I first came across Gordon Merrick's landmark bestseller The Lord Won't Mind when I was in the eighth grade, at an Air Force library in Madrid. The year was 1970. My hobby at the time was to read every book on the fiction bestseller list, no matter the genre. That year, the higher echelons of the list were commanded by Erich Segal's Love Story, John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, and Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave. (Yes, I read them all!) The Lord Won't Mind stayed on the list 16 weeks, peaking at number 7. Its appearance on the list was remarkable in that it was the first bestselling novel to feature a gay romantic theme, as well as the first to deal with gay sex lives in candid detail. The other singular aspect of the novel was that the gay protagonists were two Ivy League preppies, Peter and Charlie, the latter of whom went to Old Nassau.

Merrick did not complete his four years at Princeton. (As he put it on the dust jacket of the original edition of TLWM, he was "born in Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, and, in the limited time he allotted his teachers, educated at Princeton.") Before TLWM, Merrick had published four well-received novels and appeared in the original 1939 production of Moss Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner. During World War II, he was recruited by "Wild Bill" Donavan as an officer in the Office of Strategic Services. When he landed in the South of France during the Allied invasion, one story has it, Merrick was carrying a martini glass and wearing a white dinner jacket and black patent-leather shoes.

Merrick wrote two sequels to The Lord Won't Mind: One For The Gods (1972) and Forth Into Light (1974). Collectively, they became known as "The Peter and Charlie Trilogy," and, in one Avon edition, featured a portrait of the gay couple against the backdrop of a Princeton dormitory. Merrick went on to write a total of 13 popular novels of gay romance.

Merrick died in Sri Lanka in 1988 of lung cancer. He left behind an almost-finished manuscript, entitled The Good Life, which has been completed by his companion of 32 years, Charles G. Hulsea novelist in his own rightand which is now being published by Alyson Publications.

Based on a true 1943 high-society murder trial, Merrick's novel fictionalizes the story of Wayne Lonergan, who was accused of murdering his wife, Patricia Burton Lonergan. Renaming him Perry Langham, The Good Life tells the story of a Depression-era poor youth who is swept into the sexual and social company of millionaire Billy Vernon, whose daughter Bettina he eventually meets, marries, and murders. Interestingly, Langham is not portrayed as gay per se; he is primarily straight, but comfortably engages in gay relations when doing so advances him socially or financially. The Good Life offers an intriguing portrait of what some gay relations were like in an era that predated more recent forms of public or social gay identity. The novel is marked by Merrick's usual smart, semicomic candor on sex. Langham's prized possession, for instance, is his phalluswhich he sees as the key that will open the door for him to the good life.

R. Hunter Garcia '79

R. Hunter Garcia is book review editor of Entertainment Today in Los Angeles. He also writes and performs stand-up comedy under the name Gay Boy Ric.

Bloody good remedies

Honey, Mud, Maggots, and Other Medical Marvels

Robert '75 *80 and Michele Root-Bernstein *81

Houghton Mifflin, $24

In the irresistibly titled Honey, Mud, Maggots, and Other Medical Marvels, Robert RootBernstein and his wife, Michele, examine and explain the use of various medicinal practices that have sprung from folk medicine.

Covering such remedies as blood letting, laudable pus, taking the waters, dirt-eating, and honey, the book is both engaging and provocative. Once past any initial revulsion, it's exciting to think about the positive use of maggots to clean a wound, or of bloodsucking leeches in microsurgery.

The authors do a good job of explaining the efficacy of practices generally viewed as backwoods notions. To balance the beneficial, they are careful to include within each chapter the risks associated with the therapy. For instance, while eating dirt can provide needed minerals, it can also lead to high blood pressure and other ills.

The Root-Bernsteins are not trying to convert us to folk medicine but to reacquaint us with bygone treatments that actually have a place, in some way, in modern medicine. At the least they hope to remind readers that conventional medicine is often built on folk practices of the past.

Other topics of interest, each covered in its own chapter, are circumcision, contraception (a woefully underexplored area, according to the authors), plastic wrap, the evolution of medical treatments, and culturally appropriate health care.

Robert RootBernstein, a MacArthur fellow, is a professor of physiology at Michigan State University; Michele RootBernstein is a writer and teacher.

