Tell Me What You’re Reading

Jen Maxfield is an Emmy® Award winning correspondent for NBC 4 New York. She covers breaking news and general assignment stories in New Jersey, and is a fill-in anchor on all of NBC 4 New York’s newscasts.

Jen has covered many of the Tri-State area’s most memorable and powerful stories throughout her long career. More After the Break describes her initial reporting and follow up many years later for the 2003 Staten Island ferry crash, Katrina and Sandy in 2005 and 2012, a 2011 horrendous hit and run casualty, and several other accidents, tragedies and moving stories. The stories themselves are compelling, but mostly I loved Jen’s honesty, and her humility and introspection; the way she expressed the vital role of local news reporters in the community; her bouts of what she referred to as “news guilt”; and her expression of the "moral ambiguity" of her job, while recognizing her professional obligations.

Our friend Maxine Davidowitz recently introduced me to Hank Neimark, telling me that Hank was getting ready to work on the Summer 2022 Woodstock Shakespeare Festival production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After talking with Hank for just a short time, I asked if he would like to talk about the play on the podcast, and he agreed. 

At Hank’s suggestion, we were joined on the podcast by David Aston Reese, the Producing Artistic Director of the Bird-On-A-Cliff Theatre Company in Woodstock. David has acted, directed and produced works for Bird-On-A-Cliff Theatre Company's Woodstock Shakespeare Festival and The Woodstock Playhouse. David is the Director of the Summer 2022 Woodstock Shakespeare Festival production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hank is working with him. 

Hank and David, both extraordinarily knowledgeable and enthusiastic Shakespearians, discussed A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s often misguided or misdirected lovers, the Kings and Queens, marriages, and dreams, the irrepressible Bottom and Puck, and the other “mechanicals” and fairies, the play within the play, and the tension between what some think of as one of Shakespeare’s most sexual plays, and also as the one most suitable for children. An unlikely but highly effective combination. 

Lots of discussion as well about the production of the play, the direction embedded in the language of the play, and the “choreography”, i.e. the blocking, and stage direction, that comes together with the music that is embedded in Shakespeare’s words. Our discussion culminates with Hank’s Mel Brooks impersonation from “Queen Alexandra and Murray”.

My guest for this episode is Mark Weeks, a friend and former colleague at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Mark has practiced law at Orrick in New York and Tokyo for more than 30 years and after many years as a Partner and head of Orrick’s Tokyo office, Mark is now a Senior Counsel at the firm. Mark is also a world class, award winning, international saltwater fly fisherman.

It is said that first novels are at least partly autobiographical, and much of Mark’s debut novel, Bottled Lightning, neatly overlaps with his life and career: a top global technology lawyer and avid motorcyclist, born in Alaska and practicing law in Japan. The objective of our discussion was to discuss Mark’s novel, and we did. However, we talked at least as much about Melville’s Moby Dick, which I had mentioned, and Mark’s writing process. All great. Thanks Mark!

My guest for this episode is Trinh Q. Truong. Trinh came to the U.S. from Vietnam with her mother about 20 years ago. During what we in the U.S. refer to as the Vietnam War, Trinh’s grandfather worked for the governments of the Republic of Vietnam and the United States doing intelligence work, mainly mapping the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Most of the rest of her family was engaged during the war years in democratic activism in the country.  After Saigon fell in 1975, Trinh’s grandparents and eight of their children—with the exception of Trinh’s mother, who was one year old—were sent to reeducation labor camps for nine years to atone for their wartime allegiances. Trinh herself is a longtime refugee activist in the U.S. and a recent graduate of Oxford in England with a masters degree in refugee and forced migration studies.

When I met Trinh last summer, we had, what to me, is an inevitable discussion of books. As I was intrigued by her background, I asked Trinh if there was a book she might like to discuss with me on the podcast. Trinh said that she had started reading The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen several times, and that she would get through it this fall and then talk with me.

The Sympathizer is a beautifully written, dark and tragic novel set during and after the war in Vietnam. The unnamed narrator is a Western-educated Vietnamese. While he is working for the CIA in Saigon and serving as aide-de-camp to a South Vietnamese general, he is also a spy for the North, secretly sending intelligence to the insurgents, and his spying continues as he joins Vietnamese refugees in America after the war. Adding to the difficulties for our narrator, his boyhood friends are soldiers fighting for the South. The narrator is torn apart by his conflicting sympathies. Now, sometime in the late 1970s, the narrator is in a communist prison, addressing an interrogator who demands that he explain his activities among the enemy.  The book is ultimately an indictment of the French, the Americans and the Vietnamese themselves. 

