The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
featuring Joel Johnstone, FCLC ’01—and the Rose Hill campus

After five celebrated seasons, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has come to an end. The fan-favorite comedy about a rule-breaking 1950s housewife turned raucous comedian featured Rachel Brosnahan as the title character, Miriam “Midge” Maisel, and Michael Zegen as her soon-to-be-ex-husband Joel, vice president of a plastics company and an aspiring comedian. Fordham’s own Joel Johnstone, FCLC ’01, starred as Archie Cleary, who, along with his wife Imogene, is one of the couple’s best friends. Johnstone aside, the cast and crew were no strangers to Fordham, having filmed at the Rose Hill campus a couple of times. In fact, if you look closely at episode eight of the final season, you’ll notice something familiar in the background: Cunniffe Fountain and Edwards Parade (see above). In this episode, in which Fordham provides the setting for Midge’s college reunion, the characters engage in a lot of self-reflection, illustrated with some throwback clips, and Midge’s dad, Abraham (Tony Shalhoub), finally comes to appreciate the women in his life. Mrs. Maisel is far from the only production to be drawn to Rose Hill’s idyllic beauty. Since the 1940s, dozens of TV shows and films have been shot, in part, at Fordham—including 2015’s True Story, which starred James Franco, Jonah Hill, and Felicity Jones, and featured Fordham Theatre grad Betty Gilpin, FCLC ’08, in a supporting role.
—Sierra McCleary-Harris

Can You Dig It?
co-created and executive produced by Bryan Master, FCRH ’99

This past August marked the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, and media outlets across the world have been looking back at the early days of the culture. In this audio series, though, the focus is on events that led to the birth of hip-hop—ones that took place not far from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. Co-created by Bryan Master, FCRH ’99, and narrated by legendary Public Enemy rapper Chuck D, Can You Dig It? chronicles the 1971 gang peace treaty in the Bronx that paved the way for hip-hop. Through scripted scenes and unscripted interviews, it tells the story of the murder of Ghetto Brothers member Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin, which resulted in an escalation of violence. That moment of chaos was followed by the Hoe Avenue peace meeting, organized by the Ghetto Brothers’ Benjamin “Yellow Benjy” Melendez, which ushered in an era of relative calm among gangs in the South Bronx. Two years later, on August 11, 1973, with young people in the area safer to socialize across neighborhood boundaries, Cindy Campbell threw a “Back to School Jam” in a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Her brother, Kool Herc, DJ’d the party, which came to be considered the origin of hip-hop music. For Master, the founder and owner of Sound + Fission, a music and audio production company, the series is a tribute to the peacemakers and an open “love letter to the Bronx.”
—Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08

The Color of Family
a novel by Jerry McGill, FCRH ’92

In his latest novel, Jerry McGill, author of Bed Stuy: A Love Story (2021) and the memoir Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me (2012), shares a portrait of the Paynes, an upper-class, African American family that lives in suburban Connecticut. Despite appearances, the Paynes aren’t quite as happy as people assume, especially when twins from France—the result of one of patriarch Harold Payne’s extramarital affairs—arrive on the family’s doorstep. One fateful night, brothers Devon and James are in a car accident that leaves Devon paralyzed. James eventually goes off to college and excels at football, the sport they both loved. When Devon is moved into a rehabilitation center across the country, the distance between the two brothers— wrought by their explosive, sports-fueled rivalry—is no longer just figurative. Years later, as Devon travels around the world over the course of a decade to visit his seven siblings, he sees how the traumatic accident of his youth has affected—and connected—all of them. They each may have moved on in their own way, but it’s only through forgiveness and by coming to terms with the past that they’ll be able to live freely in the present. Though Devon is at the center of the novel, McGill weaves in diary entries and first-person narratives from the other characters, giving readers a chance to examine the relationships, events, and heartbreaks from multiple perspectives. The novel is less than 300 pages, and that, coupled with the shifting points of view, makes it a great, page-turning read.
—Sierra McCleary-Harris

Veteran Sportswriter Jack Curry Gives Readers a Behind-the-Scenes Look at ‘The Greatest Team Ever’

When Jack Curry, FCRH ’86, began interviewing players for a book about the Yankees’ 1998 season, he asked Hall of Fame shortstop Derek Jeter to describe the team. “Greatest team ever,” Jeter told Curry. “That’s what comes to mind.” And that’s how the subtitle of Curry’s latest book, The 1998 Yankees: The Inside Story of the Greatest Baseball Team Ever (Hachette, 2023) was born.

Curry has been covering the team for decades. He co-wrote Jeter’s 2000 book, The Life You Imagine: Life Lessons for Achieving Your Dreams, and he’s also written books with former Yankees Paul O’Neill and David Cone. Since 2010, he’s been an analyst on the YES Network, and for more than two decades prior to that, he was a sportswriter for The New York Times, including during the 1998 season.

