David LowRespected tax scholar Leonard Burman ’75 is the co-writer (with Joel Slemrod) of Taxes in America: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press), a clear, concise explanation of how the U.S. tax system works, how it affects people and businesses, and how it might be improved. This highly accessible book, organized in a question-and-answer format, describes the intricacies of the modern tax system in an easy-to-grasp manner. The book starts with the basic definitions of taxes and then examines more complicated and controversial issues. They address such questions as: How much more tax could the IRS collect with better…
Norman Shapiro, professor of romance languages and literatures, translated Comtesse Anna de Noailles' A Life of Poems, Poems of a Life. The poetry collection was published by Black Widow Press in 2012. A poet whose reputation has lasted beyond the popularity of her actual works, de Noailles was respected and beloved by France's literary and lay population alike, counting among her admirers such figures as Proust, Cocteau, Colette and many others. Seemingly unconcerned with the tenets of this or that poetic school, she tuned the traditional elements of French prosody to her personal lyrical use, refusing however to be straitjacketed…
Acclaimed National Geographic photographer Michael Yamashita ’71 has just published a new book of photographs Shangri-La: Along the Tea Road to Lhasa (White Star Publishers). His latest photography collection is a rare, intimate look into the Tibet’s changing world—both ancient and modern, sacred and commonplace, the rarefied and the gritty—before the legends and mysteries of the Chamagudao, the Tea Horse Road, disappear into the Tibetan mist. Yamashita captures stunning images of the Tea Horse Road, which winds through dizzying mountain passes, across famed rivers like the Mekong and the Yangtze, and past monasteries and meadows in a circuitous route from Sichuan…
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University recently announced that Visiting Writer in English Adina Hoffman ’89 is one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Prizes. This new global writer’s award was created with a gift from the late Donald Windham and his partner, Sandy M. Campbell, and is now one of the largest literary prizes in the world. Nine $150,000 prizes were awarded for outstanding achievement in fiction, nonfiction, and drama and recognize writers from all stages of their careers. The recipients range in ages from 33 to 87. Writers were considered from around…
In his new nonfiction collection Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories (University of Chicago Press), acclaimed journalist Carlo Rotella ’86 explores a variety of characters and settings, His writing has been praised for going beneath the surface of the story as he sympathetically dwells in the lives of the people and places he encounters. The two dozen essays in this volume deal with subjects and obsessions that have characterized his previous writing: boxing, music, writers, and cities. “Playing in time” refers to how people make beauty and meaning while working within the constraints and limits forced on…
Krishna Winston, the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature, is the translator of Patrick Roth's Starlight Terrace, published by Seagull Books in 2012. In a rundown Los Angeles apartment building—the titular Starlite Terrace—Roth unfurls the tragic linked stories of Rex, Moss, Gary and June, four neighbors, in a sort of burlesque of the Hollywood modern. In each of their singular collisions with fame, Roth’s dark prose presages a universal and mythical fate of desperation. In “The Man at Noah’s Window,” Rex shares the story of his father, a supposed hand double for Gary Cooper in High Noon. In “Eclipse…
In her illuminating new book, Doctoring Freedom (University of North Carolina Press), Gretchen Long ’89 shares the stories of African Americans who fought for access to both medical care and medical education, as she reveals the important relationship between medical practice and political identity. Even before emancipation, African Americans recognized that control of their bodies was an essential battleground in their struggle for autonomy, and they devised strategies to retain some of that control. During her research, Long, an associate professor of history at Williams College, closely studied antebellum medical journals, planters' diaries, agricultural publications, letters from wounded African American…
Five alumni have contributed to exceptional documentaries that were shown this January at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Marc Shmuger ’80 is one of the producers of We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, which had its premiere at Sundance. Directed by Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, the film is an in-depth study of all things related to WikiLeaks and the larger global debate over access to information. It tells a compelling story of what happens when a small group of people decide to break open the intelligence vaults of the world’s most powerful nation. The…
This January, Liz Garcia ’99 brought her first feature film, The Lifeguard, to Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah to be shown in the U.S. Dramatic competition. She directed, wrote, and co-produced the movie; her husband, Joshua Harto, is a co-producer and an actor in the film. The Lifeguard follows a young woman (Kristen Bell, Veronica Mars) who leaves her job as an Associated Press reporter in New York City and returns to her hometown in suburban Connecticut where she last felt happiness. Complications arise as she rebels against adulthood by resuming her high school job as a pool…
Jim Margolis ’93, a six-time Emmy Award winner, left his job last year as an executive producer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to become the show runner for a new series, Newsreaders, which airs at midnight Thursday on Adult Swim, part of the Cartoon Network. Co-created by Rob Corddry, Jonathan Stern and David Wain, Newsreaders is a sketch comedy show in the form of a fake TV news magazine and a spinoff of a successful Adult Swim series, Children’s Hospital, a parody of the hospital drama genre. The new series features both established and up-and-coming comic talents. In…
Halley Feiffer ’07 is the star and co-writer (with Ryan Spahn) of the feature film of He's Way More Famous Than You, which premiered in the dramatic competition at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah in January. The film is directed by Michael Urie, the star of Ugly Betty and Partners, and co-stars Urie, Spahn, Jessie Eisenberg (with whom Feiffer appeared in The Squid and the Whale), Natasha Lyonne, Mammie Gummer, Tracee Chimo, and Ralph Macchio. Feiffer plays a struggling actress will stop at nothing to get her movie made in this sharp, satiric comedy about the film…
Krishna Winston, the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature, is the translator of Günter Grass's From Germany to Germany, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012. In January 1990, just months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Günter Grass made two New Year’s resolutions: the first was to travel extensively in the newly united Germany and the second was to keep a diary, to record his impressions of a historic time. Grass takes part in public debates, writes for newspapers, makes speeches, and meets emerging politicians. He talks to German citizens on both sides, listening to their…