Photo: Bruce Holliday & Kids
Click the thumbnail below for a photo of proud dad Bruce Holliday with his kids Kerry and Christopher:
Primps' Daughter Comments
Bill Primps writes that his daughter Emily (Y '03) has been doing television commentary as a Democratic strategist for Obama--click the link below to see a clip on YouTube:
Emily Primps YouTube 2/25/08 (Emily's debut appearance)
Rubin: Islamism and Nazism
When Nazis and Islamic extremists bonded
By Martin Rubin
February 24, 2008 (Washington Times)
JIHAD AND JEW-HATRED: ISLAMISM, NAZISM AND THE ROOTS OF 9/11
By Matthias Kuntzel
Telos Press Publishing, $29.95, 180 pages
This brief but important book begins with an all too familiar image: "[T]he skyscrapers turning into huge burning torches and falling hither and thither, and the reflection of the disintegrating city in the dark sky." The skyscrapers are Manhattan's, but it is not September 11, 2001. Adolf Hitler is salivating over his plan to use suicide bombers to attack the United States, as reported by Albert Speer, who confided to his diaries that:
"In the latter stages of the war, I never saw Hitler so beside himself as when, as if in a delirium, he was picturing to himself and to us the downfall of New York in towers of flame."
As German historian Matthias Kuntzel tells us, the fuhrer was planning such an attack: "Not only Hitler's fantasy but also his plan for realising it, recall what happened in 2001: the idea was for Kamikaze pilots to fly explosive-crammed light aircarft lacking landing gear into the Manhattan skyscrapers.
"The drawings for the Daimler-Benz "Amerikabomber" from spring 1944 actually exist . . . ."
For Martin's full review, click here or visit www.washingtontimes.com.
Rubin: Besotted by Books
Besotted by Books
'Editions & Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat,' by Nicholas A. Basbanes
(Fine Books Press: 210 pp., $27.95)
By Martin Rubin, Special to The (L.A.) Times
February 23, 2008
If anyone in the United States is truly a book person, surely it is Nicholas A. Basbanes. For two decades, the literary critic and columnist has cast a fond, even loving eye, on the culture of books, their substance, their wider meaning in society and the people who -- in ways similar and markedly different -- share his passion. His intense engagement with all things bookish shines from every page of his new collection of journalistic pieces, each one sparkling with insights born of total immersion in his beloved subject.
Basbanes already has written a handful of indispensable books on this topic, but, as he makes clear in his introduction to "Editions & Impressions," he selected these particular essays "precisely because they are not replicated in any substantial way" in his other published work. The essays are radiant with his joy in discovering and exploring the byways of the book world. And what a world it is, full of fascinating characters and interesting tales, which Basbanes, with his experience covering "every imaginable kind of story as a newspaper reporter," is perfectly fitted to evoke. . . .
For Martin's full review, click here or visit www.latimes.com.
Rubin on 'Fragile Diplomacy'
The Saxon Angle: Porcelain Politics
By MARTIN RUBIN
Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2008 (p. W11)
Fragile Diplomacy
Edited by Maureen Cassidy-Geiger
Yale University Press, 369 pages, $125
. . . "Fragile Diplomacy," a combination of lavish illustration and substantial scholarship, captures the beauty of Meissen's porcelain and the subtle role it played among Europe's statesmen and royal houses. The book's stunning photographs, accompanied by expert essays, show off the details of ornate design and striking form -- table services, tureens and vases painted with soft landscapes or intricate patterns, gilt-edged candlesticks, hunting cups, mythic beasts and goddesses in leafy bowers. . . .
The period 1710-63 is a momentous one for Europe, for those years mark the inexorable decline of France as the pre-eminent European power, creating shifting alliances as Austria, Prussia, Russia and minor states like Saxony jockeyed for position. At one point the elector of Saxony actually became the king of Poland, displacing no less a figure than French King Louis XV's future father-in-law. These years were the perfect time for Saxony to employ its one asset that no one else could match. . . .
For the full review, click here or visit www.wsj.com.
Rubin on Kazin
Thursday, February 7, 2008 (SF Chronicle)
Review: Kazin's diaries enliven Cook biography
By Martin Rubin
Alfred Kazin A Biography By Richard M. Cook YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS; 452 PAGES; $35
. . . Kazin's account in "A Walker in the City" of his upbringing and his parents' poverty and struggles in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn is a classic of American immigrant literature, and his biographer rightly begins his own book by quoting the sentence "Brownsville is that road which every other road in my life has had to cross." But he has already provided an even more evocative quote from Kazin's journals in the epigraph: "Looking back upon it [the hot summer of his childhood] is like opening my mind to everything out of that childhood I've wanted so desperately to lose and can never lose." . . .
To read the complete review, click here or visit www.sfgate.com.
NYC Yale Club Lunches
Jim Kaplan, Bill Primps and Bob Shapiro write (1/25/08):
On the theory that a new tradition should not die young, the Yale Class of 1971 table at the Yale Club, which has been in hiatus for some months will again be held in the tap room on Friday February 8, 2008 at 12:15 pm.
Please contact Jim, Bill, or Bob, or Jim's secretary Lisa Mastropolo by email, lmastropolo at herzfeld-rubin dot com or by phone, 212-471-3229 to let them know if you will be attending by February 6.
