Temple University Press’s Annual Holiday Give and Get

This week in North Philly Notes, the staff at Temple University Press suggest the Temple University Press books they would give along with some non-Temple University Press titles they hope to read and receive this holiday season. 

 

Ann-Marie Anderson, Marking Director

Give: This year I’d give Nelson Diaz’s memoir Not from Here, Not from There because of its uplifting story as the first of many things—from first Latino to graduate from the Temple Law School to the first Latino judge in the state of Pennsylvania, and on and on.  This is a book for all of us who have dual status—American but also “other”—and a dare to dream of life’s many possibilities.

Get: It’s a bit late to give me a book that I’d want to read because I already have it.  Michelle Obama’s Becoming is another inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. Besides, I still haven’t gotten the book I asked Santa for last year—Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, a survey of African American art from 1963-83.

Karen Baker, Financial Manager

Give: The Eagles Encyclopedia Champions Edition by Ray Didinger with Robert S. Lyons, all my family—Mom, Dad, brothers, and kids who are all die-hard Philly fans.

Get: I would like to receive Dog Shaming by Pascale Lemire because it looks so funny.

Sara Cohen, Editor

Give: This year, I’ll be giving Rebecca Yamin’s Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution to the history buffs in my life. It tells the story of 300 years of Philadelphia history through artifacts found in privies on the site of the Museum of the American Revolution through tons of gorgeous full color images. It’s also short which makes it an easy read and an affordable gift.

Get: I’m getting ready to move, so I hope that no one give me any holiday presents this year (just more to pack). Once I get settled, I’m hoping to read Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (I just read a great chapter on it by one of my authors) and Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto.

Irene Imperio, Advertising and Promotions Manager

Give:  Color Me… Cherry & White. What better way to unwind than with a coloring book?  A great gift for kids and kids-at-heart.

Get: Becoming by Michelle Obama, an eagerly awaited memoir of a truly inspirational woman.

Aaron Javsicas, Editor in Chief

Give: I’m so thrilled to have Steven Davis’s In Defense of Public Lands on the list. This is an academically rigorous and powerfully written book that’s not afraid to take a stand. Davis offers the privatizers’ best arguments in a fair-minded way, then systematically dismantles them. This is engaged scholarship at its best, and there’s simply nothing else like it—you won’t find a more comprehensive and keenly argued overview of this vital and terrifyingly timely debate anywhere.

Get: I hope someone gives me Kathy Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. I believe this book is still understood to have been the most prescient work on political conditions which would eventually give us President Donald Trump. Maybe I’m not the only one still trying to figure this out?

Gary Kramer, Publicity Manager

Give:  Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968, edited by Mark Shiel. This book has all my Venn Diagrams overlapping—it’s about film, it’s about cities, and it’s about 1968. It’s also about protests and architecture. It’s the perfect gift for my cinephile friends, my urbanist friends, my activist friends, and anyone else who turned 50 in 1968 (or like the press will in 2019).

Get: Jonathan Coe’s Middle England. This is the third of Coe’s books about four friends that began with The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle. The only problem with getting this book is that it will make me want to re-read the first two!

Mary Rose Muccie, Director

Give: They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows, and to me, that was never truer than in the alliance of Evangelicals with Republican candidate and now President Donald Trump.  How people dedicated to spreading the message of Christianity could support a man who is at best morally ambiguous seems incongruous. If you, too, are perplexed, as are many of my friends and family, the contributors to Paul Djupe and Ryan Claassen’s book The Evangelical Crackup? The Future of the Evangelical-Republican Coalition explain how and why this came to pass.

Get: Technically, I already got this (as a gift to myself), but I’m looking forward to sitting down with a pot of tea and Circe, by Madeline Miller. I love Greek mythology, and books about strong, independent, intelligent woman are always on my wish list. Circe has both covered.

Ryan Mulligan, Editor

Give: Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America 50 Years After the Kerner Report, edited by Fred Harris and Alan Curtis. This year marked the 50^th anniversary of the Kerner Commission’s warning that the United States was headed toward two societies, “separate and unequal” and that “To continue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.” As Americans struggle more and more to find common ground, the keepers of the Kerner flame Fred Harris and Alan Curtis compile the top authorities on the most pressing urban issues and assemble a comprehensible compendium of what we know works: as reasonable a place to start as any in an unreasonable time.

