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Director (or send email to emeriti@emory.edu) Letters to the Editor Click on the above link to let us know what you think (or send email to emeriti@emory.edu)! |
ZOOM MEETING
Gretchen Schulz
April 6, 2020
ZOOM MEETING
Bobbi Patterson
April 13, 2020
ZOOM MEETING
EUEC Distinguished Awards
April 16, 2020
ZOOM MEETING
Kipton Jensen
April 6, 2020
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This issue of our newsletter is sent to members and friends of the Emory University Emeritus College (EUEC). I hope the newsletter will help keep you informed about our activities and help you feel connected with our members throughout the U.S. On the left are links to our website and links to contact either me or the EUEC office.
With best wishes,
Gray
Gray F. Crouse Director, EUEC
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 Message from the Director
These are astonishing times. COVID-19 cases are still in exponential growth in the U.S. and at this point we don't know how long that trend will continue. The lack of adequate testing continues to be a severe constraint on epidemiological modeling. If we somehow manage to greatly slow the current infections and only 10% of the U.S. population becomes infected, and if the mortality rate is only 1%, that would still mean that 330,000 people would die in the U.S. and 90% of the population would still be at risk of infection. Within our membership we have experts on many different areas relating to public health. I would welcome articles dealing with what we might expect in the next year or two.
My own view is that it is difficult to imagine that we could have meetings in person in the foreseeable future. There are now too many infected people to think that SARS-CoV-2 will disappear. Until there is an effective treatment or vaccine, it will likely be too risky for our population to meet in close quarters. It is that reasoning, more than anything else, that has convinced me that we need to envision a virtual future for EUEC, at least for many months. That is why I am encouraging as many of you as possible to get on Zoom. As with any technology there is a learning curve, but once you are over the initial hurdle you will have access not only to our programming, but also to connections with other colleagues and friends and family.
On March 26, Peter Sebel gave our first Zoom-only Retirement Seminar for not-yet-retired faculty. The seminar, in the midst of the stock market collapse, "Can I Afford to Retire?" was especially timely, and 120 faculty registered for it and Peter received many complements. Our first Zoom-only Lunch Colloquium last week had over 40 registrations, and some of the participants had never used Zoom before or had used it only a very few times. Today's Lunch Colloquium has 50% more registrations, and so we are seeing an encouraging trend. One advantage of meeting virtually is that members from anywhere can join in, although one of our members in Hawaii has commented that 5:30 a.m. is a bit too early for her to get up and participate. We did have members joining from NC and VA and possibly other states as well last week.
We have made the decision to increase our programming in this time. Social distancing can lead to social isolation, which is not healthy for any of us. Our Mind Matters Committee, led by Gretchen Schulz, has gone into overdrive and has a lineup of weekly Lunch Colloquiums stretching at this point through mid-May. We also plan to have our Awards and New Members Reception on April 16. Before that time, choose a nice wine or other beverage of your choice and some good cheese or sweets, and join us to celebrate our members who are getting awards and our new members as well as our donors. I hope this will be a good time for us to get together.
There is much to read in this issue. I am pleased that many of you have sent in emails about your activities and some COVID-19 experiences. I will put many of them into the next issue; please keep them coming. Do read Sidney Perkowitz's essay and link to his article that is in this issue. His is a great example of how so many of our members stay active!
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz, Ann Hartle, and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.
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Zoom Lunch Colloquium--Monday, April 6
Bringing 'Remote Learning' Closer to Home
Location: Wherever you are
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Zoom Lunch Colloquium--Monday, April 13
Building Resilience through Contemplative Practice
Location: Wherever you are
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Zoom Lunch Colloquium--Monday, April 20
Howard Thurman: "Tutor to the World"
Location: Wherever you are
11:30-1:00
Kipton Jensen, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Leadership Studies Program in the Andrew Young Center for Global Leadership, Morehouse College
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Zoom Lunch Colloquium--Monday, March 30
BookFest 2020: Recommendations for Reading Now
Voracious Readers Anonymous, Assorted Members of the Emeritus College
Click here to read more below about this Lunch Colloquium
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Awards and New Members Reception--Thursday, April 16. 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
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New Members
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Faculty Activities
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Zoom Lunch Colloquium--Monday, April 6
Bringing "Remote Learning" Closer to Home
Gretchen Schulz, Professor of English Emerita, Oxford College
Most emeriti have had little or no experience with the "remote learning" so many of our colleagues are struggling with just now. But hey, it's never too late to learn about "remote learning." This Zoom Lunch Colloquium will give us a chance to do just that-and learn a little bit about James Joyce, too. Gretchen is going to "teach a class" on one of the very best short stories of all time--"Araby" from Joyce's 1914 collection Dubliners. And, having done your "homework" by reading the (very short) story ahead of time as we will enable you to do, YOU will be able to participate in the class, "raising your hand" to ask and answer questions. By the end of the experience, we should all have a fuller sense of how online teaching works and, not so incidentally, a fuller sense of what the heck it is English professors do in their classes, virtual and otherwise.