More on Trinh

From Vietnam to Utica and back again: Reflecting on my refugee journey Trinh Truong

Tom Vartanian discusses his recent book, 200 Years of American Financial Panics - Crashes, Recessions, Depressions, and the Technology That Will Change It All. Tom is the former head of the financial institutions practice at two major law firms; the former General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and at the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation; and the former executive director and professor of law at George Mason University's Scalia Law School Program on Financial Regulation & Technology.

Kate McGloughlin is a painter and printmaker (and storyteller), and during her long career, she has exhibited in notable galleries and museums around the world. Kate is president emeritus of the Board of Directors of the Woodstock School of Art, where she teaches printmaking and landscape painting, including to Carol, and where she directs the Printmaking Studio. Through her paintings, poetry and prose, Kate’s book, Requiem for Ashokan, The Story Told in Landscape, is her outlet to tell a personal story with universal themes of tragedy, loss, grief, confusion and rage, as well as of migration, shared resources, competition for resources, and the importance of fair treatment by the government.  Kate lives and maintains her own studio in Olivebridge, NY, near the site of the Ashokan Reservoir, which is at the center of our discussion. The Ashokan Reservoir and its aqueducts and tunnels were built to get water to New York City to alleviate chronic and dangerous water shortages in the rapidly growing metropolis, but the cost was borne by the thousands of residents of the Esopus Valley who were displaced from their family homes and farms and mills; taken from them and demolished to make room for the reservoir, which dammed the Esopus Creek and then flooded the valley.

My friend Jim Finnegan (who was my guest on episode #3 of our podcast) discusses Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart; a tough book but a great read. An unfortunate tale of growing up gay in working class poor Glascow with an alcoholic mother; anger, sadness, lack of hope, despair and dependence. Jim and I also discuss Milkman, Ironweed, The Vanishing Half, The Shadow King, Deacon King Kong, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Interior Chinatown, Lolita, Caro’s LBJ biographies, The Power Broker, Motherless Brooklyn (film), Angela’s Ashes, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, Ten Lessons For A Post-Pandemic World. A Swim In a Pond in the Rain - In Which Four Russians Give A Master - Class on Writing, Reading and Life, Passing, The Tenant and The Natural. Another whirlwind of a discussion with Jim. Reviews of each of these books are linked in my website www.bookwormsinthewild.com

Special Edition (March 31, 2021) Our friend Evelyn Lerman wrote a loving biography titled “A Dressmaker's Threads: The Life and The Legacy of My Russian Immigrant Mother", which was published in 2013. In July 2018, I sat down with Evelyn in her cabin in Winslow Maine to discuss the biography she wrote about her mother. As you will hear, I use the excuse of talking to Evelyn about her book to talk with Evelyn about her own life as well. Evelyn describes her mother - Celia Gorfinkel - as a remarkable woman, who  in 1920, with a sick husband and an infant, escaped from the Czar's Army in Russia, walked across Europe from the Ukraine, and sailed to Ellis Island. Celia was a dressmaker who worked 12-18 hour days at her sewing machine and whose love for education motivated her to put Evelyn and her two sisters through college. Our warm, loving and dear friend, Evelyn passed away on March 17, 2021. Ev, as remarkable as her mother, was 95 years old; married to Albert for almost 74 years. Evelyn was vibrant to the end. We are all very sad, but have been reflecting on what a wonderful, fulfilling and productive life Ev had, a journalism degree from Simmons College, graduate degrees in education and human development from Harvard, a teacher and later an administrator in the Brookline, Massachusetts Public Schools for 27 years, author of four books, traveling (including cross country with Albert in their RV in their late 80s), teaching writing to adults and directing a reading program for third graders while in her 90s, the blessings of her children, her grands and her great grands, Camp Caribou, and, most of all Albert. Our entire family is so blessed to have been a part of Ev and Al’s life. Carol was 19 years old when she first met Evelyn as a student teacher in Ev's elementary school classroom, and Carol and Ev then taught together as colleagues. Carol adopted Evelyn as her “chosen mother“ and Evelyn and Albert also adopted us. We visited Ev and Al at Camp Caribou in Maine almost every summer beginning in about 1972 for over 40 years. Melanie, Dave and Ben also had wonderful relationships with Evelyn (and with Albert too).  Evelyn was a role model and a friend for us all, but most especially for Carol, whose loving relationship with Evelyn was very special. The Altarescus all feel the pain, Carol most deeply among us, but it was Carol who so wisely referred to this loss as a part of the circle of life. We love the entire Lerman family and know that there are so many wonderful memories to sustain them all. I’m so glad to have had this discussion with Evelyn a few years ago, and to publish the discussion now as a tribute to our friend.