Get: The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing, by Merve Emre. I’m a millennial, and if there’s one thing millennials like, it’s taking quizzes to better label, sort, and categorize ourselves, proudly declaring the insights that we’d only discovered moments ago must now be immutably true. Luckily, if there are two things millennials like, the other is reading about how all our habits and values are harmful and wrong. This book tells how the mother-daughter team of Myers and Briggs created our national obsession with slapping four letters on who we are and how we operate and asks what it is we think we’re getting out of it?

Kate Nichols, Art Manager

Give: Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies. This isn’t a first-time choice for me. Published by Temple University Press on behalf of the UCSB Center for Black Studies Research, Kalfou addresses the many issues and critical concerns that increasingly are plaguing our communities and institutions. The journal gives me a measure of hope in this very crazy time. As per the inscriptions in the beginning: kal ´fü—a Haitian Kreyòl word meaning “crossroads”—“This means that one must cultivate the art of recognizing significant communications, knowing what is truth and what is falsehood, or else the lessons of the crossroads—the point where doors open or close, where persons have to make decisions that may forever after affect their lives—will be lost.”—Robert Farris Thompson.

Get: Educated by Tara Westover. I keep hearing wonderful things about it.

Ashley Petrucci, Rights and Contracts Coordinator

Give: Who Will Speak for America? edited by Stephanie Feldman and Nathaniel Popkin. Who Will Speak for America? draws upon the current political climate to advocate for change, which makes it a very timely piece that I think is important for everyone to read.  This would definitely be a book of great interest to several of my friends, who would enjoy reading about the various perspectives and reading through the various styles of the contributors to this edited collection.

Get: The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History edited by Dennis Waskul and Marc Eaton. I may be a bit biased, since aspects of the supernatural were key components to my senior thesis on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but this would be the book that I would most like to receive.  I’ve always enjoyed horror movies and studying the supernatural elements of folktales and stories (particularly from the Middle Ages), so I would love to sit down and read this book over the holidays.  A nightmare before Christmas, if you will.

Joan Vidal, Senior Production Manager

Give: Undocumented Fears: Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, by Jamie Longazel. To quote the Preface, “This book contributes to an understanding of U.S. immi­gration politics in this tumultuous first decade and a half of the twenty-first century.” 

Get: Dreams and Nightmares: I Fled Alone to the United States When I Was Fourteen, by Liliana Velásquez.

Dave Wilson, Senior Production Manager

Give: Policing in Natural Disasters, by Terri M. Adams and Leigh R. Anderson, is inspired by the personal accounts of triumph and tragedy shared by first responders. The short- and long-term effects of these events on first responders—the very people society relies upon in the midst of a catastrophe—are often overlooked. This book opened my mind about the strength of these responders and the challenges they face while responding during times of crisis. I find it fascinating to weigh the dilemma: How do they take care of their own families first and risk neglecting their needs when the responders are required to place the needs of the people they serve first.

 

 

 

 

The Phillies’ Connections to George H. W. Bush and Government

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost Biz Mackey, a Giant behind the Plate author Rich Westcott’s recent column from the Delaware County Daily Times about the connection between George H. W. Bush and the Philadelphia Phillies. 

The recent passing of George H. W. Bush brings to mind a Phillies connection with the 41st president of the United States. It is a particularly intriguing connection that went unnoticed in this week’s multitude of reactions.

Bush attended Yale University. While there, he played on the baseball team and was captain in his senior year. His coach was former Phillies outfielder Ethan Allen.

Allen, who coached at Yale from 1946 through 1968, spent three seasons with the Phillies, playing as a starting outfielder in 1934 and 1935 before getting traded during the 1936 campaign. He hit .330 in his first year in Philadelphia and .307 in his second. Altogether, Allen spent 13 years in the majors, retiring in 1938 with a lifetime batting average of .300.

After serving overseas on a special-services assignment for the federal government during World War II, Allen became the baseball coach at Yale. There he led his team to the first two College World Series, where they were finalists both times. In each case, his first baseman was a former Navy pilot named George Bush.

What kind of player was Bush? “George was an excellent fielder,” Allen told the author during an interview some years ago at his home in North Carolina. “But he was not such a good hitter. He was a very likeable guy, though, and a fine leader.”

Allen, who had an undergraduate degree from the University of Cincinnati, a master’s from Columbia and was eventually inducted into the College Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame, said that Bush always sent him a Christmas card, even after he became president. “Once, he even called me from Air Force One,” Allen recalled. “Earlier, when he was being considered as head of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), I was called for a recommendation. I said, ‘If he can understand the sequence of signals we had at Yale, he is certainly qualified for the CIA.’”

