In Review: February 10, 1999
The game of hoops and the game
of life
An examination of the glories that make up basketball
Values of the Game
Bill Bradley '65
Artisan, $30
I must admit to some initial skepticism about Values of the Game,
a new book by Bill Bradley '65. Bradley's previous books all made sense:
His first, Life on the Run, chronicled life as a pro basketball player,
while his second and third, The Fair Tax and Time Present, Time
Past, recapitulated his tenure as a Democratic senator from New Jersey.
By contrast, Bradley's newest volume -- a collection of chapter-long meditations
on such topics as "passion," "discipline," "selflessness,"
"respect," "courage," "resilience," and "imagination"
-- sounded, to say the least, rather fuzzy.
My judgment was too hasty. Values of the Game is a gorgeously
designed, intelligent study of basketball. True, it's probably not for people
who don't already love (or at least respect) the sport, and it's hardly
the most obvious way for Bradley to kick-start a presidential campaign,
if that's what he'd had in mind. But on a more limited scale, Values
of the Game is a terrific guide to basketball for the thinking man or
woman.
Backed by first-rate photographs from the Sports Illustrated archives,
Bradley displays impressive range, citing players and events from the 1940s
to today. (Tales of Princeton hoops under coaches Butch van Breda Kolff
'45 and Pete Carril abound.) We learn about his penchant for hard work --
as a youngster, he set up chairs on the court to represent defenders, then
dribbled around them for hours, all by himself. The book also reveals his
thoughtful introspection, which enables him to fill the role of perceptive
color commentator -- only on the printed page in this case, rather than
on television.
By chance, the book was released at a pivotal time for the National Basketball
Association -- during a divisive and costly labor struggle that led to the
scuttling of much of the 1998-99 season. Bradley, a union representative
for most of his playing career, nonetheless notes, wisely, that "players
have an obligation to assure the game's quality -- not just for reasons
of self-interest, but also out of respect for what the game means to millions
of fans....
Once the sport is in disrepute, a player's reputation is not far behind."
Unfortunately, Bradley glosses over basketball's downside: its habit
of driving America's youth away from the classroom. Even so, his larger
point -- that the lessons of basketball are long-lasting -- strikes me as
on target. Indeed, it took Bradley's coaxing before I fully realized how
important basketball was to my own development. Not once but twice in my
youth, basketball proved to be my salvation -- first when I was an eight-year-old
only child coping with sleep-away camp, then later as a new student joining
the sixth grade at an unfamiliar school. For a shy (and admittedly somewhat
nerdy) youngster, a good jump shot and scrappy defense were one-way tickets
from outcasthood to peer-group acceptance.
Lest the reader assume that my basketball lessons were uniformly positive,
I should add that after a year on the high school junior varsity, my classmates
finally caught up with my early growth spurt, and before long I was cut
from the team. Even though Bill Bradley was good enough to win a spot in
the Hall of Fame, I'm confident that he would empathize with this final,
sobering lesson about life.
-- Louis Jacobson '92
Louis Jacobson covers politics and policy for National Journal
and also writes frequently about sports.
Scientist, thinker, teacher
John Wheeler recalls his life in gravitation physics
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam
John Archibald Wheeler with Kenneth Ford *53
Norton, $30
John Archibald Wheeler, who is now an emeritus professor of physics
at Princeton and has recently published his autobiography, Geons, Black
Holes, and Quantum Foam, initially shied away from working in gravitation
physics and relativity, because he worried about the job prospects for graduate
students of his who might focus in that area. The idea that space was malleable
was a beautiful theory and fascinated the public imagination when Einstein
formulated it, but few scientists saw, or were interested in, the possibilities
of confronting the theory with new experiments and observations. Wheeler
feared his students might have trouble finding a job where further work
in the field would be supported. In his book, Wheeler tells the story of
how his fascination with gravitation physics ultimately took over. His pioneering
work in this area deepened scientific appreciation of the irregularities
of space, and led to his coining and putting into usage the terms "black
hole," "wormhole," "geon," and "quantum foam"
-- all of which describe various contortions of spacetime at the universal
and subatomic level.
In the course of his long and productive career, Wheeler traded ideas
and theories with many of the leading physicists of the century -- he sought
counsel from Einstein, worked with Niels Bohr on the newly discovered phenomenon
of fission, and as a novice 23-year-old took long spring walks with Werner
Heisenberg. After deciding to commit himself to the study of physics as
a freshman at Johns Hopkins, in 1927, when he was only 16, Wheeler went
on to do postgraduate work with Bohr at the University Institute for Theoretical
Physics, in Copenhagen, a mecca for leading physicists in the 1930s. Their
work together on fission came later. In Copenhagen, working on quantum physics,
Wheeler developed the "layer of intuition" necessary to a physicist.
That intuition, combined with his conviction that a theory must be pushed
to its extremes, enticed him to turn his attention to gravitation physics
later in his career. On his return from Copenhagen, Wheeler accepted an
assistant professorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
and moved three years later to an assistant professorship at Princeton,
where he has spent most of the rest of his career. During World War II,
Wheeler was recruited to assist in the design of plutonium production plants
in Hanford, Washington. A strong believer in the importance of national
service, he also helped with government work on the H-bomb in the early
'50s.
A common political cause brought scientists together in times such as
these; nonetheless, collaboration among Wheeler and his colleagues clearly
went far beyond political or military necessity. In one amusing incident,
Wheeler tells the story of an "elegant discovery" concerning spacetime
and relativity made by Martin Kruskal, a mathematical physicist and colleague
of his. At the time Kruskal made the discovery, he related it to Wheeler.
