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 The gung-ho guys have already taken it. If you're only gung-hah, don't let your viewpoint be neglected. WINTER 2014 ISSUE MARCH 7, 2014 Skim the table of contents and the brief introductory sections below, then click on what interests you. Here's a fruitcake with
— Chris TRAVEL, HISTORY A LIVELY GHOST Fred Starr saves a New Orleans treasure  Neglected cultural corner. One of the four fireplaces at the Lombard house in New Orleans that Fred Starr has restored. Fred says, "The massive Creole box fireplaces ample room for cooking crances, which existed in two rooms. Remarkably, all survived intact." Interested in
It's the latest polymath's paradise from Fred Starr, one of whose several specialties is unearthing and explaining neglected corners of culture. (While still an undergraduate, he traveled across Turkey one summer discovering parts of the fabled Silk Road, using Turkish rugs as sleeping bags and writing about it for the National Geographic.) Une Belle Maison: The Lombard Plantation House in New Orleans' Bywater (University Press of Mississippi) intriguingly describes and handsomely illustrates his rescue and meticulous, 20-year restoration of a "classic Creole/West Indian" house in New Orleans, and his research into its culture and famous neighbors. The house is the last remnant of a series of thousand-acre riverside plantations created on New Orleans' east bank in the early 1800s. Fred's other books on Louisiana culture include New Orleans Unmasqued (1989), Southern Comfort: The Garden District of New Orleans (1998), Louis Moreau Gottschalk (2000), and the introduction to New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories. Tourist note: thanks to a park along the levee in front of the house, Fred says you can walk or bicycle right to the Lombard house from the French Quarter. Click here to read how the house came back, see photos of it now — and in an entirely different vein, read a publisher's preview of Fred's next book on the days when Central Asia was the world's leader in economic development, knowledge and the arts. We'll have an excerpt in our next issue. RESORTS WATCH WATCH HILL, DAAHLING Click on the image above to watch a trailer for the video about the Watch Hill summer colony, including a shot of its cicerone, Chap Barnes. Anyone with an interest in threatened shore communities with plummy summer resorts can find an illuminating case study in a video that airs March 6 on Rhode Island public television and that soon will be available for purchase. It is based on a book about Watch Hill, Rhode Island by Chap Barnes, a longtime resident who is a lawyer with a background in environmental concerns. He also is a founder, vice president and former executive director of the  Watch Hill Conservancy, an interesting land trust, conservation, planning, and historic preservation nonprofit. The book, published by the Conservancy in 2005, is Watch Hill through Time: The Evolution of a New England Shore Community; Chap also collaborated on a 2009 companion volume about the architecture, Watch Hill Style. Lushly illustrated with charming historic and current photographs, both books and the video can be ordered from the Conservancy, which nicely makes them available free to computer users as PDFs. The main book chronicles the long-skirted, parasoled women and tie-wearing men who started Watch Hill as a summer colony in the 1880s, many of whose families are now in their fourth and fifth generations, as well as storms like the hurricane of 1938 that eliminated a substantial part of the increasingly vulnerable peninsula on which the town perches. The tone is elegiac:
In early summer, the air is redolent of wild roses, honeysuckle, and beach pea, and at all seasons of the bracing salt of the sea. As summer progresses, adults and children flock to the sandy beaches and take to the water in boats. They play tennis and golf, and sail and swim at the clubs. They gather on manicured lawns for parties. They worship at the Chapel. And for three months, they live a life of active sociability or quiet relaxation in a charmed place.Read the book online at the Conservancy site. Click here to comment. MUSINGS PRIDE AND PREJUDICE IN BATHING SUITS From the editor: One of my best reads these days is the little essays Ed Goodman writes for the newsletter of his venture capital firm, Milestone Venture Partners. He spares readers his obligatory few sentences on how well his firm is doing by putting all that last, instead starting with notes on topics like the "father" of the VC industry, the French general Georges Frederic Doriot, yoga, the crowdfunding movement, poverty, and immigration. For instance, here