The Life and Media of Gordon F. Sander

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

2025 in review: “It was a very interesting year…”

2025 was an interesting and productive year for our little multi-media shop, with significant developments and achievements on our multifarious fronts, along with a few surprises.

On the JOURNALISM front, the highlights included:

--in January, the lavishly illustrated feature, JFK Wanted You to Watch This Movie Before He Was Assassinated - POLITICO, about “Seven Days in May,” the 1964 film about an attempted coup d’etat based on Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey’s thriller of the same name—which gave me a chance to bang the drum for both my political hero, JFK, and my literary hero, Rod Serling, the subject of my first book, Serling — The Life and Media of Gordon F. Sander.

In a sense, that piece was the bookend for the lengthy essay I also wrote for Politico back in 2017 about another unknown or unseen side of JFK, JFK’s Forgotten Constitutional Crisis - POLITICO Magazine, about the 1962 B-70 crisis, in which Kennedy resisted the efforts of General Curtis LeMay and the Air Force-industrial complex to build LeMay’s mad so-called “super-bomber,” arguably preventing World War III and came close to being impeached for his trouble.

Too, I was able to continue to indulge my passion for writing about overlooked personalities and events in both American and European history for my fantastic new London-based outlet, Engelsberg Ideas, where I published profiles of three of my varied “forgotten” heroes and heroines, Virginia Cowles, the great American war correspondent, Virginia Cowles Virginia Cowles, a woman in search of trouble - Engelsberg ideas; Henry J. Kaiser, the titanic industrialist whose Liberty Ships were crucial to the Allies’ winning the Battle of the Atlantic, and much more Who remembers Henry J. Kaiser? - Engelsberg ideas; and Orde Wingate, the dynamic and extremely eccentric British general Orde Wingate, always audacious - Engelsberg ideas.

--Also in January, the essay I wrote for “The Washington Post” about Donald Trump’s revived Greenland obsession and the history of America’s relationship with Greenland Trump isn’t the first U.S. politician with his eye on Greenland - The Washington Post, which led to a number of other things, including—

--My participation in an on-line forum about that explosive subject for the American Scandinavian Foundation Greenland: Past, Present & Future | Panel with Ulrik Pram Gad, Gordon F. Sander & Thorsten Wagner in April; and my own memorable journey to Kalaaliiit Nunaat, as the native Greenlanders call it and Denmark proper, and the in-depth feature I wrote for my primary outlet for my foreign correspondence, The New York Review of Books Not for Sale | Gordon F. Sander | The New York Review of Books, plus the even longer, illustrated feature I wrote about Greenland for my Nordic alma mater, ASF’s venerable—since 1913 and still going strong!—journal, Scandinavian Review Greenland_At_The_Crossroads_Fall_2025-1.pdf

So I think can say that 2025 was a productive year on the journalistic front.

Pleased to say we also made progress on the BOOK front, especially the Finnish sector of that front with—

--The completion and publication of The Finnish Front Line: Kekkonen, Kennedy and Khrushchev’s Cold War Crisis The Finnish Front Line by Gordon Sander | Hardcover | Cornell University Press by my beloved U.S. publisher, Cornell University Press.

That book doubles as the English language version and international version of Citizen Kekkonen — The Life and Media of Gordon F. Sander, the biography of Urho Kekkonen, the singular and still controversial man who presided over Finland for the better part of the Cold War, which I originally wrote for my esteemed Finnish publisher, WSOY.

Featuring a lot of things the original 150,000 word Finnish obra maestra didn’t have, including a completely revised and stream-lined text, a new12,000 word introduction, photos, and maps, Finnish Front Line is effectively a new book.

The highlight of the book, is the epochal, mutually revealing—and yes, essentially forgotten—Kekkonen’s visit to Washington in October 1961 at the height of the Berlin crisis, when JFK welcomed the Finnish president to the White House, to the Kremlin’s extreme ire; which in turn helped trigger Finland’s greatest postwar crisis the so-called Note Crisis.

