Remembering Denny by Calvin Trillin -- book review

Remembering Denny is a memoir and meditation. Calivin Trillin (journalist, doggeralist, New Yorker essayist, syndicated columnits of Uncivil Liberties, and other accomplishments too numerous to mention) was a Yale classmate of Denny (Roger D. Hansen.) In Remembering Denny, Trillin writes of his memories of Denny Hansen. He also writes about the era in which they studied at Yale, what Yale students were like then and later (in the 70's and 90's), what sort of expectations men met who grew up in the fifties, and what happened in Denny's life to cause him to commit suicide.

Denny Hansen at Yale was known as a popular, handsome and athletic student with a future of great potential. He left Yale to become a Rhodes scholar. After his years at Oxford, he returned to the U.S. where he held several jobs--mostly in the field of international relations--until his final job as a professor of international relations at the Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

In Remembering Denny, Trillin wrestles with the idea that sometime between Denny's time at Yale and the time of his death something happened to change him from golden youth to embittered man. In the course of his investigations and meditations, Trillin hits on some larger truths. He considers the problems of being a homosexual who came of age in the fifties. Hansen had unresolved sexual identity issues, that eventually he recognized as homosexsuality. Trillin also considers the problems for a man of early promise who fails to meet society's and his own expectations. And, Trillin considers the possible implications of personality and genetics in Denny Hansen's late life misery.

Remembering Denny is a warm reminiscence of a time and a person as well as an exceptionally well-thought-out and beautifully written consideration of a place and time.

Remembering Denny by Calvin Trillin, c. 1994, Warner Books, 1994.

You can find out more about Calvin Trillin here:

Bio page from The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/calvin_trillin

Interview from Salon
http://www.salon.com/weekly/interview960624.html

Interview on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/july-dec98/trillin_10-14.html

Goodman Speaker's Bureau bio
http://www.goodmanspeakersbureau.com/biography/bio-trillinC.htm