About Gretchen Schulz
Gretchen Schulz earned a BA in English from Wellesley College and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin (Madison). She taught at Agnes Scott College and Georgia Institute of Technology before coming to Oxford College in 1979-1980. In 2000, she earned another MA after four summers of study at the Graduate Institute in Liberal Arts at St. John's College in Santa Fe.
Renaissance drama is her area of expertise, and she has studied Shakespeare at Harvard University (as one of 15 chosen for a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar), at the Folger Institute (as one of 16 chosen for a Mellon-funded seminar on "Shakespeare in an Age of Visual Culture"), and at the Blackfriars Theater in Staunton, Virginia and the Globe Theatre in London (as one of 24 chosen for a National Endowment for the Humanities institute on "Shakespeare's Playhouses, Inside and Out"). She served as a long-time Board member (and sometime Chair of the Board) of the Atlanta Shakespeare Company, which she still serves as Resident Scholar. Her most recent publication in this area is an edition of Othello that she did for the New Kittredge Shakespeare series by Focus Publishing.
In the last fifteen years, both before and after her retirement in 2011, Dr. Schulz has also devoted much time to advancing interdisciplinary studies on the Oxford and Emory campuses, on other campuses throughout the country, and beyond. After years of presenting at the annual conferences of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, she chaired the conference Oxford and Emory hosted in Atlanta in 2006; she has served on the Board of the Association since 2008, and is currently in her ninth year of service as co-editor of the journal Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies.
Finally, Dr. Schulz has been making the most of the time her retirement has given her to serve the Emory University Emeritus College (for which she schedules speakers for the Lunch Colloquiums). She much enjoys thus helping to make the pleasures of intellectual camaraderie available to all. As she has put it in a video about the EUEC that is archived on our website, the Emeritus College programming--in all its increasing variety and vitality--makes it possible for all its members to "stay in school forever." And she adds, "That's my idea of heaven, really."
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Zoom Lunch Colloquium--Monday April 13
Building Resilience through Contemplative Practice Bobbi Patterson, Professor of Pedagogy, Department of Religion Bobbi Patterson's book Building Resilience Through Contemplative Practice: A Field Manual for Helping Professionals and Volunteers recasts burnout as a crucial phase of service and also of life itself. Using real-world case studies, including aspects of our current situation, she will offer a presentation on and relevant exercises for cultivating resilience through tough times. Yes, as she'll argue, to choose change in the midst of difficulty, even collapse, we need guiding values as well as concrete tools and skills. But drawing on contemplative principles and practices, in secular as well as Christian and Buddhist forms, can enable us to find the resources we need to move forward. The very burnout that may force us to ease our grasp on long-held assumptions may free us to reach out for new means to new ends and a more productive future. As you'll see, it's no wonder that reviewers have celebrated this book as "a hopeful and compassionate refuge [for those feeling challenged] at the crossroad where service and contemplative practice meet." About Barbara (Bobbi) Patterson Bobbi Patterson received an AB in Religion from Smith College in 1974, an MDiv in Urban Ministries from Harvard Divinity School in 1977, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University in 1994. She joined Emory University's faculty in 1994 after serving as a University Chaplain and Emory University Dean of Students. As Dean of the Emory Scholars Program while on the faculty, she designed a comprehensive program for 350 students including in-course service projects, a residential living program, a summer residential internship program, and service scholarships abroad. Professor Patterson's initial training focused on feminist theory and theology at the intersections of symbolisms and narratives of the body, psychodynamics, and cultural studies. Her current research and teaching focuses on comparative contemplative practices and pedagogies often related to questions of place and thriving/sustainability. Her approaches draw from ancient and contemporary Christian and Tibetan Buddhist perspectives with emphasis on processes of self and communal transformation through ethical engagement for social change. She works closely with Emory's Office of Sustainability Initiatives linking contemplative perspectives to issues of place and space. Writing widely about community-partnered learning and service, she founded the Theory-Practice-Learning Program at Emory, offering workshops, trainings, and placement coordination for faculty and community leaders. She remains engaged in community-partnered teaching and research through Emory's Office of University-Community Partnerships. Professor Patterson has developed numerous portfolio formats, field-based exercises, and case study models to hone insights and skills for joining conceptual and experiential learning and teaching. More recently, her writing focuses on sequenced pedagogies integrating reflective judgment and critical analysis as pathways of resilience for learning for life, where information becomes discerning and transformative action. Her most recent publications describe contemplative pedagogies used in Religion and Ecology classes. She has led numerous workshops addressing these and other pedagogical theories and strategies at national academic meetings and on college and university campuses across the nation. With several other teaching prizes and an Emory Scholarship named for her, she is an established national leader in reflective and engaged pedagogies. In 2010, Professor Patterson was recipient of the Award for Excellence in Teaching of the American Academy of