Robert Weibezahl '81 and Jo Grossman, eds.
A Second Helping of Murder: More Diabolically Delicions Recipes
from Contemporary Mystery Writers
Poisoned Pen Press, 2003

The perfect treat for any mystery fan, Robert Weibezahl has co-edited A Second Helping of Murder: More Diabolically Delicious Recipes from Contemporary Mystery Writers, “a cookbook featuring recipes from both today’s mystery writers and the classics of crime.” This innovative creation, a sequel to the successful A Taste of Murder, features over 100 recipes, each contributed by notable mystery writers such as Elizabeth Peters, Don Bruns, Susan Kelly, and Candace Rob. Recipes for appetizers, drinks, soup, bread, breakfast dishes, pasta, seafood, poultry, steak, side dishes, and deserts are cleverly divided into sections with titles such as “The Set-Up,” “A Shot in the Dark,” “A Bunch of Crooks,” “The Quick and the Dead,” “Murder Most Fowl,” “Accomplices,” and “The Proof is in the Pudding.” The collection even includes a centuries-old eggnog recipe from Edgar Allan Poe. Each entry has a message from its creator on the origins of his or her recipe, the recipe itself, and biographical information on the author.

As you may have already surmised, this is not your average cookbook. The editors spiced things up by interspersing excerpts from mystery stories with the recipes. Besides providing the opportunity to try some new dishes, A Second Helping of Murder gives its readers the chance to help others eat well, too. A portion of the book’s royalties will be donated to From the Wholesaler to the Hungry, a Los Angeles-based organization that directs unsold produce from distributors to food banks so that low-income families can have healthy diets. For its clever premise, mouth-watering recipes, and philanthropic angle, this cookbook is ideal for culinary crime-solvers.

-Dinielle Bullen

Marlene Schwartz and her colleagues present a structured, meaningful guide for families coping with a child who has an eating disorder. Schwartz is a psychologist and the co-director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, which researches the roles family and society play in preventing and treating eating disorders. Eating disorders are not only about food, nor are they merely cries for attention or purely mental problems. This book teaches its audience, “People of all shapes and sizes can develop eating disorders.” Common causes of these disorders are the social environment surrounding a patient, traumatic life events, negative influences from family and friends, unhealthy eating habits, self-deprecating thoughts, and a person’s individual biology and personality.

However, the book is more than a laundry list of facts and figures; it is an indispensable guide for people struggling with these issues. It turns scientific research on anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating into comprehensible chapters with topics such as understanding eating disorders, finding help, and what you can do as a family. These and other sections of the book include frequently asked questions to help debunk myths about eating disorders, case studies of eating disorder survivors (which give the book a personal edge), and activities for the family geared toward recovery. One of the main messages of Helping Your Child Overcome an Eating Disorder is the importance of parental involvement in treatment and recovery. Although the authors rightfully acknowledge, “Eating disorders have very real psychological and physical consequences,” they also emphasize, “recovery and health are possible.”

-Dinielle Bullen

I did not know Oscar Goodman well in college, but he was one of those “other-classmen” who had a “presence” on campus. The remarks made about him in the 1961 Record give a few clues as to Oscar’s future, describing his as a “sparkplug on the bench,” and his campaign for Student Council Treasurer as “promising.”

In reviewing John L. Smith’s book, Of Rats and Men, I will begin at the end. The last part of the book describes Oscar’s first term as mayor (now serving his second) of the fastest growing city in the United States, Las Vegas.

Since I retired from the Navy in 1998, I have been serving as executive director of a federal medical association headquartered in Bethesda, Md. In the year 2000, our association held its annual convention in Las Vegas, and I invited Oscar, as mayor, to offer a few welcoming remarks at the opening plenary session. He graciously accepted and delivered a delightful address that clearly illustrated his love of his job and the city. At the conclusion of his remarks I fully expected that about one half of the audience would rush out to a real-estate office and forget the meeting. He was that persuasive.

That experience ties in well with the author’s description of Oscar’s first term as mayor, always charming, enthusiastic, passionate about his responsibilities, particularly savvy, and knowing what levers to pull to get things done. In another interview I remember reading elsewhere, Oscar is quoted as saying, and I paraphrase, that his effectiveness is partly related to knowing where the bodies are buried. (Joking, I’m sure.)