Interestingly, over the years, the Phillies have had many other connections with government and politics. These probably outnumber most, if not all, of those of other professional sports teams.

The Phillies had another player who had connections with two U.S. presidents. That would be Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, whose first two names were those of the country’s only president who served two terms that were not consecutive. In the movie about his life called “The Winning Team,” produced in 1953, Alexander’s role was played by future president and then-actor Ronald Reagan.

Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Bunning, who spent six seasons with the Phillies, winning 19 games three straight times and hurling the team’s first perfect game in 1964, served for the state of Kentucky in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1988 to 1998, and the next 12 years as a U.S senator. He also ran unsuccessfully for governor of Kentucky.

Larry Jackson, another pitcher, spent 1966 through 1968 with the Phillies during a 14-year big league career. He was a four-term member of the state House of Representatives in Idaho while also once running a losing campaign for governor.

Still another pitcher with perhaps the most interesting career in government was Pete Sivess, a little know Phillies pitcher in the late-1930s. A high-ranking Naval officer during World War II, Sivess, who spoke Russian because his parents had immigrated from there, helped to train the Russian navy while stationed in the Aleutian Islands. After the war, he became one of the American government representatives who ran Rumania for two years while the war-torn country recovered. Next, Sivess became a member of the CIA, and from 1948 until his retirement in 1972 was in charge of a covert operation in St. Michael’s, Md., that indoctrinated defectors and refugees from battered areas of Europe into the ways of American life while helping them to get jobs, places to live, and in some cases, new identities.

Although no story is more intriguing than Sivess’, the Phillies have had many other connections with the government and military. Hugh Mulcahy, a Phillies pitcher from 1935 to 1946, was the first major league player drafted into military service in World War II. Inducted in 1941, he spent most of the next five years in the army.

Third baseman Ed Grant, who played with the Phillies from 1907 to 1910, was the first major league player killed in World War I. As a captain and the commander of Army troops searching for the “Lost Battalion” after the battle in 1918 in the Argonne Forest in France, Grant was killed by an exploding shell.

Of course, many other former Phillies served their country in the military. One in particular was pitcher Curt Simmons, who in the midst of his best season in 1950 when he compiled a 17-8 record, was twice pulled from the team that season to serve in the National Guard at the start of the Korean War. The second time, Simmons’ superb season was cut short and he was unable build upon his record or to experience that rare opportunity of pitching in the World Series.

A man who was for the most part the hidden owner of the Phillies from 1909, when he put up $350,000 to buy the team, until 1913, carried the name of Charles O. Taft. He was the older brother of U.S. president William H. Taft, the nation’s first leader ever to throw out the first pitch on opening day. The Taft family also owned the Phillies ballpark called Baker Bowl for many years, and later owned a piece of the team from 1981 to 1987 as part of a group headed by Bill Giles.

Another former Phillies chief, William Baker (1913-30) was the police commissioner of New York City before taking over the team. Outfielders Gavvy Cravath (Long Beach, Calif.) and Curt Walker (Beeville, Texas) were justices of the peace after their playing careers ended.

In addition to all these people, the Phillies had two others who should be mentioned. Former Philadelphia Stars outfielder Ted Washington, who in 1952 became the first African-American player ever signed by the Phillies, had his chance to join the team, but was denied that opportunity when he was drafted into the Korean War and subsequently suffered an injury that kept him from ever playing again.

And Philadelphian Edith Houghton, who was the first woman full-time scout in major league history when she joined the Phillies in 1946, previously served for 28 years as first a reserve and then an officer in the Navy during World War II.

As all these names ably demonstrate, many people from the Phillies had important connections with the country’s federal or local government, either politically, militarily, or in some other way. Ethan Allen’s association with former President Bush served as a significant reminder of these many connections.

Rich Westcott is a writer and historian and the author of 26 sports books, his most recent being Biz Mackey – A Giant Behind the Plate.’ Westcott was once a sports writer for the Daily Times.

Temple University Press’s annual holiday sale

This week in North Philly Notes, we encourage you to attend our annual holiday sale from 11:00 am – 2:00 pm December 5-7 in the Diamond Club lobby, 1913 N. Broad Street, at Temple University.

Ray Didinger will sign copies of The Eagles Encyclopedia: Champions Edition, at 12:00 pm December 7. 

And if you can’t make it, our books are always available for purchase on our website.

Happy Holidays–and Happy Reading–from Temple University Press!