Lolly O'Brien

Aging gracefully in San Francisco
Jim Brogan '63's homosexual hero accepts the inevitable

Jim Brogan '63 is one of many San Francisco writers who find the city irresistible as a backdrop. His two earlier books were set in the city as well, and in this one, the protagonist is Brian, a single university professor approaching 50 and not entirely happy about the prospect. He prefers having a steady companion and being 20 years younger. As a gay man who has lost friends and lovers to AIDS for the past 15 years, he is the kind of man who leavens depression and grief with a healthy cynicism and a sense of humor. Weary resignation defines him.

What we get of Brian's life is not so much a complication of character and incident as a series of meditative conversations with Rich-ard, his friend and confidante. Richard, a retired classics professor, is in his 70s and by now a near recluse living alone with his cat.

Responding to Brian's obvious devotion, Richard offers advice on every subject, from clothes and cooking to Brian's search for Mr. Right. At Richard's lofty hilltop apartment, they reflect on their favorite subjects, especially on growing old alone.

Brogan's use of the acolyte-mentor relationship draws on a theme familiar in English and American literature and adopts the form to develop particularly gay themes and relationships. Brian learns from Richard how to face the necessities of age and loss in a society that underlines youth and fulfillment. As indicated in the title, the story relates the younger man's somewhat reluctant acceptance of experience and the maturity that necessarily goes with it.

Brogan's point is in the meditative nature of the book, whose narrative action is leisurely, even casual. The subtle line of development concentrates on the philosophical exchange between the two men and not what they do or how they live.

Brogan is clearly familiar with the theme of a younger man's maturing at the hand of an older teacher. As a professor of English at San Francisco State, he would have covered numerous instances of this theme in his 30 years in the classroom. What he brings to the convention are the more current concerns of urban conflict, of numerous deaths from AIDS, and of the gay culture that forms so much of San Francisco's contemporary community.
Don Harrell
Don Harrell, a former English professor, works in New York City.

Surviving the revolution
Islamic Iran through the eyes of its women

Reconstructed Lives: Women & Iran's Islamic Revolution

Haleh Esfandiari

Woodrow Wilson Center Press, $15.95

"One day, after the revolution, I was attacked with a metal chain by two hezobollahis in one of the city squares," says Amineh, a researcher and translator. "It was then that I found out that my skimpy scarf was not the hejab they were expecting from us." The enforcement of a strict dress code for women was just one of the many shocks professional women experienced after the 1979 Islamic revolution, writes Haleh Esfandiari in Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution.

Esfandiari, who until recently was a lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, interviewed 32 female doctors, lawyers, professors, and business owners, many of whom supported the revolution in Iran, seeing it in secular, European terms. The book chronicles the women's hopes before the revolution, their shock at the executions and purges after the fall of the Shah, the crackdown on women and women's rights, and how they resist and survive today. Reading each woman's words on these subjects is fascinating although it's often hard to recall the biographical information provided in the beginning At the beginning of each chapter Esfandiari summaries their thoughts, but too often she repeats quotes and forces agreement when, in fact, many of the women express conflicting views on Iranian life.

Reconstructed Lives is good at illuminating the reality of life in a country where women are called prostitutes when they show a bit of hair or neck, offences for which they are hauled in by the authorities and questioned. Other indignities the Iranian women suffer relate to their husbands' right to forbid foreign travel, to have multiple wives, and to take custody of the children if they divorce. Men have "carte blanche," says one woman; another, a lawyer, says, "You would be surprised how many educated young men beat their wives."

Despite the crackdown and the daily humiliations, many of these women continue to work out of economic necessity and flout the code by wearing loose scarves or brightly colored robes. Their bravery is astounding, especially in the face of constant harassment. One woman, taken in for improper dress, laughed at the enraged Komiteh fellow who explained to her husband that women's hair emits "rays that turn into demons."

Reconstructed Lives provides an enlightening glimpse into the complicated world of the Islamic Republic and a window into the minds of women who survive in a culture that most Americans would find uninhabitable.

Jennifer Gennari Shepherd

Jennifer Gennari Shepherd is a freelance writer living in Natick, Massachusetts. Limericks by Al Kracht '49

There once was a poet named Kracht,

Whose new book of limericks was packed

with rhymes fun and bawdy,

and several quite naughty,

and most with no decorum or tact.

