David M. Alexander/Courtesy

Revered science-fiction author and UC Berkeley alumnus Jack Vance passed away May 26. He was 96.

Vance began his writing career at The Daily Californian and went on to publish more than 60 books. One of his works, “The Dragon Masters,” won him the Hugo Award in 1963, leading to his induction later in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2001.

Though Vance never quite reached the celebrity status of other authors in the genre, such as John Varley or Dan Simmons, he gained a devoted following for his skillful prose. His work influenced best-selling authors like Stephen King and George R.R. Martin.

“His work has distinctive elegance,” said Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer-Prize winning book critic for the Washington Post, describing his style as “witty and ingratiated with rhythm.”

On meeting Vance, Dirda noted the difference between Vance’s image on and off the page. “In person, he was extremely down-to-earth, dressed very ordinarily and played the ukulele. But his style was urbane and sophisticated. He wrote like a dandy, like Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse.”

A Bay Area native, Vance grew up in Oakley, Calif., and lived in Oakland for most of his life. He enrolled in UC Berkeley in fall 1937 as a physics major but changed his major to English after developing an interest in journalism working for the Daily Cal.

According to his memoir, “This is Me, Jack Vance!”, Vance was a student of the Great Depression and began working at the Daily Cal his freshman year as a part of the Works Progress Administration, earning $60 a month.

Vance quickly formed a group of friends who shared an inclination for revelry that included “beer-drinking, jazz music and staff parties which occurred at an isolated site in the hills east of town.”

Vance left campus in his junior year to work for the Navy at Pearl Harbor. Though he returned to UC Berkeley and enrolled in classes, he never completed his studies.

“He just liked learning and was interested in self-education,” said Carlo Rotella, director of American Studies at Boston College who interviewed Vance for a piece in 2009.

For the remainder of World War II, Vance worked with the merchant marines and began writing fiction in the 1940s on decks of ships while traveling the Pacific.

Aside from his writing, many remember Vance for his friendly, boisterous personality.

“Vance and [his wife] Norma were always so great to work with because they made me feel like I was doing a good job,” said Beth Meacham, Vance’s publisher and former editor in chief of Tor Books.

Vance’s wife Norma passed away in March 2008. Vance is survived by his son, John Holbrook Vance II.

Contact Hannah Lee at jhlee@dailycal.org.

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Kenneth Waltz, a prominent thinker in international relations known as the father of the political theory neorealism, died on May 12. He was 88.

Waltz joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1971 and became professor emeritus of political science before leaving for Columbia University in 1994. His most influential works, “Man, the State, and War” (1959) and “Theory of International Politics” (1979) introduced new arguments about state behavior in international relations that spearheaded political thought in the postwar era.

The preceding dominant theory of international relations, realism, attributed state behavior to human nature. Waltz introduced neorealism as an alternative explanation, attributing states’ behavior to the contexts they are in as well as systemic reasons. According to neorealism, states exist in a world with no central authority and pursue their own interests for self-survival.

“His theory of neorealism plays such a central role that you couldn’t teach ‘Intro to International Relations’ without teaching it,” said professor Amy Gurowitz, one of Waltz’s former students, who now teaches the introductory international relations course on campus. Waltz is also known for his controversial argument in his 1981 monograph, “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better,” which says that nuclear proliferation would enhance international security.

James Fearon, a professor of political science at Stanford University, was advised on his thesis by Waltz and said Waltz was always nuanced in his thinking and thought long and hard on the issues he cared about, such as nuclear deterrence.

“One of the things he took exception to in my thesis was that I wasn’t sufficiently distinguishing between deterrence and defense,” Fearon said. “He was upset by the way deterrence has migrated to mean any attempt to dissuade another state from doing anything.”

Waltz leaves behind a legacy through mentoring accomplished political thinkers, including Robert Gallucci, president of the MacArthur Foundation, and Barry Posen, director of MIT’s Security Studies Program.

Shibley Telhami, a former student of Waltz and current Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, College Park, said he was greatly influenced by and resonated with Waltz’s writing. When he decided to switch subjects — to political science from mathematics and philosophy — the first book he read was “Man, the State, and War.”

“It was brilliant,” Telhami said. “It was new to me, so I immediately went to meet him, and told him I was interested in doing a Ph.D.”