Japan Society Events
A note from Katherine Hyde (1/24/08):
I write for the Japan Society of New York and thought classmates who'll be in NYC next week might be interested in a couple of events there:
On Thurs., Jan. 31, noon to 2, there'll be a lunch and talk with Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte. Brian Lehrer of The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC will preside.
On Fri. Feb. 1, 9:30 to 1 pm with a buffet lunch 1-2, there'll be a conference on securities enforcement with a dozen regulators and financial industry folk from the U.S., Japan and the UK, including SEC commissioner Paul Atkins; Yasuhisa Shiozaki, Japanese legislator and former chief cabinet secretary; Margaret Cole, director of enforcement for the Financial Services Authority in the UK; Michael Garcia, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of NY; and a couple of speakers I've heard before, both of whom are quite dynamic, Robbie Feldman of Morgan Stanley Japan (incidentally a Yalie of approximately our vintage) and Linda Chatman Thomsen, SEC director of enforcement.
The Jan. 31 lunch is $65 for lunch and lecture, $15 for lecture only (that's the nonmember rate). The Feb. 1 conference is $100 ($50 for academic, govt and NPOs).
The website to reserve a seat is www.japansociety.org. The Society is over by the UN, at 333 E. 47th St.
Stu Brogadir & the MCAT
Dear Harry and Classmates;
Lost in the grander preparations for the apocalypse that was to be May Day was the closing of the MCAT testing site at Sterling Chem Lab by the test administrator, the (aptly named) Psychological Testing Service. Since the half of our class that had mastered Organic Chemistry was taking the MCAT, a significant number of us were to be evacuated from New Haven on that fateful day.
Earlier in the week, I was called by the PTS and told that Sterling had been one of the buildings targeted for potential vaporization on May Day, and that the center was declared unsafe and therefore closed. I was given the choice of two "safer" test centers, Columbia or Wesleyan. It seemed to be a no brainer. Columbia was the home base of Mark Rudd and the intergalactic headquarters of SDS, hosting protests on what seemed to be a daily basis. Wesleyan was in a sleepy town where a PTA meeting was the only event of any import whatsoever. I had a friend of a friend who knew a friend who knew a student with a sofa. I signed up.
Imagine my surprise that Friday afternoon to find that the Middletown exit off of the Wilbur Cross was backed up for a mile. The improbable cause: the Grateful Dead was giving a concert at Wesleyan on May Day! So much for the PTA meeting!
The early dawn of May Day was shattered by the sound of fire alarms, and I was awakened from my lumpy sofa. A fire bomb had gone off in center campus and all buildings had to be evacuated. We watched the sun rise outside in our yaya's and, at about 6 am, were told we could reenter the buildings. I showered, picked up my #2 pencils, and went off to the test center. (I believe I changed into fresh yaya's, but am not positive.) So much for the PTA meeting!
After the exam, I headed home to Yale to partake in the activities of May Day; but the National Guard had basically closed New Haven down. I drove home to my parents' house in Ansonia listening to reports from New Haven. I am not sure whether it was more cacophonous to hear Jerry Rubin scream "F--- Kingman Brewster!!" in person or over the car radio!
Thus, this book is my only connection to one of the most significant days in New Haven and Yale history. I have sometimes wondered whether the detonation at the sedate Wesleyan MCAT site was some prophetic metaphor for the destruction of our once staid health care system and medical practice by the Plaintiffs' Bomb (or, is it "Bar"?) and insurance companies. Hmmmm....Just makes you wonder.....At least Sterling has survived!
Anyway, I dedicate this anecdote to you, Harry, and the seriously fantastic work you have done and are doing to unite our class. We are all grateful. I hereby nominate you as Class Secretary in Perpetuity!!
Best to all,
Stu
Review: 'Day' by A.L. Kennedy
Wednesday, January 9, 2008 (SF Chronicle)
Review: Inside the rattled mind of a British World War II vet
Martin Rubin
Day By A.L. Kennedy KNOPF; 274 PAGES; $24
Born in 1965, the British writer A.L. Kennedy is known for her vigorous imagination and her unusual and highly original use of language. Both are on display in "Day," which takes its spare title from the last name of the novel's protagonist, a former Royal Air Force gunner who spent time in a Nazi prisoner of war camp after his aircraft crashed. Now, four years after his release at war's end, he decides to serve as an extra in a film about POWs being made in Germany.
Alfred Day was still a young lad when he left his abusive father and beloved mother - to say nothing of a stinking job gutting fish - to volunteer for the air force. His experience there was one of the two highlights of his life - the other was Joyce, the married woman he met and loved during the war - and he hopes to recapture on the film set some of the male bonding and camaraderie he experienced in actual service.
What happens instead is the eruption of all sorts of confusing emotions: "It had seemed not unlikely that he could work out his own little pantomime inside the professional pretence and tunnel right through to the place where he'd lost himself, or rather the dark, the numb gap he could tell was asleep inside him. Something else had been there once, but he couldn't think what. He was almost sure it had come adrift in Germany, in the real prison, in '43, or thereabouts. So it could possibly make sense that he'd turn up here and at least work out what was missing, maybe even put it back." . . . .
---To read the full review, click here or visit www.sfgate.com and search on Martin Rubin.