Princeton Alumni Weekly | The Weekly Blog: Katherine F. Greenwood Archives

July 12, 2011

Tiger of the Week: William "Red" Whittaker '73

Red Whittaker ’73 in front of his lunar lander (Tim Caulen/Courtesy Carnegie Mellon University)

Robot designer William “Red” Whittaker ’73 likes challenges. One of his latest goals: sending one of his robots to the moon. With a team of students, the Carnegie Mellon robotics professor is competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, which will award $20 million to the first privately funded team to create a robot that can land safely on the moon’s surface, travel 500 meters, and transmit data and images back to Earth.

Whittaker has developed dozens of robots that have cleaned up nuclear damage at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, harvested alfalfa, mapped mines, traveled into active volcanoes, and sought meteorites in Antarctica. His ground vehicles have driven thousands of autonomous miles. In August, he will receive the Feigenbaum Prize for his contributions to machine intelligence.

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July 7, 2011

Ben-Ami '84 calls for new approach to Israel advocacy

New book: A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation, by Jeremy Ben-Ami ’84 (Palgrave Macmillan)

The author: The founder and president of J Street, a lobbying group with a left-of-center stance toward the Middle East that backs a two-state solution, Ben-Ami served as President Bill Clinton’s deputy domestic policy adviser and as national policy director on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Ben-Ami was selected as one of 50 “people of the decade” last year by Ha’aretz, an Israeli daily newspaper, and The Jerusalem Post named him one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world.

The book: Ben-Ami shares his personal story — his grandparents were first-generation Zionists and founders of Tel-Aviv, and his father fought for Israeli independence in 1948 — and argues that the efforts to secure a safe and democratic future for Israel are heading off-track and that there is more than one way to be pro-Israel. A New Voice for Israel calls for a new approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to Israel advocacy — one that allows for more debate and conversation and that moves “away from its traditional zero-sum paradigm,” he states in the introduction. Ben-Ami argues that friends of Israel must give up the idea that support for Israel requires unquestioning loyalty to the Israeli government and recognize that the creation of a Palestinian state will increase Israel’s chance of survival.

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June 23, 2011

Moss '71 explores 'unorthodox approach' to innovation

Frank Moss '71 (Webb Chappell)

New Book: The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab Are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform Our Lives, by Frank Moss ’71 (Crown Business)

The author: Until recently Moss was the director of MIT’s famed Media Lab, the interdisciplinary incubator of such innovations as an e-reader, LEGO Mindstorms robotic toys, and child-safe airbags. Today he is a professor of the practice at the MIT Media Lab, where he heads the new media medicine group. An entrepreneur in the software and computer industries, Moss was CEO and chairman of the software maker Tivoli Systems and cofounder of companies including Infinity Pharmaceuticals and his latest startup venture, Bluefin Labs.

The book: Moss takes readers on a tour of the MIT Media Lab, introducing them to the inventors and their innovative projects and “how they grew out of an environment that totally defies the conventional wisdom of what a research lab ‘should be.’” Among the technologies in development that he explores are Nexi, a mobile humanoid robot that can serve as a companion for the sick and elderly, and SixthSense, a compact wearable device that transforms any surface into a touch-screen computer.

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June 17, 2011

Snyder '82 chronicles extreme athletes

New book: Hell on Two Wheels: An Astonishing Story of Suffering, Triumph, and the Most Extreme Endurance Race in the World, By Amy Snyder ’82 (Triumph Books)

The author: After an almost two-decade career in management consulting, Snyder retired, moved to La Jolla, Calif., and took up Ironman triathlons. A three-time Ironman finisher and marathon cyclist, Snyder understands what it means to push yourself. But even she was struck by the athletes who compete in the Race Across America (RAAM) — a brutal 3,000-mile bicycle race from Oceanside, Calif., to Annapolis, Md. “I couldn’t fathom racing such a long distance,” says Snyder, who wanted to discover how other athletes could and why they would do it.

The book: Snyder followed a group of the ultra-distance racers before, during, and after the 2009 RAAM. To win, athletes make do with an hour or so of sleep a day. The winner of the 2009 contest finished in nine days. Many athletes experience muscle, joint, and nerve failure, broken bones, terrible saddle sore, hallucinations, and dehydration. Some don’t finish. Their neck muscles can give out from the strain of holding up their heads — a condition known as Shermer’s Neck. “Watching this relentless contest unfold was considerably more disturbing than I expected,” she wrote. “As it dragged on, I saw how RAAM transformed my new friends, brutalized them, and at times broke their spirits. I bore witness to their suffering, but it was their passion and grit that stuck with me most.”