Robert Jervis, a professor of international politics at Columbia University, knew Waltz since he was an undergraduate student and later became a longtime friend and colleague.

“He was already a leading IR theorist, and here I was — just got my Ph.D. and just started teaching, and he treated me as a peer,” Jervis said.

Waltz also encompassed many attributes that contradicted his public image.

“Waltz had an image,” Telhami said. “The image was that he was a power guy. He was opposite of that; he was a warm and caring person. His realism led him, more often, to oppose war.”

Waltz emphasizes in “Theory of International Relations” that he means to describe general state behavior rather than specific foreign policies and state actions. However, Steven Weber, a professor of political science at UC Berkeley, said that Waltz was still interested in policy issues, contrary to his reputation.

In addition to his professional interests, Waltz also loved opera and art and visited numerous opera houses in New York in his free time, according to Jervis.

Waltz’s wife, the former Helen Lindsley, died in 2008. Waltz is survived by his two sons, Daniel and Kenneth, as well as four grandchildren.

Contact Mary Zhou mzhou@dailycal.org.

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Katherine Hala/Courtesy

Paul Alpers, a longtime UC Berkeley English professor and the founding director of the UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities, passed away on Sunday after a battle with cancer. He was 80.

A pioneer of interdisciplinary studies on campus and an expert in Renaissance literature, the professor of 38 years was known for expanding the scope of scholarship within his department and helping bridge divides between siloed academic departments.

“He was a scholar, a gentleman — seriously committed to the academic enterprise at Berkeley and making it work, not only at his own department but across boundaries into different departments with different people and different interests,” said Randy Starn, director of the Townsend Center from 1996 to 2000.

Alpers came to Berkeley in 1964 after receiving his master’s degree and doctorate in English from Harvard University. As a professor of comparative literature and English, he quickly built a rapport with colleagues and students as one of the school’s most respected faculty members, winning the 1972 Distinguished Teaching Award, the top teaching award at UC Berkeley.

“He had a warm, generous and rigorous intelligence,” said Anthony Cascardi, dean of arts and humanities in the College of Letters and Science. “He spoke to you as a colleague and as a teacher, and he always seemed to preserve his interactions with his colleagues and his students. He was the essence of what it means to be a humanist.”

Emblematic of Alpers’ focus on interdisciplinary studies was the founding of the UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities, created in 1987 to more efficiently connect disparate talent on campus.

Rather than bringing in outside talent, the focus of the center was on fostering and developing relationships with various campus humanities departments, offering support for its members through fellowships, scholarships and publishing papers.

“He saw the need for interdisciplinary studies,” Cascardi said, “and he saw the need for interdisciplinary studies long before it was fashionable to do that.”

As founding director of the center from 1987 to 1992, Alpers helped lay the groundwork for the burgeoning organization’s sustained success.

“Paul felt we needed an internal center for the people that were already at Berkeley,” said Christina Gillis, associate director of the center from 1988 to 2004. “Berkeley was such a lively place. We needed more connection between the faculties here, and that was right. That is what we needed at Berkeley.”

Alpers also used this interdisciplinary mentality as an English professor, pioneering the department’s extension with scholars of literature from around the world.

“He was really important in the reinvention of the English department as it existed then and exists today,” Starn said. “He completed its transition from being a local department with its roots in a fairly parochial vision of what literature was like.”

The author of books on the Faerie Queene and pastoral poetry, Alpers was a founding editor of the journal Representations, a multidisciplinary journal first published in 1983 with articles from various social sciences.

“That was a highly, highly respected journal,” Gillis said, “and a highly respected group of people on that board.”

Alpers’ wife, Carol Christ, served as Berkeley executive vice chancellor and provost from 1994-2000 and was named president of Smith College in 2002. Alpers retired from Berkeley that year, assuming the title of Class of 1942 Professor of English Emeritus. At Smith, Alpers became a professor in residence and an unofficial ambassador for the college.

Alpers is survived by Christ as well as his sons, Benjamin and Nicholas Alpers; his stepchildren Jonathan and Elizabeth Sklute; four grandchildren; two brothers, David and Edward Alpers; and his former wife, Svetlana Alpers.

Contact Chris Yoder at cyoder@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @christiancyoder.

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UC Berkeley student Jose Felix Mayen died in a car accident on the San Mateo Bridge approximately two weeks ago. He was 23.