Religion, which also noted that much of her current research relates to her pedagogical interests. Using a Grounded Theory approach, her research team is analyzing over 150 portfolios, identifying major student self-reported themes of content learning, epistemological shifts, growth in analytical skills, and personal and spiritual change. She is also co-leading a Compassion Meditation group for suicide attempters through the Grady Hospital Psychiatry and NIA project programs. Through the Office of Sustainability Initiatives, she developed the Emory as Place Initiative, designed to explore and educate about campus histories, places, and ecologies. Using media-based, experiential, and narrative-based formats, this initiative has created tours of campus woodlands, an Emory civil rights related tour, and a campus-wide scavenger hunt among other residential hall activities. As Chair of the American Religious Cultures concentration within the Graduate Division of Religion (GDR) of Emory University, Professor Patterson teaches graduate courses that range from examining methodological approaches, particularly practice-driven frameworks, to the genealogies of "mind" in American religious cultures of healing, meditation, and spirituality, to place and space. She co-leads with Professor Liz Bounds the graduate teaching training program of the GDR, comprised of a series of workshops and special topics sessions which interrelate with the GDR's emergent professional development initiative. As Chair of the Sustainability Task Force of the American Academy of Religion, she draws her interests in material culture, religion, and spirituality into areas of sustainable living and transformation. The Task Force has thoroughly greened the Academy's meetings and become a model for other international organizations which have consulted with it including the American Philosophical Association and the American Anthropological Association. The Task Force has developed a number of workshops and is working more closely with Regional Sections. Professor Patterson currently serves as a contemplative practices consultant on three major grants with Emory University's Psychiatry, Nursing, and Psychology/Medicine Departments. She is also involved in a grant to Emory's GDR from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. Click here to return to top
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Zoom Lunch Colloquium--Monday, April 20
Howard Thurman: "Tutor to the World"
Kipton Jensen, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Leadership Studies Program in the Andrew Young Center for Global Leadership, Morehouse College
Howard Thurman (1899-1981) is one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights movement in America. Having met with Gandhi in 1936, he quickly appropriated and adeptly applied the philosophy of nonviolence to the problem of racism in America, eventually and memorably mentoring Martin Luther King in his application of that philosophy. However, as Kipton Jensen demonstrates in his most recent work, Howard Thurman: Philosophy, Civil Rights, and the Search for Common Ground (2019), the reach of this extraordinary man's thinking extended to an entire generation of activists, making him the man his wife has described as a "tutor to the world." Himself an activist as well as a philosopher, he preached the power of the love that can get us past hatred, through reconciliation, and into a peaceful and productive life shared on "common ground." And, speaking of preaching, Kipton will also discuss Thurman's Sermons on the Parables, subject of another book that he recently co-edited with Emory (and Oxford) Professor of Religion, David Gowler.
About Kipton Jensen
Kipton Jensen received a BA in Classical Languages from the University of Nebraska in 1987, an MA in the Program in Philosophy from the University of Kentucky in 1989, and a PhD in Philosophy from Marquette University in 1996.
Prior to coming to Morehouse College, he taught philosophy at the University of Botswana (2004-2008). His research in Botswana on the role of traditional healers and faith communities in public health was published as Parallel Discourses: Religious Identity and HIV Prevention in Botswana (2012). Jensen also published Hegel: Hovering (2012). Jensen's scholarly essays deal with the philosophy of religion, social philosophy, pragmatism, nonviolence, and the philosophy of education.
As a graduate student at Marquette University, Jensen studied in Karlsruhe, Germany (1994-1996). As a Fulbright Scholar at Martin-Luther-Universität (1999-2000), in Halle, Germany, Jensen taught courses in American transcendentalism and American pragmatism. Jensen was subsequently a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2001 and Emory University in 2009. He came to Morehouse in 2010.
Besides the books mentioned above, his recent publications include "Howard Thurman and the African American Nonviolent Resistance Tradition" and "Pedagogical Personalism: Mays as well as Thurman and King at Morehouse." Jensen is presently editing a Festschrift on the life and work of Preston King, who is a scholar-in-residence at the Andrew Young Center for Global Leadership.
As a professor in the Morehouse AYCGL Leadership Studies Program, as well as in the Department of Philosophy and Religion, Jensen teaches a first-year experience course that focuses on socio-ethical leadership as exemplified in "Mays, Thurman and King." Jensen's approach to teaching is collaborative, interdisciplinary, and cosmopolitan. Jensen has co-taught courses at Morehouse on Martin Luther King and Racial Capitalism, Violence and Nonviolence, and the Philosophy of Science. He co-advises the honor society in philosophy, Phi Sigma Tau, serves as a mentor in the Mellon-Mays program, and participates in an inter-institutional political theory colloquium series, SOPHIA-ATL.
Since coming to Morehouse, Jensen has taught summer courses in Shanghai and Beijing, China, as well as traveling with students and colleagues to Germany, Sweden, Ireland, and India. In his free time, Kipton enjoys painting portraits of his philosophical heroes and heroines as well as building treehouses. Kipton lives with his wife and children in Decatur.
