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Show Books 4E Sunday, October 10, 1993 Standard-Examinet Author: Volunteering a do-good-for-me task By LINNEA LANNON NEW FROM REGIONAL WRITERS Yorgason pens Old West tale Mormonwriter Blaine Yorgason has woven another tale of the Old Westto join such earlier best sellers as “Charlie's Monument” and “The Windwalker.” “To Soar with the Eagle" (Deseret Book, $13.95) follows “It’s a little extravagant, but Ill sayit: Nothing has meant more to me as a teacher. Knight Ridder Newspapers CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Robert Coles, the child psychiatrist, prolific author and Harvard professor, a man who counts Anna Freud and William Carlos Williams among his mentors, is his mother’s son. Not that he’s blaming his late mother for anything, mind you. She was an inspiration. “Mymother’s wayof dealing with some of my (youthful) rebelliousness was either to hand me a copy of ‘War and Peace’or tell me to go think ofothers.” His rather raspy voice breaks into laughter. “It never occurred to her to send me to a psychiatrist!” Mother knew best. To be there with them in that housing project, to just sit with them and go over some of the children’s drawings, to read Tillie Olson, William Carlos Williams ...” He looks very 19-year-old Indian scout Samuel Loper as he escorts a 12-year-old Indian girl whose father wishes her to be raised among the Mormons. Thegirl, litats, learns the new culture but never forgets the young scout, who is knownbythe Indians as happyas he considers those efforts. But don’t get him wrong. He insists, as do Eagle Who Walks on the Ground. manyvolunteers in his book, that he gets written more than 50 books, with nearly 1.5 million copies of his booksin circulation. Stories complement scholar’s research self-serving volunteering.” He points to the work he did in 1960 that first won him notice and began the five-book Pulitzer Prize-win- Utah scholar Helen Papanikolas, known for her research into Utah's ethnic and labor history, has turned tofiction. ning Children of Crisis series: talking to the 6-year-old children who were integrating New Orleans’ schools. vice,” about idealism as it’s expressed in vol- “My first fantasy was that I would study it unteer work, is a very personal testament that for a few months and write a paper about it. bears the imprint of his mother’s exhortations. Although much ofthe book is about other people, it also details the 63-year-old Coles’ ownservice, beginning in high school, when he carried trays and pushed wheelchairs in a hospital. He tutored children during his undergraduate years at Harvard. Then he moved This was the equivalent of those kids volunteering to get into college,” he says of the students who volunteer because community service looks good on their applications to Ivy League schools. “I was right with them. to NewYork City and Columbia University’s medical school. “I was having a lot of trouble with the first two years,” Coles says of those chemistry and physics classes 40 years ago. “My mother, rather impatiently, once told me, ‘I think you ought to ask yourself why you're so absorbed in yourself. Why don’t you go find other people whose lives are much more precarious than yours?’ ” He did, and he ended up living and working in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker hospitality house, a homeless shelter on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, while he was in medical school. “The Call of Service” (Houghton Mifflin, $22.95) is dedicated to Day, whose words inspired the title: “There is a call to us, a call of service — that we join with others to try to makethings better in this world.” Coles teaches literature, not medicine, at This was not going to be a do-goodeffort, this was going to be a do-good-for-me effort.” He quotes Williams, the New Jersey physi- cian and poet who encouraged Coles to become a doctor and whose work heusesin his classes: “Outside myself there is a world.” Andthat, he says, is the beauty of volunteering. “It’s a terribly important gesture for all of us to make for our ownselfish reasons.” “He’s the most incredible human being I’ve ever known,” says Greg Johnson, the execu- tive director of Phillips Brooks House. “He’s such a gracious man. He’s neverlost his inner light. ... On a personallevel, well, students are mesmerized,” Johnson reports. “He doesn’t do a star thing. He’s very, very unassuming.” Certainly modest. To hear Coles tell it, he frequently didn’t grasp what children wanted him to know,es- pecially about such areasoflife as spirituality, something psychiatry doesn’t put much faith in. He regularly credits his wife, Jane, a Harvard. His research with children from schoolteacher, with better interviewing skills and says she and their three sons, who fre- Boston to Brazil, South Africa to Alaska, has generated more than 50 books on such topics quently accompanied him on field trips as children, gave him the stamina to do what he as poverty, privilege and morality. They have won him awards, a MacArthur grant and a does. faithful, if not best-seller size, following. He still volunteers about 10 hours a week. For the past three years, he has taught volunteers at City Year, a full-time program for 17- to 23-year-olds started by former students in Boston. During the winter, he serves food in a soup kitchen in Cambridge. He speaks with real emotion about his volunteer work with Phillips Brooks House, the 100-year-old service arm of Harvard College, which sends groups of students to live in low-income housing projects and work with 7- to 13-year-olds. Coles met with those volunteers, using some of his — and his mother’s — favorite literature to help them put what they were doing into a larger con- “I would not have done