Writer, photographer, educator: Gordon F. Sander is a man of many talents — some of which he has actually managed to put to constructive use.

WELCOME TO SANDER MEDIA

2022 in review

Note: this introduction to our new vastly improved and expanded website will take approximately 12 minutes to read.  We guarantee that they will be the most entertaining 12 minutes you will spend today--or your money back! 

Greetings friends, fans and colleagues from around the world.  Welcome to www.gordonsander.com.

This "living" site is at once an archive of my collected literary and photographic works and musings, and a window onto the many worlds I have lived in and reported on, including the people and places I have met and interviewed and photographed over the course of my wild and (generally) wonderful, forever interesting life and times. 

At the same time, it's also a testament to the succession of devoted student associates both at Cornell, where this cyber-cornucopia was launched when I was artist in residence there and here in Riga, after I relocated to Latvia and the myriad hours they have devoted to updating and tweaking it, including typing up the myriad articles and essays from the clunky, pre-digital age.  Thank you Sarah, Phoebe, Scott, Tal!  Paldies Dace, Eleonora, Ieva, Anastasia, Matiss and Anna! This site is your labor of love too.  

Let's put things into perspective.  Mind, this is not quite the same as the opening of a presidential library.  But, blimey, it's darn close!  Amongst other things, this capacious site holds over or has links to roughly 450,000 of my published and unpublished words, including the text of  over 150 articles and essays of various length from or most of the 70 plus US, UK, and other European newspapers, magazines, and websites where my work has been published over the last seven decades, including such noted outlets as  The New York Times, Financial Times, Christian Science Monitor, Politico and Foreign Policy, as well as The Cornell Alumni News, where I first learned the journalist trade, and such other far-flung places where my by-line has appeared, such as The Fire Island News, Amsterdam Weekly, and In Time the sadly defunct in flight magazine of Estonian Air.  

Don't knock In Time!  I did a fun series of articles for In Time, "Estonia Lost and Found," about "lost" or overlooked aspects of Estonian/Baltic history for In Time in the early 2000s, like this one about Moura Budberg, H.G. Wells and the lost world of Yendl https://www.gordonsander.com/estonia-lost-and-found-time-105 and this one about the "secret lives" of Tallinn hotels https://www.gordonsander.com/estonia-lost-and-found-the-secret-lives-of-tallinn-hotels-in-time-winter-2005.  As you can see, they still hold up very nicely, even if Estonian Air didn't.  

To be sure, all of my published squibs, dispatches and post cards from my legendary forty plus year career as a roving journalist/contemporary historian are there, or at least the majority of them are. (What? You didn't know that I was a legend?)

To be sure! Interested in reading the longest piece of foreign correspondence I have ever published, and still one of the best, the 11,000 word profile of Sweden I published in Wilson Quarterly in 1996?  It’s here, in the foreign reportage section: https://www.gordonsander.com/sweden-after-the-fall-wilson-quarterly-296.  

So is the 300 word squib I wrote about the wonders of my beloved Aland Islands I wrote after one of the first of the dozen or so trips I have taken to that enchanted, quixotic Finnish archipelago for the late The European in 1995: https://www.gordonsander.com/summer-comes-gently-to-the-baltic-the-european-magazine-595

Then of course there is my first proper journalistic alma mater, The New York Times.  Keen on revisiting some of the 40 odd pieces I published in the various sections of the Sunday Times?  All of them are also here, from my debut piece of foreign correspondence, and first "Letter from.." country profile, of my first base, the malaise-beset Netherlands from the Magazine in 1976 after I had returned from my first postgraduate sojourn in Europe in 1976 https://www.gordonsander.com/innocence-lost-the-new-york-times-magazine-82276, to the thought pieces I did about trends in education for the Ideas & Trends page of the Week in Review, like this one about the parlous state of area studies: https://www.gordonsander.com/area-studies-coming-back-from-nowhere-the-new-york-times-377; through the Life Goes to a Party-type features I wrote about the night life scene and high society in New York and around the world for Style during my Damon Runyon phase, like my celebrated front page feature about the picaresque weekly Monday night soiree at the China Club https://www.gordonsander.com/looking-forward-to-mondays-the-new-york-times-61994, to my dinner with the late Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, then London's best known Drop Dead girl, at the Oxford-Cambridge Club https://www.gordonsander.com/she-without-whom-no-party-is-complete-the-new-york-times-5299.  Would you believe that I was the first person to write about the denizens of the night world, their haunts and the hard-working people of the night life industry in a serious way for the Times?  Why?  Because their stories were not being told. 