Now, 25 years later, he takes readers through the team’s incredible 125-win season, from a sluggish 1-4 start through an impressive postseason run that culminated in the Yankees’ 24th World Series title (they’ve added three more since then). And while Curry recounts all the big moments fans know so well, he also peels back the curtain so readers can appreciate the back stories and see how the players—and a dramatic season—came together.

Curry shares how the night before David Wells threw a perfect game, he was out drinking until the wee hours with then-Saturday Night Live star Jimmy Fallon; how a connection General Manager Brian Cashman made the season before helped the Yankees sign a contract with pitcher Orlando “El Duque” Hernández, who defected from Cuba on Christmas Day, 1997; how closer Mariano Rivera came across his signature cut fastball during a game of catch; and how Scott Brosius went from “a player to be named later” in a trade to World Series MVP.

For Yankees fans and baseball fans alike, Curry’s latest book offers a front-row seat to the team’s journey from a heartbreaking playoff loss in 1997 to the top of the world just a year later.

—Kelly Prinz, FCRH ’15

Jerry McGill Explores Family Dynamics, Betrayal, and Forgiveness in The Color of Family

In his latest novel, The Color of Family (Little a, 2023), Jerry McGill shares a portrait of the Paynes, an upper-class, African American family that lives in suburban Connecticut. Despite appearances, the Paynes aren’t quite as happy as people assume—made all the more evident when twins from France, the result of one of patriarch Harold Payne’s extramarital affairs, arrive on the family’s doorstep.

One fateful night, brothers Devon and James are in a car accident that leaves Devon paralyzed. James eventually goes off to college and excels at the sport they both loved. When Devon is moved into a rehabilitation center across the country, the distance between them—wrought by their explosive, sports-fueled rivalry—is no longer just figurative.

Years later, as Devon travels around the world over the course of a decade to visit his seven siblings, he sees how the traumatic accident of his youth has affected—and connected—them all. They each may have moved on, but it’s only through forgiveness and coming to terms with the past that they’ll be able to live freely in the present.

Though Devon is at the center of the novel, McGill weaves in diary entries and first-person narratives from the other characters, giving readers a chance to examine the relationships, events, and heartbreaks from multiple perspectives. The novel is fewer than 300 pages long, and that, coupled with the shifting points of view, makes it a great, page-turning summer read.

McGill is the author of two other novels, including Bed Stuy: A Love Story, and a memoir, Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me. Read our 2012 profile of McGill and review of his memoir.

Award-Winning Novelist Andrew Krivak Evokes the Effects of War on Four Generations of a Pennsylvania Family

The title and epigraph of Andrew Krivak’s century-spanning new novel come from the Book of Joel. Warning of ecological disaster, the biblical prophet compares a plague of locusts to war horses: “Their appearance is like the appearance of horses, and like war horses, they run.”

The proverbial war horses run through each generation of the family at the heart of this lyrical, moving book. Homecomings are both longed-for and fraught, as each generation is haunted by the moral complexities of war, and by their own struggles to survive battles intensely physical and psychological.

The novel begins in 1933, when a teenage Bexhet “Becks” Konar flees fascist death squads in Hungary. He appears at the Dardan, Pennsylvania, homestead of Josef Vinich, who saved his infant life at the end of World War I. Vinich, now co-owner of a roughing mill, treats Becks like a son. Eventually, Becks and Vinich’s daughter, Hannah, fall in love, marry, and have two children, Bo and Samuel, before Becks is sent to fight for his adopted country in World War II.

He returns from the war a shell of his former self, and in 1949 he’s killed in a hunting accident—shot through the chest by Paul Younger, whose father had been forced to sell his land to Vinich years earlier, and whose family becomes even more intimately linked with the Konars.

In the 1960s, Samuel enlists in the Marines, becomes a prisoner of war, and develops a heroin addiction. Both he and Bo eventually learn about their father’s battles in World War II, which include a charge of desertion, imprisonment, and a bloody stint as part of the Romani resistance.

From one generation to the next, peace is elusive. And while Krivak depicts the violence of war with frightening intimacy, he’s also attuned to the persistence of beauty and grace in nature and in what love endures.

In 2012, when Krivak received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, which recognizes “the power of the written word to promote peace,” he dedicated the award to the people who shaped him, including his immigrant grandmother, whose stories about life in what is now Slovakia continue to inform his fiction.

“They’ve all done their work. They’ve all found their peace,” he said in an acceptance speech. “What remains is for us to keep telling of it as well as to keep praying for it, to keep insisting upon it as well as to keep hoping for it, and to keep listening so that we’ll know when to act, whether it’s out in the world … or at work on a sentence, alone in a room with words.”

Like the Appearance of Horses (Bellevue Literary Press) is the culmination of Krivak’s Dardan Trilogy, a saga that began with his 2011 debut novel, The Sojourn, which focuses on Josef Vinich’s experiences as an Austro-Hungarian conscript in World War I. Each book in the series, which also includes 2017’s The Signal Flame, can stand on its own.