he is on rereading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice during his recent family vacation in the Caribbean: "About 50 pages into Austen's classic, I realized she understood the appeal of my holiday retreat and wrote about such a society more than 200 years ago. Like Austen's Hertfordshire, the island has its own hierarchy which ranges from the fabulously wealthy who inhabit the 'Great House' to a number of very comfortable but more modest homes, and it has its own upstairs/downstairs paradigm...Think of it as Pride and Prejudice, albeit in bathing suits."Click here for two more issues of Goodmania, including a chart slyly showing Growth in VC Deals by Region, 2007-2011. New York, locus of Ed's company: +32%. Silicon Valley: -10%. MUSINGS SIGNED AND SEALed "Troubled by all the pain and injustice in the world," as he tells it Chris Bent regularly posts punchy (and occasionally pugilistic) mini-essays on his website, some of which also have appeared here. He's now published 118 of them in two volumes available on Amazon, both with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get subtitle: A former Navy Seal's inspirational, spiritual, straight-talking, sometimes irreverent, often humorous path of life and leadership as we should know it. The actual title of both Volume I and Volume II is 1-800-I AM UNHAPPY, which plays on 1-800 help lines. Chris proudly draws on his experience as a Navy Seal, in retailing at Lord & Taylor, B. Altman, Brooks Brothers and the World Wrestling Federation, and now, with his wife, as proprietor of four Best of Everything stores based in Naples, Florida (with a branch in Kennebunkport, Maine), which he modestly describes as "one of the most successful independent women's accessory stores in the country." The books made a fellow Seal reviewer on Amazon (who says he does not know Chris) cheer "Hooyah, old shipmate!" For instance: "Our problem is that we seek answers in a computer and not on our knees." "Life just can't be about the last years of golf..." CLICK HERE for two sample chapters. SCIENCE MINDLESS MINDREADING The increasingly buzzy buzz about the promise of neuroscience as a key to understanding human behavior has been tackled - hard - by Bob Burton MD, a retired Chief of Neurology at Mt. Zion-UCSF Hospital in San Francisco, in a recent book. A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us about Ourselves says humans' ability to study the mind using ideas generated by our own minds is subject to all the self-delusions to which human thinking is heir. While praising much of neuroscience, he warns against misusing it to predict, excuse or judge behavior or rush people to jails or treatments. A New Yorker review of this and several other books by what the reviewer, Adam Gopnik, identified as a growing number of "neuro-skeptics" found tinges of "curmudgeon" in the book, but hey — it's hard to deny the corrective value of a strong, well-informed polemic. CLICK HERE for an excerpt, including apercus ranging from nerves to Bernard Madoff and Poker, that appeared in Scientific American. Bob is also the author of a forerunner volume, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, and two novels, Doc-in-a-Box and Cellmates. STUDY LEARNING FOR US GROWNUPS The lamp of curiosity ever burneth among us, and by now you well may have been tempted to take one of the newly-trendy MOOCs — Massive Open Online Courses — or other online offerings. A good number are now being offered by Yale. As an old education reporter and publicist I know online education is a trend of interest and tried a MOOC myself last summer, but dropped out for lack of time, as is common. To help you weigh your choices, we collected comments from two of our '62 classmates who have done continuing education. In the course on Strategic Thinking in Economics taught by Ben Polak, now Yale's provost, Paul Torop "found the material more difficult than I had imagined" but despite having "no background" in the subject, says he "liked the math and learned something about economics." Bernie Silbernagel has both taken and taught in-person adult courses at the University of Washington in Seattle. CLICK HERE for their full comments. CITIES MOSES OF THE SOUTH? It's not often that anyone steers a major transformation in the American landscape and lifestyle, but Alex Garvin may be doing just that in Atlanta.  