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Spring 2006 Books Sandwiched In
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You are invited to a bring your lunch to a series of free
NOON HOUR BOOK DISCUSSIONS
THURSDAYS 12:00 to 1:00.
Community Program Room (Lower level entrance off Temple Street) |
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Feb. 23 | Mar. 2 | Mar. 9* | Mar.16 | Mar. 23 | Mar. 30 | Apr. 6 |
Thursday, February 23, 2006, Noon-1pm
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
Written by John M. Barry
Presented by Meredith Wallace, Ph.D. & APRN ( Biography)
>From Booklist at www.amazon.com
Late in this history of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Barry observes that the event "has survived in memory more than in any literature." Apparently, people would rather not record horrors that make them feel insignificant. Fortunately, there are deep-digging historians.
Barry presents the pandemic as the first great challenge to the modern American medical establishment, whose response, although it was overwhelmed, demonstrated what medical science applied to public health practice might do, and as a test of national, state, and
municipal political responsiveness to domestic crisis. Medicine, though far too lightly equipped, rose to the occasion, but politicians, from President Wilson on down, refused to acknowledge any crisis except the war in Europe and thwarted medicine's best preventive efforts.
To portray the forces that met the crisis, Barry first tells the story of scientific medicine in America, begun by the shaping of Johns Hopkins Hospital and University under William Welch into the model for all other U.S. physicians' training and medical research institutions.
The researchers who directly engaged the great flu were Welch proteges, and though they failed at the time, the continued research of one culminated in discovering the significance of DNA. Meanwhile, the death and panic, national and worldwide--the flu most probably started in Kansas, and troop movements that the army continued against its surgeon general's advice spread it cross-country and to Europe--were appalling. For readers, however, they are the somber underscoring of an enthralling symphony of a book, whose every page compels attention.
Ray Olson. Copyright C American Library Association. All rights reserved.
Thursday, March 2, 2006, Noon-1pm
Elia Kazan: A Biography
Written by Richard Schickel
Presented by Kim Rubinstein ( Biography)
>From Booklist at amazon.com
*Starred Review*
Both effusive and enigmatic, brazen and insecure, legendary director Elia Kazan is best known for
bringing the emotional realism of mid-twentieth-century New York theater to the silver screen. But, in 1999,
the accomplishments of the Greek immigrant and founding member of the Actors Studio were overshadowed by the controversy
surrounding his Honorary Academy Award. (In 1952, some 15 years after abandoning the Communist Party, Kazan "named names"
before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.) In this sympathetic, scrupulously researched biography, film scholar
and Time critic Schickel examines the career of the directorial tour de force whose dossier includes Tony Award winner
Death of a Salesman, On the Waterfront (for which he earned the Best Director Oscar), and stage and screen versions of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Kazan's purpose, said playwright and best friend Arthur Miller, was always "to hit the audience in the belly because he knows all people
are alike in the belly no matter what their social position or education."
Though Schickel's book focuses on the professional opus of Kazan (who died in 2003), the author also vividly conveys the director's
potent personality: his exuberance, relentless work ethic, and frank assessments of the fleeting nature of fame.
Allison Block. Copyright C American Library Association. All rights reserved.
Thursday, March 9, 2006, Noon-1pm
Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial City-New Haven, Connecticut*
Written by Preston Maynard & Marjorie Noyes, (University of New England Press, 2005).
Presented by Preston Maynard.
( Biography)
>From customer review at www.amazon.com
"Whether you are interested in the New Haven area, particular areas of industry such as clock-making or carriage manufacturers,
workplaces in the proceeding centuries, or urban planning and development, you will find interesting and useful information in this book."
**Book-signing event will follow immediately after the presentation.
Members of the audience are welcome to bring a copy of the book or purchase one
at the book-signing sponsored by Atticus Bookstore.
