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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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Maria Rosa Menocal, Director of the Whitney Humanities Center Almost every morning dawns with more bad news from the Middle East: the latest suicide bombing, the inevitable counterstroke, the unholy calls by one side or another to rid the area—the Holy Land, by another name—of foes who can never again be trusted. It is a depressingly ancient tale that is being played out in many parts of the modern world, but though stories from such places as Sarajevo and, more recently, New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, would suggest that Muslims, Jews, and Christians simply can’t get along, the animosity has not always been a part of history. “Once upon a time in the mid-eighth century, an intrepid young man named Abd al-Rahman abandoned his home in Damascus, the Near Eastern heartland of Islam, and set out across the North African desert in search of a place of refuge.” So begins this remarkable look by historian Maria Rosa Menocal, professor of Spanish and Portuguese, at the empire the exile founded in what is now Spain—an empire that flourished for some seven centuries and was characterized by the rarest of commodities: religious tolerance. Indeed, when a tenth-century Saxon writer named Hroswitha described Cordoba, the city al-Rahman adopted as his home, she coined the term “the ornament of the world” to characterize a cultural symbiosis that would make the region then known as Andalusia a center of science, poetry, philosophy, and architecture in a world generally beset with intellectual darkness. Andalusia was, says Menocal, a “first-rate” place, “in the sense of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wonderful formula (laid out in his essay “The Crack Up”)—namely, that ‘the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.’ In its moments of great achievement, medieval culture positively thrived on holding at least two, and often many more, contrary ideas at the same time.” Menocal traces how the “cultivation of the complexities, charms, and challenges of contradictions—of the ‘yes and no’” developed and flourished into a “whole series of golden ages” whose echoes are still present today. The writer also grapples with how this climate of tolerance disappeared and what its demise means for our own efforts to recreate a kind of Andalusia.
Stephen
L. Carter '79JD, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law Erle Stanley Gardner, Scott Turow, and John Grisham are a few of the lawyers who have used the the legal profession as grist for page-turning thrillers, and with the publication of his first novel this month, Stephen L. Carter, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, joins that storied group of writers. Carter is certainly no stranger to the literary world, and in seven nonfiction books and numerous articles, the law professor has become one of the leading “public intellectuals.” But while his explorations of such issues as values, integrity, religious freedom, and constitutional law have made him a fixture on op-ed pages and high-brow talk shows, the recent appearance of The Emperor of Ocean Park has been one of the most talked-about events of the literary season. Bought by publisher Alfred A. Knopf for $4.2 million as part of a two-novel package, the book represents an almost unpredecented vote of confidence in a first-time novelist. And in many ways, Carter delivers. The big (657 pages), wide-ranging story tells of a family patriarch with a messy secret, and a son’s efforts to learn it. “My father died at his desk,” he writes. “And, at first, only my sister and a few stoned callers to late-night radio shows believed he had been murdered.” Judge Oliver Garland had gained notoriety when his nomination to the Supreme Court collapsed in scandal, and when he died suddenly several years later—apparently of a heart attack—the Judge left to his son Talcott, who teaches law at a prominent university in the fictional town of Elm Harbor, a puzzle in which chess and shadows would figure prominently. The author is adept at moving his characters around Washington, the law school, the elite black neighborhoods of Martha’s Vineyard, and other spots on a well-drawn chessboard, and Carter has mastered the staccato zingers that make this genre so compelling. “Did you know that Daddy owned a gun?” Talcott is asked by his sister, who was going through the Judge’s belongings and found something unexpected. “It was in a box with. well, with some bullets … It’s been fired, Tal. Recently.” But this novel is more than a mere pot-boiler. Carter also offers an engaging portrait of a family and the way the Judge’s secret has played out in their lives. The result is a literary hybrid, a book that has echoes of both John Grisham and Leo Tolstoy—and is a memorable debut.
Stuart
Banner '85 In 1821 in Salem, Massachusetts, Stephen Clark stood on the gallows, lowered his head for the hangman’s noose, and without a word, stoically accepted his fate. Executed for arson, Clark was all of 16 years old. But while there had been hangings before—the colonists adopted the laws of a country with a long list of capital offenses—Clark’s case would spark a debate on the morality of execution. “Because of his death sentence, Clark dangled in public memory far longer than he had lived on earth,” says Stuart Banner, a professor of legal history at the Washington University School of Law. “He was not the first person converted into a debating point after having been punished with death, and he would certainly not be the last.” In a fascinating and macabre book, Banner describes how the death penalty has been applied throughout U.S. history and how its role has changed. “Capital punishment could command widespread support in the 17th and 18th centuries as a punishment for all serious crimes because it served three important purposes,” notes the author. These were deterrence, retribution, and penitence. To best accomplish these goals, executions were public events. But as new ways of looking at crime and punishment, as well as new technologies for meting out the ultimate penalty, began to hold sway, executions moved indoors into more and more private settings, such as the hospital room-like atmosphere in which lethal injection, today’s dominant method, takes place. The debate over the morality of capital punishment, however, remains highly public. Banner presents a thoroughly readable account of the legal history and the issues, particularly the question of the possibility of executing innocent people, that have led us to the present state of affairs.
