hilltop newsletter Feb 2009
On History: Daniel Walker Howe in Denver March 12
Chris Citron writes (Feb. 4, 2009):
You're invited! to an evening talk in Denver, CO by prize-winning historian Daniel Walker Howe on Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 7 pm.
Daniel Walker Howe, an emeritus professor at UCLA and Oxford who taught at Yale earlier in his career, will give a presentation on his book What Hath God Wrought--the Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press). The book won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 2008.
Howe's panoramic narrative portrays the revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated the extension of the American empire. He explores the role of religion in this formative period. Howe argues that those advocates of public education and economic integration, defenders of the rights of Indians, women, and African-Americans were the true prophets of America's future.
The words of Howe's title are from the Old Testament, tapped out by Professor (and distinguished portrait painter) Samuel F.B. Morse on his new telegraph device in 1844, ushering in instant long-distance communication. Publishers Weekly called this "one of the most outstanding syntheses of U.S. history published this decade."
Howe lives in Los Angeles. The Pulitzer for this latest book is one of many awards he has received.
Date: March 12, 2009, 7pm
Place: Boettcher Auditorium at The Colorado Historical Society, 1300 Broadway, Denver.
Co-sponsors: Colorado Center for Literature and Art/Colorado Yale Association
For information contact: Chris Citron at the Colorado Center for Literature and Art, 303-777-2242 (fax: 303-777-7278), BookingDenver [at] msn.com.
Harry Klebanoff: 'Pause'
Harry Klebanoff writes (Feb. 9, 2009):
Just published a book –-- PAUSE. My work as a clinical psychologist and organizational consultant has helped clients manage crisis, explore who they are, learn what matters most, and then create a life or organization that inspires passion. My goal in writing PAUSE, and in the talks I do for corporate and community groups, is to help individuals slow their pace without a crisis, and become more effective leaders of their lives or organizations.
Most of us spend way too much time trying to manage the day-to-day problems that come at us. Often we move so fast that we lose sight of what truly matters in our lives. I've worked with many clients who spend most of their lives racing up a huge ladder---only to discover as they reach the top that it's been leaning on the wrong building.
PAUSE will help slow the pace and encourage us to develop a vision of how we would like our life, or organization, to be. Only then can we make the most effective decisions about how we spend our time each day.
This will give you some sense of how I've been spending my time. If you would like more specifics, take a look at my blog, www.harryklebanoff.com. One nice thing about my work is that it helps remind me of what matters. There will always be time for three sons, triathlons with Linda, and walks on the beach with our new puppy.
Calvin Hill Day Care Center Dec 08 newsletter
From Bill Porter, the latest Calvin Hill Day Care Center newsletter---click on the following link for the Winter 2008 edition: ch_newsletter_winter_20081
Shelley Fisher Fishkin's 'Feminist Engagements'
Harry Levitt writes (Jan. 19, 2009):
Shelley Fisher Fishkin has a new book coming out in March: Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture, published by Palgrave/Macmillan. Parts of the book discuss aspects of being in the first Yale College class to include women.
From the book's jacket:
This book offers historically-grounded, feminist interventions into American literary history by one of the country's leading scholars in American Studies. It integrates criticism, biography, social history, popular culture, and personal narrative to explore the poetry, fiction, nonfiction and drama of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-American, Jewish-American, African-American, and Asian-American women writers. It also examines gender issues in the work of canonical male authors-in print and on the stage. These lively, readable essays on American literature and culture range from explorations of feminist humor and chutzpah, to meditations on the personal and the political, to examinations of feminists' challenges to cultural paradigms that redline people like themselves.
"Feminist Engagements employs a feminist lens to re-view American writers and American culture from the nineteenth century through the beginning of our own twenty-first century. This book is excitingly intellectually engaged and, at the same time, movingly self-revelatory. Every page is to be savored."---Annette Kolodny, College of Humanities Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture, the University of Arizona and author of The Lay of the Land, The Land Before Her, and Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty First Century.
"Because she has an appreciation of humor and of writing from the undergrounds of race, class, and gender, Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the perfect person to meditate on the contributions of black and Latino writers, unsung women writers, and those who transgress the conventional boundaries of literature. Her book is enormously valuable and great fun to read."---Erica Jong, poet and novelist, author of twenty-two books including Love Comes First.
Feb. 4 East Asia Event in NYC
Katherine Hyde writes (Feb. 1, 2009): Should be a good program at Japan Society in New York this coming Wed. evening Feb. 4.
To log on for the live webcast at 6:30 pm Feb. 4, click here
---or visit www.japansociety.org for tickets to the event in NYC, or to view the archived video after the event.
The U.S. & East Asia Under the Obama Administration
Mark Halperin, Editor-at-Large and Senior Policy Analyst for Time Magazine, John Bussey, Washington Bureau Chief, The Wall Street Journal and Howard French, Associate Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, discuss whether the Obama administration will create substantive change in the U.S. approach to East Asian relations.
Moderated by Aaron L. Friedberg, Professor of Politics, Princeton University.
---I've written about John Bussey's recent Japan Society appearances here and here. All interesting people though none with a Yale connection that I can discover---KH
Feb Club Emeritus 2009
You are invited!---a message from '87 alums via the AYA:
With February 1 just around the corner, Yale alums around the world are
gearing up for a truly historic month. If you attended in 2008 or if you
have received our previous e-mails, you know that in February 2008, a
group of Yalies from five decades of classes initiated a new tradition
for alumni by hosting casual, agenda-free parties each night of the
month of February in cities across the U.S. and around the globe. These
parties, known as Feb Club Emeritus, were attended by thousands of alums
from the Class of '45 to the Class of '07.
Since our last e-mail, we have added cities---from Kabul to Aspen and
everywhere in between. We have no less than 55 cities at last count. Our
hosts have also chosen venues and finalized their planning. Please visit
www.febclubemeritus.com to see the details of the Feb Club party in your
town.
We look forward to seeing you in February!
Tim Harkness '87 & Jordan Warshaw '87
and more than 55 hosts of Feb Club Emeritus 2009