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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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A Personal Crusade “You finally made it,” says Samantha Power '92, opening the door to her shorefront condominium in Winthrop, Massachusetts. With her long red hair loosely pulled back in a low ponytail, and wearing gym shorts and a striped T-shirt, Power looks more like a grad student packing up for summer vacation than a celebrated scholar and the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Power, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who spent more than five years working on "A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, has little interest in appearances. She’s finally getting around to submitting a bill for travel expenses, so piles of receipts are spread out on the living room floor. Her Robert F. Kennedy Book Award bust stands by the wall, as though waiting to be used as a doorstop. “I really need to find a place to put that,” she says. One item she has made sure to find a place for is a Bosnian shell casing she uses as a flower vase; it stands in the middle of her dining table. An ornate design was engraved in the cylinder by an entrepreneurial shopkeeper who collected the detritus of war and turned it into art. If Power has scant patience for domesticity, her commitment to human rights is boundless. When her original publisher backed out of her book project, she recalls, “you can’t imagine how shell-shocked I was. I really believed in it, so I was just stunned.” Eventually Basic/New Republic Books agreed to publish the manuscript, but it was a hard sell. “A lot of people applaud the effort but don’t want to open a book about genocide,” Power says. “I always say it’s not a book about genocide; that’s just a useful lens to look at a century of American history and the gap between our values and interests.” She also sees the book as a way to get readers to think about their own conduct. “If you know there’s domestic violence going on next door, do you get involved or not?” When Power started college, she was a baseball fan who dreamed of becoming a sportscaster. But while she was working in the sports department of an Atlanta TV station, she had an epiphany that helped reshape her plans. “I was editing the nightly sports roundup,” she remembers. “Suddenly on the TV monitor came raw footage of the student uprising in Tiananmen Square, and I thought to myself, ‘What am I doing with my life?’” Power’s growing concern with matters beyond the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry led her to move in 1993 to the former Yugoslavia, where she worked as a freelance war correspondent for two years, filing stories for the Boston Globe and U.S. News and World Report about the “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims and Croats by Serb nationalists. “I literally couldn’t believe what was going on,” says Power, whose speech still carries the slightest trace of her native Ireland. Equally shocking to her was the United States' reluctance to do anything about it. So she decided to write a book. But despite her feelings about the carnage, Power knew it would not be an angry one. “When you’re writing something that carries with it such high moral stakes, it’s ineffective to tell people something’s wrong,” she says. “It’s better to muzzle my voice and let readers debate it in their own heads.” As Power threw herself into probing man’s inhumanity to man—while simultaneously attending Harvard Law School—the one indulgence she allowed herself was baseball. “There’s a rhythm to it. I’d build my day around the Red Sox game,” she says. “In between pitches I’d work on my transitions.” Now that the book is done and the accolades are pouring in, Power knows she should probably take some time off and unwind. But with everything that’s going on in the world, especially the AIDS pandemic in Africa, that’s unlikely. “I thought about writing about baseball,” she says, “but how can I? I feel so lucky that people actually want my thoughts now. I have this window of opportunity and I need to take advantage of it.”
Anne Applebaum '86 Not long after Lenin engineered the Soviet revolution of 1917, his fledgling government began to create special prisons for “unreliable elements.” In time, the Gulag, as it was known, would become a “vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, . from the Arctic Circle . to the Leningrad suburbs,” writes Anne Applebaum. In a riveting account of the infamous prison system, the author builds on the foundation laid down by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn 30 years ago. Applebaum, a Washington Post columnist and a former correspondent with extensive experience in Eastern Europe, draws on recently opened archives, a flood of new memoirs, interviews with Gulag survivors, and trips to many of the sites in what Solzhenitsyn called the “archipelago.” The result is a thorough—the book is nearly 600 pages long, with 60 pages of notes and bibliography—history of a repressive system that “prisoners once called the 'meat-grinder': the arrests, the interrogations, the transports in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.” But this is more than a record of the Gulag’s origins, growth, day-to-day workings, and demise (in 1987 at the behest of Mikhail Gorbachev, the grandson of Gulag prisoners). With a novelist’s concern for character and setting, Applebaum brings to life the grim system and its effect on the estimated 18 million men, women, and children who went through the camps between 1929 and 1953, their heyday during Stalin’s rule. Applebaum relates how, after watching fellow inmates die from overwork, prisoners might sever one of their own hands or feet as a means of survival. Others refined the technique of tufta (pretending to work) or improved their fate, and their daily rations, by serving as informants. But a few also managed to preserve a measure of human dignity and altruism despite suffering exhaustion, hunger, illness, brutality, and constant death threats. Nearly as horrifying as prison life was the madly arbitrary basis for many arrests. People landed here for telling a political joke or rebuffing an official’s amorous advances. There were even four prominent soccer players who had made the mistake of defeating the favorite team of secret police boss Lavrenty Beria. Applebaum cites a 1937 report setting out arrest quotas for each republic—12,000 prisoners required from Beloruss, 750 from Kirgiz, and so on. The author explores the strategic, political, and economic aspects of the Gulag, and demonstrates how it emerged as a cornerstone of the Soviet system and its economy. She also shows how those involved in the archipelago, from administrators through prisoners, developed an idiosyncratic culture with its own values, conventions, and language. “This book was not written ‘so that it will not happen again,’” says Applebaum. “This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people … We need to know why—and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation.”