Thursday, March 16, 2006, Noon-1pm
Teacher Man: A Memoir
Written by Frank McCourt
Presented by Burt Saxon, Ed.D. ( Biography)
>From Booklist available at www.amazon.com
In another easily embraceable memoir by the best-selling (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) author of Angela's Ashes (1996) and 'Tis (1999),
McCourt now concentrates on his career as a teacher for many years in the New York City public school system,
where he worked in four different high schools. His trademark charm, wit, and unself-conscious self-effacement ensure that
the flashbacks of his dreadful days growing up in extreme deprivation in Ireland don't sink the narrative in self-pity.
Remembrances of his struggling days in college in New York ("dozing years") provide informative foundation for the real point
of the book: relating his development into the kind of teacher he became--namely, one who shares his life stories not only to
establish bridges of experience with his students but also to get them to open up. His new book is hardly a teaching manual; however,
what it is on one level is a tough but poignant and certainly eloquent defense of the sacrifices and honorableness of those in the
teaching profession ("Teaching is the downtown maid of professions. Teachers are told to use the service door or go round the back") and
a lesson itself in taking yourself seriously--but not too. Brad Hooper. Copyright C American Library Association. All rights reserved
Thursday, March 23, 2006, Noon-1pm
The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece
Written by Jonathan Harr
Presented by Noah Charney ( Biography)
>From Booklist available at www.amazon.com
Harr, author of the best-selling A Civil Action (1995), turns from a true-life courtroom drama to the riveting story of a lost masterpiece.
The Italian painter Caravaggio (1573-1610) was famous for his startling vision of the divine in ordinary lives, and infamous for his street-fighter life.
An artistic genius and a fugitive killer, Caravaggio remains a compelling enigma, and his mystique is enhanced by the scarcity of his works.
The disappearance of one painting in particular, The Taking of Christ, baffled art historians for two centuries. Harr, a consummate storyteller,
now traces the canvas' journey in an effortlessly educating and marvelously entertaining mix of art history and scholarly sleuthing.
The search begins when a Roman graduate student, Francesca Cappelletti, manages to charm the Marchesa Mattei, an eccentric descendant of
one of Caravaggio's Roman patrons, into allowing her and her to examine never-before-studied family archives.
Meanwhile, Sergio Benedetti, an ambitious Italian restorer working in Dublin at the National Gallery of Ireland,
believes that an old painting hanging in a Jesuit residence, a work in dire need of cleaning, is a forgotten Caravaggio. As Harr expertly
tracks the converging quests of the students and the restorer, he incisively recounts Caravaggio's wild and tragic life, and offers
evocative testimony to the resonance of his daring and magnificent work.
Donna Seaman Copyright C American Library Association. All rights reserved.
Thursday, March 30, 2006, Noon-1pm
The Year of Magical Thinking
Written by Joan Didion
Presented by Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., FACS ( Biography)
>From Booklist available at www.amazon.com
*Starred Review*
Didion--a master essayist, great American novelist, and astute political observer--uses autobiography as a vehicle
for tonic inquiries into both the self and society. In Where I Was From (2003), she meshed family history with an examination
of America's romance with the West. Here, in her most personal and generous book to date, she chronicles a year of grief with her
signature blend of intellectual rigor and deep feeling. The ordeal began on Christmas 2003 when Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne,
learn that their daughter, Quintana Roo, is in intensive care with severe pneumonia and septic shock. Five grim days later, Dunne and Didion
come home from the hospital, sit down to dinner, and Dunne suffers "a sudden massive coronary event" and dies. Married for 40 years
and sharing a passion for literature, they were inordinately close. But Didion could not give herself over to grief: Quintana's health
went from bad to worse as she developed a life-threatening hematoma on her brain. She survived, and Didion had the wherewithal to
cope: "In times of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go the literature. Information was control."
So she researches grief, schools herself in her daughter's medical conditions, and monitors the flux of flashbacks and fears that strobe
through her mind. Didion describes with compelling precision exactly how grief feels, and how it impairs rational thought and triggers "magical thinking."
The result is a remarkably lucid and ennobling anatomy of grief, matched by a penetrating tribute to marriage, motherhood, and love.