Krivak is also the author of the 2020 novel The Bear (read an excerpt), a collection of poetry, and A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, a 2008 memoir about his eight years as a Jesuit.

—Ryan Stellabotte

Three years ago, McGill self-published the book Dear Marcus, inventing a name for his assailant, who was never identified. He never thought “Marcus” would read his words. Instead, he hoped others would find inspiration in his story—“people who question why bad things happen, and how you can get through a really dark period.” 

McGill, who has full use of his upper body, also admits to dreaming of fame. “I was hoping through some crazy stroke of luck,” he said with a laugh, “I could get it to Oprah.”

The media mogul never called, but The New York Review of Books did, and acclaimed author Lorrie Moore reviewed Dear Marcus, calling it “short, sweet, homespun, and inspiring.”

“It was one of those moments where you’re in the shower and you actually have to catch your breath,” McGill said of hearing the news. 

An editor at Random House, having read Moore’s review, tracked McGill down in Portland, Oregon, where he works as a college success coach, and offered to help bring his memoir to a wider audience. 

In the book, republished by Random House in May, McGill describes with great care the unflinching support he received from his doctors, nurses, and physical therapists after he was shot—despite his sometimes cocky, rebellious attitude. “It wasn’t until later that I realized that that was unconditional love,” McGill said.

At 16, he became the youngest member of the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped, a group founded by a Jesuit priest, Rick Curry, S.J., who later helped McGill get into Fordham, where he earned a B.A. in English and made “a ton of friends.” After college, McGill traveled the world setting up international tours for disabled young adults. He also made a short film, earned an M.F.A. from Pacific University in Oregon, and taught high school for two years in Portland, where his curious students discovered his book.

McGill held an auditorium Q-and-A session about his experience, one he replicated at John Jay College in New York. He hopes to talk to more student groups, he said, and get Dear Marcus on some high school reading lists.

“The main thing I try to drive home is finding your inner strength,” he said. “That’s what’s going to pull you through in life.”

Book Review: Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me

In this powerfully moving memoir, Jerry McGill explores the physical and emotional toll that a single act of violence exacted on his life—and the hard-earned lessons it taught him about accepting loss, finding inner strength, and learning the value of unconditional love.

On New Year’s Day, 1982, McGill was 13 years old, a smart, athletic, outgoing kid living in the Lilian Wald Houses on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Life in the projects wasn’t easy for McGill, his younger sister, and their single-parent mother, but it was at least halfway hopeful. Despite living in a neighborhood and a housing complex marked by violence, cockroaches, graffiti, and the “usual scent of dread and poverty,” McGill writes, “a whole host of aspirations were floating around in that young imagination of mine.” He was getting more involved with the drama and theater program at Intermediate School 70, and hoping to attend the High School of Performing Arts, better known as the school featured in the 1980 film Fame.

But those adolescent hopes were snuffed in an instant. Walking home with a friend late at night on that first day of 1982, McGill was shot in the back just a block from his home. The shooter was never found, and the incident—unprovoked and senseless—left him paralyzed.

In recounting his experiences, McGill addresses his unknown assailant, giving him a name and several plausible circumstances that might have led him to pull the trigger that fateful evening. But, he notes, “I didn’t write this book for you, Marcus. My reasons for writing this are bigger than you or me, my friend. I wrote this book to release demons into the warm night air.”

McGill vents his justifiable anger—his frustrations with his condition, the opportunities lost, and the impact the shooting had on his relationships with his mother and sister. “My little sister should never have had to help me get dressed,” he writes. “You screwed up the balance in our relationship, Marcus. It should have been me taking care of her.” 

But McGill doesn’t wallow in despair. “What-ifs can kill you if you let them, Marcus. They can eat you up like bone cancer or a flesh-eating bacteria.” And he relays his insights with no small degree of humor and compassion.

The heart of the book is McGill’s account of the six months he spent in the now-shuttered St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he struggled to regain some upper-body strength and relearn how to brush his teeth and feed himself, among other basic tasks. He writes with unflinching, unsentimental honesty about the people and events at “St. Vinny’s” that “helped to break me down and pull me up,” including the occupational therapist who cried with him when he learned that he would not walk again.

“I wonder, Marcus, if you’ve ever known a love like this,” McGill writes. “Have you ever had someone care about you so much that when you hurt, they hurt? When you need, they need? It is this kind of love that can make all of the difference in the world.”

McGill went on to attend a high school for disabled students. And he did not give up on his dreams, joining the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped, which was founded by Rick Curry, S.J., who later encouraged McGill to attend Fordham, where he earned a degree in English in 1992. McGill writes briefly about his postgraduate trials and successes, including his work as a group leader with a company “dedicated to taking young people with disabilities on international exchanges,” an aspiring screenwriter and filmmaker, and an advocate for the disabled.

And he ultimately comes to terms with Marcus. “I hope that you have felt guilt and shame,” McGill writes, “but I also hope that you have learned to let go of it all and forgive yourself. I honestly believe that I have.”

—Ryan Stellabotte