Since the turn of this century, he and his firm have taken a major role in the planning and creation of the BeltLine, a 22-mile-long corridor of railroads-turned-transit-lines-and-trails that is connecting Atlanta without more superhighways. The tracks also string together an "emerald necklace," as he calls it, linking 20 new or expanded public parks and so far helping catalyze $1 billion of private investment in commercial properties and residential apartments (including a few subsidized "affordable" units). Despite the defeat of a tax referendum for partially funding the transit hookup, and delays from three now-resolved lawsuits over related tax increases, Alex's vision has guided the spending of $362 million in public and philanthropic funds, some of it tax revenues from the new developments, with nearly $4.4 billion to go before planned completion in 2030. A New York Times article said the idea has exhibited "a rare power to capture the imagination of diverse interest groups, from cyclists to powerful developers, and to flatten opposition." Transit, Alex says, is starting to supplant interstates "as the focus of daily life for hundreds of thousands of Atlantans." In his last book, Alex anointed a pantheon of modern city planners — the visionaries of "public assets" who transformed 19th Century Paris (Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann) and 20th Century Chicago (Daniel Burnham), Philadelphia (Edmund Bacon), and New York (Robert Moses). (See our excerpt from The Planning Game: Lessons from Great Cities on this site last July.) Is Alex ready to join their ranks? He acknowledges that the idea of joining up Atlanta's circling railroads originally came from a Georgia Tech graduate student, Ryan Gavel (now an official of the project), but if most of the BeltLine happens, Alex's concept of connecting transit, parks, housing and businesses may indeed make him a sort of Moses of the South. CLICK HERE to see stunning photographs and maps and read more details in a Planning magazine article drawn from a new book, Planning Atlanta, forthcoming in April from APA Planners Press. JUSTICE THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL PROGRESS IN THE NORTH  New and subtle forms of Jim Crow are emerging in our national life, says Bob Connery, who was a key player in dismantling old forms of racial discrimination during the 1960s. As background, he recently wrote a thoughtful, occasionally dramatic analysis of the work by the team he was part of that won public school integration in Denver via the Supreme Court's precedent-setting 1973 decision in the case of Keyes v. School District No.1. Bombs went off, early in the controversy, at the homes of the lead plaintiffs and the local judge, and damaged a third of the city's school buses. In Volume 90, no. 5 of the Denver University Law Review, Bob describes that, and how a team of young lawyers assembled vivid evidence of discriminatory techniques that at the time were practiced in the Northern cities that never had explicit segregation laws. He describes the critical importance of recruiting a "very conservative, John Birch Society Republican" to be the lead trial lawyer. Today, he writes, "legally mandated separation and inherent inequality are no longer relevant throughout most of the nation." Denver, he recently wrote to your CorSec, "has become a public schools leader in dealing with that issue, and is experiencing one of the largest rates of growth in public school population and educational achievement in the nation." Yet with a touch of sadness he says in his article that "the legacy of the decision in Keyes continues to be written by courts and scholars that are addressing not only separation and isolation of minorities but also the many forms that deprivation of equal educational opportunity may take under the Constitution's promise of equal protection in this broad and diverse country of ours." Click here for Bob's full story, including his crucial early-morning conversation, three years out of law school, in the Supreme Court office of a "dapper, courtly gentleman" who turned out to be the Court's senior clerk and a key to an 11th-hour legal order. TRAVEL, HISTORY LOVE AND WAR A Private Museum is Worth a Side Trip if You're Nearby  The personal museum above, in the former hayloft of a large family farmhouse in Obergruenburg, a village in the foothills of the Alps in the north central part of Austria about an hour from Linz, is worth a side trip if you are in Europe. It speaks quiet volumes about love, life, pain, joy and celebration, as seen through the eyes, — and the artistically displayed photos, artifacts, and letters — of the family into which Jon Saari married shortly after graduation from Yale. With his encouragement and a dash of his skills as a professor of history, his wife Christine, a journalist, artist and professional photographer, has created an extraordinary three-dimensional family archive centered on the farm where she grew up and where they spend time every spring or summer. Primarily from the late 1930s through World War II and up to the present, the displays elegiacally document her family's universally familiar struggles and triumphs. CLICK HERE to see more photos, details, and instructions for visiting. BOOKS RIVER OF TRIUMPH, A REVIEW By Paul J. Bschorr Ed note: for classmates' books that may not to get much exposure in mainstream media, we welcome reviews and comments from classmates.  