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Awards and New Members Reception--Thursday, April 16
Our annual Awards and New Members Reception will be April 16 at 2:00 p.m. in our elegant Zoom Meeting Room (please use your imagination). We will honor many of our members at this reception. Refreshments will include assorted wines and other beverages, as well as a great variety of cheeses and pastries. (Very much a bring-your-own, however.)
EUEC Faculty Awards of Distinction and the Distinguished Service Award
It is a great pleasure to announce the award winners for this year. Many thanks to our Awards and Honors Committee for their work in determining the winners of this year's awards. The Committee is chaired by Jim Roark with members Donna Brogan, Jim Keller, and Marianne Scharbo-DeHaan. The recipients this year are:
EUEC Faculty Awards of Distinction
- David Eltis, Professor Emeritus of History
- Joseph E. Hardison, Professor of Medicine, Emeritus
- Holly York, Senior Lecturer Emerita of French
EUEC Distinguished Service Award
- Helen S. O'Shea, Professor of Nursing, Emerita
Heilbrun Distinguished Emeritus Fellowships
These fellowships will be awarded by Dean Michael Elliott
- Oded Borowski, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Archaeology and Hebrew
- Kristin Mann, Professor Emerita of History
New Members and Donors
We will also recognize members who have joined in the past year and those who have donated to EUEC in the past year. Both are large and fantastic groups and we hope many of you will be present to celebrate them!
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Zoom Lunch Colloquium--Monday, March 30
BookFest 2020: Recommendations for Reading Now
Voracious Readers Anonymous, Assorted Members of the Emeritus College
THE BOOKFEST: A ZOOM LUNCH COLLOQUIUM
On Monday, March 30, we of the Emeritus College held the first of the Zoom Lunch Colloquiums we have now scheduled at weekly rather than bi-weekly intervals for the foreseeable future. Six of our members volunteered to present at the online session, recommending books they had enjoyed that they thought others among us might enjoy, as well. And, with the help of Gray Crouse's tutelage, via instructions in the last newsletter, in the later email promo for the Colloquium, and in a bit of a workshop just before the Colloquium began, almost 40 of our members were able to "attend" and (even) participate, "raising hands" to offer comments and further recommendations. For those of you not able to "be there," we here offer print versions of what our BookFest speakers had to say. Many thanks to Vernon Robbins, Holly York, Marianne Skeen, Clark Lemons, Lee Pasackow, and Jan Pratt for stepping up in these rather challenging circumstances and for suggesting such an interesting assortment of books for us to read.
Vernon Robbins:
Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic presents the gripping, tragic, heartbreaking, and presently relevant story of the election and assassination of our 20th president, James A. Garfield.
Garfield served as president for only 6 ½ months from March 4, 1881, until his death on September 19, 1881. Born and raised in Ohio, he became a major general in the Union Army during the War between the States and afterwards an Ohio State senator. He was elected to Congress in 1862, and in 1880 was chosen by delegates on the 36th ballot (!) to run as the Republican candidate for president. He was a highly skilled orator with a firm, moderate approach to civil rights for freedmen. John Philip Sousa was the leader of the band at his inauguration, and Frederick Douglass represented the freedmen at the inauguration ceremony.
A key character at the beginning of the book is Charles J. Guiteau, a wild, crazy man who, when he escaped death from a sinking ship, decided he had been chosen by God to help elect Garfield as president. Later he decided he had a special duty to assassinate Garfield. So he bought a 44-caliber pistol and shot Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, DC, on July 2, 1881.
Another key character in the book is Dr. Bliss, who was in a position of power to appoint himself head physician over President Garfield's medical care after he had been shot. Dr. Bliss was one of the American doctors who considered John Lister's scholarly papers on the necessity for antiseptic procedures while caring for wounds and performing surgery to be hogwash. He refused to believe that little germs that could not be seen were floating around through the air and getting on surgical tools and people's hands to cause infection in people. What a stupid idea to wash surgical tools in carbolic acid or to spray instruments with antiseptic solutions before using them.
The 44-caliber bullet that went into Garfield's body on July 2 missed all vital organs and lodged in the fatty tissue underneath the pancreas. Garfield's big, strong, healthy body formed a protective cyst around the bullet, so it did not cause damage that should have led to Garfield's death. But Dr. Bliss's poking around in the wound first with his finger and then with a long instrument without using any antiseptic caused horrible infection in the wound.
During the second week of Garfield's illness, Dr. Bliss announced to the nation, against the advice of other physicians, that Garfield was such a healthy man that within a couple of weeks he would be returning to his desk at his presidential office to pick up his full presidential duties. As the infection spread throughout Garfield's body, Dr. Bliss continued against all odds to insist that within just another week or two the president would surprise everyone with a healthy recovery. This continued for two and a half months while the president's body was valiantly fighting the sepsis Dr. Bliss had caused within his body. Garfield died on September 19, 1881, to the shock of people across the nation.
