On the Shelf

Gail Baccus-Taylor PhD’92 is working to enhance Captain Bligh’s legacy.

When we think of the famous eighteenth-century sea captain, it’s probably the mutiny on his ship, the Bounty, that first comes to mind, but there’s much more to Bligh’s place in history than that.

That fateful trip in the 1780s was aimed at transferring breadfruit — a large, round fruit — from its native, Pacific-island habitat to British possessions in the Caribbean to be grown as a food crop, and he was successful in introducing it to the Caribbean islands in 1793.

Today breadfruit also grows on Baccus-Taylor’s native Trinidad, where she says it’s regarded as a “poor man’s crop” and frequently stands in for rice as a starch in the islanders’ diet.

Despite breadfruit’s rather shabby reputation among the eating populace, food scientists view it as an underutilized crop that can be more widely cultivated to boost nutrition and provide a cash crop for farmers.

This is where Baccus-Taylor comes in: she and her colleagues at the Food Science and Technology Unit of the University of the West Indies are proposing an ambitious research program to their government to characterize the chemical and nutritional properties of various varieties of breadfruit. Then, she says, “We want to make various products based on those characteristics.”

Baccus-Taylor also wants to inventory the types of breadfruit grown in Trinidad — information that will allow agricultural experts to advise farmers about which of the more than fifty varieties are best to plant.

Ultimately, she hopes that this program will improve the local nutritional intake, as many breadfruit varieties are good sources of B vitamins, calcium, and iron. And, she notes that developing this crop will help to reduce dependence on foreign food imports and improve food security.

Baccus-Taylor and her colleagues attended the First International Symposium on Breadfruit Research and Development in Fiji last April, which, she notes, “really put breadfruit on the map.” She hopes that her work to choose the best varieties and grow them efficiently does that
as well.

— Harvey Black

It’s becoming more commonplace to hear of those who have swapped one successful career for a very different one — and have done just as well. Such is the story of New Yorker David Strand ’81, who traded in his legal career to become a designer of Christmas ornaments and holiday decorations.

Using his degrees in history and political science, Strand interned with the Wisconsin State Assembly during college and worked there for several years after graduation. He then earned a law degree, practiced at a Minneapolis law firm, and worked in the corporate sector. But five years ago, Strand decided it was time for a “more creative career path.”

Strand learned a lot about the ornament industry from his time with Radko and left in 2006 to form David Strand Designs. Like Radko, he began working with European workshops that use fine materials and time-honored techniques. His ornaments are mouth blown, and lined with silver for additional radiance. Then they’re hand painted and further embellished with glitter and Austrian crystals. And, they’re produced in limited numbers in order to live up to Strand’s insistence on quality over quantity.

Strand launched his first collection of ornaments and candy containers in January 2007. Retail locations are listed on his Web site, www.davidstranddesigns.com.

— P.A.

Part romance, part mystery, and part adventure, Landon’s Odyssey (AuthorHouse) is the first novel by J.A. (Joe) Gasperetti JDx’65. It’s the story of Gil Landon, a Milwaukee native and UW-student-turned-Vietnam-veteran who returns home with a lot working against him: his graduate studies have been interrupted; his job prospects are bleak; his war wound received only mediocre treatment; and his love is gone.

Landon senses that he must look to his past in order to improve his future — a journey that’s aided by discovering six letters intended for wartime buddies that have inexplicably appeared in a shipping crate that he sent himself from Vietnam.

Flashbacks to Landon’s UW days and Vietnam experiences shape the book’s characters, who converge in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during the turbulence of 1968.

The author is a past president of the UW’s San Diego alumni chapter, as well as a WAA Sparkplug Award recipient. Like Landon, Gasperetti is a Milwaukee native and a Vietnam veteran. He’s now semi-retired in Iowa City, Iowa.

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After writing so many works in so many genres, one might wonder what Joyce Carol Oates MA’61 has left to say. But what she says in her latest novel is deeply personal because she reaches back to her paternal grandmother, Blanche, upon whose life The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Ecco Press) is based. Oates says it’s an attempt to come to know the woman she was close to, but in retrospect, didn’t know very well.

Among the parallels with Rebecca, the novel’s protagonist, Blanche was the daughter of an immigrant gravedigger who brutally assaulted his wife, then shot himself. Her first husband was hard drinking and abusive, so she raised their son on her own. And Blanche was Jewish — something Oates learned only after Blanche’s death in 1970.

After Blanche gave Oates a typewriter at age fourteen, she began writing and never stopped — continuing at Syracuse University, winning the Mademoiselle fiction contest, and earning her master’s in English at the UW.

Oates met her spouse, Raymond Smith, Jr. MA’58, PhD’61, in Madison. Together they’ve operated a small press and published a literary magazine, the Ontario Review, since 1974, and she’s taught creative writing at Princeton since 1978.

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Author Joyce Carol Oates MA’61 has told Michael Krasny PhD’72 that they are “like brother and sister because we are of the same generation and from similar places,” and she views them both as “working-class, bookish intellectuals.”

The backstory of such a conversation with such an eminent author — as well as the backstory of his own life — are the stuff of Krasny’s new book, Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life (Stanford General Books).

Krasny is the longtime host of National Public Radio’s Forum, a news and public-affairs program based at KQED in San Francisco. He’s also been a professor of English at San Francisco State University since 1970, as well as a scholar, critic, and fiction writer.

In his current role with Forum and in several radio and TV positions before it, Krasny has interviewed a staggering array of the newsmakers and cultural icons of our time — work that has earned him many awards.

A self-proclaimed “writers’ interviewer,” he has a way of speaking with literary celebrities that makes them open up; his love of language and lust for literature are evident; and he’s earned a reputation as an erudite and skillful interviewer.