this on my own or if I had been married to a different person,” he says. i “I am subject to more than occasional moments of just getting exhausted and down- Ohio University Press recently published “Small Bird, Tell Me” ($24.95), a collection of stories based on the oralstorytelling Robert Coles and morerecently co-founded with Coles the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. “He sees others and himself clear- ly. And he can’t speak about others honestly if he’s not honest about himself.” “I want this for others,” Coles says he told his sons of the accoutrements of a middle-classlife. “And I want to struggle in a wayso that others can get a chance to be part of this. And if I take this away from myself, this won’t help the others, anyway. “Now maybe this is a bit of a rationalization,” Coles admits, “but it’s what I really believe. At the same time, if more of us struggled for others, maybe moreof the others would have a chance to be part of what we have.” It is a topic he clearly has wrestled with, one he has raised with people less fortunate. “It makes me uncomfortable at times. It makes me uncomfortable to sit in a room like this,” he says, “to live in Concord, Massachusetts, and to have all these pleasures oflife which were handed to me unearned by my parents while I was very young.” He agrees that this is somewhat harsh; after all, he has been a productive, income-generat- ing adult. “But you know what I’m saying? They gave mea lotthat a lot of kids don’t get from their parents. They gave me their strength, they gave me their education, they gave metheir ability to put me through college without huge debts. They gave me the freedom to — and this is important — they gave me the ability to do this work. Because when I first started, I was turned downby every founda- pressed? Clinically depressed? “Well, I’m not on any drugs and never have tion. ... They encouraged me — and my father would send me a check every month.” His 30-plus years of listening have led him understand that children are incredibly resilient. “The greatest thing I’ve learned in that been. But I know whatit is to feel that this is sense is what George Eliot tells us, that some- hearted and, well, depressed.” A psychiatrist — one who has shown the world such inner strength in children — de- hopeless and the problems are hopeless — they seem to go on and on and on. Andthat my work is-doing nothing for anyone except me and that gets a whole crescendoof self-accusation going.” Coles’ self-deprecation is genuine, says Alex Harris, who met Coles while a student at Yale : The Orem resident, one of the most prolific LDS writers, has more out of volunteering than he gives. “To my mind, the volunteering is also my field work. In that sense, you can call it He now has read Tolstoy’s heftyclassic six times. And his latest book, “The Call to Ser- text. BOOKMARK times what seems to be a terrible moment can be a tremendously important opportunity.” Again, he seems awfully hard on himself. tradition of Papanikolas’ Greek ancestors. i Papanikolas, a fellow of the Utah Historical Society, is also the authorof “Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Greek Immigrants in Utah" and “Peoples of Utah.” aE EVENTS FOR WORD LOVERS Literary agent to speak to writers Literary agent and author Carol Western will speak on “Preparing that Perfect Final Draft’ at a gathering of writers. The Blue Quill chapter of the League of Utah Writers sponsors the lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesdayat the Eccles Art Center's Carriage House, 2580 Jefferson Ave., Ogden. It is free and open to the public. Western, a creative writing teacher at Granite and West high sc 100Is, owns the Salt Lake City-based Montgomery-WestLiterary Agency. Tig faeimadion on the meeting, call 393-5089. Dean Hughesjoins fiction workshop An upcoming workshop for fiction writers will include the insights of children’s author Dean Hughes, mystery writer Anne Wingate and screenwriter Ray Goldrup. The Wasatch Mountain Fiction Writers Fall Workshop begins at 10:15 a.m. Saturday at the Sandy Library, 10100 S. Petunia Way. Costis $25, and registration can be made at the door. Hughes will discuss “Write Right: From Idea to Finished Manuscript.” Wingate, the author of several mysteries and a court-qualified fingerprint expert, will speak on physical evidence in mystery writing. Goldrup, the author of screenplaysfor “Gunsmoke”and “Little House on the Prairie” among others, will discuss “Surviving the Screenwriting Market.” For information, call 649-3425. SOND BEST SELLERS These were the best-selling hardcover novels of the week, according to Publisher's Weekly. 1. The Bridges of Madison County. Robert James Waller. 2. Lasher. Anne Rice. 3. Without Remorse. Tom Clancy. 4. Sacred Clowns.Tony Hillerman. 5. The Golden Mean. Nick Bantock. 6. Nightmares and Dreamscapes.StephenKing. 7 . The Client. John Grisham. 8. Strip Tease. Cari Hiaasen. ) . Like Water for Chocolate. Laura Esquivel. 1 0. Vanished. Danielle Steele. “For someone predisposed toward gloom, anyway, in a sense I think these children have helped me in a much-needed way. Yousee, Call Classified 625-4300 again — what’s in it for me?” GiveYour Friends © Something Good | To Gossip About. , 19 Thal id What are your fiends Saying about your carpet! il theresa vy 44a chancethat the gossip isn't good, now’s a great time to redeem your reputation. Your Stevens Signature Dealeris having a sale with the best selection and the best prices in town. And when you buy Stevens Carpet, you get Stevens’ exclusive 15-day CustomerSatisfaction Guarantee. So if your friends are inclined to gossip, make sure they have good thingstosay. Visit your Stevens Signature Dealer today! 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