Another dramatic part of the story focuses on Alexander Graham Bell, who worked day and night during July, August, and September to perfect an electrical metal detector instrument that would make a noise when a wand was moved over the president's body and indicate where the lead bullet had lodged. Dr. Bliss did not allow it to be used as Bell wished to use it, though at that point, finding and removing the bullet wouldn't have prevented the death.
I decided to start the book with an hour of reading one day. After three and ½ hours of reading, I realized I was a third of the way through the book and it was late afternoon. My second setting with the book was not pleasant; even as the infection was spreading through Garfield's body, we were getting reports of the spread of the coronavirus from Wuhan, China, to other parts of the world.
I finished the book on the third setting, haunted by how difficult it was to read such a tragic story, but energized by its description of hard work by many people in a context of extreme adversity. I was utterly amazed at how relevant the book is for what we are experiencing on a daily basis. I was deeply impressed by the remarkable detective work of Candice Millard in her research into Garfield's papers and other archives. And I was deeply grateful for her wonderful writing skills. I highly recommend Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard.
Holly York:
In this carefully documented work, David McCollough weaves together the stories of several Americans, each illustrious in his or her own way if not a familiar name today, who realize their dream of traveling to Paris during the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Among them are James Fennimore Cooper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel F. B. Morse, Elizabeth Blackwell, Charles Sumner, and several others. Each had a serious professional or personal reason for braving the North Atlantic voyage, which earlier in that time could take a month or more on a cargo ship powered only by the wind (if the ship made it across the seas at all).
Notable among Paris's main attractions for these travelers was her pre-eminence in the fields of medicine and art. A hospital system and medical education superior to ours drew young Americans seeking to advance their knowledge and careers by studying the most advanced therapies with the most renowned professors. Cadavers were widely used in training, while in the U.S. ethical considerations made their use rarer. And living women were much more willing to be used for instruction than in the States. As for young artists, they sought out both the halls of the Louvre, where they could copy the masters, and the contemporary painters who would accept them as students.
While much of Paris was still a labyrinthine medieval city plagued with mud and poverty, the book offers plenty of evidence that these travelers enjoyed its beauties and daily pleasures as travelers still do today. Their awe, for example, at the view of their first Gothic cathedral sounds much like what many of us have experienced in our first encounter with those sweeping structures. An account of a first breakfast with the delicious bread, exceptional butter, and wonderful preserves, not to mention coffee unlike any previously tasted, is also familiar.
The book is composed in large part of quotes from journals and letters, so the characters come to life in their own words. And McCollough weaves their stories together in such a way that we feel we are hearing the news of old friends in real time and look forward to the next installment in the lives of each.
Marianne Skeen:
This book, published in 2004, is the first of a trilogy in which the same events are told from the perspectives of the three main characters. It's worth noting that the author was 76 years old when Old Filth was published and age 85 when the third book came out--a tribute to creativity in later years, per the theme of the EUCC Sheth Lecture series. Gardam is the author of other adult novels and children's books, too, and has received numerous British literary awards though she is not widely read in the U.S. Old Filth is considered her masterpiece by several critics.
I found this novel both poignant and funny, with good balance between the two sentiments. It is dedicated to the "Raj orphans," the children of the many functionaries of the British empire who were sent back to England at a very young age to be educated there rather than allowed to grow up "native" in the far flung reaches of the empire.
Its protagonist, Eddie Feathers, was one of those children, sent back when he was five years old to live with a foster family in Wales until he could be sent to boarding school. His mother had died shortly after his birth and his father, shell-shocked from his WWI experiences, had been unable to connect with him. However, Eddie had been perfectly happy playing with his Malaysian friends in a village there and was traumatized by the sudden separation from them and the further shock of his abusive foster family. This was the beginning of a series of poignant losses of friends he experienced during boarding school and in WWII. He managed to get a law degree, though, and ended up settling into a lucrative career in Hong Kong, eventually becoming a judge. The embodiment of the wry acronym FILTH, Failed In London Try Hong Kong, he was a legend at Temple Bar. Along the way, he found Betty, who became his wife and the anchor of his life. He finally had someone who did not abandon him, though the emotional damage of his Raj orphan experiences impacted his marriage.
The book begins during his retirement back in England and continues with a series of flashbacks to his earlier life and how it shaped his connections with friends and his relationship with his wife. The heartbreaking stories of the losses he suffered are interspersed with amazingly funny vignettes. And his story unfolds over decades of history. The portraits of the British empire as it declines through the 20th century are vibrant. Gardam is a skillful writer and a delight to read.
Clark Lemons:
Published in 2017 by Harper/Collins, Jessica Shattuck's historical fiction The Women in the Castle is based on meticulous research. The novel takes place in 1945, in 1939, and in 1991; it is not chronological. In this, it is typical of many contemporary novels. Some may not like the switchbacks from one time to another and from one character's viewpoint to another's. However, I liked the gradual build, and there's not a lack of continuity.
"The Women" are three women whose husbands were executed for their involvement in the plot to kill Hitler in July 1944. The characters, the husbands and wives, and minor characters, are fictional; the plot against Hitler is not, nor are the circumstances of war-time and post-war Germany that are so powerfully depicted.