It makes for good, interesting reading, and brings to mind the phrase, the right man for the right time, or as the author put it, “And who better to represent an old mob city than an old mob lawyer.”

I think that when a retrospective look is taken of Oscar’s time as mayor, the reviews will be largely admiring and complimentary, but perhaps tempered occasionally by a backward glance to Oscar’s former life.

That former life occupies the first two-thirds of the book and I found that part less satisfying. The text consists of a very detailed look at the subject’s involvement with a very unusual, shady, albeit undoubtedly colorful cast of characters, (read members of the mob). Although I must admit to a certain fascination reading about this underbelly of society, I am reassured knowing that many of those mentioned have passed from the scene, one way or another, and that mob influence in our society has waned. What is most disturbing is the conjecture in what the author writes, (and apparently also raised by representatives of law enforcement), concerning the extent of Oscar’s involvement with his clients. What was the true nature of the relationship, i.e., what did Oscar really know and when did he know it? Nevertheless, Oscar emerged from his mob lawyer days unscathed and very much alive.

He was, without doubt, a great mob attorney (mouthpiece), better at motions than at trial according to his biographer, and fiercely committed to the principle that everyone deserves the best defense possible, no matter how unsavory the defendant or the case. In addition on several occasions the author alludes to Oscar’s perception (often verbalized) of undue harassment and pursuit of his clients by legal arms of the federal government, but perhaps this was just a part of good lawyerly tactics.

All in all, Oscar comes across as an extremely likeable and charismatic fellow, steadfastly loyal to his clients and hugely successful on their behalf. His second career as mayor of Las Vegas also seems to be going very well. While a mob lawyer he exhibited more than a passing interest in money and the good life, and now as mayor he seems to be repaying the city he loves so dearly by many positive accomplishments.

The readers will judge for themselves. John Smith’s book is an altogether fascinating look at this unique individual and his times, which, of course, continue. In addition to the questions already posed above about Oscar, one more comes to mind. What would Oscar be like on the state or national political scene?

-Frederic G. Sanford, M.D. '62

“How can America, the world’s oldest continuous democracy, reconcile desire for unity with vast diversity?” ask anthropologists Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman in their “groundbreaking” new book, Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power and Public Life in America. Checker, a professor at the University of Memphis, and Fishman, a doctoral candidate at New York University, collected a series of case studies examining grass roots cultural activism into an engaging volume. According to the authors, cultural activism is “public efforts to reconfigure aspects of society people perceive as oppressive.” This style of activism is uniquely American. Among the 10 chapters in Local Actions are portraits of a Georgia community saving its neighborhood from toxic contamination; Native-Americans using their casinos to change popular perception about their culture; and New York artists using their work to improve the city’s education system.

This book is written using the technique of ethnography. In ethnographic studies, researchers live and work alongside their subjects, watch their projects unfold, and become personally involved in the various causes. Checker, Fishman, and the other contributors examine issues such as how activists make connections, and how they form agendas. The authors expertly detail the positive effect activism has not only on individual communities, but also on the entire nation. They conclude that Americans form collectives not to isolate themselves, but to be better heard within the context of mainstream society. By reading these studies, audiences will gain a better understanding of how social changes are made.

-Danielle Bullen

Richard Lederer has already given us so much pleasure as a “verbivore” — his favorite word for himself — that any new book of his is likely to be received with smiles and a ready sense of relish. A Man of My Words: Reflections on the English Language will not disappoint those familiar with Lederer’s encyclopedic knowledge of English, or those who love to frolic in the fields of language generally. An inveterate punster (puns comprise one of the main themes of this book), Lederer can’t even make it to the end of his title without punning. A Man of My Words suggests his willingness to stand by what he says — he’s “a man of his word” — and equally conveys his continual astonishment at what English is capable of. “My word!” he seems to utter at almost every turn.

It’s hard, when an author is as prolific as Lederer is, to decide whether a new book should be regarded as an installment in an ever-growing oeuvre, or judged on its merits as a free-standing work. My bias as a reviewer inclines me toward the latter; after all, this book is packaged, discretely, between two covers (white ones, not brown ones, as far as the dust jacket goes), and bears its own price tag. Besides, the inner flap describes it as a “career-capping” work, so it seems fair to take it as something of a summation.

