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{{Short description|American author and advocate against nuclear weapons (1943–2014)}}
[[File:Jonathan Schell Occupy Town Square 2012 Shankbone.JPG|thumb|Schell giving a reading at the [[Occupy Wall Street]] event Occupy Town Square, in [[Tompkins Square Park]] in New York, February 2012]]
'''Jonathan Edward Schell''' (August 21, 1943 – March 25, 2014)<ref>{{cite web
==Personal==▼
Schell was born in [[New York City]] on August 21, 1943, to Orville Hickock Schell Jr., a lawyer who chaired [[Human Rights Watch]], and Marjorie Bertha. He studied at [[Dalton School]] in New York and graduated from [[The Putney School]] in Vermont. In 1965 he graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Far Eastern history.<ref name="nationinstitute1"/> He then spent a year learning Japanese at the [[International Christian University]] in Tokyo.
He was the brother of Suzanne Schell Pearce, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and [[Orville Schell]], former
Jonathan Schell died at age 70, on March 25, 2014, at his home in [[Brooklyn]], with a cancer caused by an underlying blood condition that may have been caused by [[Agent Orange]]. His last years were spent
==Career==
Schell
His next book, ''The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin'', published in 1968,
His work appeared in ''[[The Nation (U.S. periodical)|The Nation]]'', ''[[The New Yorker]]'', and ''[[Tom Engelhardt|TomDispatch]]''. ''[[The Fate of the Earth]]'' received the ''[[Los Angeles Times]]'' Book Prize, among other awards, and was nominated for the [[Pulitzer Prize]], the [[National Book Award]], and the National Critics Award.
In his words:
From 1967 until 1987, he was a staff writer at ''The New Yorker,'' where he served as the principal writer of the magazine's Notes and Comment section. He was a columnist for [[Newsday]] from 1990 until 1996. He taught at many universities, including Princeton, Emory, New York University, the New School, Wesleyan University and the Yale Law School. At the time of his death he was a
In the early 1980s, Schell wrote a series of articles in ''[[The New Yorker]]'' (subsequently published in 1982 as ''[[The Fate of the Earth]]''), which were instrumental in raising public awareness about the dangers of the [[nuclear arms race]]. He became a persistent advocate for disarmament and a world free of nuclear weapons.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/hugh-gusterson/the-new-abolitionists |title=Search | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists |publisher=Thebulletin.org |
In 1987, he was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the [[John F. Kennedy School of Government]] and in 2002, a fellow at the Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. In 2003, he was a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, and in 2005, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Yale's Center for the Study of Globalization.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.ycsg.yale.edu/activities/schell_bio.html |title=Jonathan Schell Bio |publisher=Ycsg.yale.edu |
From 1998 to his death in 2014 he was a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute and the Peace and Disarmament Correspondent for ''The Nation'' magazine.<ref name="nationinstitute1">{{cite web |url=http://www.nationinstitute.org/fellows/1193/jonathan_schell/ |title=Fellows |publisher=Nation Institute |access-date=2015-02-27 |
In 2002 and 2003, Schell was a persistent critic of the [[2003 invasion of Iraq|invasion of Iraq]].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.redrat.net/BUSH_WAR/schell.htm |title=The Case Against the War - by Jonathan Schell |publisher=Redrat.net |access-date
He won [[George Polk Awards]] in 1976 and also published essays on the [[Presidency of Richard Nixon]], as well as the aftermath to the [[Watergate scandal]], which led to the president's resignation in 1974, forming the basis to his book, ''The Time of Illusion''.
