Garrett Oliver (T2008)
Garrett Oliver is the Brewmaster of The Brooklyn Brewery, the author of The Brewmaster’s Table, and the foremost authority in the United States on the subject of traditional beer. After years of amateur brewing inspired by beers he had encountered during a year in England, Garrett Oliver began brewing professionally at Manhattan Brewing Company in 1989 as an apprentice. He was appointed brewmaster there in 1993. He soon became widely known both here and abroad for his flavorful interpretations of traditional brewing styles and as an avid and entertaining lecturer and writer on the subject of fine beer. Garrett has hosted hundreds of beer tastings and dinners, writes regularly for beer and food-related periodicals, and is internationally recognized as an expert on traditional beer styles and their affinity with good food.
In 1994, Garrett joined The Brooklyn Brewery as Brewmaster and partner. Many of his beers have won national and international awards. He has served as a judge for the Professional Panel Blind Tasting of the Great American Beer Festival for fourteen years, and is a perennial judge for the prestigious Great British Beer Festival competition and the Brewing Industry International Awards. He has hosted tastings and talks for numerous cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, MassMOCA, the American Museum of Natural History and The Jewish Museum. In the United States, Garrett has made numerous radio and television appearances as a spokesman for craft brewing, including segments on NPR, CBS,CNN, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, WB, The History Channel, The Travel Channel, A&E, Emeril Live, Sarah’s Secrets, Roker on the Road, Bobby Flay’s Food Nation and Boy Meets Grill, CBS’ Martha Stewart Living, Fox & Friends, the WB Morning Show, and Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Garrett’s profile was featured in Gourmet magazine, which referred to him as “a passionate epicure and talented alchemist.” A recent two-page profile in The New York Times Dining Section referred to his “brilliant” ability to match craft beer with great food.
Garrett has hosted beer tastings and dinners at many fine restaurants, cooking schools, and food events including several dinners at James Beard House, Oceana, The Waldorf-Astoria, Gramercy Tavern, Aubergine (London), Noma (Copenhagen), the Slow Food Cheese Festival and Salone del Gusto in Piemonte, Italy, Restaurant Roberta Sudbrack (Rio Di Janiero), Restaurant Julia (São Paulo), Anthony’s (Leeds), Cape Wine 2006 (South Africa), The Association of Westchester Country Club Chefs, Artisanal Cheese Center, The American Institute of Wine and Food, The Culinary Institute of America, the Sommelier Society of America, The French Culinary Institute, The Culinary Guild of New England, The Institute for Culinary Education, Johnson & Wales University, the 2004 IACP Conference, the London BAR Show, The Gourmet Institute, and the 2006 Cape Wine Conference (South Africa). He was a featured speaker at the 2003 Cheers Beverage Conference and a 2004 National Restaurant Association Conference. He was a founding Board member of Slow Food USA and now serves on the Board of Counselors of Slow Food International.
Garrett’s first book, The Good Beer Book, co-written with Timothy Harper, was published in 1997 by Putnam/Berkley Books. His latest book, The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food, published by HarperCollins in May, 2003, is the winner of a 2004 International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Book Award and was a finalist for the 2004 James Beard Foundation Book Awards. The Brewmaster’s Table was released in a paperback edition in May of 2005. Garrett is Brewmaster and Vice President for Production of the Brooklyn Brewery. He is a graduate of Boston University, and holds a degree in Broadcasting and Film. He is the recipient of the 1998 Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation and Excellence in Brewing, granted by the Institute for Brewing Studies. It is the highest award given within the United States brewing profession. He is also the recipient of the 2003 Semper Ardens Award for Beer Culture (Denmark) and Cheers Beverage Media’s “Beverage Innovator of the Year” Award for 2006.
Lillie Palmer (T2008)
I’m a singer/songwriter originally from the E Village (Demon Records, U.K. and, Windham Hill Records) having been educated in New England. I graduated from The Trinity Conservatory, Providence, RI in theatre and have been active in theatre as a director and actor in New York and Boston. I’m currently working on writing a play and new music. Interests include Latin study for fun, and reading philosophy, theology and socio-political with a keen interest in maco-economics and social justice.
