The Wesleyan Connection

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 the world. The prize jury in each category chose five finalists, from which the nine recipients were selected to receive awards.

Hoffman’s prize citation reads: “In a land where even the most cautious nonfiction can draw howls of protest, Adina Hoffman combines fastidious listening, even-handed research, and prose so engaged that it makes the long-vanished visible again.”

Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. She is also the author, with Peter Cole, of  Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which was awarded the American Library Association’s Brody Medal for the best Jewish book of 2011. Hoffman has been a visiting professor at Middlebury, and NYU, as well as a Franke Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, she divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven. She is currently at work on Where the Great City Stands: A Jerusalem Triptych, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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 them by life.

Besides his compelling writing on boxing, Rotella shares his engaging and insightful reportage on crime and science fiction writers, movie production, a megachurch, urban spaces, and more. Some of the essays appear in print for the first time.

Rotella is the author of Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt; October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature; and Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, the last also published by the University of Chicago Press. He writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, and the Boston Globe, and he is a commentator for WGBH FM in Boston.

A professor of English at Boston College, Rotella is director of the American Studies Program and director of the Lowell Humanities Series.

In his new book How to Love Wine (William Morrow), The New York Times chief wine critic Eric Asimov ‘79 examines why the American wine culture produces feelings of anxiety and suggests how readers can overcome their fears and develop a sense of discovery and wonder as they explore the diversity and complexity of the world of wine. Asimov shares his professional knowledge and insights along with personal stories of his lifelong passionate relationship with wine, which began when he was a graduate student on a budget.

Asimov discusses favorite vineyards, wine’s singular personalities, meaningless wine descriptions that often pass for criticism today, and current wine issues. He offers discussions of easy to find and rare wonderful vintages from around the globe, and shares thoughts on those wines that have been particularly meaningful to him. The book aims to help others fine pleasure, enjoyment, and refreshment when encountering wine.

Asimov comments: “This book is part manifesto and part memoir, a gathering of impressions through experience. I don’t imagine for a moment it will tear apart our entrenched wine culture. … The idea is to start a discussion, and a reconsideration. I do believe I am asking the right questions, and if I can pull a thread on the crazy-quilt of established dogma, accepted principles, and so-called facts that rule our wine culture, I will feel that I have done my job.”

Interview with Eric Asimov in The Daily Beast

Are you a Wesleyan alumnus? For more alumni stories, photo albums, videos, features and more, visit Wesconnect, the website for Wesleyan alumni.

The prolific Paul Dickson ’61 is the author of the book Bill Veeck: Baseball Maverick (Walker Books), the first major biography of one of the most influential and smartest figures in baseball history. Dickson used primary sources, including more than 100 interviews to tell the story of Veeck (1914-1986) who was a baseball impresario, an innovator, and a staunch advocate of racial equality. Admired by baseball fans, Veeck was known for his promotional genius for the sport, while his feel for the game led him to propose innovations way ahead of their time. His deep sense of fairness helped usher in free agency, breaking the power owners had over players.

In a recent interview with MLB Reports, Dickson says: “I had always wanted to write a biography and felt that if it were to be a sports biography it had to be about a transformational character in the history of sports which Veeck was. I also wanted to able to tell a story in the context of the subject’s time. Because of Veeck’s interest in racial equality, his position as a war veteran and amputee, and his genius as a promoter and businessman, he was perfect. He was also witty, provocative and drew outside the lines. He attracted the descriptor ‘maverick’ more than any other figure in sports before or since.”

In a review of the book in the Chicago Sun-Times, Dave Hoekstra calls Dickson’s book  “a comprehensive, steady and spirited work. Dickson had a challenge, as Veeck’s 1962 autobiography, Veeck as in Wreck, ranks with Jim Brosnan’s The Long Season and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four as essential baseball literature. Dickson brings a keen eye to his subject. You wouldn’t expect anything less from the Maryland-based author who also wrote a baseball book called The Joy of Keeping Score.”

Dickson’s subject is a fascinating one. Early in his career, Veeck worked for owner Phil Wrigley, rebuilding Wrigley Field. In his late 20s, Veeck bought into his first team, the American Association Milwaukee Brewers. He volunteered for combat duty during World War II, enduring a leg injury. Next, he purchased the Cleveland Indians in 1946—the first of four midwestern teams he would own.

