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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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David McCullough '55 The biographer of John Adams, the second president of the United States, has an easy task in some ways. The staunch New Englander was not just present at the creation of the Republic—as an original member of the Continental Congress, as adviser on nation-building, and as a well-traveled broker of loans, alliances, and finally independence—but Adams also left a paper trail of superhighway proportions: decades' worth of diary entries and voluble letters that reveal the man. If the biographer is David McCullough, author of Truman and veteran PBS commentator, the reader can be assured that the personal element is never peripheral and the history is always lived and felt. But any biography of Adams also faces some hurdles. Hardly the most colorful of the Founders, the man was more scholar than politician, often solitary, deliberate and exacting, and not above pomposity. If JFK tried to be the Jefferson of his age, Adams is the kind of figure a Nixon might identify with. It was Adams who first discovered the frustration of the vice presidency, which he called “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived. [all parties] know that I can do them neither much good nor much harm.” He wasted his first months in office debating the proper title for the U.S. chief executive (Adams’s quixotic preference: “his majesty the president of the United States”) and was largely ignored by George Washington. At a time of divisiveness between Federalists and Republicans, Adams was the “dark horse” chosen to succeed Washington. Even his detractors acknowledged Adams’s integrity and dedication, qualities that emerge forcefully here. We are spared none of the weaknesses—neither his awkwardness while serving as the first ambassador to Great Britain, nor the failure to secure his political base, which led to his loss of the presidency to Jefferson in 1800. Yet McCullough’s sympathy resides clearly with his protagonist, while Madison, Hamilton, and especially Jefferson (an inveterate shopper, always in debt) prove petty and diabolical by turns. This study gives a fascinating account of the early political and diplomatic history of the Republic, before presidents were elected by universal suffrage and when the vice presidency went to the runner-up, regardless of party. With a novelist’s flair, McCullough brings both period and places to life. The Adams-Jefferson relationship provides a strong dramatic arc, from early friendship to cold coexistence, and then from political enmity to a final reconciliation, due mostly to Adams’s magnanimity. The backbone of the story is an account of the Adams marriage, a union based on deep bonds of affection and respect between John and Abigail that was strengthened by their long periods of separation. This is a biography of a figure too statesmanlike to have survived long in Washington. “No man who ever held the office of President,” Adams stated in a moment of hard-earned insight, “would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.”
Jennifer
G. Ackerman '80 Rachel Carson, the late naturalist and writer, once wished that each child in the world could be granted “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.” In her first book, Notes from the Shore (Yale Alumni Magazine, May 1995), Ackerman showed that she was the recipient of Carson’s gift, and in this work, she demonstrates that her “sense of wonder” is alive and well. Chance in the House of Fate is an elegant examination of how recent discoveries in the science of heredity have shown that all life, despite the obvious external differences, is fundamentally similar at the level of genes and proteins. The author is a genial and patient guide on this tour of the inner workings of bacteria and nematode worms, fruit flies and humans, and Ackerman’s excitement over the “little wows” is never far from the surface. “And listen to this,” she tells readers, “rats engaged in the act of mothering sprout abundant new brain cells and do better than virgin females in tests of learning and memory.” The book is full of surprises and insights, and like such masters as Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, Ackerman connects science and the humanities. For example, in discussing the limits of genetic inventiveness, she writes that “we are sheathed in the shapes of the past . preventing the possibility of moving in certain directions and closing behind us the gate of conceivable gifts. ‘Nature is what you may do,’ wrote Emerson. ‘There is much you may not.’” Understanding how these “conceivable gifts” could be both inherited and denied took on special urgency for Ackerman, who weaves a family tragedy—her sister had serious birth defects—into her narrative. “When I was pregnant with my first child, I was shocked by the idea that it required no thought at all for me to sculpt a whole other person,” says Ackerman. “But at night, I worried about what I held.” Probably every mother has had the same fear, but, as Ackerman would learn, “The miracle is this: From the looping cascades of communication and control emerge the particular parts of a body in perfect form, nearly every time.”
Jay Winik ’80, ’93PhD History is filled with “what if's,” and nowhere is this more apparent than in April 1865, the tumultuous month marked by the the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the transition to power of Andrew Johnson. In an engaging study, historian Jay Winik explores what he calls “one of America’s finest hours,” the pivotal period during which the Civil War came to an end and the rebuilding of the United States began. It was a month that saved the nation, the historian argues, but the events of April 1865 could have just as easily unraveled the country."What if [Lee] had decided that honor lay not in surrendering but in fighting on and on for the mother South—with organized guerrilla warfare? Or if Grant and Sherman had neglected Lincoln’s admonitions and responded not with generosity of spirit, but with unbridled anger? Or if after the assassination of Lincoln, all went to pieces?” asks Winik. The historian brings to life events such as Lee’s poignant request that his men be allowed to take their horses and Grant’s wise acquiesence, and the harrowing night at Ford’s Theatre on April 14 and its aftermath. “Nowhere did the Constitution promise perpetuity for the United States as a country,” writes Winik, but in showing what happened and why alternative paths weren’t followed, he demonstrates its enduring strengths.
