“Writer, photographer, educator: Gordon F. Sander is a man of many talents — some of which he has actually managed to put to constructive use.”
When I was a child, my grandparents, the art dealers Flory and Myrtil Frank, thought that I had the talent to become a painter. Well, I took a different path in life..
A native New Yorker, I am graduate of Jamaica High School in Jamaica, Queens and Cornell University, where I graduated in 1973 with a B.A. in History.
My career as a foreign correspondent began in 1976, when I published a profile of the Netherlands in The New York Times Magazine, after which I became a regular contributor to both the paper’s Styles and Education sections. My by-line has since appeared in over sixty leading American, British and European newspapers, magazines and news sites, including Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Times Higher Education Supplement, Wilson Quarterly, Daily Telegraph, Politico and The Christian Science Monitor, where I am Nordic/Baltic correspondent.
I am also the author of five books: Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man, a historical biography of Rod Serling, the noted American teledramatist and screenwriter (1992); The Frank Family That Survived, a memoir of my mother’s family’s odyssey of flight from the Nazis, including the 1032 days they spent in hiding in The Hague ( 2004); The Hundred Day Winter War, my history of the 1939-40 Soviet-Finnish Winter War (2010); Off the Map: A Personal History of Finland, my illustrated memoir of my relationship with Finland and the Baltic region (2012); and Comeback Coach, an autobiography of Jesse Braverman, the celebrated New York State high school baseball coach (2017).
Last but not least, I am also an active photographer and photojournalist. Over the years I have mounted over thirty exhibits of my portrait and landscape photography and photojournalism around the world, including four major retrospectives, including two, “My World” and “The Cornell Zone,” at the Fine Arts Library of Cornell, where I was artist in residence; “My America 1965-1998,” at Taidehalle (Municipal Museum of Art), in Helsinki, Finland; and its sequel, “My America 2,” my largest ever exhibit, comprising 65 images, which was sponsored by the United States government and which I mounted at the Palace of Culture in Riga, Latvia where I am currently based.