Donna Seaman Copyright C American Library Association. All rights reserved.
Thursday, April 6, 2006, Noon-1pm
Gilead: A Novel
Written by Marilynne Robinson, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004).
Presented by Lana Schwebel, Ph.D.( Biography)
>From Booklist available at www.amazon.com
Robinson's first book, Housekeeping (1981), remains an astonishment, leading to high expectations for her longed-for second novel,
which is, joyfully, a work of profound beauty and wonder. Reverend John Ames of Gilead, Iowa, a grandson and son of preachers,
now in his seventies, is afraid he hasn't much time left to tell his young son about his heritage. And so he takes up his pen,
as he has for decades--he estimates that he's written more than 2,000 sermons--and vividly describes his prophetlike grandfather,
who had a vision that inspired him to go to Kansas and "make himself useful to the cause of abolition," and the epic conflict
between his fiery grandfather and his pacifist father. He recounts the death of his first wife and child, marvels over the
variegated splendors of earth and sky, and offers moving interpretations of the Gospel. And then, as he struggles with his
disapproval and fear of his namesake and shadow son, Jack, the reprobate offspring of his closest friend, his letter evolves
into a full-blown apologia punctuated by the disturbing revelation of Jack's wrenching predicament, one inexorably tied to the
toxic legacy of slavery.
"For me writing has always felt like praying," discloses Robinson's contemplative hero, and, indeed,
John has nearly as much reverence for language and thought as he does for life itself. Millennia of philosophical musings and
a century of American history are refracted through the prism of Robinson's exquisite and uplifting novel as she illuminates
the heart of a mystic, poet, and humanist.
Donna Seaman Copyright C American Library Association. All rights reserved
About Books Sandwiched In
History
The "Books Sandwiched In" (BSI) program, after a brief hiatus in 2003, has been in operation
for more than thirty years. Organized by community volunteers in collaboration with the New
Haven Free Public Library, "Books Sandwiched In" was initially patterned after similar programs
held in Syracuse and Rochester, New York. BSI offers a free series of book reviews that people
can attend during the lunch hour. Outstanding scholars and professionals from the New Haven
area, freely contribute their expertise and opinions by offering lively reviews of books of current
interest to the community and by entertaining questions from the audience. Traditionally there are
eight weekly offerings in the fall and six in the spring.
Logistics
The program will be held in the Community Program Room of the Library,
which is located on the lower level with direct access from the Temple Street
side-door entrance. Speakers will present from 12:00 to 1:00. You
are invited to bring a bag lunch and beverage to the program.
With parking near the library being difficult, you may want to consider
taking the free City of New Haven downtown Trolley from another location to
its stop across the street from the Library on Elm Street. Trolleys run
every fifteen minutes. Information about the City of New Haven Trolley is
located on the Web at: http://www.cityofnewhaven.com/trafficparking/trolley.asp.
The following Web site also includes a link to the New Haven Parking Authority with information
about parking lots: http://www.cityofnewhaven.com/ParkingAuthority/.
Feedback
If you would like to volunteer your time, talents or ideas to BSI,
please contact us via email:
Books Sandwiched In. Financial contributions to help
continue the operation of BSI can be made to New Haven Free Public Library-
Books Sandwiched In. Further information contact Kathie Hurley, Public Information (946-8125) or via email
sent to:
khurley@nhfpl.org.
Steering Committee: Books Sandwiched In
2005-2006 Steering Committee
Martha Brogan, Chair
James Charney
Fran De Toro
Sue Eisner
Eva Geertz
Norm Harrower, Treasurer
Kathie Hurley*
John Jessen*
Betty Mettler
Letha Sandweiss
Kristin Whitehead*
*Ex-officio members from the New Haven Public Library
Our Speakers
Meredith Wallace - Kim Rubinstein - Preston Maynard - Burt Saxon
Noah Charney - Sherwin B. Nuland - Lana Schwebel
MEREDITH WALLACE, Ph.D. and APRN, is Associate Professor and Elizabeth DeCamp McInerney Chair of Health Sciences at Fairfield University School of Nursing.