On April 24, Mayen was driving a Toyota Corolla on Highway 92 on the side of the San Mateo Bridge when his car stalled. A black BMW station wagon rear-ended the Toyota, and a silver sedan rear-ended the BMW at 7:15 a.m., according to California Highway Patrol officer Art Montiel.

Shortly afterward, an ambulance transported Mayen to the Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley, where he passed away the next day, Montiel said. The California Highway Patrol is still investigating the crash.

“When Jose passed, I had to make the announcement to let everyone know,” said Genevieve Negron-Gonzales, a UC Berkeley lecturer on global poverty and practice, in an email. “Several students commented that they were looking for him that morning because he was always there, on time, sitting near the front, with a warm smile. His absence was felt by all of us.”

At the age of 16, Mayen came to the United States from Guatemala, facing the challenges of learning a new language and adapting to a different culture. However, these difficulties did not stop him from excelling academically.

When Mayen entered his sophomore year at Menlo-Atherton High School, he knew little English and took English instruction classes, but by the time he was in his junior year, he had already caught up and was taking core English classes.

“He had a great sense of community,” said Stephen Ready, a bilingual resource teacher at Menlo-Atherton High School. “He was diligent about catching up, accelerating up as quickly as he could … In my 20 years as an educator, I have never known anyone like him.”

Before he came to UC Berkeley, Mayen attended Canada College, where he was heavily involved in many areas of campus life, such as serving as the vice president of the campus’ student government, working as a tutor for English learners and helping out at the reference desk in the library.

“We have a lot of students who start off the same way as Jose,” said David Patterson, a librarian at Canada College. “They’re immigrants, they have very little English and they have lots of dreams … Jose was able to do it. He was able to transfer to Berkeley.”

His passion for helping others led him to consider sociology as a major. Since he personally knew the challenges immigrants face upon coming to America, Mayen hoped to be an immigration lawyer, Patterson recalled. Even before he came to UC Berkeley, Mayen had already received his paralegal certificate.

One of the classes Mayen took at UC Berkeley was called “Educational Justice: Undocumented Migrant Students and Struggles to Remake ‘Citizenship.’”
“(Jose) saw himself as a member of a community and wanted to get involved in changing the conditions that make it so difficult for marginalized students to access a university education,” Negron-Gonzales said.

But beyond his academics, Mayen was also deeply committed to his family. When his father went into heart failure, he deferred his admission to UC Berkeley, according to Alicia Aguirre, mayor of Redwood City and a professor of Spanish literature at Canada College.

“He was just one of those students you loved having in class,” Aguirre said. “I challenge people to follow in his dreams, to do what you really believe in doing.”

Mayen is survived by his parents, his brother and his sister, who live in California.

Daphne Chen is the lead city government reporter. Contact her at daphnechen@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @dchen_dc.

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Last week, UC Berkeley student Jose Felix Mayen died in a car accident on the San Mateo Bridge, according to a report from InMenlo.com.

According to the report, Mayen, 23, was on his way to school when he stopped on the side of the San Mateo Bridge after he discovered he had a flat tire. His car was then struck by a speeding car.

A community group recently started a page on the website GiveForward.com to help pay for his memorial and burial. The group raised about $8,005 of its $15,000 goal as of early Tuesday evening.

Check back for more updates.

Daphne Chen is the lead city government reporter. Contact her at daphnechen@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @dchen_dc.

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Contact Claire Chiara at cchiara@dailycal.org.

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Harrod Blank/Courtesy

Documentary filmmaker Les Blank died in his Berkeley home Sunday after a yearlong fight with cancer. He was 77.

Blank was known for his films on American food and music and produced 42 films in a career spanning more than 50 years, according to Blank’s website.

“He definitely was a seeker of beauty and truth and the ways to express and articulate that,” said Blank’s son Beau Blank.

Blank, who received a degree in English from Tulane University in 1958, also attended graduate school at UC Berkeley. He left, however, to pursue filmmaking at USC in 1960 after being heavily influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

“(His films) really captured a special time when there was a lot more distinctiveness in cultures and how rich they were,” said Maureen Gosling, who worked with Blank for nearly 20 years. “That’s the legacy of his work.”

Friends and family said Blank captured an intimacy in work that reflected his kind and thoughtful character. Though he was known to be shy and almost painfully quiet, Blank won over subjects and audiences with his attention to the small treasures of everyday life. Gosling said he best captured moments without words.