"The Castle" is a run-down, almost uninhabitable Bavarian mansion that the main character, Marianne, has inherited from her husband. They were both aristocrats, liberal Germans, and despised Hitler from the beginning. Marianne is a principled woman. We see her as the instigator of action and center of the novel. She is not very likeable, and most of the other characters aren't either. But how many people whom we admire are what we call "likeable"? Anyway, these people are all flawed and in completely understandable ways, as are most of us.
This realism in characterization is the reason I liked the novel so much. All the characters are significantly--and humanly--affected by the war. There aren't heroes or heroines, just people trying to be conscientious and faithful to something, trying to make it in a, to say the least, "difficult time," trying, as much as they can, to understand what is going on, and finally, trying to come to grips, at the end of the war and well after, with what has gone on.
A character, at the end of the story, after the war, answers a question about her support of Nazis: "Forgiveness? God forbid! I would never ask for that!"
At the center of the novel is a question about degrees of responsibility for how war, oppression, and persecution affect or perhaps determine a response to the world one lives in.
There are some gruesome passages in the novel, but these don't take precedence. What does is the way characters of different politics and class continue relationships in spite of what's happened. What takes precedence is how people survive day to day--and how day-to-day relationships become established and then even permanent and valuable.
The prose is spare and metaphorical, the insights thought-provoking--such as, "She half knew--but there is no word for that. She knew it the way you know something is happening far away in a distant land, something you have no control over, such as earthquake refugees, living in squalid conditions, or victims of a foreign war."
Shattuck's novel, her third, was inspired by an interview she did 20 years ago with her grandmother, whom she loved, an avid Nazi, in the 30s and 40s who lived to be 100.
It is not a depressing novel, if you want to accept the reality you know-or "half-know"; and it is an uplifting one if you like novels whose characters believably respond in their own ways to the world of their times.
Lee Pasackow:
You may remember Samantha Power was Obama's Ambassador to the UN. [As Wikipedia puts it, she is "an Irish-American academic, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and diplomat who served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017."]
As Tom Friedman said in his book review of Powers' memoir in the NYT, "She believed in using American power to protect innocent civilians and advance democracy." He states that this book is a combination of autobiography, diplomatic history, and moral arguments.
Power is a terrific and insightful writer. In fact, I also recommend her book Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World; it's about Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Kofi Annan asked him, on a temporary basis, to be his special representative in Iraq. He was killed in an explosion three months after he arrived, in 2003.
In this memoir, Power tells how she struggled living with an alcoholic father while growing up in Ireland. Her mother brought them to the US in 1979, and she attended Lakeside High School in Atlanta. After earning her BA at Yale, she worked as a sports writer, then transitioned to a war correspondent covering the Bosnian war. After that experience she attended Harvard Law School and wrote her 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning work, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. As Chris Harmer, in the London School of Economics blog writes, Power had advocated a range of policy options between inaction in the face of mass atrocities and all-out "boots on the ground" military intervention. Her book was brought to the attention of then Senator Obama. She became Obama's Human Rights advisor. She also served as Director for Multilateral Affairs in the National Security Council.
In 2013, she was sworn in as the youngest UN Ambassador. Three weeks into her appointment, there was the chemical attack by Assad in Syria. She advocated for U.S. intervention in Syria. Obama put the plans in place for military intervention but at the last minute decided to ask for Congressional approval, which he did not get. She considered resigning over Obama's refusal to act on Syria, but in the end acquiesced, quoting Obama, "better is good," and perfect is rarely on the menu. In Libya, Obama followed her advice and that of others to intervene. But, with no follow up strategy, the country dissolved into chaos.
Despite such failures, Power served in an administration that also did much to promote human rights. Thousands of Iraqi Yazidis who fled ISIS in 2014 were provided safe passage following U.S. air strikes that Power and others advocated. She helped persuade the UN Security Council to define the Ebola epidemic as a threat to international peace and security, energizing the mobilization of a multinational response including the deployment of U.S. troops. (Hmm, think where we would be today with advisors such as Power in the administration.) Power's pioneering work in promoting LGBT rights at the UN encouraged the first ever Security Council condemnation of attacks on the basis of sexual orientation.
Some say she was a bit too sanctimonious. Obama could make the remark, "Yeah Samantha; we all read your genocide book." But, when she was quiet in meetings, he would pause and ask for her opinion.
She is a caring human being, a mother, trying to live by a moral compass, and that hasn't always worked out. But she has accomplished much that has often served the good--and done so with a decidedly personal touch. While at the UN, she made an effort to visit every UN mission in NYC - not inviting them to the big U.S. headquarters, but rather going to their offices. She invited all the women ambassadors to her residence to watch the election returns in 2016. (Oh, Gretchen cannot resist adding, to have been a fly on that wall.)
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and think it's highly relevant today as we read about the decision-making processes in our government.
Jan Pratt:
Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow-no, not my sorrow but this incomprehensible nature of this our life-for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
The book I recommend, Rules for Visiting, is a novel about friendship.
