Arthur Fergenson is keeping us both connected as a Class, and busy:

 

"Please put these dates on your calendar for Casual Conversations.  These dates are subject to change, and new guests are likely to be added.  As always, the goal is to bring classmates together for an interesting and sometimes challenging discussion.  The range of topics is intentionally broad, from history to science to the performing and fine arts and beyond.  We have hosted discussions with two quantum physicists, both women, and an optics professor whose specialty in invisibility requires a grounding in quantum theory, and, who knows, there may be more.  I am looking to obtain a cosmologist for a future discussion.  The two I have in mind are both women.

 

As of today, here are the names, dates and times.  All times are Eastern (US).  DO NOT EMAIL ME NOW WITH YOUR RSVP TO ANY OF THESE.  WAIT UNTIL THE ANNOUNCMENTS COME OUT.  IF YOU EMAIL ME WITH AN RSVP NOW, I WILL BOTH IGNORE YOU AND BE ANNOYED.

 

  1. Sunday, January 21 at 3 pm.  Johns Hopkins Professor William Egginton will speak with us about his new and widely praised book The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Pantheon 2023).  Egginton is the director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.   The WSJ review brought this book to my attention.   (Please let me know if you wish me to send you a copy of the review; as a subscriber, I have the right to do so).
  2. Monday, February 19 at 5 pm.  UNC Professor Emeritus Christopher R. Browning will join us courtesy of classmate Bruce Alpert, Chair of the Jewish Culture Group.  Professor Browning is author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (HarperCollins, 1992).
  3. Wednesday, March 6 March 13 at 5 pm.  Dan Elitzer, son of classmate Chip Elitzer, will speak with us about cryptocurrency.   It behooves us all to understand what it is and what the future holds for this alternative, non-State means of payment.  Perhaps Class Treasurer Rick Willets will adapt his procedures to accommodate crypto transactions.
  4. Sunday, March 17 at 3 pm.  Protecting the Estate of Eric Arthur Blair (who wrote under the name of George Orwell) from intellectual property thieves was the responsibility of attorney and classmate Bill Coulson, who spoke with us before about his involvement in Chicago’s public transit system.  Literary life after death.  Find out the stories behind the stories.  Apparently, Blair’s works are out of copyright in the UK but not in the US.  Complicated?  You bet, but that is why we have lawyers.
  5. Sunday, April 14 at 3 pm.  Eric Forsythe, classmate and Professor Emeritus at Iowa, has spent a career teaching theater as well as acting and directing across the country and internationally, and writing and translating plays. He has promised to regale us with stories about his life in the theater, as well as about his father’s career.  Henderson Forsythe was the actor who, with Alan Schneider as his director, did more than any others in the performing arts to advance the appreciation of Samuel Beckett in this country.
  6. Sunday, April 21 at 3 pm.  Professor Edward Slingerland, Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth and teaching half-time starting in 2006.  His book is Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (Little, Brown Spark 2021).   I bought his book in Stratford ON, Canada, and find it informative and delightful.  How did alcohol survive Darwinian evolutionary development? Tex Talmadge stated that he “really enjoy[s] your scholarship.”
  7. Sunday, April 28 at 3 pm.  Classmate Paul Pillar, at the suggestion of Bill Stableford, will speak with us about an intelligence officer's view of U.S. foreign policy, which would include some look back at some of his experiences as a public official, probably with a war story or two, before drawing implications from what he has learned from that experience for the making of U.S. foreign policy,
  8. Sunday, May 19 at 3 pm.  For the final Casual Conversation before our 55th Reunion, we will be speaking about hospice care with two guests: L. Scott Sussman, M.D., Physician Executive Director, Office of Chief Medical Officer, Yale New Haven Hospital; and Debbie Dye, R.N., who has worked for ten years at St. Bernards, Flo and Phil Jones Hospice House, Jonesboro, Arkansas.  Nurse Dye comes to us courtesy of classmate Bruce Alpert, M.D.  She was the nurse who helped Bruce with his Cardiology outreach clinic in AR, and she is a professional pilot in her spare time. Dr. Sussman is my wife Shirley’s son, did his residency in internal medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and specializes in hospice & palliative care medicine.   Dr. Sussman recommends the following book as reading for the discussion:  The In-Between: Unforgettable encounters during life’s final moments by Hadley Vlahos, R.N. (Penguin Random House 2023).