Most of the essays in this volume are short. A number have appeared in other venues, which suggests, as does the overlap among a number of chapters, that the book is an assemblage, a gathering-together of pieces in some ways only loosely related. Such an organization has both drawbacks and advantages. Very much on the plus side, the reader is treated to eye-opening observations on a broad range of facts, phenomena, and curiosities pertaining to the English language. I especially welcome the brief chapter, “Etymological Snapshots,” and the section titled “The Glamour of Grammar,” which sensibly steers a middle course between affirming the importance of grammatical correctness and acknowledging that language “breathes” by growing and mutating.

Lederer opens the book by celebrating the extraordinary robustness of English — the most voluminous of all languages in its number of words (616,500, almost four times the number of its nearest competitor, German); the most democratically welcoming to words from other tongues, Yiddish among them; and (as Lederer argues through a bombardment of statistics) the world’s most pervasively influential language in today’s world. The next mission he undertakes is to declare linguistic independence on behalf of the American idiom. In back-to-back chapters, he cites the confounding differences between “Britspeak” and English as it is spoken in this country, and flexes the right of the U.S. to enjoy its own natural way of speaking. The second section of the book, “This American Language,” is chock-full of intriguing data. Here, we learn how prescient — and assertive — early leaders like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were in declaring America’s right to, and need for, a distinctive form of speech that reflected its astonishing variety and growth. We also learn, here, impressive things about the contributions Native Americans have made to our speech; about the multiplicity of dialects that thrive in the U.S. (Southerners must forgive a hilarious list of pronunciations current in their precincts); about slang, circus speech, the history of OK, the tendency of certain politicians to butcher the word “nuclear,” and about the versatile if excessive use of “like” among younger Americans.

The next, fairly short section, “Getting the Word Out” (also a pun), is something of a grab-bag essentially focused on Lederer’s life as a public figure — writer, lecturer, radio personality. The brief essay, “How I Write,” is the most satisfying of these entries. It reminds us of the peculiar shifts some writers have resorted to to get their juices flowing — Schiller, for example, breathing the fumes of rotten apples — at the same time that it alerts us to the hard truth that every serious writer wins through to: whatever one’s aptitude, a ferocious work ethic is the key to success.

The ensuing section of the book considers such curiosities as the often-conflicting “wisdom” found in proverbial phrases; words rigidly paired with another word or words (“gone haywire,” “slim pickings,” “from time immemorial”), and words large and small. In his treatment of this last topic, Lederer errs, I believe, in citing unionized (the presence of labor unions) and unionized (not ionized) as the longest heteronyms in English — two words spelled the same but pronounced differently. Surely he has overlooked consummate (the verb, to “fulfill,” “to bring to fruition”) and consummate (the adjective, rightly pronounced “con-SUM-it,” meaning “masterful,” “outstanding”) — one letter longer than the nine-lettered unionized.

This, of course, is a minor cavil. If I were to fault this volume on more substantive grounds, I would cite, among other things, the large number of unadorned lists it contains; and I might observe a certain imbalance in the subjects that it treats. Too much space — at least to my taste — is devoted to puns here. That punning is fun, I do not deny; nor do I doubt that punning constitutes good mental exercise, as Lederer claims. Still. It was Derrida, I believe, who said, “I must pun as I must sneeze,” and I would answer, “Well and good! But who really wants to listen to a bout of sustained sneezing?” Carried to excess, punning — like all forms of hyperconsciousness of language — risks being tiresome, a kind of mental horseplay. The sheer unmindfulness of our language as we use it in our daily lives is what gives it its “transparency,” and aptly makes it the vehicle of our going about our business.

This is not at all to suggest that vagueness and ambiguity should be given free rein. Verbal precision is hard-won — and precious. Indeed, in a fine essay titled “Real-life Linguistics,” Lederer demonstrates what a heavy price the lack of exactness can carry in practical terms.

