The Japan Tufts Alliance is pleased to host

Sol Gittleman reading from
Reynolds, Rashci, and Lopat: New York's Big Three and the Great Yankee Dynasty of 1949–1953

Date & Time:
Sunday, March 16, 2008

Location: TBD

Cost:
TBD

Contact:
For more information about this event, contact gretchen.dobson@tufts.edu or call 1-800-THE-ALUM (843-2586)

About the book:
Between 1949 and 1953, five rather ordinary New York Yankee baseball teams won five consecutive World Series, an accomplishment that may never be repeated. For those five years, no New York Yankee led the league in an offensive category. Rather, the success came from gifted management and from the unusual but astonishing synergy of three older pitchers. Reynolds, Raschi, and Lopat, all from different backgrounds, led America to confront issues of race and ethnicity in baseball as they went on to become lifetime friends and rewrite baseball history.

About the author:
Sol Gittleman's talents as a storyteller with a keen eye for historical details were recently illustrated in An Entrepreneurial University: The Transformation of Tufts, 1976–2002. As for baseball, Gittleman has been a lifelong fan and sees the game as a metaphor for life in the modern world. "As you watch the evolution of American values in the twentieth century, baseball is a metaphor for almost all the social and political change that went on in the last 100 years," he says. "Integration, American business practices, anti-trust laws, crime, corruption — baseball has every aspect of American life."

Gittleman came to Tufts in 1964, rising to professor of German in 1971. He chaired the Department of German and Russian from 1966 to 1981, when he was appointed provost and academic vice president. In 1985 he was named senior vice president and provost. He received his B.A. from Drew University, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Hebrew College in 1993 and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Stonehill College in 1996.

The author of books on German literature, East European Jewish literature, and the American immigrant experience, Gittleman has received two Fulbright awards, the Harbison Prize of the Danforth Foundation for Outstanding Teaching, and a citation as Professor of the Year from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). He is married to Robyn Singer Gittleman, associate dean of undergraduate education and director of the Experimental College at Tufts.