The main character, May, works as a university gardener. She lives with her father, a retired professor from that same university. They are not social people. They stick to a routine. They don't interact with others. May observes her neighbors but has no desire to get to know them or let them know her.
Unexpectedly, she is granted leave from her job, and she decides to spend this free time visiting with four old once close friends, visiting each in turn. She muses on the rules for being a host and a guest. She says "being a good guest requires knowing how to let yourself be welcomed," but she has no experience with that. Emily Post is no help. She says Post has pages and pages on directions for hosts but for a guest writes only, "the perfect guest not only tries to wear becoming clothes but tries to put on an equally becoming attitude."
So May decides to put her plan into action. She buys a suitcase she names Grendel and sets off on her Odyssey. Each friend welcomes her. Their interaction is made different than it used to be by the circumstances of their present lives. They have changed. At the end of her journey, May finds that she has changed, too.
This is a lovely book exploring friendship and what makes friendship last over time and distance when it is possible to meet in person only occasionally. Also, as a bonus for gardeners, there are many references to trees and shrubs described in loving detail. It is well written and absorbing--a good choice that I enjoyed and think you might, too.
At the end of the BookFest session, there was time enough for Vernon Robbins to offer a second recommendation. Here it is.
Vernon Robbins:
For a delightful reading experience where language soars like an eagle from page to page, I highly recommend Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow. In this book of historical fiction, which begins during the Russian revolution in the context of World War I, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to house arrest on the sixth floor of the Metropol Hotel located in Theatre Square in Moscow.
His crime was writing and publishing a 19-line poem in 1913 titled "Where Is It Now?" that contained revolutionary implications. He is sentenced to life in the hotel, rather than shot in the town square, because of the wealth and status of his family, signified by his title as Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt.
So, on the 21st of June, 1922, Count Rostov is taken to the Metropol Hotel and moved from the palatial suite on the third floor that he formerly inhabited to a small room on the sixth floor. He is able to expand the size of his living quarters by smashing through the back wall into a small room behind it that no one knew about. Hanging a curtain over the hole in the wall, he can part the curtain and walk through the hole into the little room that functions nicely as a cozy study where he can read and write.
As the story unfolds over three decades from 1922 until 1954, Count Alexander Rostov develops a charming relationship with a nine-year-old girl named Nina. This young girl introduces him to special stairways and hiding places in the hotel, including the basement, which becomes important as the story moves forward. Nina grows up, gets married, and has a child named Sofia, and Count Rostov suddenly becomes a step-father to a five-year-old child when Nina leaves little Sofia in his custody for what she believes will be only a short period of time, though she is taken off to a work camp in Siberia and is never able to return for her darling Sofia.
Another part of the story concerns Count Rostov's love affair with a well-known actress and movie star, Anna Urbanova, who has a luxurious suite in the hotel. Anna is able to help Count Rostov with important connections for nurturing young Sofia's brilliant skill on the piano, skill that takes her through musical competitions and recitals in multiple venues including finally a performance in Paris, France.
Important events occur in the barbershop in the Metropol Hotel, where Count Rostov has a weekly appointment with Yaroslav Yaroslavi, a barber without peer anywhere else in Moscow. Many things also happen in the lobby, as people from various countries gather or come to the desk and then are taken to their room.
Of the two restaurants in the Metropol, the Boyarsky, which is the finest restaurant in Moscow, provides not only the most excellent choices of cuisine and beverage for Count Rostov but also some of his most cherished male comradeship. When Count Rostov becomes the Headwaiter of the Boyarsky, his close relationships with the chefs and others there provide wonderful moments in the book.
One of the most delightful aspects of the book is Amor Towles' choice of names, words, and phrases. Another is the lively conversation among people. The actress Anna Urbanova is a willowy beauty. Young Nina demands amazing patience from Count Rostov as he answers her many questions about how a princess thinks, acts, and moves her body. The sous-chef delicately debones pigeons with a whistle on his lips. The pastry chef seems as dusted with flour as one of his rolls.
In the Kindle edition of the book, every word in the forty titles of chapters and sub-sections starts with the letter A. This begins with "An Ambassador," "An Anglican Ashore," "An Appointment," and "An Acquaintanceship," and continues all the way to the "Afterword," "Afterwards," and "And Anon" at the end.
I highly recommend this delightful book titled A Gentleman in Moscow.
Gretchen Schulz:
Finally, to close out the session, Gretchen Schulz mentioned--and recommended--a book just out that she (and others all over the world) have been waiting for for a long time, the third volume in Hilary Mantel's much acclaimed trilogy about Thomas Cromwell--who rose to heights of power and then fell so precipitously from them in the time of Henry the Eighth. The first two volumes, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both won the Booker Prize. The third volume, The Mirror & the Light, may well do the same. Just sayin'.
--Gretchen Schulz
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New Members
New members are the lifeblood of any organization. Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC!