Which of course is the story of my career. "I don't understand your career," my attorney said to me at one point in the 90s, after the latest of my dispatches from the night for the Times's "Style" section came out, in this case a feature about party promoters, shortly after the Kennanesque portrait of Sweden I did for Wilson Quarterly.  "You write about geostrategic affairs and the party scene."  True that.  But in fact there was a through line connecting the two:  both pieces, in their own way, were about overlooked stories.

Keen on sampling the smorgasbord of dispatches from the North I have published in The Christian Science Monitor since 2014 as Nordic/Baltic correspondent for my estimable flagship?   There's a healthy selection of them here, inclding my 2016 feature about Iceland's techno-utopic Pirate Party https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2016/0927/Pirate-Party-ready-to-sail-Iceland-s-government-into-uncharted-waters, my 2019 feature about how Latvia and Lithuania are handling their respective suicide scourges https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2020/0211/Latvia-and-Lithuania-begin-to-tackle-a-chronic-scourge-suicide, and my 2021 piece about Latvia's campaign to lure its expatriates back to the homeland https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2021/1214/Can-expats-be-lured-back-Why-these-Latvians-are-coming-home.  .

The wide-ranging work I have done for Politico over the last six years of which I am also  proud, is also represented here, including my 2017 exhumation of the pivotal 1962 intergovernmental fight over the B-70 bomber, also known as LeMay's Folly, which I consider John Kennedy's forgotten finest hour https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/29/jfk-xb-70-lemay-constitutional-crisis-215203/    through my expose of the scandalous state of what passes for American civil defense https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/11/would-you-know-what-to-do-during-a-nuclear-attack-218675/, up to my recent pair of Ukraine-related features about the various ways Russia's invasion of that sovereign country impacted Daugavpils, the "capital" of Russian-speaking Latvia https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/20/latvia-russian-support-putin-war-00018585?fbclid=IwAR0Fl2gCJPtbjDd6h94V_NEJ2BvAbJGkCr9SCRHv-CrIRZknHF9hChL6EY4 and why the new war has thrust Finland and its president, Sauli Niinisto, the Western leader who had the best relationship with Vladimir Putin, into the news again, just like the 1961 Berlin Crisis thrust Urho Kekkonen, its then president--who also happens to be the subject of my last major work of history--did sixty years ago https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/07/finland-mattered-why-matters-again-00014580?fbclid=IwAR2Bz8P9W7g4AoJR3UDmn5tjkFH9vvLmhziOcTmpfT8ZTyI71sj1nY0CIR8.

Speaking of 2022, which saw the Sander Media team in particularly high demand because of the war (thank you Mr. Putin), you'll also find the clutch of pieces I did for my two newest outlets, The Washington Post and The New York Review of Books, including the series of history-based pieces for the Post, like this one examining the uncanny parallels between the Ukraine war and the 1939-40 Winter War https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/03/04/finland-russia-winter-war/?fbclid=IwAR2LkHXQyA-qDxcQtd3Qi6FfUW88xKLvK__o0hcmcD8LcQ1fNYS2-QRCy3o --which also includes the nutshell of my future dual biography of Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles, two pioneering foreign correspondents and gal pals who covered the Talvisota--and my look back at the Marshall Plan on its 75th anniversary and homage to its progenitor, and one of my other foreign policy heroes, George C. Marshall, and the renewed relevance of Marshall's vision of a transatlantic alliance in light of the new crisis https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/10/08/marshall-plan-russia-ukraine/?fbclid=IwAR0HvMkET_l248u7aLBjZkdKPN7T6cc2b356KwVEAXQTttZtGhe2a0HzIxY; and, "Memory Wars," my debut feature-cum-country profile in New York Review about the controversy over the Soviet era memorials in Riga set against a portrait of my adopted homeland, and the latest installment of the country profiles that I have been filing since my first one about Holland when I was just starting out:  https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/07/21/memory-wars-in-latvia-gordon-sander/ 