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June 9, 2011

Gerson '92 performs for prevention of domestic violence

In the late 1990s singer-songwriter and voice teacher Ruth Gerson ’92 discovered the benefits of performing in people’s living rooms versus in clubs — she wasn’t pushed on and off stage, the audience members really listened to the music, and she enjoyed the relaxed, intimate setting. She also found it more lucrative than club playing. “By the end of the night, we were all singing together,” said Gerson, who remains friends with some of the people she met at her first living room concert in Washington, D.C.

Several years ago she performed living room concerts for charity – asking the hosts to pick a cause they cared about. During that year, she helped raise $100,000 for various organizations through some 50 concerts.

This year, with the release of her latest album, Deceived, she aims to help raise $100,000 for one particular cause: the prevention of domestic violence. She’s donating proceeds from the album and performing a series of living room concerts and shows to benefit domestic violence prevention organizations.

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June 2, 2011

Braude *98 pursues a mysterious murder in Casablanca

Joseph Braude *98 (Phyllis Rose)

New book: The Honored Dead: A Story of Friendship, Murder, and the Search for Truth in the Arab World, by Joseph Braude *98 (Spiegel & Grau)

The author: An American journalist born to an Iraqi-Jewish family, Braude studied Arabic and Islamic history at Princeton. His work has been published in The New Republic, Best Life, and Playboy, among other publications. He also is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World (2003). To research his new book, he was embedded for four months with a Moroccan security service in Casablanca, whose detectives handle everything from terrorism to drug trafficking and homicides.

The book: Braude explores the story of an ordinary Islamic citizen whose life runs up against the underbelly of the Moroccan police. While embedded with the detectives, Braude befriends an unemployed Muslim Berber, Muhammad Bari, whose best friend has been brutally murdered in a warehouse where he had been sleeping for five years. Braude suspects a cover-up and launches his own investigation of the murder.

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May 24, 2011

Orr '96 pens guide to modern poetry

David Orr ’96 (Tom McGhee)

A poetry critic, poet, and part-time lawyer, David Orr ’96 is the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review. In his columns and reviews, he writes in a witty way that is inviting for nonpoets and poets alike. In his new book, Beautiful & Pointless {A Guide to Modern Poetry}, which he began working on as a Hodder Fellow at Princeton several years ago, he aims to bring nonpoets along with him to “Poetryland” — to help them understand a bit about poetic form, and what poets think about and talk about in the contemporary poetry world. Slate critic Craig Morgan Teicher wrote that Orr “seeks not just to initiate the uninitiated … but also to hold a mirror up to the poetry world itself.” Orr spoke with Katherine Federici Greenwood.

For whom did you write the book?

People who are quite bright, who are quite good readers, but who don’t read much poetry. And more specifically, I have a lot of friends who are lawyers, who are academics in departments other than the English department, the comp-lit department, or the creative writing department, and who are interested in poetry, but who haven’t read much of it in 10 or 20 years. It’s meant to reintroduce some readers to poetry. It’s also intended for poets who know it’s for nonpoets.

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May 19, 2011

Jenkins *96 sounds the alarm on toxins

New book: What’s Gotten Into Us? Staying Healthy in a Toxic World, by McKay Jenkins *96 (Random House)

The author: A professor of English and journalism at the University of Delaware, Jenkins wrote The White Death, about five men who died in an avalanche in Glacier National Park in 1969; Bloody Falls of the Coppermine, about two Catholic priests murdered in the Arctic; and The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler's Europe, about an elite unit that specialized in winter and high-altitude combat.

The book: Several years ago, Jenkins went in for a routine check-up and found out that there was a “suspicious mass” in his abdomen. It turned out to be benign, but the scare and questions from hospital researchers about his exposure to toxic chemicals and contaminants in his home and work environment led him to investigate how we have gotten to the point where “we have spent our lives virtually marinating in toxic chemicals.” In What’s Gotten Into Us? Jenkins examines the dangers of the chemicals present in our lives and offers advice on how to reduce our exposure to toxins in everyday products — from ant spray and perfume to dryer sheets and baby shampoo.

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May 10, 2011

Bell '79 pens "vicious and appalling" story

Madison Smartt Bell ’79 (Jerome De Perlinghi)

New book: The Color of Night, by Madison Smartt Bell ’79 (Vintage Books)

The author: Madison Smartt Bell is the author of 15 previous works of fiction, including the trilogy of novels about Haiti’s long, bloody struggle for independence led by Toussaint Louverture, among them All Souls’ Rising, which was a National Book Award finalist. A creative writing professor at Goucher College in Baltimore, Bell also is a musician, part of the recording duo Bell & Cooper. “I have always said that my work is dictated to me by daemons,” writes Bell in the acknowledgments for The Color of Night. “Surely [this novel] is the most vicious and appalling story ever to pass through my hand to the page.”