“We’re looking for the golden moments,” Blank once said to Gosling.

The subjects Blank chose reflected a wide variety of interests, ranging from garlic to gap-toothed women, blues musicians to Tex-Mex Chicano culture and tea-making to California hippie-culture.

“(His films) offer something unique,” said Harrod Blank, Blank’s other son. “His interests were diverse — his films were diverse.”

Harrod recalls watching foreign films, traveling and attending music festivals as a child with his father. Now a filmmaker himself, he expressed appreciation for the independence and skills that his father taught him. Both Harrod and Beau treasured the time spent with their father in the later years of his life. In the last 15 years, Harrod and his father regularly attended and filmed the annual Burning Man Festival in Nevada.

But Blank was appreciated by many more than just family members. He won several awards, including the 2011 Career Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association, the Maya Deren Award for outstanding life achievement from the American Film Institute and a British Academy Award in 1982 for his film “Burden of Dreams.”

“I try to find a fresh way of looking at the world around me and making some sense of it,” Blank said in an interview after winning the 2011 Career Achievement Award. “Hopefully (it is) something positive, something lasting that the world would want to see 100 years from now.”

Along with leaving behind a legacy of a prolific career, Blank is survived by ex-wife Chris Simon, sons Harrod and Beau, daughter Ferris Robinson and three grandchildren.

Contact Jennie Yoon at jyoon@dailycal.org.

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John Gumperz dedicated his life to language. A UC Berkeley professor emeritus of anthropology, he died at the age of 91 on Friday in Santa Barbara.

Gumperz was an intellectual and adventurer — a curious, unassuming scholar who studied people and language all around the world. He used his research to fill the gaps that written language could not, focusing linguistic study on solving issues of social justice and helping people communicate across cultural boundaries.

He brought this passion for language to UC Berkeley, where he taught for 35 years until his retirement in 1991. The professor pioneered research in linguistic anthropology — studying language as a social and cultural endeavor as well as a form of written communication.

“He was totally unpretentious,” said lifelong friend and colleague Dan Slobin, who is a professor emeritus of psychology and linguistics at UC Berkeley. “I struggled at first to make sense of him and was finally just overwhelmed at how profound his ideas were.”

Among the focuses of Gumperz’s work was code-switching, a process in which speakers use multiple languages in one conversation. He also studied the way culture affected linguistics, finding at times that two people speaking the same language were in fact communicating very differently, depending on the different environments in which they learned to speak.

Born in 1922, Gumperz quickly became a scholar of language when he left his native Germany to finish high school in Italy. This move was prompted by an increasingly dangerous Nazi regime, which Gumperz, a Jew, eventually escaped by moving to Holland and then the United States in 1939.

Gumperz completed his education in the United States, eventually earning a doctorate in Germanic linguistics at the University of Michigan in 1954. He went on to work in India alongside other linguists, a post that had a lasting influence on his research.

Gumperz was an engaging, amiable man who could sit down with professors and farmers alike to talk about the world.

“He had a way of being totally at ease with people,” Slobin said. “He would just sit down with them. He was such a sweet man.”

This interest in people led Gumperz to the center of a vibrant intellectual community in Berkeley, which formed in the early 1960s. He often hosted dinner parties where graduate students and professors from different disciplines would discuss and share ideas, a practice that led to great support for interdisciplinary studies at UC Berkeley.

“We had constant afternoon and evening dialogues,” said Susan Ervin-Tripp, a professor emeritus who taught psychology while Gumperz was at UC Berkeley. “It was an exciting time.”

Gumperz left the UC Berkeley community after retiring but continued to work and study linguistics until his death.

“He opened people’s eyes to the fact that language isn’t just the language you read in texts,” Slobin said. “It’s in face-to-face interactions.”

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Wendy Lim/Courtesy

UC Berkeley Haas School of Business graduate Hansoo Lee, an entrepreneur known for his huge enthusiasm for life, died March 4 at age 35 after a 15-month struggle with lung cancer.

Lee, a class of 2010 Haas MBA graduate, co-founded the successful educational startup Magoosh while he was a student at the business school and was known as a driving force for entrepreneurship, encouraging others to pursue their ideas and build their own ventures.