A specialist in gerontological nursing, community health, and prostate cancer in older men, Dr. Wallace is an award-winning author, researcher,
and practitioner. In 2005 the Adrian & Jessie Archbold Charitable Trust awarded Fairfield University's School of Nursing a grant to enhance
the online version of its highly successful Geriatric Nurse Online Education Program and extend it nationwide free to any registered nurse who
cares for the elderly. Since 1988 Dr. Wallace has also provided nursing care at various local health centers including the Hospital of Saint Raphael (1992-1998),
where she served as the Manager of Health Promotion in the Department of Health and Outreach. Prior to her appointment at Fairfield University in 2002,
Dr. Wallace taught in the nursing programs at Southern Connecticut State University (1998-2002) and other area colleges.
Among her extensive publication credits figures Essentials of Geriatric Nursing (Delmar Publishing Company, 2006). Dr. Wallace co-authored two books
that won the prestigious American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in 2003 and 2001 respectively: Prostate Cancer: Nursing Assessment,
Management, and Care (Springer Publishing Co., 2002) and Geriatric Nursing Research Digest (Springer, 2000). A prolific author, editor,
and reviewer of books, Dr. Wallace has contributed to numerous books and referred journal publications.
Dr. Wallace is active in the local community and wider profession, including Life Haven Shelter for Women & Children, where she currently serves as
Vice President (formerly President); Saint Vincent's Hospital Prostate Cancer Institute (Board of Directors), the Connecticut Nurses Association,
Sigma Theta Tau, Gerontological Society of America, and the Eastern Nursing Research Society. From 1989 to 2002, Dr. Wallace served as Captain
in the United States Army Nurse Reserve Corps.
Dr. Wallace received her Ph.D. in Research and Theory Development in Nursing Science from New York University in 2001; her M.S. in Medical-Surgical Nursing with a sub-specialty in Gerontological Nursing from Yale University in 1993; and her B.S. (magna cum laude) in Nursing from Boston University in 1988.
More information about Fairfield University School of Nursing grant to develop a free online course in geriatric nursing nationwide is available at: http://www.fairfield.edu/x15621.xml More information about Dr. Wallace's current research is available at: http://www.fairfield.edu/x7013.xml
More information about Dr. Wallace's award-winning book is available at: http://www.fairfield.edu/x5037.xml
KIM RUBINSTEIN is the associate artistic director of Long Wharf Theatre where she has directed Guys and Dolls, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Private Lives
and founded the Long Wharf's Theatre Studio where she teaches acting. Chicago directing credits include: American Plan; Eloise and Ray (Roadworks Productions),
Old Times (Court Theatre), Romeo and Juliet; MacBeth; Julius Caesar (Chicago Shakespeare Theatre), Pan and Boone (Running with Scissors)
Love's Labour's Lost (Next Theatre), Mineola Twins (American Theatre Co.), Not I (Splinter Theatre's Buckets O'Beckett Festival),
Chekhov in Yalta (Seanechai Theatre), Lapin Lapin (Bailiwick Theatre), and Hellcab (Famous Door).
Kim was Associate Director with Michael Mayer and Tour Director of the National Tour of Angels in America, which originated at the Royal George Theatre.
Kim directed eleven casts in The American Girl Revue; a world premiere musical by Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford which had its New York
premiere in November 2003. Some regional theatre credits: The Tempest for Southwest Repertory, Shirley Valentine with Judy Kaye for Pennsylvania Stage Co.,
Beckett Shorts: Come and Go and Sarita for the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Baby with the Bathwater (winner of 4 Helen Hayes awards) for Roundhouse Theatre
and 42nd Street for Timberlake Playhouse.
