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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. |
Peter Matthiessen '50 In 1937, pioneer conservationist Aldo Leopold '09MF noticed with alarm the rapidly dwindling populations of an elegant, long-legged bird known as the sandhill crane, and in an essay called “Marshland Elegy,” Leopold explained why saving cranes was an ecological and moral imperative. “When we hear his call we hear no mere bird,” he wrote. “He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.” Natural history writer, conservationist, and novelist Peter Matthi-essen takes up where Leopold left off, and Matthiessen’s latest (his 19th work of nonfiction, along with nine novels) is a progress report on the gauntlet thrown down 65 years ago. In The Birds of Heaven—the title comes from the crane’s ability to fly so high (up to three miles) that it disappears from view—the writer visits representatives of the world’s 15 crane species, discusses their ecology and conservation status, and profiles a legion of biologists bent on protecting the bird. Most prominent among them is George W. Archibald, the self-described “craniac” who in 1973 founded the International Crane Foundation in Wisconsin and has since pioneered captive breeding efforts to save the birds and to preserve their habitat. Matthiessen accompanies Archibald and others on research treks to such places as the Daurian Steppes of Mongolia, Hokkaido Island in Japan, the outback of northern Australia, the Transvaal in Africa, and the sandhills of Wisconsin (cranes are found on every continent save South America and Antarctica), and his accounts of these travels and the cranes’s prospects can be depressing or uplifting, but always memorable. “Soon the legions come straight in, many thousands at a time, filling the river dusk with yelps and beating wings,” Matthiessen writes of sandhill cranes returning to a wetland near the Platte River in Nebraska. “They drink from the silver glitter of the braid as evening deer step out from the night willow and move in peaceful silhouette among them.” Matthiessen’s eloquent writing, along with Robert Bateman’s exquisite paintings of cranes that illustrate the book, makes this a deeply satisfying read—and a conservationist’s call to arms. “If man wants the last wild land and life to illuminate his world, he will have to pay dearly to undo his damage, and he must,” says Matthiessen.
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers '64MCP On campus this month, thousands of flowers and trees, including some of the original plantings of famous designer Beatrix Farrand, are beginning to come to life. And whether the observer is simply contemplating the potential in a package of seeds or viewing the splendor of one of the world’s great gardens, it’s clear that the human-shaped landscape has had a profound impact on us. In a book that is encyclopedic in scope and gorgeous to peruse, art historian and city planner Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, founding president of the Central Park Conservancy, explores landscape design as “a relationship between people and place, a partnership between art and nature, and, increasingly, between art, nature, and technology.” Rogers begins her comprehensive tour with a consideration of ancient structures, from Stonehenge in England to the Serpent Mound in Ohio, that represented “cosmological landscape design—the shaping of the earth and the erection of monuments to reflect a cosmic paradigm.” The author then examines how, as technology and philosophy helped cut our complete dependence on nature, ideas about landscape design shifted over time and ultimately helped to restore some of those deep-seated ties to the natural world. There is something for every interest in this magnificent volume: the garden as a “vision of paradise,” the landscape ideals of the Renaissance, the grandeur of Versailles, “intimations of immortality” in Chinese gardens, and the pastoral visions of Thomas Jefferson, to name but a few of the topics Rogers covers. In addition, she profiles the masters of the craft, from the 14th-century Turkish leader Tamerlane, who built legendary gardens at his palace in Samarkand, to the aptly named “Capability” Brown-the 18th-century English “professional improver”—the 19th-century creators of public parks in America, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, and modern landscape sculptors, Yale graduate Maya Lin among them. Along the way, the author also considers the landscapes of suburbia, shopping malls, Disney’s “Magic Kingdom,” Colonial Williamsburg, and modern recreations of old-fashioned towns. “It is important to realize that the making and erasure of place are continuous processes,” says Rogers. Landscape designers may attempt to rework the natural world into something permanent, but their very medium, as well as the way humans view the land, is always changing, “as long as there are hands, assisted by machines, to shape space in partnership with nature.”