Richard
Lingeman '59LAW The ambitious, protean quality of Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)—author of iconic American works like Babbitt, Main Street, Elmer Gantry, and Arrowsmith—eludes the grasp of standard biography. It would take a novelist, one like Lewis himself, to encompass the man’s satiric vision, his political and artistic passions, and the improbable arc of a career that included the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930 and a series of hellish alcoholic binges. Still, the facts themselves make a fascinating story, both of a celebrity author and of America in the first half of the 20th century. Lingeman (author of a Theodore Dreiser biography as well) shows how much Lewis belonged to his place and time, with his zest for aviation and automobiles and interest in social issues like female suffrage and racial integration. His sociopolitical satire won him praise abroad, along with resentment at home. To his publishers' delight, each new novel, during his peak years, generated not just favorable reviews but newspaper headlines and massive sales. Pockmarked and insecure, Lewis felt like a misfit at Yale (Class of 1907), and later in bohemian Greenwich Village and in artist colonies on both coasts. He alternated sprees and binges with periods of hard work, including year-long research missions to prepare each of the major novels. He changed residences constantly, ignored his sons, divorced twice, and alienated a vast circle of friends, including H.L. Mencken. Even when inspiration failed him, the act of writing remained a physical need. Following decades of critical disfavor, this appreciative biography recognizes Lewis’s impact on American realist fiction and social criticism. “We’ve all known a Babbitt, an Elmer Gantry, a Gopher Prairie,” Lingeman writes. “His portrayals, out of another age, live on, larger than life.”
Stephen Sandy ’55 Stephen Sandy’s latest book, a long poem called Surface Impressions, has designs on making sense of a world where transitory moments, such as losing one’s hat to the wind, must be negotiated with “eternity that great white.” The latter, Sandy writes, is “a little… much.” So, he decides to stay focused on the here and now: “I’m taking / them as they come, these thoughts like skipping stones / that trip along the water till they fizzle, / sinking.” The stream of musings, ranging from punchy to poignant, touches upon family and strangers, companionship and isolation, civilization and nature. The whole of this conflicted, harmonious, battered, and life-giving world is welcomed heartily into the lives explored in this poetry. Of a son who is embarking on his first road trip and about to face the wideness of the world for the first time, Sandy says, “Home is where you leave from / and soon he’ll be on his way to all the space / he is a part of.” While oblivion may be inevitable, it can be delayed by a full acceptance of living. As with skipping a stone, the joy is in just how far you can take it before it sinks—and Sandy is a champion skipper.
Brief Reviews Roberta Baker '79 Alvin Kernan '54PhD Steve Olson '78 Ann Packer '81 Bryan Mark Rigg '96 Alexander Stille '78
More Books by Yale Authors Louis Daniel Brodsky 1963 Colette Brooks 1978MFA Alan Dundes 1955, 1958MA David Whitcomb Gow 1945 Elizabeth Grossman 1978 Philip Hamburger 1982JD Benjamin Harshav, J. and H. Blaustein Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, Editor, and Barbara Harshav, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, Translator Richard E. Henrich Jr. 1969, Translator Daniel Karasik 1945 Stephen R. Kellert 1971PhD, Tweedy Ordway Professor of Social Ecology, and Peter H. Kahn Jr., Editors Robert C. King 1948BS, 1952PhD, and William D. Stansfield Edward Lee 1996BS, 1996MS, William Berkowitz, Babak Razani, Steven Wang, and Jennifer Wu John P. McCormick, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Editor Wayne A. Meeks 1965PhD, Woolsey Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, and Allen R. Hilton 1997PhD, Assistant Professor of New Testament, and H. Gregory Snyder, Editors Geoffrey Moss 1962BFA, 1964MFA, Photographer, and Stuart Miller Edgar M. Nash 1948BS Robert Reich 1991 Lawrence Schimel 1993, Editor Susan M. Schultz 1980 Charles Scott 1961BD, 1965PhD Shawn C. Smallman 1995PhD Roger P. Smith 1952 Carol M. Swain 2000MSL John V. Tolan 1981 John Alexander Williams 1966PhD |
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