Stay tuned for the upcoming one about Finland in NYR this January. Praise the lord and pass the journalistic ammo!  Did you say anything about slowing down?  In case you didn't notice, 2022 was our busiest year!  

 

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THEN there are the books.  Or should I say THE BOOKS! 

Herewith you will also find extracts from six of my eight published non-fiction books, each of which has its own archival cubbyhole, so to speak, including essays about the story behind each tome and other related materials:  

--Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man (1992), my historical biography of Rod Serling, creator of "The Twilight Zone," https://www.gordonsander.com/serling

--The Frank Family That Survived (2004), my historical memoir of my mother Dorrit's German-Jewish family's twenty year odyssey of flight from the Nazis, culminating in the 1036 days they spent sequestered in a streetside flat in The Hague, inspired by the 2001 radio documentary of the same name I wrote and narrated for BBC Radio 4. This compartment also contains the memorable documentary based on the book that my friend Michael Franck, the noted documentarian, created for Finnish tv, for which he interviewed Dorrit at length. https://www.gordonsander.com/the-frank-family-that-survived

-- The Hundred Day Winter War (2010), my intensively researched history of the 1939-40 Fenno-Soviet Winter War https://www.gordonsander.com/the-hundred-day-winter-war

--Off The Map: A Personal History of Finland (2012), my illustrated "personal history" of Finland, https://www.gordonsander.com/off-the-map

--Citizen Kekkonen, aka The Finnish Factor: Kekkonen, Khrushchev, Kennedy and the Cold War, my historical biography of Urho Kekkonen, the long-time president of Finland, who oversaw that country's tricky "special relationship" with the Kremlin during the Cold War, including how JFK turned to Kekkonen for guidance during the height of the 1961 Berlin Crisis. https://www.gordonsander.com/citizen-kekkonen, and my last book,

--Latvia Rising: A Personal Portrait (2022), the contemporary history of Latvia that was commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia, illustrated by own photos, which I wrote with the aid of my friend Anastasia Maisuradze, and the second of my series of Nordic/Baltic country profiles: https://www.gordonsander.com/latvia-rising  (Estonia is next!)

Stay tuned for the compartments-under-construction about my two very different works-in-progress, in order: 

--In the Shadow of the Peace, the much-anticipated sequel to The Hundred Day Winter War, about the nebulous, still controversial sixteen month period between the March, 1940 following the armistice which brought the Talvisota to an unhappy close, and Finland's still controversial decision to become co-belligerents with Nazi Germany when it invaded the USSR in June 1941, and

--Rooms: The Works and Life of J.J. Manford, the book I am writing with my friend, one time Cornell assistant, partner in creative crime, now rising star of the international art world, J.J. Manford, wherein we take readers on a guided tour of the inter-connected rooms of J.J.'s extraordinary, interior-based oeuvre. 

Last but certainly not least, this expansive floor of www.gordonsander.com also contains my one celebrated stab at fiction, C-Town Blues, the autobiographical novel about my hazy crazy years as an undergraduate at Cornell during the late 60s and early 70s which was serialized in 24 parts in The Cornell Daily Sun after I returned to The Hill as artist in residence in 2002, which was illustrated by the aforementioned J.J. Manford, which also showcases those memorable sketches: https://www.gordonsander.com/ctown


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SO much for the "first" two floors of the site devoted to my various and sundry published works. Then there are the diverse disjecta membra which are harder to categorize, including the best--and in some cases, more eccentric--of my unpublished works, including the items in the idiosyncratic  https://www.gordonsander.com/in-search-of and https://www.gordonsander.com/humor-miscellany compartments. 