 

THERE WILL BE NO CASUAL CONVERSATIONS IN JUNE.  IF YOU WANT TO BE WITH CLASSMATES, AND YOU SHOULD, YOU CAN SEE THEM IN PERSON AT OUR 55th REUNION FROM JUNE 10 to 12 (with early check-out on the 13th), IN HANOVER NH (if you are able to travel).

 

  1. Professor Mary Fulbrook, Professor of German History, University College London on Sunday, July 14 at 1 pm Eastern Time.  She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University.  Professor Fulbrook is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Memorial Foundation for the former concentration camps of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora; the Academic Advisory Board of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation; the Editorial Board of Yad Vashem Studies; and the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Among her many writings are: Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford University Poress (20128); and Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press 2023).  She was the first female Chair of the German History Society.  I will spend my June reading those books, and their total of @1,000 pages. "
  2. Sunday, August 11 at 3 pm Eastern:  Dena Rueb Romero, widow of Dartmouth ’69 classmate Oscar Romero, who wrote All for You: A World War II Family Memoir of Love, Separation, and Loss (She Writes Press 2024).  “A poignant family memoir set against the tumultuous background of World War II and the Holocaust.  In btracing the struggled of her parents to escape Nazi Germany and build a new life in America, Dena Rueb Romero explores the agonizing choices and traumas familiar ro generations of political refugees the world over.”  Michael Dobbs, author of The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between.”  From Dena: “It is about my parents, refugees from Nazi Germany, who came to Hanover and ran the Camera Shop of Hanover on Main Street” until her father’s death in 1980 and her mother’s retirement in 1986.

  3. Sunday, August 18 at 3 pm Eastern: Cecily N. Zander, Assistant Professor of History at Texas Women’s University, is the author author of The Army Under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era (Louisiana State University Press 2024).  “Cecily N. Zander’s book is a revelation.  Countering the notion that the U.S. Army was the celebrated agent of nineteenth-century American frontier expansion, Zander shows that, in fact, the ascendant Republican Party looked suspiciously upon the nation’s military.”  Andrew R. Graybill, author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West.  Classmate Tax Talmadge is responsible for identifying and securing the participation of Professor Zander.

  4. Sunday, August 25 at 3 pm Eastern:  Christopher (“Chris) A. Hart, former Chair, National Transportation Safety Board, under President Obama.  Chris comes to us courtesy of his friend and our Dartmouth ’69 classmate Jay (“Yogi”) Glaser.  Yogi writes: Think of any major transportation disaster of the past 40 years, and Christopher A. Hart has been involved in dissecting the causes -- human and mechanical — and making recommendations for preventing recurrences. From self-driving test cars, 737 MAX airliners, train derailments to ditching in the Hudson, Hart can give you the inside story. From 2009 until 2018 Hart was Chairman, Vice Chairman, and a Member of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), having been nominated by Barack Obama. Have you noticed how relaxed you are as your airplane is taxiing for takeoff, and how anxious you are as you are being wheeled in for surgery? Maybe you know that your chances of dying in a plane crash are miniscule and in surgery are substantial. Hart will talk about this discrepancy, using his expertise in transportation disaster analysis. He has recently joined the board of the Joint Commission that accredits hospitals, chosen to bring the successes of airline safety to health care. Chris developed a love for flying planes as a teenager and is a pilot with a commercial rating. He got his BS (1969) and MS in aeronautical engineering at Princeton before attending Harvard Law. He is a Denver grade school friend of Jay (Yogi) Glaser who has recommended him for a Casual Conversation. 

  5. Sunday, September 15 at 3 pm Eastern:  Foster Hirsch, Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, and board member of the Film Noir Foundation, is author ofHollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher—Television (Knopf 2023).  I ordered Foster’s book immediately after I read a laudatory review of it, and before I met him at The Brattle Theater in Boston for a satellite Noir City celebration of film noir.  He captivated his audience with his insights into US and Argentinian noir as we watched rare gems from both countries.   At a break between two of the films, I asked him if he would speak with us about his new book (he has written 16, including one about Dartmouth graduate Joseph Losey), and he immediately agreed.  I will let his book speak for itself:  Consider thuis: during the dense tangle of ends and beginnings, of farewells and introductions, that defines the history of genre filmmaking in the postwar era, there was at least one definitive entry in each category:  Here are my Best Genre Picture nominations:  Best Classic-Era Noir, “Sudden Fear.”  Best Original Musical: “Singin’ in the Rain.”  Best Ancient-World Epic: “Ben-Hur.”  Best Melodrama: “Imitation of Life.”  Best Western: “High Noon.”  Best War Film: “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”  Best Comedy: “Some Like it Hot.”  Best Science Fiction: “The Incredible Shrinking Man.”  Best Animated Feature, “Sleeping Beauty.”  Best Documentary: “On the Bowery.”  We lived through the fifties, and started our movie-watching lives then.  Come and discover new ways to see what you think you know from your hours glued to the Big Screen and the Small Screen.