An interesting read for those digging into books XIII & IX
It is surprising to me that I am forwarding around a link to Tucker Carlson’s work, but in reading books XIII and IX, I’ve been struck by how apropos they are to today’s world, and here I’ve found a great example to prove the point. Maybe we’ll get this argument resolved in another 2,500 years!
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-28/in-defense-of-elitism/
John Halloran
Chuck Densinger (T2008)
Chuck Densinger, Vice President – Business Information Officer is responsible for customer business technology strategy for Best Buy’s US and international businesses. Chuck is accountable for developing strategies, in partnership with the business teams, to create deeper and more enduring customer relationships. He provides IT support for bestbuy.com, the Marketing capability, and is responsible for technologies that enable customer data integration, CRM functions, and customer analytics across Best Buy’s channels and brands world-wide.
Chuck’s experience spans a variety of business and IT roles. Prior to his current role, he served as a Customer Segment Leader, and as a Program Director in Business Development. He joined Best Buy in November 2001 from a healthcare technology startup company, where he was Sr. Director of Product Development for one year. Prior to that, he spent 11 years at Target Corp. in a wide variety of IT, finance and retail operations roles. Chuck graduated from St. Olaf College in 1985 with a Bachelor in Arts in Music Composition, and from the Carlson School of Management in 1990 with an MBA in Strategy. He is married and has two children.
Valerie Pearcy (T2008)
Valerie Pearcy is General Manager of Mod Green Pod, the sustainable design brand focused on high-end textiles and wallcoverings. She oversees the business operations and co-pilots the strategic growth of the business, which was founded in 2005.
Prior to Mod Green Pod, Valerie spent 11 years with Hoover’s, which was acquired by Dun & Bradstreet in 2003. In her last role she served as Director of Customer Care. In that capacity, she worked as part of Hoover’s Customer Experience department, with primary responsibility for customer education, feedback, and support. She also advised the business on areas of improvement in the customer lifecycle to enhance the customer experience. Valerie was a member of the core teams for many of the company’s major redesign and product launches since 2002.
Her other positions at Hoover’s included Quality Assurance, third-party vendor relationships, and leading various editorial teams.
Prior to joining Hoover’s, she worked in other fields including academic survey research. Valerie has a B.A. from Smith College and an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, where her graduate work focused on design history.
Stephan Roche (T2008)
Stephan Roche has more than 15 years of experience driving growthstrategies, major marketing, and business development initiatives forhigh-profile companies. In January 2007 Stephan joined GuidantFinancial Group, a leading provider of self-directed IRA services andbusiness funding solutions, as President and Chief Operating Officer(COO).
In his new position at the Bellevue, Washington-based company, Stephanis tasked with creating greater operational efficiencies within thebusiness, developing management-team competencies, identifyingstrategic enterprise-level partnerships and executing major companyinitiatives.
Stephan most recently led all aspects of ShareBuilder Corp’s 401(k)business unit and served as one of four members of the company’sexecutive team. He joined ShareBuilder to head up their web marketing,partnership marketing and business development teams. In that role,Stephan was responsible for driving ShareBuilder’s growth agenda vianew customer account acquisition, new strategic partnerships, and newproduct opportunities.
Before joining ShareBuilder in 2004, Roche was a Senior Manager at Bain& Company, leading projects on growth strategy, businessdevelopment, marketing, and operational excellence for majorcorporations as well as private equity firms. Roche began his career inbrand management at Procter & Gamble and Church & Dwight.
In addition to being a 2006 Puget Sound Business Journal “40 under 40″honoree, Roche graduated cum laude with a B.A. from PrincetonUniversity and earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Phillip Moss (T2008)
Phillip Moss Joined Gump’s in September 2007 and leads multi-channel technology and direct operations for a single department-store in San Francisco’s Union Square shopping district and a national mail-order catalog and web business.
Since joining Gump’s in 2006, Phillip replaced foundational pieces of the business as he implemented carrier management and supply-chain disciplines, IT, Fulfillment and then Call Center through a compliment of balanced in-sourced and out-sourced solutions. These accomplishments were positive to both his customer’s experience and P/L netting a reduction in expense greater than 40% measured at the bottom line.