I could wish, though, for more such reflective essays in this collection, especially if we are to see it as a “career-capping” work. Notably absent from A Man of My Words is any discussion whatever, say, of vulgarity and profanity. Equally absent are such serious current issues as hurtful speech and the language of rage and hatred. Clearly, Lederer wants to keep this book light-hearted and upbeat. I grant that to freight it with such somber and controversial topics as these would be to alter its character. Yet their absence gives the volume a rather sanitized quality, at least for this reader. I would like to hear Lederer speak on profanity and vulgarity; for better or for worse, Americans writing about war, from James Jones to Norman Mailer to Tobias Wolff and others, have recognized foul language as one of the coins of our realm. “Like” is the least potent of the four-letter words that bedevil American speech and our culture in general. In a country where aggression is ingrained in the national character, and where anger is the least heralded of all of our addictions, one would like to hear — again, in a career-capping book — what an authentic master of language has to say about such matters.

But enough criticizing. On balance, A Man of My Words: Reflections on the English Language is a welcome and joyful book. Lederer’s love for his subject shines through in every paragraph, and his own writing is a model of exuberance and lucidity. His penultimate section, “’ . . . And Gladly Teach," celebrates the relish he takes in opening people's minds not only to the wonders of English and the broader mysteries of language, but also to all modes of modern communitycation- flim, TS, radio, cyberspace, in its several forms.

Here's hoping that Richard Ledere has other caps on his hat rack he'll deign to wear for us in the future!

-Dinielle Bullen

As Charles D. Cohen skillfully demonstrates in this unique book, “a good cartoon will leave an indelible memory upon a reader far more effectively than many pages of text.” Through vignettes and a multitude of illustrations, Cohen traces the career of Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel) from his childhood in Springfield, Mass., to his work in advertising, to his prolific output of children’s literature. This book’s visual biography style is ideal for portraying the life and work of its subject. Cohen weaves accounts of Ted Geisel’s life in with pictorial creations of his famous alter ego, creating a comprehensive study.

Even in Geisel’s early work for his high school newspaper and the Dartmouth College literary magazine, his zany style and sense of humor were evident. From the beginning, according to Cohen, his creations embodied a “youth’s enjoyment of poking fun, a fondness for sophomoric word play and. . .images of the animal that would later become inextricably linked to his... alter ego: the cat.” Yet his early cartoons were not designed solely for a children’s audience. Geisel was a skilled satirist, lampooning Prohibition during his college years, and later American isolationism and Nazi Germany.
Dr. Seuss, named after Geisel’s mother’s maiden name, grew to popularity when he used the pseudonym in his advertising work. For years, he created print ads and direct mail campaigns, most famously for Flit bug spray. His catchphrase, “Quick, Henry, The Flit,” along with the imaginary creatures he designed for the ads, made his work recognizable to thousands of Americans. His diverse career also included military service during World War II producing training and propaganda films, creating early television commercials for Ford, and working on the musical The 500 Fingers of Dr. T, a movie based on one of his books.

Yet to generations of children, Geisel is best known for his imaginative picture books. The first, And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street, was published in 1937. It was in the 1950’s, however, that Dr. Seuss’s reputation as a children’s author was solidified. He was a “pioneer in the fight for equality,” says Cohen, teaching children “a person’s a person no matter how small,” in 1954’s Horton Hears a Who! Arguably his two most famous characters, the Cat in the Hat and the Grinch, both debuted in 1957. His most successful book, Green Eggs and Ham, has sold over eight million copies. Geisel continued writing until 1990, when he published his final book, Oh the Places You’ll Go.

According to Cohen, “Ted’s books succeed because he believed children's abilities and their imaginations exceed adult's expectations."

-Dinielle Bullen

Edited by Alison Anderson and Jack Coleman
The Intrepid Quaker: One Man's Quest for Peace. Memoirs, Speeches and Writings of Stephen G. Cary
Pendle Hill Publications, 2004

No person deserves the adjective “intrepid” more than Stephen G. Cary. He was only in his 20s when he ventured into the devastation of post-World War II Europe to feed the hungry, rebuild roads and houses, and give hope to war-torn families and communities. His youthful exuberance was tempered by experience into a lifelong resolve to do peacework and service to humanity. This book is a rare gift — an inner autobiography — which, in addition to describing the historical times in which he lived, details the inner workings of a principled life.