For those of you who have an interest in digging into the details (some real and some fictional) of the Revolutionary War, and in particular the role played by the Hudson River Valley in that War, Ken Cascone's River of Triumph (Heritage Press, Inc./Book Baby) will be a great read. Not only does Ken reconstruct many of the major events of that War, as well as inventing some minor ones, but he superimposes a modern day murder mystery also set in the Hudson River Valley, which he expertly interweaves with the historical account of the War. And to add to your enjoyment, many of the characters and settings revolve around that university in New Haven we love so well. CLICK HERE to read the rest of Paul's review. BOOKS IF YOU ARE PRODUCING A BOOK, VIDEO, CD, APP OR OTHER WORK ... ...you might want to remember three moderately-influential places to which you can send review copies, links and publicity information. First is your CorSec, who as readers of this website know, is keen to note classmates' productions of all kinds (including newsletters, sermons, musical compositions, shows and the like), and who runs texts and excerpts (with permission) to give readers a taste. Second and third are the "Output" and "Arts & Culture" sections of the Yale Alumni Magazine, which respectively consider commercially-produced works for short descriptions and full reviews. Our motto: Ideas are too important to be left to their originators. AGING GRIEF ADVISORS: A PROPOSAL As a few of you know, my wife of almost 51 years died last September. When it became clear to me that Ginny was very ill and the outcome could be grim, I began seeking out people whom I knew had been through this life event in the recent past. I connected with a cousin, a '62 classmate and a high school classmate. Their sharing of their experience has been extremely helpful to me, both in the final days of Ginny's illness and in the mourning that has followed and is ongoing. As Secretary of our class, I receive notices from AYA of all known deaths of Classmates. What none of your Class officers receives is notice of the death of classmates' spouses or partners. Since we are all over 70, this life event will occur with increasing frequency, And we need not suffer alone. Hence, I propose that we help each other as my three "counselors" have helped me. If you have lost your wife or partner and would like to talk about it, please call me at 845-279-6709. If your wife or partner is ill and would like to talk about it, please call me. If you're not comfortable talking to me, I may be able to refer you to other classmates who have gone through this and might be willing to help. Over time, I believe we can build a class roster of volunteers to whom classmates can be referred by me or Chris Cory. We promise that the roster will be confidential and known only to Chris and me. My steps through this part of my life's journey have been made easier by sharing with my three counselors. We can help each other as the inevitable losses occur. — Dave
CLICK HERE to comment.YALE OUR ALUMNI NOTES FROM YALE ALUMNI MAGAZINE Read our January/February '14 Alumni Notes from Yale Alumni Magazine online here. News from many of our newsmakers, and live links to their current projects and endeavors. NOTIFYING CLASSMATES ABOUT SERVICES If you would like classmates to be notified about your funeral or memorial activities, the Class of 1962 will send information to our email list, providing we get the information in time. Please ask those who will be in charge to send the details to Bob Oliver at oliver@moglaw.com, phone 203-624-5111, and for backup to John Stewart, Co-Corresponding Secretary, at johnhargerstewart@gmail.com, phone 845-789-1407. We will not send information unless someone makes this request. Even if services are not involved, please encourage those involved to send basic information to the above and to the Yale Office of Information Resources at alumni.records@yale.edu or PO Box 208262, New Haven, CT 06520-8616, telephone 203-432-1100. WE WANT YOUR COMMENTS Let us know what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, and especially, what you'd like to see on our website. We're here for you. Thanks. CLICK HERE TO COMMENT (and see comments from others). |
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