==Reviews, response, and criticism==▼
▲==Personal==
In 1967, John Mecklin wrote in ''[[The New York Times]]'' that ''[[Bến Súc|The Village of Ben Suc]]'', Jonathan Schell's first book, was "written with a skill that many a veteran war reporter will envy, eloquently sensitive, subtly clothed in an aura of detachment, understated, extraordinarily persuasive."<ref>{{cite news|last=Johnson |first=George |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/28/books/new-noteworthy.html |title=New & Noteworthy |newspaper=[[The New York Times]]|date=1988-02-28 |
▲Schell was born in [[New York City]] on August 21, 1943, to Orville Hickock Schell Jr., a lawyer who chaired [[Human Rights Watch]], and Marjorie Bertha. He studied at [[Dalton School]] in New York and [[The Putney School]] in Vermont, later on graduating from Harvard University in 1965, in ''Far Eastern history''.<ref name="nationinstitute1"/> Then he spent a year learning Japanese at the [[International Christian University]] in Tokyo. He penned [[Bến Súc|The Village of Ben Suc]] when he stopped at [[Vietnam]] in 1966, en route back to the United States from Tokyo, this book started as a series of articles in the New Yorker.<ref>Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. 10th Aniv. 3rd Edition. Voices of a People's History of the United States</ref> At just 24, he managed a press pass to [[Saigon]], of [[The Harvard Crimson]], whose correspondents helped him to cover the war. Armed with a moral conscience he wrote; ''"Faithful to the initial design, Air Force jets sent their bombs down on the deserted ruins, scorching again the burned foundations of the houses and pulverizing for a second time the heaps of rubble, in the hope of collapsing tunnels too deep and well hidden for the bulldozers to crush—as though, having decided to destroy it, we were now bent on annihilating every possible indication that the village of Ben Suc had ever existed."''<ref>[https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/postscript-jonathan-schell-1943-2014 Postscript: Jonathan Schell, 1943-2014, David Remnick]</ref><ref>David Remnick [https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/david-remnick][[The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama]].</ref>
Reviewing ''The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin'', journalist and historian Jonathan Mirsky<ref>
▲His next book, ''The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin'', published in 1968, too drew a graphic picture of the devastating effects of American bombings and ground operations on [[Quảng Ngãi Province]] and [[Quảng Tín Province]] in South Vietnam, as he was a witness to [[Operation Cedar Falls]],<ref>The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin [https://www.amazon.com/Military-Half-Account-Destruction-Quang/dp/B000NYC9IY][https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jonathan-schell-4/the-military-half-an-account-of-the-destruction/]</ref><ref>[https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/27/us/jonathan-schell-author-who-explored-war-dies-at-70.html Jonathan Schell, 70, Author on War in Vietnam and Nuclear Age, Dies]</ref> writing particularly on the destruction of Ben Suc.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/07/15/the-village-of-ben-suc|title=The Village of Ben Suc|author=Jonathan Schell|website=The New Yorker|language=en}}</ref>
On its publication in 1982, ''The Fate of the Earth'' was described by Kai Erikson in ''[[The New York Times]]'' as "a work of enormous force" and "an event of profound historical moment.... [I]n the end, it accomplishes what no other work has managed to do in the 37 years of the nuclear age. It compels us - and compel is the right word - to confront head on the nuclear peril in which we all find ourselves."<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/schell-fate.html |title=A HORROR BEYOND COMPREHENSION |newspaper=[[The New York Times]]|date=1982-04-11 |access-date=2015-02-27}}</ref> The book also reflected on the end of love, politics and art, and annihilation of humans as a species. CBS newsman Walter Cronkite called the book "one of the most important works of recent years", which made this book on nuclear disarmament, a commercial success.
▲He was the brother of Suzanne Schell Pearce, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and [[Orville Schell]], former dean of the [[University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism]].<ref>[http://journalism.berkeley.edu/faculty/schell/schellqa.html ] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070716052823/http://journalism.berkeley.edu/faculty/schell/schellqa.html |date=July 16, 2007 }}</ref> and current Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at [[Asia Society]] in New York. He was a graduate of [[The Putney School]] in [[Putney, Vermont]].