Members in TransitionJeffrey H. Boatright, PhD, FARVO, Professor of Ophthalmology,
Core Director & Research Biologist, Atlanta VAMC Center for Visual & Neurocognitive Rehabilitation
Leonard T. Heffner, Jr., MD, Professor of Hematology and Medical Oncology, Winship Cancer Institute
Marie A. Johanson, PT, PhD, Professor & Interim Director, Division of Physical Therapy, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine
William Torres, MD, FACR, Professor, Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory School of Medicine; Chief, Department of Radiology, Winship Cancer Institute Dipak Vashi, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine
Affiliate Member
Donald C. O'Shea, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Physics, Georgia Tech
I received a Bachelor of Physics from the University of Akron, a Master of Science in Physics from Ohio State University, and a PhD in Physics from Johns Hopkins University. Following my work at Hopkins, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Gordon McKay Laboratory at Harvard University. In 1970, I joined the faculty of the School of Physics at Georgia Tech. In July 2004 I retired as Emeritus Professor of Physics. I have been a Visiting Scholar at the Optical Sciences Center of the University of Arizona and at the University of Oulu, Finland. I co-authored an undergraduate textbook on lasers, An Introduction to Lasers and Their Applications (Addison-Wesley, 1977), published an undergraduate textbook on optical design, Elements of Modern Optical Design (Wiley, 1985), and a tutorial text, Diffractive Optics (SPIE Press, 2004). I created the Optics Discovery Kit for the Optical Society of America for use in precollege education and was awarded the Esther Hoffman Beller Award by the Optical Society of America for "excellence in the field of optics education." My earlier research included laser Raman spectroscopy, optical design, diffractive optics and optical engineering to ultrafast pulse devices. I am the co-inventor of a display system for low vision patients and have published more than 50 scientific papers and presented a similar number at national and international scientific meetings. Currently I am writing a textbook on optical design that uses CODE V for its examples, demonstrations, and exercises. This effort is a collaboration with Professor Julie Bentley at the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester. I am a Fellow of the SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering and the Optical Society of America. I was SPIE President during 2000 and served as editor of its flagship journal, Optical Engineering, from 1998 to 1999 and 2001 to 2009.
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Faculty Activities
Sidney Perkowitz Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Physics
Perhaps most interesting for us is an essay by Sidney on how he came to write his article "Only Disconnect! A Pandemic Reading of E.M. Forster."
Writing about the virus while isolated - by the virus
Sidney Perkowitz
Like most other EUEC people I'm sure, my wife Sandy and I have been voluntarily house-bound for the last couple of weeks. After checking that our family in Seattle, and our friends there and here in ATL, are healthy and are taking all precautions, we settled in to make the best of our retirement-within-retirement. We have both long worked from home and have well-equipped home offices. I was ready to continue several writing projects.
But a pandemic has its ripple effects. It's hard to be creative when part of your mind is filled with anxiety and the urge to tune in to the latest plague news. Also our new era of remote interactions under a hovering threat produces inevitable losses and slow-downs. An editor at one well-known press apologized for a delayed review of my book proposal because potential reviewers are not eagerly taking on additional tasks. Also science-related publishing has only one subject today: the corona virus. Indeed, a writing idea about some abstract physics that I recently submitted certainly seems less than relevant right now.
But, in the midst of all this, I had a small "aha" moment. Could I write about the virus myself? I could not compete with the medical experts who are giving us the information we need. But how fascinating to think about how the pandemic has made us dependent on technology to maintain human contact. I've written about technology in society, but I know someone who wrote about it a century before it became so dominant. That was the celebrated English novelist E. M. Forster, whose story "The Machine Stops" from 1909 examines what tech may do for us and to us under extreme conditions that parallel our current need to separate ourselves.
An editor I know at Nautilus, a broadly-based science magazine, liked the idea of comparing that 1909 vision of technology to where we are today. The piece was written, edited and put online in a couple of days as "Only Disconnect!," Nautilus, March 26, 2020.
If there's a moral to my story, it is that a pandemic has all sorts of effects--anxiety, fear, illness and death, sadly yes--but it may also spur us to efforts toward understanding it and its effects, and expressing this for others. That's what Albert Camus did in writing The Plague, showing that this horrendous subject can yield a masterpiece--and one where in the end, the plague passes away.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
Our last walk took us to a spot that some of us have probably stepped on quite a few times! That spot is the Allen Family Plaza located in the courtyard area at the entrance of the Schwartz Center. This drop-off circle and open space, next to the Donna and Marvin Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, was made possible by Emory trustee David Allen (1967C, 1970D, 1975D) and Beverly Dew Allen 1968C. The space was named in 2003 and recognizes their daughters, Lisa Carol Allen 1991B and Pamela K. Allen.
Most buildings on campus are closed due to COVID-19, which means our walks will need to be outdoors for awhile....so, let's take a look at one of the newer buildings on campus. It still features that gorgeous marble, but also contains a lot more glass than most of the older buildings at Emory.
Where will you find this on the Emory Campus?
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Emory University Emeritus College The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206 Atlanta, GA 30329 |
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