Which Cornell spotlit on its site here Two Days in Washington: An Excerpt from The Finnish Front Line - Cornell University Press.

Full circle on several levels there!

Amongst other things, The Finnish Front Line is, effectively, my fourth book about Finland.

And—wait!—I have another in the oven, my current project, In The Shadow of the Peace, the sequel to The Battle of Finland, my best-selling (and still selling!) 2011 book about the 1939-1940 Winter War The Hundred Day Winter War — The Life and Media of Gordon F. Sander, about the murky and still controversial 15 month interlude that followed the Talvisota, as the Finns call it, which saw their country mysteriously transition from “America’s sweetheart” to an ally of Nazi Germany and pariah state after it joined in the invasion of the USSR.

It’s complicated, as are so many things when it comes to Suomi. You’ll be able to read all about it when that book, which also happens to be my fifth book about or dealing with Finland—which I also believe is a record for a non-Finnish writer—is published later this year.

So I suppose you can also say we made progress on the book front.

Meanwhile, the Estonian edition of Kekkonen, Kodanik Kekkonen Kodanik Kekkonen : suur projekt | Helmet-kirjastot | helmet.fi also was published by Varrak, the estimable Estonian publisher, thanks to the exertions of my wonderful and hard-working agent, Elina Ahlback of Elina Ahlback Agency.

Kiitos Elina! And aitah Varrak!

Last but not least, I continued to indulge my passion for photographing beautiful places, people and things, as can be seen here on my resplendent and ever-expanding web site www.gordonsander.com/photography.

I also was privileged to mount another resplendent exhibit of my photography in October, at Coffee Society, the new art café in Riga. The show, the third proper show of my photography in my adopted hometown—and my 36th altogether--featured my photographs of—surprise!—Finland.

“My Finland,” I entitled it, following the long tradition of calling my exhibits “My” after “My America,” “My World” and so forth.

Finally, last year saw some significant changes to my staff, including a big surprise--most notably the arrival of my newest associate and right hand person, the lovely and formidable Tamila Zolotareva.

This remarkable young woman, who I have known for several years, also happens to be my muse. As some of you know I also am a fashion photographer in my spare time and I have done a number of shoots with Tamila, so I already “knew” how beautiful she was. Her portrait was the frontispiece for my 2024 exhibit of female portraiture, “Portraits de la Femme II” at the Dome Hotel here in Riga.

What I didn’t know, or more accurately, didn’t have the opportunity to know, is that Tamila is also a gifted writer and researcher. I found that out quickly enough after she started working for me in September of last year as my literary associate and personal assistant.

Since then Tamila has proven herself a key and irreplaceable member of the Sander Media team, doing everything from researching my books and articles to designing posters for my exhibits—and making sure that I am still alive, which of course is the first duty of the long, formidable line of American, Finnish and Latvian assistants I have had since that great tradition began two decades ago when I was artist in residence at Cornell.

Additionally, three of my former literary and personal assistants, Mau Vuori and Henry Mannberg, the fantastic flying Finns who helped me with my three prior Finnish tomes, and Tamila’s predecessor, Marta Gulbe, have returned to the fold, so to speak, to help me complete “In The Shadow of the Peace.”

I am truly humbled by their loyalty and devotion to the cause.

Thank you all! Kiitos! Paldies! Spasibo!

Speaking of surprises, in November I got a a nice surprise from “The New York Review of Books” in the form of a lengthy interview with me about my life and career as a foreign correspondent and Nordic/Baltic specialist in combination with my feature about Denmark and Greenland: Good-Bye Atlanticism, Hello Darkness | Gordon F. Sander, Chandler Fritz | The New York Review of Books

Amongst other things, the interview gave me a chance to share my true feelings about our deluded and demented Dear Leader vis-à-vis Greenland, America’s sadly deteriorated relationship with our long time ally, Denmark, as well as some tales from my occasionally wild and crazy career, including the time I was nearly killed by some drunken Russian mafia who I had cut in line on the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn while in hot pursuit of a story about an Estonian discotheque for “The New York Times” when Estonia was part of the “Wild Wild East,” as the Balts were called at that time…

--As well as why and how 20 years later I wound up moving to Latvia—not Finland, as one might have expected. Answer: basically because I felt that I had a contribution to make here…too!

