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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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Michael Johnston ’97 Right after graduating from Yale in 1997, Colorado resident Michael Johnston traveled to Mississippi to work for two years in Teach for America, a program that helps meet the staffing needs of some of the most underserved public schools in the United States. After a hasty few weeks of training, Johnston began his career at Greenville High, a once-thriving school in the Mississippi Delta, an area known, according to the prevailing folk wisdom, as the “deep heart’s core” of the Deep South. The English teacher arrived with a few lesson plans and a youthful idealism that “education was the one valuable skill I could bring to Mississippi that she could use. It was the well-intentioned gift I offered for the privilege of room and board and revelation.” In this powerful memoir of his time at Greenville, a school whose students “had been through more memorials than grade promotions, more funerals than honor roll assemblies,” Johnston receives revelations aplenty. These began with his first morning in the classroom, when “it was farewell to my romantic notion of what teaching might be,” and he encountered a “series of characters and experiences [that] threatened to break my faith in humanity every day.” And they would continue as the teacher had to deal with all the well-known problems that stalk inner-city schools. But Johnston persevered, and, in part by teaching his charges to play chess, he helped turn around some lives. The effect of chess players rather than drug dealers becoming the hotshots on campus is reminiscent of calculus teacher Jaime Escalante’s triumph in the movie Stand and Deliver. “I discovered that feeling of redeeming exhaustion that comes when you work so hard for something you believe in,” he writes. Johnston also discovered the truth of a phrase written by Yeats: “in the deep heart’s core” lies hope.
J. D.
McClatchy ’74PhD In Hazmat, the latest book of poetry by J.D. McClatchy, the hazardous material in question is not (as a reader may most readily assume) a highly dangerous external substance that people must avoid at all costs in order to lead healthy lives. The “hazmat,” for McClatchy, is much closer to the heart. In the poet’s view, hazmat is the human body itself, as it becomes its own—or another body’s—worst enemy. In “Largesse,” he writes about a youth who is already cultivating the body that harms itself: “You don’t know where it’s been, my mother said, / And slapped the sidewalk nickel out / Of my mouth.” Of partaking the harmful, McClatchy writes, “From brimming nipple to crematory flame, / We give ourselves to what will take / The breath away.” Other human hazards explored in the poems include a suicide bomber who desires death for himself and others (“And who would want to return to life / Except to be killed again?”), and a cancer patient (“The birthday she had over and over prayed / To die before was offered like a present”). In the latter, the body’s death is a double-edged sword. Death is guaranteed to be victorious, but that is not enough of a win. After the patient has suffered enough and an end to life is invoked, death further shows its power by cruelly withholding the final blow. What appears to be the saving grace in these, our dangerous bodies, is their ability to be kind and to connect with one another. A positive connection comes—but too late—in “Visiting the Dead,” where a son imagines his dead, estranged father to life: “Could I tell him I loved him. / I reached to embrace him and closed my arms on air.” A more successful attempt at reciprocated feelings appears in “Two Men.” Even though a somewhat distant love exists between the title characters, the poem ends with the speaker hoping for “a future that will have come out right, / each of us, both of us, brought at last to light.” The first step towards salvation, here, is at least believing, while still alive, that illuminating love is possible.
John Leggett ’42 “I remember,” John Leggett writes, “when Saroyan was the rage, when plays spilled from his beloved Underwood like bucketfuls from a swollen springtime stream. In the year 1939 three of them were on Broadway, one a Pulitzer and Drama Critics prizewinner [The Time of Your Life] for best play of the year.” There were also popular novels such as The Human Comedy, as well as screenplays, short stories that he could dash off in a couple of hours, and memoirs. While unable to explain Saroyan’s eclipse since his death in 1981, the biographer offers a convincing portrait of the author as a daring young man with a chip on his shoulder. Based largely on the writer’s exhaustive journals, the biography charts by the day, and sometimes by the hour, the quick rise and long, depressing fall of the boy wonder. The tale brings encounters with celebrities from Charlie and Oona Chaplin to Ernest Hemingway and Marlon Brando. Saroyan’s writing philosophy, Leggett says, was “to forget rules, to be yourself and write what you pleased, to spurn adjectives . to learn typing for speed, and, above all, to live life to its emotional peaks.” Through this merciless tide of negative book reviews, gambling losses, and fights with wife, family, the U.S. Army, and nearly everyone else, the reader can never stop hoping that the next book—or the next card or roll of the dice—would bring the tireless brawler the wealth and respect his ego demanded.
