Literary Arts
Believer: David Axelrod’s
Improbable Journey
INTRODUCTION: 1:44 min. Introduction to David Axelrod. Music: Jahzzar, Solitude. David Axelrod (b. 1955) was born and raised in New York City, graduated from the University of Chicago, was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, became a political operative and TV analyst, wrote a wonderful New York Times bestselling memoir titled, “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics,” and along the way became a rabid Chicago Cubs fan (2016 is a good year for that). Of course, Axelrod is best known as the chief strategist for Barack...
read moreA Prophet in Our Own Land: A Personal Reminiscence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy”. – Martin Luther King Jr. The day Martin Luther King Jr. died–April 4, 1968–my father was cradling his right hand with his left. Somehow, he’d injured his thumb. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Shot!” He shook his head. “Assassinated! Just like that.” He was weeping, turning his...
read moreSouth Beach on the Cusp
[Editor’s Note: David Dunlap (b.1952) has been with the New York Times since 1975, and his current beat is writing and photographing architecture. I first met David because he was in the midst of an ambitious project—to photograph every single dwelling in Provincetown, Massachusetts (the artist colony at the very tip of Cape Cod), and write about the most interesting people who had ever lived in each house (see www.buildingprovincetown.com). David used some of my portraits of Provincetown artists and writers (i.e. Pulitzer Prize...
read moreThe Big Kahuna: A Video Chat with Pulitzer Prize Recipient William Finnegan
INTRODUCTION: 2:10 min. Introduction to William Finnegan. Surfing video by Leo Zuckerman. In April, 2016 William Finnegan was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. For the rest of Bill’s life, whenever he is introduced or his name appears in print, he will be known as “Pulitzer Prize recipient William Finnegan.” Finnegan has been a surfer since growing up in California and Hawaii. He was also an enthusiastic writer and reader from an early age. He became a New Yorker magazine staff...
read moreA Video Conversation with Gail Sheehy – Author & Journalist
INTRODUCTION TO GAIL SHEEHY: 1:24 min. Introduction to Gail Sheehy Gail Sheehy (b.1937) is an iconic author, journalist, and lecturer. Sheehy is the author of seventeen books, including Passages (1976), named by the Library of Congress as one of the ten most influential books of our times. She has written biographies and character studies of major twentieth-century leaders, including Hillary Clinton, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Soviet...
read moreFrom the Desert to the Sea: A Video Conversation with Mark Doty – Poet, Essayist, Memoirist
INTRODUCTION: 2:45 min. Introduction to Mark Doty Mark Doty (b. 1953) is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. He received the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. Doty is the author of nine books of poetry and four books of prose. In 2015, W.W. Norton published Deep Lane, “which the publisher calls a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life.” His volumes of poetry include Sweet Machine (HarperCollins, 1998), Source, (HarperCollins, 2002), School of the Arts...
read moreVideo Chat: Richard Blanco – Poet, Author, Civil Engineer
Selected by President Barack Obama as the fifth inaugural poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco joined the ranks of such luminary poets as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou. The youngest, first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role, he read his inaugural poem, One Today, at the official ceremony. Blanco was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States—meaning that his mother, seven months pregnant, and the rest of the family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid, where he was born. Only forty-five...
read moreStephen Kinzer:
Our Man in Istanbul, Berlin, and Nicaragua
Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than fifty countries on five continents. Stephen worked at the New York Times for more than twenty years, serving as bureau chief in Turkey, Germany, and Nicaragua. He previously worked as Administrative Assistant to Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, and then as Latin America correspondent for the Boston Globe. Stephen has written nine books on foreign affairs. The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire...
read moreFrom Mau Mau to Raven
Picture the 2001 State of Georgia Women’s Intersport Female Athlete of the Year. She’s a 5’9” four-sport athlete with brilliant blue eyes, long straight blond hair, and a disposition like a bright sunny day. Now imagine that Laura Lee Huttenbach, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia, is trekking alone through Kenya in 2006. In the remote Meru district, Laura Lee chances to meet Japhlet Thambu, an 85-year-old tea farmer also known as “The General,” because he was a leader of the Mau Mau Revolution. They bond like...
read moreThe Writer’s Room
It should come as no surprise that hotels have long been incubators of poetry and the arts. For 700 years, readers have been feasting on Chaucer’s tales of pilgrims sauntering to Canterbury from the Tabard Inn in Southwark. More recently, booklovers have been charmed by the exploits of Eloise at the Plaza and of Hemingway in the Ritz. Who doesn’t get giddy thinking about the Round Table of New York wits at the Algonquin or the bohemians at the Chelsea? And then there’s Eugene O’Neill’s famous last words from his death bed in a Sheraton...
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