.

Limericks New & Naughty, $19, Limerick Lane Press, 5 Birch Lane, Chappaqua, NY 10514

British models for American universities
U.S. schools had mixed success emulating Oxbridge

In 1896, while visiting England, Woodrow Wilson fell in love. He was not alone. Over the years, presidents of Harvard and Yale, of Pomona College and the University of California at Santa Cruz, were also seduced not by a young ingenue, dressed in the latest fashions, but by an old matron, garbed in the antique style: Oxford.

From the 1890s through the 1960s, a series of American university administrators and reformers came to see Oxford Universityor, more precisely, an idealized version of Oxfordas the solution to the grave problems threatening American higher education. At the turn of the century, as faculty increasingly pursued original research at the expense of their teaching duties, as student enrollments expanded, and as undergraduates deserted campus for local lodging and the pleasures of the frat house, reformers worried that the undergraduate experience was becoming dangerously impoverished. Their solution, whose intellectual origins and uneven implementation are the subject of Alex Duke's book, was to remodel American undergraduate education by importing Oxford's system of residential colleges.

The Oxford residential college was believed by advocates on both sides of the Atlantic to foster the growth of the "whole man." Faculty lived in the same buildings as their students, thus encouraging informal intellectual contact outside the classroom; meanwhile, the shared rituals of dining hall and playing field shaped the undergraduate's character to complement his new-modelled intellect. Oxford made the men who ruled the British Empire. The Oxford model, the reformers hoped, would make men fit for the arduous task of building an American one.

As Duke, an administrative analyst at UCLA's school of management, recounts it, Princeton's flirtation with the residential college was brief, coming on the heels of Wilson's successful effort to revise the university's curriculum and pedagogy along Oxonian lines. In 1907, Wilson proposed four residential quadrangles as a solution to the anti-intellectual bias of the typical Princeton undergraduate. Wilson believed that by transplanting students into residential quadrangles where they could interact with resident faculty, thereby diminishing the pernicious influence of the eating clubs, he could harmonize Princeton's vibrant social life with its intellectual mission. But the plan fell victim to internal administrative division and to opposition from faculty and alumni.

Duke argues, however, that the many American plans to import the Oxford residential college were all intrinsically flawed. Some (as at Princeton and Chicago) were stillborn, others (as at Yale and Harvard in the 1920s, and at Santa Cruz in the 1960s) were implemented with, at best, disappointing results. But none were based on a precise understanding of the Oxford system. Instead, these plans were pieced together from superficial idealizations derived from idle observation, British mythology, or the ill-informed enthusiasm of former Rhodes scholars. Anglophile faith in a common Anglo-Saxon cultural and racial identity blinded early 20th-century reformers to the vast differences between the social forces that shaped English and American higher education, differences that rendered exact replication virtually impossible.

Many of the problems the residential college was intended to solve are with us still. Alex Duke's interesting book suggests that to cure them, true love alone is not enough.

Alastair Bellany *95

Alastair Bellany is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University.

TELEVISION - Mathematician at work
How Andrew Wiles solved Fermat's Last Theorem

As a topic for a documentary film, pure mathematics lacks a certain visual zip. Nonetheless, last fall the PBS program Nova tackled mathematics professor Andrew Wiles and his efforts to solve Fermat's last theorem in "The Proof." Drawing out all the drama of Wiles's seven years of struggle, director Simon Singh compellingly portrays one of the great intellectual feats of our time.

The program begins with a statement of Fermat's theoremthat there exists no solution for xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ when n>2. Writing in Latin in the margins of Diophantus, Arithmetica, 17th-century mathematician Pierre de Fermat said he had a proofbut lacked space in the margin to record it. Enter Wiles, captivated as a child by this "ultimate challenge." While generations of mathematicians had dashed their wits against this rock, Wiles opted for a new approach, bridging different fields of mathematics to slowly, painfully, and secretly develop a proof.

Singh's brisk and charming documentary explores the areas of mathematics from which Wiles drew his proofelliptic curves, modular forms, and the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture. Using a ticking metronome, rapid-fire quotes from Wiles and colleagues (including Prince-ton's Nick Katz, John Conway, and Peter Sarnak), spiffy computer graphics, and even the jarring 1970s song "One Way or Another," Singh meets the challenge of translating the abstract into compelling TV. The program's charm lies in the timelessness of the 350-year quest and in the scholars, whose tools are notepads and sheer brainpower.