One of the advantages of having one's own site is the opportunity to publish the original draft of articles that were hopelessly mangled by their respective editors, which is what happened to the profile of Robert Redford I wrote for Omni in 1981, featuring the exclusive interview with America's then leading male star-cum-director for which I sortied to the wilds of southeastern Washington state, which the magazine's philistine editor steamed the life out of. You can peruse the surviving excerpt from the original typewritten manuscript about that adventure, one of the great coups of my career https://www.gordonsander.com/arch-hanging-with-the-sundance-kid.  

Mind, I did get $4000 ($13,000 in 2023 dollars) for that coup.  But it still hurts. 

This anomalous section also includes the product of my first great literary-cum-historical pilgrimage, "Day by Day in Every Way:  Emile Coue and the Birth of American Positive Thinking," the epochal 15,000 word thesis I wrote about Emile Coue, the French pharmacist of father of Self-Conscious Autosuggestion, the workaday system of self-help which revolved around the repeated use of the phrase, "Day by day in every way, I am getting better and better," which took America by storm in 1923.  It was this copiously illustrated, exhaustively researched paper which at once established one of the great themes--if not the major theme--of my career as a writer/historian, i.e., writing about unsung or overlooked figures and/or incidents from history and convinced my Cornell History department advisor that I was perhaps a bit too eccentric to be a proper academic and that perhaps I might be better off trying my hand at journalism. 

And so I did.  Was the history profession's loss journalism's gain?  You tell me: https://www.gordonsander.com/day-by-day.  For my money it's still one of the best things I have ever written, not to mention the last word on Coueism, America's first great psychological fad.  And remember, day by day in every way you are getting better and better!

Next Humor/Miscellany.  Unsurprisingly, some of the funniest/wackiest writing lovingly deposited in this section by my wide-eyed assistants was never published, mainly because it was written for my own divertissment or because of the subsequent damage I feared same would cause my career/and or person.

Thus https://www.gordonsander.com/nowledge-nosh-unpublished-1981 the catalog for Nowledge Nosh: The 24 Hour Delicatessen of 'Nowledge my 1981 parody of the then "hot" adult education trend by which self-styled adult education "schools" offered "courses" of varying difficulty and seriousness advertised in free catalogs distributed willy-nilly around Manhattan.  With its finely calibrated descriptions for such nearly plausible psuedo-educational fare as "Dating After Death," "Breaking into Blackmail," and "Feigning Interest" this deathless piece of persiflage still stands as the funniest thing I have ever written.  

Try it yourself and see if you can get through it without a laugh.  If "Dating After Death" doesn't get you--"are you single, widowed, divorced? being a single person can be difficult enough when you are alive, but what happens after the lights go out for good?"--then "Grenade Therapy, Or Pulling the Pin On Your Ennui" doubtless will: "...the purpose of this stimulating course is that most sufferers of intense ennui will quickly regain their interest in life, as well as their immediate surroundings once they discover that a live hand grenade has been tossed beneath their table or chair..."

Then there is the excerpt from The White Shark, the eye-opening, now-it-can-be-told memoir of the lookout on one of the first U.S. Coast Guard cutters charged with running down drug runners in the Caribbean in the late 70s during the early days of the War on Drugs which I had to abandon after I belatedly discovered that my co-author, who I had met in the dining car of the Amtrak Empire Builder on the way back from my Redford adventure had in fact been dishonorably discharged and was a dangerous, heavily-armed sociopath humself. 