Veeck tried to bring Negro League players to the majors earlier without success. But in the summer of 1947, Veeck integrated his team by signing Larry Doby, the American League’s first black player, and hiring the first black public relations officer, trainer, and scout. A year later, Veeck also signed the legendary black pitcher Satchel Paige, who helped win the 1948 World Series (Cleveland’s last championship to this day).

Dickson is the author of more than 40 books, including The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary, The Joy of Keeping Score, Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, and Baseball: The Presidents’ Game. In addition to baseball, his specialties include Americana and language. He lives in Garrett Park, Maryland.  (Paul Dickson web site)

A fascinating study by theater critic and scholar Jonathan Kalb ’81, Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater (University of Michigan Press), considers large-scale theater productions that often run five hours or more and present special challenges to the artists involved as well as the audience. He takes a close look at seven internationally prominent theater productions, including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby, Peter Brooks’s The Mahabharata, and the “durational works” of the British experimental company Forced Entertainment. Diverse and savvy viewers who may otherwise be distracted by film, television and other media nevertheless continue to seek out the increasingly rare experiences of awe, transcendence, and sustained immersion provided by monumental theater works.

The book’s diverse examples range from adapted novels and epics, to dramatic chronicles with macrohistorical and macropolitical implications, to stagings of super-size classic plays, to “postdramatic” works that negotiate the border between life and art. Kalb reconstructs each of the works, re-creating the experience of seeing it while at the same time explaining how it maintained attention and interest over so many hours, and then expanding the scope to embrace a wider view and ask broader questions. The discussion of Nicholas Nickleby, for example, considers melodrama as a basic tool of theatrical communication, and the section on Peter Brooks explores the ethical problems surrounding theatrical exoticism.

The book is aimed at general readers as well as theater specialists. It places the chosen productions in various historical and critical contexts and engages with the many lively scholarly debates surrounding them.

Kalb is a theater critic and scholar whose work has appeared in The Village Voice and New York Press. He is a professor in the Department of Theatre at Hunter College, City University of New York.

Jay Geller ’75 is the author of The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (Fordham University Press). Geller considers how modernizing German-speaking cultures, undergoing their own processes of identification, responded to the narcissistic threat posed by the continued persistence of Judentum (Judaism, Jewry, Jewishness) by representing “the Jew”’s body—or rather parts of that body and the techniques performed upon them. Such fetish-producing practices reveal the question of German-identified modernity to be inseparable from the Jewish Question.

Jewish-identified individuals, immersed in the phantasmagoria of such figurations—in the gutter and garret salon, medical treatise and dirty joke, tabloid caricature and literary depiction, church façade and bric-a-brac souvenir—had their own question, another Jewish Question. They also had other answers, for these physiognomic fragments not only identified “the Jew” but also became for some Jewish-identified individuals the building blocks for working through their particular situations and relaying their diverse responses.

The Other Jewish Question maps the dissemination of and interrelationships among these corporeal signifiers in Germanophone cultures between the Enlightenment and the Shoah. It portrays how Jewish-identified individuals moved beyond introjection and disavowal to appropriate and transform this epidemic of signification to make sense of their worlds and our modernity.

Jay Geller is associate professor of modern Jewish culture in the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University. He also is the author of On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions.

Dr. Halley Faust MA ’05 is co-editor (with Paul Menzel) of Prevention vs. Treatment: What’s the Right Balance? (Oxford University Press). In the West, prevention is usually underfunded while treatment receives greater priority. This book explores this observation by examining the actual spending on prevention, the history of health policies and structural features that affect prevention’s apparent relative lack of emphasis, the values that may justify priority for treatment or for prevention, and the religious and cultural traditions that have shaped the moral relationship between these two types of care.

The publication helps clarify the nature of the empirical and moral debates about the proper balance of prevention and treatment by offering essays from a wide range of perspectives, many of them not often heard from in health policy. The book compares prevention and treatment by looking comprehensively—philosophically, legally, religiously, and scientifically—at their underlying values.

Contrary to common beliefs that prevention is lamentably underemphasized, there may be grounds in contemporary western values for prioritizing treatment over prevention, though rationally that appears to make little sense. Several essays in this volume examine such alleged reasons for according moral priority to treatment. Other essays consider major religious traditions for their views on the relative importance of treatment and prevention, as is the interesting intersection of western acute medicine and Confucian values in Hong Kong.

