Lucette Lanado

Lucette Lanado was a successful Jewish Egyptian businessman, making deals and trades around Cairo dressed in signature white sharkskin suit.After the rise of the Nasser dictatorship, the Lagnado family lost everything and was forced to trade their life of luxury in Cairo for one of hardship, entering any country that would have them. A vivid, heartbreaking and powerful inversion of the American dream, Lucette Lanado’s unforgottable memoir is a sweeping story of family,faith, tradition, tragedy and triumph set against the stunning backdrops of Cairo, Paris and New York. Lucette Lanado is an award-winning investigative reporter for The Wall Streets Journal and recieved the Saint Rohr Perize for Jewish Literature.

China Hands

James Lilley’s life has been entwined with China’s fate since 1917, when his father started selling kerosene for Standard Oil along the Yangzi river.Lilley spent his childhood in China, much of it in Tsingtao, a bursting,Westernized port city. Days were filled with trips to the beach and trailing around older brother Frank, who became a mentor to young Jim. When world War 2 forced Lilley family to leave China, the die was already cast for a maturing jim. a professor at Yale took him aside and suggested a career in intellegence, a decision that meant a lifetime of returning to the country of his birth.China Hands, written in Lilley’s voice with the assistance of his journalist son Jeffrey, is a memoir of that exceptional life.

Lilley served for nearly thirty years in the CIA in Tokyo,Taiwan,Hongkong,Laos, Bangkok, Cambodia,and Peking before moving to the state Department in the early 1980s to begin a distingulishded diplomatic career. From covert operations during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, to participating in Richard Nixon’s opening to China as the CIA’s first station chief in Peking,Lilley rose up through the ranks of CIA to become the country’s leading intellegence officer on China. Then, as the United States’s top diplomat in Taiwan and South Korea while those countries became “true” democracies in the 1980s, while attempting to somehow bring Taipei and Peking closer together, and as ambassador to Peking during the bloody Tiananmen massacre of 1989, he participated in and witnessws extraordinary changes while advancing America’s interests in Asia.

China Hands recounts his adventures as well those of three generations of his family-all of them absorbing, many of them exciting, and one unduly tragic. It is a fascinating and moving look at America in Asia. Asia itself, and the remarkable life of one especially capable america.

Eleanor coppola: Notes On A Life(prologue)

I am an observer at heart who has the impulse to record what I see around me,what i experience.I’ve shot ducumentary films and videos,but very often what interests me does’t fit satifactorily into the frame of camera or find a way of expression into the art workI do,so i write. what follows is aelection from my notebooks, both old and recent.In these pages i can see my deep , imponderable love for my husband and our children and the wealthof experiences their extraordinary to my remarkable family and longing to be immersed as a working artist myself.And like everyday life, mine is formed by the times in which I’ve lived and by tradegy and triumph.

Perhaps my family members would tell a different story,and maybe they will.I think them for encouraging me to tell mine.

4 Generations

A top-notch, muti-discupline team,with individuuals from four generations, has been assembled to recommend solutions to a nasty construction problem, on one of the firm’s elite projects.after a couple of weeks, the project manager resposible foe the team cannot understand why there is constant bickering.Additionally, no one potential solution has been generated to address the problem.the situation is now desperate. There are serious cost overruns and it is eating into the firm’s profit margin. Even more significant is the fact that the client is extremly disappointed with the lack of performance.This client recently annouced a tremendously profitable and transformational project and the firm is scheduled to bid on it. the client has indicated without a virable solution produced to the current construction problem, they will not entertain future bids from this firm.

If the manager were aware of this significant characteristics of each generational group relating to communication needs,he or she might understand the stalemate and bring it into a resolution.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/38337/Tips-to-Improve-Interaction-Among-the-Generations

George Orwell on style

Perhaps George Orwell summarized style in scientific writing best in “Politics and the English language.”

1.Never use a metaphor,smile, or other figure of speech which you’re used  to see in print.

2.Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3.If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4.Never use the passivewhere you can use the active.