A recipient of the TCG/NEA Fellowship in Directing, Kim was also honored with a nomination for TCG's Alan Schneider
Director Award and received an After Dark Award for her production of Pan and Boone. For ten years Kim was a full time member of the theatre/acting
faculty at Northwestern University, and has also taught acting and directing at Wesleyan University, University of Chicago, Act One Studios,
Teatro degli Stracci in Italy, among many others. Kim has also directed and continues to teach for Steppenwolf's Professional School.
PRESTON MAYNARD is vice president, senior community development officer, at the Community Economic Development Fund in New Haven.
He has been active in the community development field for over twenty-five years and has held positions in planning, historic preservation,
real estate, and community lending. Preston served as executive director of the New Haven Preservation Trust from 1982-86 and carried out
neighborhood advocacy, heritage education, and historic preservation projects. He worked in the real estate industry and managed a
thirty five million dollar real estate portfolio for People's Bank. From 1995 to 1999 as vice president at People's, he developed
special loan programs for low-income communities.
Joining the Community Economic Development Fund in 1999, Preston works with communities across the state in planning and
implementing economic development projects. He oversees a grant program that has awarded more than $700,000 over the last six years
for local economic development initiatives. In this capacity, he helps build collaborations with diverse constituencies,
including neighborhood residents, business group owners, municipal officials, and merchant associations.
Preston has served on numerous boards and committees related to affordable housing, neighborhood revitalization, and historic preservation.
He is past president of Mutual Housing Association of South Central Connecticut and serves on the board of Casa Otonal, a non-profit
serving Hispanic elderly. He is a founding board member of the Connecticut Main Street Center. In 2001, he was elected to serve on
the Board of Advisors for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He is also president of the Guilford Preservation Alliance,
a local preservation group. Preston co-edited a major publication, "Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks, the Rise & Fall of an Industrial City,
New Haven, Connecticut" and he also wrote one of the chapters.
Preston holds a bachelor's degree in Environmental Design, master degrees in Historic Preservation and in Social Work, and has been
awarded a certification as an Economic Development Finance Professional by the National Development Council.
BURT SAXON, the Connecticut and New Haven Teacher of the Year in 2004-05, teaches Advanced Placement Psychology and U.S. History in the talented
and gifted program at Hillhouse High School (1980-present). Affiliated with the Yale College Seminar Program since 1976, Dr. Saxon has taught
thirteen seminars on such topics as Urban Education, New Haven's Schools, and Educational Reform in Theory and Practice. He also teaches part-time
at Southern Connecticut State University (1999-present) and the University of New Haven (1998-2003) on subjects ranging from Educational Psychology
and the Dynamics of Educational Change to the History of American Education and Multiculturalism.
Dr. Saxon has numerous publication credits including co-authoring two textbooks, Invitation to Psychology (Scott Foresman, 1980, 1989)
and Modern Human Sexuality (Houghton Mifflin, 1976). Among his academic articles figure: "My Three Career Guardian Angels" (Education Week, April 20, 2005),
"Urban Educational Reform: A Teacher's Perspective" (The Yale Law and Policy Review, Spring 1992), and "Tally's Corner Revisited"
(The Harvard Educational Review, February 1991). The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Dr. Saxon is listed in Who's Who in American Education,
Who's Who Among American Teachers, and Who's Who in the East.
Previously a social studies teacher at Lee High School, Dr. Saxon earned his Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University
in 1977 where he specialized in Family and Community Education. As an undergraduate, he majored in Economics at Carelton College before
pursuing his Master's degree in Teaching with a concentration in History at Wesleyan University. In his leisure time,
Dr. Saxon is a baseball enthusiast and has published several articles about the sport. He expects to retire from the New Haven Public School system
in June 2006, but will continue to teach part-time at several area universities, including Yale and Southern Connecticut State University.
NOAH CHARNEY is nearing the completion of his Ph.D. in the History of Art Theft, at Cambridge University (England). He is trained as an Art Historian,
with a Master's degree from The Courtauld Institute of Art in 17th century Roman art, and a Master of Philosophy degree from Cambridge University
in 16th century Florentine painting.