Essays are organized in three sections: Part One—Evidence, Policy, and History; Part Two—Philosophical and Legal Analysis; and Part Three—Religious and Cultural Perspectives.

Faust, MD, MPH, MA, is a preventive medicine physician, philosopher, health care executive, and venture capitalist, and the president-elect of the American College of Preventive Medicine. He is clinical associate professor of family and community medicine at the University of New Mexico.

In Share, Retweet, Repeat (Prentiss Hall Press), John Hlinko ‘89 shows readers how to take their ideas, causes, and products, and craft marketing campaigns around them that create buzz—in a quick and cost effective way. In the world of constant communication using new technologies, the average consumers of information have become micro publishers of information as well.

Hlinko has been involved in the realm of viral marketing for most of the last 20 years, working with a range of Fortune 500 companies and helping lead MoveOn.org and DraftObama.org. In his book, he shares his expertise on how to create spreadable messages to optimize return on investment with any budget, large or small.

Hlinko suggests focusing on three key components that he calls the Viral Trifecta:

1) Crafting content that is “spread worthy”
2) Identifying and engaging the people most likely to spread it
3) Taking advantage of the technologies that will help you spread the content

In the introduction to his book, Hlinko writes:

“We’re in a time when consumers are more cynical than ever about the information they receive—especially from companies. According to a survey by Yankelovich, a research firm with a particular expertise in consumer attitudes, 76 percent of consumers don’t believe companies tell the truth in advertisements. Their friends, on the other hand, they do still trust … If you want your message to penetrate beyond the 24 percent who are still blissfully receptive in advertising, a peer-to-peer spreading component is critical.”

For more information about Hlinko’s book, go to http://shareretweetrepeat.wordpress.com/.

In his book The Buddha Walks Into a Bar …: A Guide to Life for a New Generation (Shambhala), Lodro Rinzler ’05 shows how Buddhist teachings can have a positive impact on every little nook and cranny of your life—whether you’re interested in being a Buddhist or not. These teachings can help inspire individuals to make a difference in themselves and in the world. The book explores the four dignities of Shambhala (the tiger, lion, garuda, and dragon) and the three yanas, or vehicles, of traditional Tibetan Buddhism.

Rinzler writes in his book’s introduction that the volume is “about taking these traditional teachings that have been tried and tested over thousands of years and saying, ‘I am going to try to live my day with a little more compassion,’ or, ‘I’m going to slow down a bit and enjoy my life.’ You don’t have to change you. You are great. This book is just about how to live your life to the fullest.”

In a recent profile of Rinzler at The Daily Beast, Allison Yarrow writes:
“The tactic that’s earned him an audience outside the practicing Shambhala Buddhist community is that he applies meditation techniques to modern temptations often perfected on college campuses—drinking in bars and one-night-stands. While the benefits of meditation have crept into the scientific mainstream in recent years, Rinzler believes ancient teachings continue to be misunderstood by outsiders who see them as “hippie stuff.” Hence the slick wardrobe of bow ties and fitted jeans. He’s rebranding the practice for a new millennium, starting with himself.”

Justin Whitaker’s review of the book at American Buddhist Perspective says: “Rinzler does a good job of weaving ancient wisdom with the kinds of situations many young people will find themselves in today: from relationship break-ups to experimenting with alcohol. His use of pop culture: cartoons, comic books, rap music and the Rocky movie, help ground Buddhist practice in the real life experiences of his intended audience.”

In a recent essay “Becoming Who You Want to Be (When You Grow Up)” at the Huffington Post, Rinzler writes:

“… I call upon members of my generation to look not just for a profession which might make you happy but also contemplate who you want to be as you get older. What are the core values you care about, as opposed to a profession you think might be suitable?

“If my generation, Generation O, took on this simple question we would not squander years trying to find the ‘perfect job’ or the ‘perfect position’ within a company. We would discern what is important to us and live all aspects of our life in line with that core intention. We wouldn’t all be astronauts or athletes but we would be who we want to be, and by doing that we would ultimately create that Change with a capital C.”

Rinzler is a meditation practitioner and teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage. Over the last decade he has taught numerous workshops at meditation centers and college campuses across the United States.

In The Dance Claimed Me (Yale University Press), Peggy MALS ’77 and Murray Schwartz provide an intimate perspective on the life of Pearl Primus (1919–1994) who made her mark on the dance scene in 1943 with impressive works incorporating social and racial protest into their dance aesthetic. Friends and colleagues of the dancer, the authors explore her influences on American culture, dance, and education. 

