SHOWCASE

SHORT TAKES

Novel Approach John Slade wanted to bring the American Revolution to life even for people who hate history. So the veteran high-school English teacher began a five-year project combining meticulous research with a novelist’s imagination. Slade, ’69, PhD ’74, even joined a tall ship’s crew and clambered to the top of a square-rigger to capture 1774 sailing conditions. Then he created two narrators close to the action—a cobbler-soldier who fights in every major battle and a farm girl who becomes a courier for George Washington. The result is Bootmaker to the Nation: The Story of the American Revolution (Woodgate International, 2003, www.woodgateintl.com) a 736-page epic aimed at college students and adults that gallops along as steadily as the general’s messenger. Fulfilling Formula Do poets lead more interesting lives than mathematicians? Ben Yandell once thought so. Yandell, ’73, transferred to Stanford junior year because he’d “run out of math classes” at Occidental College. He took only graduate-level math on the Farm and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. But the prospect of all math, all the time, seemed stultifying. He’d also enjoyed history and English, he says, “so I set out to be a poet.” Yandell had “absolutely no success” with verse, but he wrote one travel book with his wife, Janet Nippell, and got by as a TV repairman. Then he hit upon a way to combine his interests: writing a biography of extraordinary mathematicians. The Honors Class: Hilbert’s Problems and Their Solvers (A.K. Peters, 2002) sparkles with the often quirky lives of the wizards, including Stanford’s own professor Paul Cohen, and Yandell spent a decade understanding their calculations, too. The experience convinced him that his subjects “make a typical coterie of poets seem buttoned-down.”