Have you ever seen Alfred Hitchcock's film, Strangers on a Train? I lived it. Moral of the story?  Beware of coast guardsmen bearing bewitching tales.  Here is the souvenir from that literary adventure https://www.gordonsander.com/coast-guard-novel-unpublished-1982

Oh yes, I may not have had the happiest life of anyone I know, as I tell my friends sometimes.  But, I'll be damned if I haven't had the most interesting.  The proof is all there in Humor/Miscellany.  Enjoy.  Laugh's on me. 


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SO much for the two expansive floors--or, technically two and a half floors--devoted to the half million odd words on tap or linked here. 

But wait, there's more

Last and certainly not least, there is the expansive sector devoted to my photography career.  And, as you can see once you step inside, I truly have  had a separate career as a photographer.  

To be sure, I was an accomplished photographer long before I published anything.  The proof is here, to cite one precocious example of my American photography, in the arresting image of the visitor-filled People Wall of the IBM exhibit of the 1964 New York World's Fair which I took with the Fujica 35-SE camera my beloved Aunt Dina and Uncle Mackie Widmann gifted me for my bar mitzvah.  It's also there in the poignant shot I took of the spontaneous demonstration of shocked New Yorkers that took place in Central Park the day after Martin Luther King was shot on April 5, 1968.  

Thirty years later, I used the latter image as the frontispiece for, "My America: 1965-1998," the retrospective exhibit of 68 of my photographs that I mounted at Taidehalle, Helsinki's Municipal Art Museum, celebrating my relationship with Finland, the country where my "Baltic thing" began. Twenty two years later it also appeared in "My America 1965-2019," the sequel exhibit I mounted with the aid of the United States Embassy in Riga at the Palace of Culture, the event which confirmed my relationship with my new home.  You can see the work I mounted in that exhibit, as well as the gala opening in the hall we creared for it here https://www.gordonsander.com/my-america-1, one of the twenty galleries  comprising over 800 images, from my travels and pictorial peregrinations since I first wamdered around the New York World's Fair with my Fujica 35-SE through my recent wanderings which make up the panoramic "third floor" of this site.

Some of the images from the two dozen other exhibits around the world I have mounted over the years, including my two other major retrospectives, "My World," and "My Cornell," the two shows I mounted at the Fine Arts Library of Cornell's College of Art, Architecture and Planning in 2007 and 2009, when I was based at my alma mater, can also be found here when you click on https://www.gordonsander.com/new-york and https://www.gordonsander.com/sixties-1 and https://www.gordonsander.com/cornell.  

My photography has always been integral to my life and my work, including my work as a journalist.  My first serious job was as a photojournalist attached to the U.S. National Park Service Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada following my freshman year at Cornell. Every twenty years or so I return to Lake Mead and Boulder Beach to revisit the vivid memory of that unforgettable summer knocking around the moon-like Nevadan desert with my trusty Nikon, as I last did in 2019, when I took new shots for "My America II."  See https://www.gordonsander.com/nevada.

I have been illustrating my own articles since I began working for the Times in the 1970s, through my recent work for the Monitor.  Note: I am not a writer who takes photographs.  I am also a professional photographer. My work hangs in Cornell's Herbert Johnson Museum of Art as well as dozens of private homes around the world.  My photography, along with my love of cinema, is also interwoven with my journalism and historical writing. A visual writer, I like to inaugurate a text with an indelible image.  

My photography is one of the things that keeps me alive, and I would like to think, a young man--even at my (relatively) advanced age.  I also like to think I am pretty good at it.  

Judge for yourself, as you skim through the interconnected galleries of boundless dimension to cite the opening narration of  Twilight Zone of www.gordonsander.com.  And yes, as you can see, there is a gallery devoted to miscellany too https://www.gordonsander.com/miscellany-1 for images which are hard to categorize. 

Don't miss the one of the wistful girl on the beach with her I took in East Hampton in 1998!  Somehow I found it difficult where to place that one.  Then again, I suppose, you could say the same thing about my career. 

So be it. Enjoy. Thanks for your attention! The best is yet to come!

As ever, 

Gordon

January, 2023 

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