The trials and triumph of Wiles are, of course, the point of "The Proof." Modest, tenacious, and articulate, Wiles describes his years of reflection and probing that seemingly culminated in what Fermat's Enigma, Singh's book expanding on the program, calls "the most important mathematics lecture of the century." "Seemingly" because, after worldwide acclaim, Katz found a flaw that Wiles could not fix. "Only later did it come out that there was a problem," Wiles said (a statement illustrated by a collapsing house of cards). For over a year, Wiles struggled under extreme public and professional scrutiny to find a remedy. With assistance from former student Richard Taylor *88, he found a solution he described as "so indescribably beautiful, so simple, and so elegant."

Van Wallach '80

Check TV listings or PBS's Website (www.pbs.org) for rebroadcast information.

FILM - After a town's children die

The Sweet Hereafter

directed by Atom Egoyan

based on the novel by Russell Banks

What happens to a town when a freak accident takes away its children? This is the subject of Atom Egoyan's superb new film, The Sweet Hereafter. Based on the novel of the same title by Russell Banks, the Howard G.B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities, The Sweet Hereafter is about the aftermath of a school bus accident in a small economically depressed town in upstate New York. Subtly developed and gorgeously shot, Egoyan's film captures both the desolate beauty of the town and the horror of its tragedy.

The central character is Mitchell Stephens, a New York City lawyer played by Ian Holm. Stephens convinces some townspeople to initiate a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the accident victims. His case depends on the testimony of Nicole Burnell, a teenage singer paralyzed by the accident, charmingly played by Sarah Polley. What at first seems a straightforward case becomes more complicated as the characters' bleak and often disturbing personal lives are revealed.

In writing the screenplay, Egoyan made many structural changes to the novel, which is narrated by four different characters. He also added references to Robert Browning's poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin."

Still, the film beautifully captures the richly textured feel of Banks's novel, juxtaposing images of the accident with flashbacks to the characters' past lives, readings from the Browning poem, and a series of telephone conversations between Stephens and his estranged, drug-addicted daughter Zoe, played by Banks's daughter, Caethern. In this age of news sensationalism, Egoyan's complex and emotionally honest treatment of tragedy is a rare delight.

Tamsin Todd '92

Tamsin Todd is a freelance writer living in Baltimore.

Short Takes

Being Positive: The Lives of Men and Women with HIV, by Robert Klitzman '80; (Ivan R. Dee, $26). Klitzman, a psychiatrist, shares excerpts from his interviews with 54 HIV-positive people, whose experiences with the virus he organizes into broad categories of response. Their voices eclipse that of the author, but this can't be faulted in a book aiming to give voice to an often voiceless segment of society.

From My Grandmother's Bedside: Sketches of Postwar Tokyo, by Norma Field *83; (California, $24.95). Norma Field, the daughter of an American G.I. and now a professor at the University of Chicago, grew up in post­World War II Japan, raised by her mother and grandmother. In From My Grandmother's Bedside, she recounts her 1995 visit to her childhood home, where Obaachama, her grandmother, having suffered two strokes, is tended by Field's mother. What promises at first to be a memoir of the trip becomes a series of reflections on the intermingling of Japanese and American cultures.

Written in short segments, Field's book offers exquisite descriptions of her home and powerful and complex meditations on the 50th anniversary of the deployment of Abombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's fascinating to see through Field's eyes the effects of the war as revealed in contemporary Japanese society.

Noteworthy is Field's use of juxtapositionthe reality and the wake of the Abomb contrasted with the quiet labor to feed and dress Obaachama as she lies mute but watchful.

Lesley Carlin '95

Oriental Journal of a Flirt, by Ruth Isabel Strong, with a preface by S. Sterling McMillan '29; (Rowfant Club, $25, 216-431-4518). In 1901, Sterling McMillan '29's mother, 22yearold Ruth Strong, went with her older married sister on a six
monthlong trip to Japan and China. McMillan has edited the diary she kept on the journey, and the result is a delightful glimpse into a young girl's experience almost 100 years ago.

Ann Waldron