The book is divided into four parts. The first three parts, comprising the bulk of the book, are memoirs organized more or less chronologically and thematically. Part One: Roots opens with the twinkling observation that “By the time I was four years old, I could make life miserable in the Cary household.” (p.3) Steve goes on to describe his early family life, including everything from hilarious anecdotes about his years at Germantown Friends School and Haverford College, and not omitting his exceptional predilection for adventures and pranks, to the more serious foundations of his Quaker upbringing. Replete with photos, this section sets the context for his later leadings to a life of service.

Chapter Two poses the recurring theme of the book when Steve asks himself “Principle; keeping life consistent with profession - these were what mattered to [my father]. Did they matter to me?” (p.14). More specifically, pressure from the world events of the late 1930s caused Steve to question and debate about “things that mattered: faith, integrity, duty, morality, conscience. How can pacifism be reconciled with Hitler? Christ with war? Citizenship with refusal to serve?” (p. 15). We glimpse, with rare inward directness and honesty, how Steve’s personal convictions were formed. Not only did he want to live a life of service, but he had to – something in him mandated it.

The task was not easy. Chapter Three chronicles Steve’s decision to become a Conscientious Objector to the draft for World War II, which led to four years of hard labor in Civilian Public Service digging holes, clearing brush, fighting fires, and often living in primitive conditions with an eclectic assortment of other COs. Typically, these experiences only served to temper his convictions, hone his leadership style, and train him for the subsequent reconstruction work in Europe.

Chapter Four provides some of the most poignant material in the book. As European Relief Commissioner for the American Friends Service Committee, it was Steve’s responsibility to organize food, housing, community networks; in short, any assistance he could muster to begin relieving the overwhelming human suffering that was so widespread in France, Italy, Austria, Poland, Finland, and Norway, as well as Germany. Through numerous stories and anecdotes, such as the all-night trek up a mountain on foot to a village in the Abruzzi region of Italy, a train ride from Warsaw to Gdansk on “seemingly square wheels,” and a caravan of 10 supply vehicles moving across Europe which had 30 flat tires in one day, he witnesses to the devastation of war, as well as to the soaring human potential for care. The stories come alive with his own particular brand of humor: “I learned to exploit a modest talent to lighten an evening with tales of some of my adventures, drawing on an ever-expanding repertoire based on dumb behavior.” (p. 49) Yet, in typical Quaker style, each story ends with a reflection or a moral, something to be learned about human nature under adversity.

The next six chapters, Part Two: The American Friends Service Committee, record for posterity Steve’s unique perspective on the work of the AFSC in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America. Over a period of more than 50 years Steve was variously involved in this global peacework, offering material aid and comfort to refugees and war victims, assisting immigrants, working for fair treatment of prisoners, civil rights, and the campaign against capital punishment, and protesting against the war in Vietnam. These chapters educate the reader about the methods and convictions of civil disobedience and peacework. They are in no way starry-eyed or sugar-coated; rather, Steve is unambiguously clear about the consequences that must be risked.

Together with his wife, Elizabeth Summers Cary, Steve also felt a calling to educate young people in non-violence and peaceful resolution of conflict. Thus in Part III: Haverford College 1955-1981, the focus of the book shifts from global to local, from the AFSC to Steve’s years on the Board of Managers, as Vice President for Development, and culminating in his year (1977-1978) as acting President. He describes the inner workings of the College as it grappled with admitting women, increasing multiculturalism, establishing policies about research funding from the federal government, and renewal of the long-standing cooperation with Bryn Mawr College. With strong emotion, he writes “The year as Haverford’s acting President may have been my happiest.” (p. 197).

In Part Four: Reflections and Conclusion Steve synthesizes and summarizes what he has learned from the adventures of his life. He repeatedly claims that the inspiration and touchstone for his callings was the life of Jesus — a life devoted to peace. Thus, what emerges from these memoirs is the story of how one man strove to express this conviction in the circumstances of his time in history. “The crisis of our time is not the clash of ideologies or the aggression of rogue states,” writes Steve, “but the illness of the human spirit.” He goes on to say “…we can cure our own spirits and that is the stuff of peacemaking.” (p. 227).