The Schwartzes trace Primus’s journey from her childhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad, through her rise as an influential international dancer, an early member of the New Dance Group (whose motto was “Dance is a weapon”), and a pioneer in dance anthropology. They interviewed more than 100 of the artist’s family members, friends, and fellow artists, and others.

Primus traveled extensively in the United States, Europe, Israel, the Caribbean, and Africa, and she played a significant role in presenting authentic African dance to American audiences. She was celebrated by dance critics and contemporaries such as Langston Hughes. But she found controversy in both her private and professional lives, marrying a white Jewish man during a time of segregation and challenging black intellectuals who opposed the “primitive” in her choreography. Her political protests and mixed-race tours in the South triggered an FBI investigation.

Peggy Schwartz is professor of dance and former director of the Dance Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Murray Schwartz is former dean of humanities and fine arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He teaches literature at Emerson College.

For an interview with the authors, click here.

Black teenage girls are often negatively represented in national and global popular studies, either as being “at risk” for teenage pregnancy, obesity, or sexually transmitted diseases, or as helpless victims of inner city poverty and violence. These pervasive popular representations often portray Black adolescents’ consumer and leisure culture as corrupt, uncivilized, and pathological.

In her insightful new study She’s Mad Real (New York University Press), Oneka LaBennett ’94 draws on more than a decade of researching teenage West Indian girls in the Flatbush and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn to argue that Black youth are, in fact, strategic consumers of popular culture—and through this consumption, they are far more active in defining race, ethnicity, and gender than academic and popular discourses tend to acknowledge.

The author also focuses on West Indian girls’ consumer and leisure culture within public spaces (such as a YMCA, a Barnes and Nobles bookstore, a McDonald’s, a movie theater, and a museum), in order to analyze how teens are marginalized and policed as they attempt to carve out places for themselves within New York’s neighborhoods.

LaBennett is assistant professor of African and African American studies and women’s studies at Fordham University, New York City. She is also research director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Along with Daniel HoSang and Laura Pulido, she is co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (forthcoming, University of California Press).

In her illuminating new book, Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (Grove Press), Brook Wilensky-Lanford ’99 traces the stories of various men who have sought over time to find the “real” Garden of Eden all over the globe, often in the most unlikely places, despite scientific advances and the advance of Darwin’s theory of evolution. This obsessive quest consumed Mesopotamian archaeologists, German Baptist ministers, British irrigation engineers, and the first president of Boston University, among many others. These relentless Eden seekers all started with the same brief Bible verses, but ended up at different spots on the planet, including Florida, the North Pole, Ohio, China, and Iraq.

 

On the web site Religion Dispatches, the author answers questions about her book and her approach to writing about each of the seeker’s quest to discover Eden on earth.

Wilensky-Lanford says: “I want you to be able to follow each seeker’s logic for as long as possible, before that veneer of philosophy breaks down into straight-up belief. … For me, each theory became a miniature creative work, convincing in the sort of literary way where you’re rooting for the narrator of a great novel. I do have a soft spot for the ‘why not?’ school of Eden rhetoric, in which a location is deemed possible because it’s no more unlikely than the alternative. One of my favorite seekers, Tse Tsan Tai, tried to prove Eden was in Mongolia by virtue of the fact that Iraq was just too ugly.”

In her review of Wilensky-Lanford’s book in The New York Times, Andrea Wulf writes: “The stories she has collected in Paradise Lust are certainly weird, and at times strangely wonderful. … Wilensky-Lanford tackles her subject with an appealing mix of serious research and tongue-in-cheek humor. Neither too academic nor too whimsical, the storytelling … is often irresistible.”

In another review, Michael Kroner in the Cleveland Plain Dealer writes: “Paradise Lust is an entertaining history of a story we all know, whether we believe it or not. It is also a thoroughly researched and engaging examination of faith’s role in our lives. This is Wilensky-Lanford’s first book, and it bodes well for her of-this-world future.”

Wilensky-Lanford majored in religion at Wesleyan and received an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University. For more about the author, visit www.brookwilenskylanford.com.

Upcoming New York City event:
Thursday, Sept.15, 7 p.m.: Restless Legs Reading Series, 266 Broome St, New York, NY 10002