So here I am, eight years after the big move, still living in Riga, while jetting around the NB9, as the Nordic and Baltic countries are called, producing cool journalism, history, photography, and good vibes with the help of my wonderful friends on both sides of the Baltic, including my very best friend and sometime muse, Misha, the house parrot at the Grand Palace Hotel, the fabulous and welcoming hotel where I stayed during my first visit to Latvia way back in 2002.

And so it goes.

Finally, on the subject of gratitude I would be remiss not to thank my family, especially my beloved and steadfast brother Elliot and cousin Roger, also my honorary editor, for their continued support for our wondrous little multi-media shop.

And, to paraphrase Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard,” thank you, all you wonderful people out there in the dark for your interest and support.

Too…

Gordon

2024 in review

2024 was a fertile year for the team at Sander Media as our troops pressed forward over our diverse multi-media paths while opening up new ones.

In my BOOKS, the main event of the year was the publication of ROOMS: The Works and Life of JJ Manford, my biography-cum-catalog raisonne of my former assistant, now rising star of New York art world, the Right Honorable JJ Manford: www.gordonsander.com/rooms

Something of a literary outlier, at least for me, ROOMS was my first proper art book, as well as the first book I designed entire—as well as my gift to JJ.

I had a lot of fun promoting it, holding no less than four openings and events revolving around it from it in three countries, in Daugavpils, Latvia, in New York, where the main opening was held at my old hang out, Dorrian’s Red Hand—the same bar where I signed the contract for my first book, SERLING, thirty odd years ago; then, next, on Aero Island, Denmark, at my old friend Jacob Fuglsang Mikkelsen’s restaurant/culture house, Landbogaarden; and finally, in November, in Ithaca, where JJ and I first met twenty years ago when I was artist in residence at Risley College and JJ was my neighbor and sometime right hand man.

At the same time, speaking of Cornell, I also put the finishing touches on the long-awaited US edition of THE FINNISH FRONT LINE: Kekkonen, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Cold War, my historical biography of Urho Kekkonen, the long-time Finnish president, which WSOY published in 2022 Citizen Kekkonen — The Life and Media of Gordon F. Sander, and the latest addition to my Finnish historiography, which Cornell University Press is bringing out fall of 2025.

Looking forward to that!

In JOURNALISM, I continued to write for my regular outlets, The New York Review of Books, where I published a long feature about Sweden, pegged to that country’s historic decision to join NATO, the latest of the series of profiles of the countries of the Nordic and Baltic region I have been doing for that estimable publication Ready for War in Sweden | Gordon F. Sander | The New York Review of Books; and The Washington Post, where I did a number of essays for the Post’s History department about overlooked or forgotten events in American and European history, including a very special and personal one based on my book, THE FRANK FAMILY THAT SURVIVED, about my mother’s family’s experience underground during the German occupation, about the sketchbook which her lover, Edgar Reich, left her before he was shipped to Auschwitz which drew hundreds of moving responses from Post readers The Nazis took my mother’s boyfriend. His sketchbook preserved their love. - The Washington Post

Our Photography department also continued to be active, with “Portraits de la Femme II,” an exhibit of female portraiture I mounted at the elegant Dome Hotel.

Last but not least, the ranks of Sander Media saw a changing of the guard, as Anna Sicova, my formidable senior associate, Anna Sicova, who I first hired way back in May 2022 and was the moving force behind ROOMS, graduated from “Sander University” and handed the guidon to Marta Gulbe, a talented student in her first year at Latvia University, who brought her own flair and panache to the position of adjutant and production manager.

And so the Sander Media beat goes on!

And, finally, to quote Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard,” thank you all you wonderful people out there in the dark!

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