Phyllis Y. Harris '91MPH “There is no more maligned institution in America than the black family,” says writer Phyllis Y. Harris. But though their stories rarely make the front pages or the evening news, there are plenty of black families in a variety of economic circumstances that rate as solid successes. In this touching book—a “thank-you card” that “black parents deserve to see in print”—Harris presents ten successful black men and women who relate their upbringings as examples of “great black parenting” and discuss how the family values they absorbed contributed to their successes. The tales are all highly personal, ranging across the geographic and life history map—an architect who was raised in exile from her birthplace in apartheid South Africa; a doctor who grew up in the Jim Crow South; a senior officer and West Point professor whose father’s military career carried the family around the world, to name a few. Segregation and bigotry are in the picture, but the portraits are studies of parents teaching their children the skills necessary to overcome adversity rather than tales of being overcome by problems. For this reason, Harris’s often poignant collection of memories has universal appeal. “Great parenting transcends racial and ethnic divisions,” she says, “because the standards of all parenting are the same: Did it help the child grow into an adult with the ability and desire to reach his or her potential? Is the child happy with the human being he or she has become?”
L. Perry Curtis Jr. '53 Today, it is difficult to appreciate the full impact that five murders of lowlife prostitutes had on London in 1888. The loss of a sense of security helped fuel the uproar, but the dramatic surge in newspaper sales had more to do with the erotic subtext of the crimes. In Jack the Ripper and the London Press, Perry Curtis, a cultural historian at Brown, conducts a multilayered analysis of how the Victorian London press dealt with these literally unspeakable deeds. His findings touch on wide-ranging themes—social conditions, labor relations, the Irish question, and anti-Semitism, among them—and offer “a window on Victorian society.” A journalist covering this ground might have lingered longer on the horrendous deeds themselves, the mutilations and removal of organs, the self-confessed perpetrator’s blood-stained letter and postcard to authorities, and the fruitless police work. But Curtis deals more in bibliography than gore; he entertains an astonishing range of methodologies while honoring feminist and other current critiques of the killer, the legal system, and the press alike. Above all, Curtis knows his London newspapers and the culture that produced them. Curtis delves into the ownership, political orientation, commercial success, and general tone of 15 different dailies and weeklies that seem to have gotten England’s tabloid press off to a hair-raising start. Journalists, he shows, took great liberties with fact while they pushed ever harder against the frontiers of taste and censorship. This critique forms part of Curtis’s portrait of an era. His evocation of the dark, deprived, bustling East End of London will appeal to admirers of Dickens and other Victorian writers.
Brief Reviews Elizabeth Ballantine '71, ‘82MSL, ‘86PhD, and Stephen Lash '62 The Mill Reef Club in Antigua has been the idyll of many Yale men, among them Dean Acheson, Paul Mellon, and Archibald MacLeish. This history includes recipes for rum punch. Wickham Boyle '81MBA On September 11, freelance writer and community activist “Wicki” Boyle bore witness to horror several blocks from her “safe, calm, sweet TriBeCa home” in New York. Her moving essays are a diary of the following days. Susan B. Matheson, the Molly and Walter Bareiss Curator of Ancient Art In a book that is both beautiful and fascinating, art historian Matheson presents a tale that begins in 1718 and continues to unfold. Dorothy Roberts '77 In an indictment of the child welfare system, Roberts, a law professor at Northwestern, maintains that the disproportionately large number of black children in foster care is a manifestation of racial injustice that punishes parents rather than tackles poverty’s social roots. David Strohmaier '95MAR Wildland firefighter, naturalist, and philosopher Strohmaier presents a personal view of battling blazes and trying to understand the role fire plays in shaping the natural and human world. Joseph Weisberg '87 In a modern version of the coming-of-age tale, Holden Caulfield meets Jack Kerouac in the body of an irrepressible tenth-grader named Jeremiah Reskin. The result is a funny, unflinching, and rarely grammatical look at sophomore year.
Bruce Ackerman 1967LLB, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science, and Ian Ayres 1981, William K. Townsend Professor of Law Tami Davis Biddle 1995PhD Meiling Chang 1990MFA, 1993DFA Robert A. Dahl 1940PhD, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science Benjamin R. Doolittle 1991BS, 1994MDiv, 1997MD Norman Etherington 1963, 1971PhD Peter X Feng 1988, Editor Thomas S. Greenspon 1963 Elizabeth Hartmann 1974 Martha Hollander 1980 Stephen R. Kellert 1971PhD, Tweedy Ordway Professor of Social Ecology, and Timothy J. Farnham, Editors Richard Lingeman 1959Law Michael Lobel 1999PhD Richard Meyer 1988 James E. Mooney, Editor Mark E. Neely Jr. 1966, 1973PhD Jules David Prown, Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus of the History of Art Stanton E. Samenow 1963 Stephen Sandy 1955 Michael Satlow 1986 Robert J. Sternberg 1972, IBM Professor of Psychology and Education, Editor Eugene S. Stevens 1960 Roger D. Stone 1955 and Claudia D'Andrea Carol Weston 1978
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