Prior to Gump’s, Phillip actively managed internal teams and consulting projects for retail, technology, non-profit fund-raising, product marketing and service delivery industries. Notable company names in Phillip’s portfolio are Smith & Hawken, Apple Computer, Working Assets Long Distance, Disney Direct, BabyCenter and Restoration Hardware in addition to others that introduced Phillip to compelling business models and strategic/tactical challenges that stretched the boundaries of industry and professional experience.
Phillip is completing his Bachelor’s degree in Strategic Management at Dominican University.
Welcome to our Thucydides Reading Group
Phil Terry and I want to welcome you to the Thucydides reading group 2008-2009. We will hold an Introductory conference call on Mon Nov 3. The phone number for this call and subsequent calls, as well as subsequent call dates, will follow. We encourage everyone to obtain a copy of Robert Strassler’s edition of Thucydides. In it, Victor Davis Hanson’s Introduction is very informative and valuable. Also, Robert Strassler’s Editor’s Note is essential to getting the most out of Strassler’s format and, of course, Thucydides’ numerous references to the ancient world of the 5th century Greek city-states. We will touch on these two sections of the Strassler edition, as well as strategies on how to read Thucydides on our Introductory call. Looking forward to ‘meeting’ you all and engaging in discussion with you. Here’s to the start of a new group and a new year of reading the Classics!
Sincerely,
Andre Stipanovic, your reading group moderator
Kerty Nilsson Levy (T2008)
Kerty Nilsson Levy is based in Iowa. She is Vice President of Kemin Industries, a privately owned bio-chemical company which provides nutrition and health solutions to the feed, food, petfood, nutraceutical and pharma industries. Her background is in strategic marketing and organizational development, having spent time in the online learning industry doing business development and product management and at BCG and Technomic Consultants doing management consulting, among other things.
Kerty was born in Tokyo, Japan and spent her early years in the Philippines, Belgium and Switzerland. She went to boarding school in Sweden and was naturally drawn to China, where she lived and worked for six years after graduating from college. Kerty speaks Swedish and Mandarin Chinese. Kerty received her BA from the University of California at Davis and her MBA from Harvard University. She and her husband reside in Des Moines with their two daughters.
What makes reading Thucydides so relevant through the ages?
Dear fellow readers,
What makes reading Thucydides so relevant to us and to others before us? Here are my opening thoughts:
I have just finished re-reading the Introduction in Strassler’s edition of Thucydides. In it, Victor Davis Hanson says that Thucydides “believed that the war between Athens and Sparta offered a unique look at the poles of human and not just Greek experience, at contrasting ideologies and assumptions for a brief time ripped open by organized savagery and left exposed for autopsy” (xi).
History is a great teacher. Good history teaches through the ages.
I have been recently reading and researching the Roman historian Sallust, who was a witness to the end of the Roman Republic. In a commentary on Sallust, Professor J.T. Ramsey remarks: “As we happen to know from Cicero, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War seems to have enjoyed a sudden access of popularity at Rome in the mid-first century B.C. shortly before Sallust began writing. Apparently the interest in Thucydides was revived by the crisis precipitated when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and civil war broke out. Readers turned to the historian of the decline and fall of the Athenian empire for grim consolation or enlightenment under the pressure of similar circumstances which Thucydides (1.22.4) argues are controlled by human nature and therefore are likely to recur so long as human nature remains unchanged” (Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, 10).
Another anecdote. Woodrow Wilson is said to have had Thucydides at his side while negotiating the Versailles Treaty after WWI:
The lessons he teaches about imperial over reaching and unreasonable peace settlements are prescient today as they were during his times. President Woodrow Wilson, read this book on his voyage across the Atlantic to the Versailles Peace Conference and vociferously fought the other Allies in making unreasonable demands of the Germans. Wilson learned the dangers that the world would be placed in by backing the Germans into a corner politically and economically from Thucydides book.
(Michael Neulander)
I look forward to “meeting” you all at our conference call on Monday November 3rd, 8pm EST.
Andre
30. October 2008 by Arrian
Categories: Commentary, Thucydides | Tags: Commentary, Thucydides | Comments Off on What makes reading Thucydides so relevant through the ages?