“He believed in putting yourself behind an idea and focusing completely on what you want to accomplish,” said Pejman Pour-Moezzi, one of Lee’s former classmates and a co-founder of Magoosh.

As an entrepreneur, student and friend, Lee was described as a source of inspiration, admired for his courage and charisma as well as his ability to light up a room.

“He was absolutely fearless — fear wasn’t part of his vocabulary,” said Wendy Lim, Lee’s fiancee. “He embraced every experience and was always eager to try new things.”

Lee’s courage and dedication to entrepreneurship were particularly evident when, in the summer between the first and second year of his MBA program, Lee decided not to pursue a traditional internship but instead began working full time to build Magoosh.

“It was a brave move because at that point, we didn’t have any funding,” Pour-Moezzi said. “He brought the company to life.”

Lee’s courage and positivity extended to all aspects of his life, especially in the face of cancer, his fiancee added.

“He was never scared and was always focused on finding the right treatment — he remained optimistic and courageous to the end,” Lim said.

Now, Pour-Moezzi, Lim and third Magoosh co-founder Bhavin Parikh hope to instill that same courage in members of the Haas community by creating the Hansoo Lee Fellowship for Entrepreneurs. The fellowship will be used to support Haas MBA students wishing to pursue their ventures full time.

“This fellowship is a realization of Hansoo’s vision,” Parikh said. “He always talked about giving back. This is our way of celebrating him.”

Professor David Charron, Lee’s mentor during his time at Haas and an early investor in Magoosh, said that Lee will be greatly missed by the Haas community. He added that Lee exemplified the entrepreneurial spirit sought after in Haas’ graduate program.

“Hansoo was intellectually curious, constantly driven to learn and grow,” Charron said. “He was always trying to better himself. It is by virtue of people like Hansoo that our business school and entrepreneurship program are able to improve and grow.”

A memorial service will be held for Lee in Golden Gate Park on Monday.

Contact Natasha Osborne at nosborne@dailycal.org.

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Peace Corps/Courtesy

Several hundred friends and family members gathered in Brentwood, Calif., Saturday morning to celebrate the life of UC Berkeley alumnus and Peace Corps volunteer Nicholas Castle, who died of a sudden illness in early February.

Family and friends remembered Castle’s smile, which appeared throughout a photo slideshow depicting his life: as a baby grinning broadly, as a young man happily conquering the waves on his surfboard and as a UC Berkeley student confidently smiling with his parents in front of South Hall.

“How can you take such a beautiful life and put it into words?” said Castle’s brother Joe at the commencement of the memorial service.

Castle, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 2012 with a degree in political science and comparative politics, had taught university-level English in China’s Guizhou province with the Peace Corps since August.

Castle’s love for teaching preceded his role as an English teacher in China. He spent more than six years as a tutor and mentored countless others in his hometown of Brentwood.

“Whenever our girls had a question about anything, they’d call him,” said Jolene Conder, a family friend whose two daughters Castle mentored. “He was real-life proof to them that anything was possible.”

Castle also built lasting relationships with his students in China, who would often eat dinner with him and affectionately referred to him as “Mr. Sunshine” because of his smile, according to Peace Corps regional director Helen Lowman, who read a letter expressing President Obama’s condolences.

Eric Behne, Castle’s high school friend, remembered that his first impression of Castle was that he was “extremely smart” and “good at everything,” but his fondest memories are the countless hours the two spent listening to the Beatles’ music and classic rock. Behne said that when he recalls his high school years spent with Castle, he can barely remember being in class at all.

Family and friends were unsurprised to hear that Castle would be serving in the Peace Corps, as he had spent a great deal of his childhood serving in his local community. Jami Palladino, another family friend, told of the way in which Castle had often helped out in her husband’s vineyard, pulling weeds and helping customers select fruit to purchase.

“I was so proud of the man he had become,” said Castle’s father, David. “I was so impressed with his intelligence, his compassion and his love for humanity.”

David Castle’s lasting memory of his son is of when the two visited a Vincent van Gogh exhibition at the de Young Museum, where he remembers his son standing in front of “The Starry Night” in quiet contemplation.

“That memory reminds me of a lyric once written about that painting,” he said, referring to “Vincent” by Don McLean. “‘The world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.’”

Megan Messerly covers city government. Contact her at mmesserly@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @meganmesserly.

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