| MEDIA |
32
UNION COLLEGE | FALL 2021
BURK KETCHAM ’48
RON SINGER ’62
MARTIN JAY ’65
The Pledge
The Real Presence
Green Hollow Press
Adelaide Books
The Pledge is the finale in Ketcham’s trilogy based in a fictional upstate New York town. He previously published Dyken Falls and China Bound. Following three years in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Ketcham graduated from Union College and went on to get a master’s degree in planning from the School of Architecture at Columbia University. As a planning consultant, he is the author of over 100 planning reports and plans for cities and towns throughout the United States. His deceased wife, Helen Schmid Ketcham, was a published novelist, playwright and actress. Both of their sons are married and are college professors. One is a retired teacher of risk management and ethics. The other is an artist who teaches drawing and painting.
The Real Presence is a political novel and can be considered a sequel to Uhuru Revisited: Interviews with Pro-Democracy Leaders (Africa World Press/ Red Sea Press, 2015). Like Bob Shepard, the American character in The Real Presence, Ron Singer served with the Peace Corps in Nigeria in the mid-1960s, during the lead-up to the Biafra War. Since then, he has written a great deal about African politics, history, economics and culture. Much of the inspiration for an exciting and enlightening story in The Real Presence comes from the author’s personal experience. This is Singer’s 15th book. The genres represented are poetry, memoir, fiction and non-fiction. Singer’s work has appeared in journals, newspapers, magazines and e-zines across the English-speaking world. Many of Singer’s poems have been anthologized and/or set to music, and four stories have garnered Pushcart nominations. He has also written the librettos for two performed operas.
Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History University of Pennsylvania Press
There is no more contentious and perennial issue in the history of modern Western thought than the vexed relationship between the genesis of an idea and its claim to validity beyond it. Can ideas or values transcend their temporal origins and overcome the sin of their original context, and in so doing earn abiding respect for their intrinsic merit? Or do they inevitably reflect them in ways that undermine their universal aspirations? These and other persistent questions are at the heart of the discipline known as intellectual history. The essays in this collection address them through engagement with leading intellectual historians, as well other giants of modern thought. Martin Jay is the Ehrman Professor of European History Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley. He is author of numerous books, including The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–50, and Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory.