Drew D. Hansen ’00JD August 28, 1963, was a sweltering day in Washington, D.C., but despite the weather, a crowd of about 250,000 people jammed the Mall to protest racial inequality. After many singers and speakers had finished, there was one man left on the program: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King’s “I have a dream” speech, writes Drew Hansen, has become “the definitive statement of the meaning of the civil rights revolution,” and as Hansen shows, its genius was the result of inspired improvisation. King, a minister and fixture in the civil rights movement, opened his carefully written address with a nod to Lincoln and a note that “one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free.” He went on to remind his Washington audience that “America has given the Negro people a bad check.” There was “fierce urgency” in ensuring that “the bank of justice” was not bankrupt. But as King’s talk swelled to an eloquent conclusion, something unscripted happened. “Behind him, Mahalia Jackson shouted, ‘Tell them about the dream, Martin!’” And after she repeated the request once more, King “left his prepared text and began to preach,” writes Hansen. “[E]ven though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream,” said King, beginning a seven-minutes-long extemporaneous masterpiece whose words struck a deep chord that continues to resonate. The end of the speech was crafted on the fly from set pieces—King had been using the “dream” set piece since 1962—in the preacher’s vast repertoire. In a book similar to historian Garry Wills’s deconstruction, in Lincoln at Gettysburg, of the Emancipation Proclamation, Hansen examines the origin, development, and impact of King’s speech. The author does a fine job of placing King in historical context, and Hansen’s exploration of the literary and religious traditions that King called on—from anaphora (repeating a word or phrase) to the cadences of the King James Bible, and from parallelism to prophecy—is fascinating. Of particular value is Hansen’s account of the aftermath of the speech and the not-always-successful campaigns King led until his assassination in 1968. The author also follows the speech to the present, where it has been the foundation for an “astonishing transformation of America” and, ironically enough, it has also been invoked as a justification for opposing affirmative action. Of course, the dream remains unfulfilled. “King’s legacy is the gift of prophecy,” writes Hansen, “a vision of what a redeemed America might look like, and a hope that this redemption will one day come to pass.”
Brief Reviews Jessica Helfand '82, '89MFA Before the invention of the computer, people created paper wheels that could be used for everything from finding the position of stars to calculating fertility. Graphic designer and volvelle collector Helfand offers a beautiful look at these often remarkable devices.
Lloyd Kaufman '69 The creator of The Toxic Avenger, Tromeo and Juliet, and more than two dozen other films provides an irreverent guide to making the kinds of independent films that Hollywood doesn’t.
Mary Jane Minkin '75MD, Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Carol V. Wright Authoritative and easy-to-understand answers to a wide range of gynecological questions.
Tricia Rose '84 While there is an abundance of narrative material about sex, little of it relates to black women. Sociologist Rose explains why such a paucity exists and presents a wealth of storytellers who relate their most intimate lives.
Henry Ruth '52 and Kevin R. Reitz A meticulous survey of the last 30 years of American criminal justice offers a stinging indictment of the present system and a series of rational reforms.
Calvin Trillin '57 Desperately seeking such foods as magic bagels, pan bagnats, ceviche, and boudin, Trillin recounts his adventures roaming the world in search of the perfect nosh.
More Books by Yale Authors Antoinette Burton 1983, Editor Brent Hayes Edwards 1990 Leslie Epstein 1960, 1967DFA Stephen Gorman 1988MES Jake Halpern 1997 Ken Howard 1969Dra William Maynard Hutchins 1964 Teresa Jordan 1977 Jake Kosek 1995MES, Donald S. Moore, and Anand Pandian, Editors Richard Krevolin 1986 Patrick B. Miller 1972 Paula A. Monopoli 1980 Bruce Moody 1954 Laura Morelli 1998PhD Jim Rogers 1964 Molly Anne Rothenberg 1974, Dennis A. Foster, and Slavoj Zizek, Editors Sam Rubin 1995 Peter H. Schuck, Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law Thomas A. Schweich 1982 Roger L. Simon 1970MFA Jeremi Suri 2001PhD Christopher Torchia 1989 and Sang-Hun Choe John Philip Trinkaus, Professor Emeritus of Biology Jennifer Vanderbes 1996
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