Elisabeth Gitter ’72PhD Half a century before Helen Keller’s struggle to overcome both deafness and blindness captured national attention, a young girl named Laura Bridgman conquered similar handicaps and won considerable acclaim. “Rescued” from a New Hampshire farm and schooled at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston by educational reformer and abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe, Bridgman’s accomplishments were so enthralling that thousands of people came to see her on “exhibition days,” and Charles Dickens told her story in American Tales. But despite Bridgman’s fame in the middle of the 19th century, her story was all but lost. Reading Dickens, Elizabeth Gitter, a specialist in Victorian studies, rediscovered the tale and located, in the Perkins basement, “bundles and boxes of uncataloged, unpublished manuscripts.” From this trove, the historian assembled a compelling picture of a feisty, though difficult, spirit; her dedicated and conflicted teacher Howe; and an era during which attitudes towards the care and status of the handicapped began to change. “Laura’s story still matters,” says Gitter. “She was the first: the pioneering experiment and the living proof that a deaf-blind child could learn verbal language.”
Connie Voisine ’86 Drawing on her upbringing in northern Maine, Connie Voisine has crafted rich poems in her first book, the winner of the 1999 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry. With simple yet ethereal imagery, Voisine explores life in a town where a mother of a dead child works “at a factory sewing zippers or punching snaps on thousands of tiny pajamas (this is what women do here) and at our house the yard blooms with refrigerators and cars insides out and rusting.” There are references to the countryside as well. The slow-paced panorama in “Booming the Lake” records the various effects of an explosion on farm animals, and ends with the stunning image of people who “watch for the white moon of a child’s back to rise in the water, cut loose by sound.” For the inhabitants of the community, perched in isolation at the top of the world, Voisine writes, “There is what we desired, but mostly what we got instead.” In this grim world, escapism thrives. In the Italo Calvino-inspired, “Invisible City / Float,” a village is remembered magically as an island that floats in outer space, tethered to the ground. In this city, “The only sound is one of crying./ .the way a ship cries, against its ropes.” Likewise, Voisine’s poems, focused as they are on the unvaulted sky, ache for ascension.
Brief Reviews Peter Brooks, Chester Tripp Professor of the Humanities “The imperative to 'fess up is deeply engrained in our culture,” writes Brooks, who examines fiction, film, and legal cases to explore the act of admitting guilt.
Thad
Carhart '72 A trip to an improbable café in the back of a piano repair shop in Paris leads the expatriate author to rediscover a passion for music and music-making that had been dormant since his childhood.
Allen
Forte, Battell Professor of the Theory of Music From the 1920s through the 1940s, songsmiths like Cole Porter '13 and George Gershwin created a repertoire that has long captivated listeners. The author discusses 23 classics, interpreted by Richard Lalli and Gary Chapman on an accompanying CD.
Jonathan Spence '65PhD, Sterling Professor
of History An 18th-century Chinese emperor does the unexpected when he learns of a letter that contains a plot against him. Historian Spence shows that instead of ordering an execution, the emperor begins a correspondence.
Harold
H. Tittmann III '51, ‘54LLB In 1986, allegations surfaced that Kurt Waldheim, then a candidate for president of Austria, was a Nazi war criminal. The author, a corporate lawyer, makes a case that Waldheim was innocent.
More Books by Yale Authors Kent Bloomer 1959BFA, 1961MFA Professor of Architecture (Adjunct) Jane Dailey 1987 Michael W.R. Davis 1953 Trudy G. Ettelson 1974PhD Alexander Garvin 1962, 1967MArch, Professor of Architecture (Adjunct) Pamela Grundy 1984 Thomas R. Holtz Jr. 1992PhD and Michael Brett-Surman R.M. Koster 1955 Bruce H. Mann 1977PhD and Christopher L. Tomlins, Editors Armine Kotin Mortimer 1974PhD Sally M. Promey 1978MDiv and David Morgan, Editors Alexandra Robbins 1998 and Abby Wilner Adam Rome 1980 Steven T. Rosenthal 1968, 1975PhD Mark B. Ryan 1974PhD David Shanefield 1952 Hampton Sides 1984, Editor T. N. Srinivasan, Samuel C. Park Jr. Professor of Economics, and N.S.S. Narayana, Editor Gay Walker, Curator (retired), Arts of the Book Collection Meredith Baldwin Weddle 1993PhD
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