We are moving toward the 45th class of 1980 reunion in June (19-21) 2025. Of course, we will be joined by our lovely friends in the classes of ’79 and ’81. In the meantime, classmates Debo Hart Goth and Kim McConaughy Vletas and others got folks jazzed for 2025 by organizing an activity-filled, classmate-clustering time in Park City, Utah. Information on the event came from multiple directions: Carol Burns shared the official schedule and participants list for “Winter Carnival West” and Brian Boyer provided some color commentary to me about dinners and opportunities to talk with both his close classmates (Peter Fowler, Andy Minden, etc.) and folks he hadn’t connected with since some long ago reunion. For more details and pics, check out Bill Goodspeed’s most recent newsletter!
This issue of the alumni magazine is focused on books! A delight for me personally, as a perpetual liberal arts student and a professional scholar/bibliophile. I asked an assortment of classmates for their book picks from this season of life. Speaking of delight, my daily meditation (since my birthday in March) is done to The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, a poet who shares short musings on a delight he has found in his daily goings, doings, and thoughts.
A book that appeared in multiple responses is David Brooks’ The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life. Mark Fischer reflected that it was helpful as he preps for retirement. Peter Fowler contributed the biography Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, Going Infinite (Michael Lewis) on Sam Bankman-Fried, and Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (Chris Miller)—a theme? Steve Smith is in a Dartmouth book club directed by Mike Wall’s wife, Suzanne. So he had a massive and diverse list that would exceed my allowable word count. A few recommendations: four novels by Louise Erdrich ’76 (including The Sentence), books for spy novel enthusiasts such as a trilogy by Jason Matthews (starting with Red Sparrow), and any book by Erik Larson—I love his super-long titles and recommend (if you’re interested in the Gilded Age) The Devil in the White City: A Saga of Magic and Murder at the Fair that Changed America.
I saved Ellen (Groetch) LaBerge’s recommendations for last. She and I live in the same city and got together recently (first time in a while) for dinner with Daniela Varon (Dani lives in N.Y.C. and teaches at Yale drama), who came to Syracuse for the totality. Dinner was awesome; the totality was a bit cloudy in town but still able to be captured on film. Ellen suggests three books written by classmates: Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic’s Edge by Jill Fredston and Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths and Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny by Emily Katz Anhalt. I hope these suggestions (and the rest of this DAM issue) help you find texts that nourish your brains, hearts, and souls. Happy reading.
—Kal Alston, 948 Euclid Ave., Syracuse, NY 13210; alstonkal@gmail.com; Wade Herring, P.O. Box 9848, Savannah, GA 31412, (912) 944-1639; wherring@huntermaclean.com