The final section, titled Selected Speeches and Writings, covers everything from Steve’s views on pacifism, civil disobedience, Quaker testimonies, values in education, community, and self-examination to his response to Sept. 11th. Cumulatively, these writings provide a rich and powerful resource, deserving of our frequent re-reading and deep discussion.

Readers will delight in this collection of memories, speeches, and writings full of Steve’s own particular mix of Quakerly reflection, wit, and wonder at both the dark and light capacities of human nature. Each time you open this book you will hear his voice telling his stories. What a pleasure to find them written down for reference, reflection, and the pure enjoyment of Steve's perspectives and insights on his own life. In this book we find testimony to the life of a man who strove to live a principled life, a life of which it could be said "A little love goes a long way." (p.130)

-Louise M. Tritton
(Resident of I College Circle and member of Haverford Friends Meeting)

If the Olympics this summer in Athens included a literary festival, odds-on favorite to win the olive branch in history would have been Haverford’s own Alexander Kitroeff, associate professor of history. Kitroeff’s Wrestling with the Ancients: Modern Greek History and the Olympics will surely become the standard work linking Greece’s classical past (and modern construction of that past) with today’s Olympic Games and their place in Greek history and culture. Kitroeff wrapped up years of research in Greece and elsewhere just in time to prepare those traveling to Athens or watching the Games on TV this summer to understand the deeper meaning of what they will see and hear.

Wrestling with the Ancients will allow its audience to appreciate what this writer has been lucky enough to experience during three semesters of co-teaching a sports history course with Alex: his unusual ability to explicate complex historical phenomena while tracing particular and often-conflicting influences over centuries.

Kitroeff rapidly familiarizes his readers with the tensions between Greece’s attempt to incorporate its past glories with becoming a modern industrial nation, between the country’s desire to be the permanent home of the Olympic Games with its hopes to see its role in originating the Olympics recognized on an ever-expanding world stage, and between presenting its Olympic ideals faithfully and allowing other nations to incorporate them into Olympic presentations. One of the most fascinating sections in the book is Kitroeff’s discussion of how Hitler and his Nazis “Hellenized” the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to an ambivalent emotions in Greece itself.

While the book has all the scholarly integrity and apparatus anyone could ask, Kitroeff also does some exciting sportswriting. You won’t be able to avoid being caught up in the excitement of the crowd at the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896 as the Greek flag goes up when the leader in the final event, the marathon, Greece’s own Spyros Loues, enters the stadium well ahead of the field and inspires Crown Prince Constantine and his brother to jump out on the track and accompany him to the finish.

You’ll also share in the depression palpable among Greek representatives in Tokyo, in 1990 when the centennial Olympics was awarded not to its 1896 starting place but to what Europeans considered a “soulless” southern American city. “Coca-Cola defeats the Parthenon,” as Greek newspapers wrote, but Kitroeff does not spare the politicians and organizers of his native country in analyzing why Athens lost out to Atlanta.

Kitroeff weaves together disparate strands of the Olympic quilt, showing how the success of Greek athletes themselves influenced the maneuvering to bring the Games back to Athens. He offers a primer in modern Greek politics, economics, and culture while presenting Olympic titans Baron Pierre de Coubertin, Avery Brundage, Juan Antonio Samaranch, Lord Killanin, and current International Olympic Committee head Jacques Rogge of Belgium.

While well-known Greek figures such as Constantine Caramanlis, Andreas and George Papandreou and Melina Mercouri play bit or leading parts, the heroine of Athens’ successful bid for 2004 turns out to be Gianna Angelopoulou-Daskalake, president of the bid committee and probably the person who will receive the credit or blame when Kitroeff and future historians analyze the 2004 Athens Games.

Kitroeff also skillfully introduces the tantalizing historical mystery of whether today’s Greeks are the actual descendants of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle or simply the adapters of their achievements and tradition.

In this clearly written, impeccably researched volume, Alex Kitroeff sets the events to come this summer squarely within the ironies, paradoxes, and personalities of ancient and modern Hellas. If anyone can bring history to life in the context of events of today, it's Alex. The Greeks have a word for his achievement: aristos - the best!

-Greg Kennerstein '63
Associate Dean of the College and Director of Athletics