  6. Monday, September 30 at 5 pm Eastern:  William (“Will”) Masters, Professor at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science band Policy with a secondary appointment in the Department of Economics.  He is Fellow of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA), International Fellow of the African Association of Agricultural Economics, and a former editor of Agricultural Economics.  Will is the stepson of Dartmouth ’69 classmate Phil Bush, and the c o0-author of the Open Access textbook, Food Economics: Agriculture, Nutrition, and Health (Palgrave Macmillan 2024).  Will co-writes:  If you are interested in food and curious about economics, this book is for you.  Our approach starts by recognizing your expertise: every reader comes to this book with a lifetime of eating, making choices and thinking about food.  Your intimate familiarity with food gives you a head start on our topic, ready to use the language and toolkit of economics for dialogue with others about the causes and consequences of everyone’s daily meals and snacks.  Plan to cozy up to your favorite nosh and join Will to find out more about it, and about you.  No prior training required in economics and no prior knowledge called-for of agriculture.  And the book is FREE!

  7. Wednesday, October 9 at 5 pm Eastern: Brian Maracle, Dartmouth ’69, courtesy of the good offices of classmate Ron Tally, will be our guest to speak with us about his work in Canada preserving the Mohawk language and culture.  Brian was the subject of a New York Times profile on April 22, 2023, titled Unlocking the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of a Dying Language: A member of Canada’s Mohawk community devised a new method to teach an Indigenous language on the brink of extinction.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/world/canada/indigenous-languages-mohawk-canada.html?searchResultPosition=1 .  As theTimes reports:

“. . . Mr. Maracle has become a champion of Mohawk, and is helping revive it and other Indigenous languages, both in Canada and elsewhere, through his transformation of teaching methods.

“‘I never studied linguistics, don’t have any teacher training, my parents weren’t speakers,’ he said in his office at an adult language school he founded about two decades ago in his community, the Six Nations of the Grand River territory, southwest of Toronto. Yet, linguistics academic conferences now feature him as a speaker.”

  1. Monday, October 14 at 5 pm Eastern: Thomas H. Luxon, Dartmouth Professor of English, Emeritus and Cheheyl Professor and Inaugural Director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning.  In his faculty directory entry, he writes: “In teaching and scholarship, I have focused on literature of the English Renaissance and Reformation, with a particular interest in John Milton, John Bunyan, John Dryden, and 17th-century English religion and politics. I am keenly interested in technological innovations for teaching and learning.”  He is listed as teaching John Milton (whose Paradise Lost was one of the three works most of us read in freshman English) and Shakespeare (whose King Lear was another).  He was chosen to write the “What is English” chapter of Dartmouth’s 2017 What Are the Arts and Sciences? [a guide for the curious] (Dartmouth College Press).  I came across Professor Luxon as a panelist in a program titled “Fascination with Historical Fiction” at the Stratford (ON) Shakespeare Festival.

  2. Sunday, October 20 at 3 pm: April Bleske-Rechek, Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire.  Her teaching and research efforts focus on scientific reasoning and individual and group differences in cognitive abilities, personality traits, and relationship attributes.  She came to my attention as lead author of “Behavioral Science Needs to Return to Basics” in the most recent issue of Skeptic Magazine (Volume 29, Number 2).  When I let Dartmouth President Sian Beilock know that Professor Bleske-Rechek would be our guest at a Casual Conversation, President Beilock wrote back: “April does really interesting work.”  A recent publication, updated June 26, 2024, by Professor Bleske-Rechek, “Promoting Students’ Engagement in Civil Dialogue: A Pilot Study and Randomized Controlled Trial,” concluded: Taken together, these findings (and others from the 2023 report) suggest that civil dialogue among UW students, especially among those who disagree with one another about controversial issues, is unlikely to unfold naturally. (Of course, historical patterns, humans’ tribal nature, and research on deliberative dialogue in the broader community [e.g., Mutz, 2006] all imply the same conclusion).  We have much to learn from our guest, about current students and about ourselves and our willingness and ability to engage in civil discourse.