When Wheeler found that, for whatever reason, Kruskal had not published
the results, he wrote a paper up himself with Kruskal's name, and sent it
to Physical Review. He forgot, however, to tell Kruskal he had done
so. Kruskal only learned of "his" article upon receiving mysterious
galley proofs from the journal; when he figured out what had happened, he
suggested coauthorship, which Wheeler politely rejected. With this and many
other collaborations, Wheeler makes emphatically evident not only that scientific
research is quite the opposite of a solo venture but also that a professor's
original thought is inextricably furthered by what is learned in the process
of teaching students, both graduate and undergraduate.
With both collegiality and clarity, Wheeler successfully bridges the
great gap between the academic community and popular understandings of science
as he conveys to the nonscientist the thrill of thinking and researching
at science's cutting edge and the elegance of a branch of learning where
equations that can be written on a square inch of paper -- Einstein's E=MC2,
for example -- spawn decades and decades of new and fruitful insights.
-- Christen Kidd '96
At Yeats's Grave: Drumcliff
Blown mist climbs Ben Bulben like a flight
of Dante's ghosts enshrouding
bald head's rising brow's dead light
is greyed held down
the sea to west is bright
blown mist curls the air down walls to seize
shingle and shutter flap on the tall
narrow flat church tower bears crease
of damp rook call
while trees
drip drip to body-filled unshorn
rolled ground where
puddles fall in green streams borne
between the graves
From The Farm
at Richwood, a collection of poems by Hazard Adams '47, a professor of
English and comparative literature at the University of Washington. (Castle
Peak Editions, $15)
How a museum came to pass
In her third book, Creating the Musée D'Orsay: The Politics
of Culture in France, Andrea Kupfer Schneider '88, an assistant professor
of law at Marquette University, writes about the history of the Paris museum
that opened in 1986 on the Left Bank in what used to be a train station.
This book, which grew out of her senior thesis, describes the political
and cultural struggles that went on during the 13 years before the museum
opened. In looking at the history of the museum, Schneider analyzes the
cultural forces in France and compares and contrasts them to those in the
U.S.
(Pennsylvania State University Press, $25)
Fantasy lit and E-charity
www.tabarron.com
From the typeface to the illustrations to the big gnarly tree on the
home page, the Website (www.tabarron.com) of writer ThomasA. Barron '74
evokes the imagery of his fantasy series, such as The Lost Years of Merlin
and The Heartlight Trilogy, and nature books. Newcomers to Barron's
work will find it a thorough introduction with generous selections from
the books, including artwork and maps. A Q&A section gives Barron space
to talk about his characters, inspiration, and the process of writing, which
he terms "the most joyous -- and also the most agonizing -- labor that
I know." He even reproduces pages of handwritten drafts complete with
scratch-outs and marginal notes. The site allows teachers and libraries
to order a "gift pack" with bookmarks, a video, posters, and other
promotional items. The only mild disappointment of the site is the links
page, which goes only to two publishers (presumably the sponsors of this
"official" Website) and the Wilderness Society.
www.4charity.com
The site www.4charity.com cleverly exploits a financial quirk of Internet
commerce: the affiliate agreement. It works like this: 4charity features
links to various Web marketers, such as Amazon.com, Music Boulevard, eToys,
and others. When a viewer gets to, say, Amazon.com from 4charity and buys
a book, then Amazon -- through its affiliate link with 4charity -- sends
a portion of the sale back to 4charity. Cofounder Carl Anderson '95 has
assembled 16 links on 4charity and pitched the affiliate payments as a source
of charity donations. The homepage tagline couldn't be clearer: "where
shopping online raises money for charity." When viewers register to
become 4charity members, they indicate which of six charities they want
to support with the affiliate payments from their purchases. Options include
the American Red Cross, World Wildlife Federation, and the Special Olympics.
The well-designed site describes both the marketers (and the percent of
sales sent to affiliates) and the charities. The copy is up-to-the-minute,
which can lead to some peculiar juxtapositions. An index page describes
how the Red Cross is "feverishly trying to raise money to assist 300,000
victims of Hurricane Mitch," while immediately below that, eToys warns,
"Don't be left behind when it comes to this year's coolest toys for
children," proceeding to pitch Teletubbies and Happy Holidays Barbie.
The site is worth watching just to see if 4charity posts the amount of affiliate
money it donates to charities.
-- Van Wallach '80
Books recieved
Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption,
by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau '76 (MIT, $25) --
Examines the national security, law enforcement, commercial, and civil liberties
issues surrounding the policy debate on telecommunications privacy. Landau
is a research associate professor of computer science at the University
of Massachusetts in Amherst.
Geometry by Discovery, by David Gay '61 (Wiley, $69.95)
-- A text for upper-division undergraduate math students. Gay is a professor
of mathematics at the University of Arizona.
The Powers of Preservation: New Life for Urban Historic Places,
by Arthur Cotton Moore '58 *60 (McGraw-Hill, $49.95) --
An illustrated discussion of preservation projects in the U.S., including
the author's recent work on the Library of Congress. Moore is an architect
and preservationist.
The Liberal Civil War: Fraternity and Fratricide on the Left,
by Jim Tuck '51 (University of America, $39.50) -- A study
of the lacerating post-World War II conflict between the anti-Communist
Americans for Democratic Action and the Communist-tolerant progressives
who rallied to the Henry Wallace movement. Tuck is a freelance writer and
syndicated columnist.
GO TO
the Table of Contents of the current issue
GO TO PAW's
home page
paw@princeton.edu