5.Never use a foreign phase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6.Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

A Reunion That Maks All Things New

Some of the talk among the nearly 3000 participants at this year’s reunion Weekend foucused on how ND has changed;new buildings going up around campus helped to prompt those conversations.But the event’s magic mixture of old and new, of the innovative and the indelible ,went far beyond bricks and mortar.attendees generally agreed that they experienced  the emotional, intellectural,social, and spiritual delights that they expected-and more.

the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Martin Puryear

an exhibition by the accalaimed sculptor, a homecoming for the native son

the most startling work in the National Gallery’s Martin Puryear wxhibition is a 36-foot  ladder of ash and maple that wobbles skyward in the grand West building rotunda. It hovers over the greaming marble floor, its lower rungs at two-foot intervals, its final rungs only two inches apart. Amarvel of manipulated perspective, this rough, vernacular object lifts toward the coffered dome of a museum whose galleries, only steps away, hold masterpieces of art that expain the discovery of such an illusion.

1986-lives in Romeas visiting artist at the american Academy(and again 1992-93,1997-98 as artist -in-residence)

bower of the Sitta spruce and pine at the Smithsonian american Art museum;

“amennities” in a plazza at 7700 Old Georgetown road,Bethesda,Maryland.

Oceans, Rivers, Skies

Modernist photographers alfred Sttieglitz,Ansel Adams and Robert Adams each created, decades apart, the own series of outdoor photographs of places very dear to them, exporing the relationship of time to photography and the ways in which sequences of images can address larger issues.Operatic yet calm, the three series have never been exhibited together- and since its 1923 exhibition,Stieglitz’s series has never been shownin its entirety.

Pompeii and the Roman villa

Some 150 luxurous works of art excavated from the opulent houses of the urban elite in Pompeii and from nearby villas alone the shoreline of the Bay of Naples illustrate the region’s importance as an artistic center in the first exhibition devoted to ancient Roman art at galery.Expuisite objects reveal the breath of cultural and artistic life, as well as the influence of classical Greece on roman ar and culture in this region.

Save The Garden

The National Cathedral is in a crunch and has closed its beloved greenhouse.Expect that isn’t quite the spin put on it by one Cathedral official:”It’s no longer economically viable,”said Margaret Bergan Davis, assiciate dean of the Cathedral.”In the post 9-11 world, with large divisions that we are trying to heal , does the cathedral belong running a greenhouse?”

While the national press focused their attention on the historic debate regarding Climate Change Legislation last week in the senate, a debate that was unfortunately cut short by parliamentary wrangling, hundreds of ordinary Washingtonians concentrated their own efforts on preserving a historic greenhouse just few miles from the Capital that is emblematic about the large national debate about our stewardship of the natural enviroment.

The issue arose as a result of a budgetary crisis at the National Cathedral which is in its centennial year and has recently spent lavishly on major ‘improvements’ including a 35 million dollar underground parking garage to accommodate up a hundreds of cars and eighteen tour buses, as well as a seven million dollar anniversary program replete with light shows and headline speakers.

At the same time the Cathedral, which is run by an independent foundation, wholly apart from the Episcopal church, decide to close the sixty year old greenhouse which has served generations of families and is regarded by many city residents as the most sacred place on the Cathedral’s ground.

It is an inviteing green chapel that stands in contrast to the Cathedral’s overpowering monumental structure, best know for the state funerals of american Presidents and society weddings.

Perhaps not surprisingly however, the Cathedral’s administration,which is presided over by a thirty year ex-military officer who served with the Pentagon’s Joint chief of Starff did not consult with the greenhouse’s many congregants, who have, in barely a week,launched an unprecedented grass roots campaign to reverse the Cathedral’s action and to reinvigorate the greenhouse’s role in the Cathedral’s large ministry to Washington and wider world.

Notably the Cathedral’s spirital leader, the Right Reverend Samual Lloyd, has often sermonized about the church’s responsibility to the enviroment,describing enviromental degredation as perhaps the greatest spiritual crisis of the age, saying” I am not calling upon you to save the world but to do what you an as an individual.”

It seems that the hundreds of people who have recently signed the internet based petition to save the greenhouse seem to have taken him as his world and manyof them have left comments as eloquent as any voiced from the cathedral’s pulpit.

Isn’t it now time that the Cathedral practice what they preach.