  3. Wednesday, October 30 at High Noon: Sue Leavitt, spouse of Dartmouth ’69 classmate John Leavitt, will once again grace us with a lunchtime piano recital.  This will be the second time that she will regale us on Zoom with a display of her considerable musical talents.  If you were with us the first, you will want to attend; and if you some how managed to miss it, don’t make the same mistake twice!  Her program will be announced shortly before the performance. 

  4. Sunday, November 10 at 3 pm Eastern:  Angela Ranzini, M.D., spouse of Dartmouth ’69 classmate Chris Hu.  Dr. Ranzini has clinical expertise in the areas of Complex Pregnancy and Delivery and Maternal/Fetal Medicine (High-Risk Obstetrics), and is a Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.  In August she reports: “Hopefully, I'll be on the summit of one of the 46 High Peaks in the 'Daks as a volunteer Summit Steward educating folks about the Arctic alpine terrain up there.”

  5. Sunday, November 17 at 3 pm Eastern:  Dartmouth ’69 classmate Paul R. Pillar will be returning in a Casual Conversation to focus on his most recent book, Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press 2023).  Paul “examines how and why partisanship has undermined U.S. foreign policy, especially over the past three decades.”  Francis Fukuyama writes that Paul’s book “presents an ominous warning from one of the country’s most respected former national security officials, chronicling the way that domestic polarization has progressively undermined American foreign policy and weakened the United States.”  Next January, a new American president will be in office with her or his national security and foreign policy teams.  This will certainly be an important moment to discuss with our classmate the issues presented in his book.

  6. Sunday, December 15 at 3 pm Eastern:  Paula Kurman, widow of Jim Bouton, and author of The Cool of the Evening: A Love Story (RosettaBooks 2024).  Our classmate Chip Elitzer writes: “Paula's book about their [to wit, hers and Jim Bourton’s] life together, "In the Cool of the Evening" has just been published.  In a way, it's the completion of a trilogy, following Jim's classic, "Ball Four", and his recounting of our adventure together in Pittsfield [MA], Foul Ball Part II.”  We have hosted several sports related Casual Conversations, including with classmate Sandy Alderson, and with prolific author and Dartmouth graduate Peter Golenbock (The Bronx Zoo).  Make this your next sports session with your classmates and Ms. Jurman.

  7. Sunday, December 22 at 3 pm Eastern:  Classmate and attorney Doug Reynolds and Kevin Cox, a law firm colleague of classmate Bruce Alpert’s son Jeremy, will be discussing with us estate planning and administration.  Doug was recruited by classmate Clint Harris.  This session was suggested by classmate Peter Beekman, a retired trust officer, who has stories of his own:  I am suggesting where perhaps things didn’t quite work out.  I’m suggesting that the unexpected occurred.  I’m suggesting the grandchild beneficiary of a trust who is a convicted felon.  I’m suggesting the sisters who fought over a rhododendron bush that cost $1M in legal expenses. I’m talking about the  family that possibly disagreed so much that they forfeited over $25M.

    At one level, if things go-to-hell-in-a-handbasket you won’t be around to see the mess.  At another, you might want to try to protect your heirs and your hoped-for distribution of assets from your estate.  The timing of this session is just right.  The week following 12/22 will usher in three family-gathering holidays, Christmas (for the non-Orthodox), Chanukah (same day), and Kwanza (next day), followed in quick succession by secular New Years Eve and Day, and Orthodox Christmas.  Check out your relations, and decide who gets what, when, and how, although I wouldn’t recommend following King Lear’s approach with his three daughters.  Also, you could try to trick one of your family to take on the job of being your executor.  See: “Grief, Then Paperwork: The Messy, Thankless Job of an Estate Executor: The role can entail family drama and tracking down heirs” by Ashlea Ebeling (WSJ June 29, 2024). 

  8. Sunday, January 12, 2025 at 3 pm Eastern:  Ehud Eilam, Ph.D., suggested by classmate Jay (“Yogi”) Glaser as a Casual Conversation sponsored by the Jewish Culture Group, which classmate Bruce Alpert chairs.  Dr. Eilam is a former member of and consultant to the IDF and the author of eight books on Israel’s strategic and military options and constraints, his most recent being Israel's New Wars: The conflicts between Israel and Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinians since the 1990s (Peter Lang 2024).  From a talk he gave at a small shul in Clinton MA:  “Dr. Eilam will discuss the existential dangers confronting Israel from a purely military and not a political perspective.  He will address its military strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its meany surrounding hostile neighbors; its fraught relationships with its military allies including the US; and the results of its recent efforts to suppress guerrilla and terror activity in the West Bank.”

 


 

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