The plot: The narrator of this novel about the persistence of violence in America is Mae, a blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino, who was the victim of horrendous child abuse and later had joined a violent cult. When she isn’t working at the casino, she spends her free time roaming the desert with her rifle or sitting in her trailer obsessively watching clips of Sept. 11, where she spots her old cult lover, Laurel, escaping the wreckage. Those images recall memories of her violent past.

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May 5, 2011

Helen Marrow '00 examines immigration in the rural South

A native of a small, Southern town in North Carolina, Helen Marrow ’00 realized the area around her home, whose population of Mexicans was growing, would be a good place to study the consequences of a national trend: Immigrants are increasingly settling in small, rural and suburban towns particularly within the South instead of urban gateways like New York and Los Angeles. So Marrow, an assistant professor of sociology at Tufts University, headed home to interview Hispanic newcomers and non-Hispanic Southerners in two counties to find out about the immigrants’ experience, how rapid Hispanic immigration influences Southern race relations, and how institutions like schools and public health centers are dealing with undocumented residents. Her findings are in her new book New Destination Dreaming: Immigration, Race, and Legal Status in the Rural American South (Stanford University Press). Marrow spoke with Katherine Federici Greenwood.

How are Hispanic newcomers doing economically in the South?

I found a cautiously optimistic story about how they are becoming economically incorporated. It wasn’t a big move up into the middle class really quickly. I was finding that a lot of these people were achieving what I call lateral mobility – or economic stability. Some were achieving upward mobility, even if it was what I would call a short distance.

You also examine the relationship between Hispanics and African-Americans and their relationship with white Southerners. What did you find?

The findings in the book are really controversial. … In many ways the Hispanic newcomers are judging their relationships with blacks as more tense than their relationships with whites. For that to be the case among a group of white Southerners who have generally been taken to be pretty darn racist and pretty conservative in the rural parts of the region – that is a hard story, but it is one that has to be dealt with.

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April 28, 2011

Rubenfeld '80 pens historical thriller about a terrorist attack

Jed Rubenfeld ’80 (Gianluca Battista)

New book: The Death Instinct, by Jed Rubenfeld ’80 (Riverhead Books)

The author: A professor at Yale University Law School, Rubenfeld is an expert on constitutional law. He also is a novelist. As a philosophy major at Princeton, he wrote his thesis on Sigmund Freud, who figures in both his new novel and his 2006 book The Interpretation of Murder.

The plot: This historical mystery novel begins with New York’s first terror attack – not the one on Sept. 11, 2001, but the one that occurred Sept. 16, 1920, when a bomb exploded on Wall Street. Four hundred people were killed or injured in an event that remains unsolved. In this story that blends fact and fiction, war veteran and surgeon Stratham Younger, his friend New York police Captain James Littlemore, and Colette Rousseau, a French chemist whom Younger met during the war, follow a mysterious trail of evidence that takes them from Paris to Prague, and from the Vienna home of Sigmund Freud to Washington, D.C., in finding those responsible for the attack.

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April 22, 2011

Talking gargoyles, 'weretigers,' and a magical side of Princeton

Sarah Beth Durst ’96’s latest work of fantasy fiction for teens is set at Princeton Reunions. (Adam Durst '96)

A Princeton connection turned out to be key to launching Sarah Beth Durst ’96’s writing career. She had penned drafts of novels and shopped them around for about 10 years, collecting a slew of rejection letters. But her luck changed when she connected with Andrea Somberg ’01, a literary agent, in 2006. Within weeks of signing with Somberg, Durst had secured offers from several publishers for Into the Wild, a novel about a girl who must battle witches and fly griffins to rescue her mother and save her town from becoming a fairy tale kingdom. They got the news of the offers the week before Reunions.

Since then, Durst has written three other novels — all fantasy fiction for teenagers. Her latest, Enchanted Ivy, published last fall by Margaret K. McElderry Books, is set at Princeton during Reunions.

The coming-of-age novel follows Lily Carter, an eleventh-grader who attends her grandfather’s 50th reunion. His friends tell her that if she passes a secret legacy test, she will win automatic admission to the University. Lily takes on the challenge and quickly stumbles on an alternate Princeton — a magical and dangerous place where gargoyles come to life and “weretigers” and dragons roam.

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