Mr. Charney's primary interest is in how the study of art theft through history can help inform contemporary law enforcement and museum protection.
To this end he has organized an international conference on this subject, entitled "Art Theft: History, Prevention, Detection, Solution,"
which will take place in Cambridge in June 2006. Speakers include scholars and art detectives from a variety of countries, including heads of the
art squads of the FBI, Scotland Yard, and Interpol. The conference has generated significant interest, and an article will be published this summer
in The New Yorker magazine about him, his subject, and the conference. He has also been interviewed recently for an article on art theft in the
U.K. edition of GQ magazine. He has lectured extensively in a number of countries, and has taught art history in Florence, Italy, and Cambridge, England.
He is also a writer of fiction.
SHERWIN B. NULAND. M.D., FACS, is Clinical Professor of Surgery at the Yale School of Medicine, Fellow of the university's Institution for Social and Policy Studies,
and a member of the Affiliated Faculty in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine. He serves on the executive committee of Yale's Interdisciplinary Center
for Bioethics.
Dr. Nuland is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, New York University (summa cum laude), and the Yale School of Medicine.
After training in surgery at the Yale-New Haven Hospital, he practiced and taught there from 1962 to 1992, when he began to write full time.
He considers the most rewarding work of his career to have been the bedside and operative care of the approximately 10,000 men and women
who became his patients during those three decades.
After contributing to the literature of clinical research, surgery and medical history during the time of his practice, Dr. Nuland wrote
this first book for the general reader, Doctors: The Biography of Medicine (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), a history of medicine.
Since then, he has written for The New Yorker, Time, Life, national Geographic, Discover, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books,
the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Lose Angeles Times, Republic, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, the Journal of the History
of Medicine and Allied Sciences and The American Scholar, for which he wrote a column on medicine entitled "The Uncertain Art," from 1998 to 2003.
He continues to teach bioethics and medical history to undergraduates and medical students, and to serve the university in various capacities.
He has been awarded two honorary degrees: Doctor of Science from the University of Massachusetts and Doctor of Public Service from Cedar Crest College.
In 1994, Dr. Nuland published How We Die, (Alfred A. Knopf), a reflection on the modern way of death, which was on the New York Times best-seller list
for 34 weeks, with more than half a million copies sold in countries throughout the world, having been translated into 21 languages.
It won that year's National Book Award, and was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Price and the Book Critics Circle Award.
Dr.Nuland was a founding member of the Bioethics Committee of the Yale-New Haven Hospital, serving from 1986 to 2000. Growing out of his interests
in history, human biology, ethics and the nature of humanity, he undertook a wide-ranging study of all these preoccupations, resulting in the publication
in 1997 of The Wisdom of the Body (Alfred A. Knopf), available under the title of its paperback, How We Live, in English and 22 European and Asian languages.
Dr. Nuland's next book, The Mysteries Within: A Surgeon Explores Myth, Medicine and the Human Body (Simon and Schuster) describes the many ways
in which superstition and religion have influenced the development of medical thought and our own notions of our bodies. It was a finalist
for the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Award. In the same year, Dr. Nuland published Leonardo da Vinci, a volume in the lipper/Viking Short Biography series.
His The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis appeared in October, 2003 as a volume in the W.W. Norton
Great Discoveries series. His biography of Moses Maimonides was published in October 2005. He has written a memoir,
Lost in America: A Journey with My Father (Alfred A. Knopf), published in January 2003. Each of his books is in multiple foreign translations.
Dr. Nuland is married to Sarah Peterson, a professional actor and director, and has four children ranging in age from 21 to 43.
LANA SCHWEBEL, assistant professor of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School, previously taught at Vassar College,
where she was visiting Assistant Professor of English. Primarily a medievalist, her dissertation explored the ways in which poets
understood the sale of indulgences in fourteenth-century England; she is particularly interested in the use of poetic language
to articulate penitential thought and doctrine. She is currently at work on a book about ghosts and earthly intercession in the later Middle Ages.
Revised February 7, 2006
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