Joan
Sullivan ’95 As someone who has braved the “smoky back rooms” of a political campaign, I know that the experience can disillusion even the most idealistic person. Following the recent death of her father, Joan Sullivan was looking for a political education and joined the advance team on Senator Bill Bradley’s 2000 campaign for president. But she feared losing her ideals. That fear, it turned out, was not unfounded. An American Voter, Sullivan’s account of life on the campaign trail, reveals the less glamorous side of a presidential campaign—she encounters long hours, huge egos, a seeming disarray in the campaign’s organization, and the frustration of feeling that her talents are being wasted. Yet she remains on the team. The reason, it seems, is found in Sullivan’s own idealism. She has known Bradley, a longtime family friend, since she was 16, but becomes enamored with his honesty, his sincerity, and his ideals. She is “nervous with admiration” for Bradley, she writes, and falls into the trap that so many young political idealists do: She comes to truly believe in him, in his candidacy, and in his chances to win the White House. That sets her up for a severe blow when Bradley ultimately fails to get the Democratic nomination. But it also helps her come to terms with the loss of her father. “I grew up believing, because of my father, that dreams and ideals were something practical, something that could be maintained,”says Sullivan. And so Bradley becomes a father figure to her, a man “who also believes in dreams and ideals.” Despite the bumps along the way, Sullivan holds on to her idealism. But what she doesn’t count on is falling in love with politics. Sullivan starts out despising “this awful, crass business” and ends up romanticizing the entire political process, even the aspects that infuriate her. “Maybe I have become a political realist, or maybe I am too in love to see straight,” she writes. But Sullivan finds, as she reflects on her experiences, that she actually did learn something about the political system: that for all of its flaws, its success eventually comes down to the actions of the American voter.
Brief Reviews Katherine Lawrence ’90 and Jeff DeGraff A “one-size-fits-all” approach to fostering creativity in the workplace often yields disappointing results. The authors show how businesses can discover and tailor creative practices to their specific needs and stimulate innovation.
Harold Morowitz ’47BS, ’51PhD Biologist Morowitz takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the universe, making stops in places where complexity emerged, from the birth of stars to the birth of cities.
G.B . Trudeau ’70, ’73MFA The crew from Doonesbury, now in its 32nd year, appears in this post-9-11 compilation of comic and poignant adventures in places such as Walden College, corporate boardrooms, and Ground Zero.
Frank
M. Turner ’71PhD, the John Hay Whitney Professor of History Cardinal Newman, an Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism in 1845 and has been mentioned as a candidate for canonization, is portrayed as less than saintly in this magisterial biography.
Jessica Warner ’91PhD One of the first wars on drugs began in 1720 when gin emerged as the drink of choice among London’s working poor. Historian Warner provides a lively social history of the impact of “Mother Gin.”
Allen Weinstein ’67PhD and David Rubel This beautifully illustrated history provides a novel view of the development of the United States by examining 26 key historical episodes and profiling the leading characters.
More Books by Yale Authors Deb Abramson 1991 Jack M. Balkin 1994MAH David Boonin 1986 Marie Borroff 1956PhD, Sterling Professor Emerita of English Barnaby Conrad 1944 and Monte Schulz, Editors Alex Epstein 1985 Bruce Feiler 1987 Paul Foos 1997PhD Lorraine Gorrell 1966MM, 1967MA Richard Jensen 1966PhD and J. Douglas Smith Richard M. Ketchum 1943 Karl Kirchwey 1979 Katherine A. Lawrence 1990 and Jeff DeGraff Elise Lemire 1986 Ellen Peel 1982PhD Samantha Power 1992 Stephen G. Ray Jr. 1993MDiv Lori Rotskoff 1999PhD Lawrence Schimel 1993, Editor Bruce Shenitz 1976, 1994MSL and Andrew Holleran, Editors Harvey B. Simon 1963 Ray Sipherd 1957 John F. Stacks 1964 Stephen Joel Trachtenberg 1962JD Khristaan Villela 1990, Logan Wagner, and Ellen Bradbury Loren Wengerd 2001, Laura K. Hurwitz, and Amanda Lumry, Photographers Gary Jay Williams 1974PhD
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