In his 'Author's Note' to his collection of five short stories entitled [[Einstein's Monsters]] (1987) meaning nuclear weapons, the Anglo-American writer [[Martin Amis]] said this about Schell's writings: "And throughout I am grateful to Jonathan Schell, for ideas and imagery. I don't know why he is our best writer on this subject. He is not the most stylish, perhaps, nor the most knowledgeable. But he is the most decorous and, I think, the most pertinent. He has moral accuracy; he is unerring."<ref>Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books,1988), p.ix.</ref>
▲Jonathan Schell died at age 70, on March 25, 2014 at his home in [[Brooklyn]], with a cancer caused by an underlying blood condition that may have been caused by [[Agent Orange]]. His last years were spent on research on climate change for an unwritten book he titled ''The Human Shadow.''<ref>[https://www.thenation.com/article/jonathan-schell-and-fate-earth/ In Memoriam: Jonathan Schell (1943-2014)]</ref>
▲==Reviews, response, and criticism==
▲In 1967, John Mecklin wrote in ''[[The New York Times]]'' that ''[[Bến Súc|The Village of Ben Suc]]'', Jonathan Schell's first book, was "written with a skill that many a veteran war reporter will envy, eloquently sensitive, subtly clothed in an aura of detachment, understated, extraordinarily persuasive."<ref>{{cite news|last=Johnson |first=George |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/28/books/new-noteworthy.html |title=New & Noteworthy |newspaper=[[The New York Times]]|date=1988-02-28 |accessdate=2015-02-27}}</ref>
Writing in ''[[Foreign Affairs]]'' magazine, however, David Greenberg called ''The Fate of the Earth'' an "overwrought doomsday polemic."<ref>{{cite
▲Reviewing ''The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin'', journalist and historian Jonathan Mirsky<ref>[http://www.chinafile.com/contributors/jonathan-mirsky Jonathan Mirsky]</ref> wrote in ''[[The Nation]]'': "I know no book which has made me angrier and more ashamed."
In 2019, philosopher [[Akeel Bilgrami]] described Schell as "one of the great public intellectuals of our time,"<ref name=bilgrami2019>{{cite book |last1=Bilgrami |first1=Akeel |title=Nature and Value |date=2019 |publisher=Columbia University Press |isbn=978-0-231-55090-1 |pages=ix–xvi |doi=10.7312/bilg19462-001 |chapter=Preface|s2cid=243015528 }}</ref>{{rp|x}} and described ''The Fate of the Earth'' as a "rightly celebrated classic".<ref name=bilgrami2019/>{{rp|x}}
▲Writing in ''[[Foreign Affairs]]'' magazine, however, David Greenberg called ''The Fate of the Earth'' an "overwrought doomsday polemic."<ref>{{cite web|author=David Greenberg |url=http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/55872/david-greenberg/the-empire-strikes-out-why-star-wars-did-not-end-the-cold-war |title=The Empire Strikes Out: Why Star Wars Did Not End the Cold War |publisher=Foreign Affairs |date=2000-03-01 |accessdate=2015-02-27}}</ref> Two decades later, in [[Slate.com]], [[Michael Kinsley]] characterized it as "an overheated stew of the obvious and the idiotic" and suggested it was "the silliest book ever taken seriously by serious people."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/readme/1999/03/_3.html |title=Gratuitous Meritocracy |publisher=Slate.com |accessdate=2015-02-27}}</ref> The ''[[Los Angeles Times]]'' noted that "some reviewers found Schell's book shrill and overstated."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/26/local/la-me-jonathan-schell-20140327</ref>
==''The New Yorker'' editorship succession controversy==
In 1977, [[William Shawn]], the longtime editor-in-chief of ''[[The New Yorker]]'' magazine, designated Schell as his chosen successor to replace him but he was forced to rescind that plan as it proved immediately unpopular with the magazine's staff.<ref>Gardner Botsford, <em>A Life of Privilege, Mostly</em> (St. Martin's Press, New York, 2003), p.242</ref> Shawn revisited the same plan in 1982 but again withdrew Schell's name from consideration in the face of a staff revolt. Ultimately, upon a change of ownership of the magazine in 1987, Shawn was removed and replaced as editor-in-chief with [[Robert Gottlieb]].<ref>Gardner Botsford, <em>A Life of Privilege, Mostly</em> (St. Martin's Press, New York, 2003), p.258</ref>
==Bibliography==
{{
* {{cite journal |ref=none <!--|author=Schell, Jonathan
* {{cite book |ref=none <!--|author=Schell, Jonathan |
* ''The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin'' (1968)
* ''Comment on the Pentagon Papers'' (June 26, 1971)
* {{cite journal |ref=none <!--|author=Schell, Jonathan |author-mask=1--> |date=January 7, 1974 |title=Notes and comment |department=The Talk of the Town |journal=The New Yorker |volume=49 |issue=46 |pages=21}}<ref group=lower-alpha>Interdependence of the United States and the Soviet Union, displayed in latest Middle East peace talks.</ref>
* ''Comment on America's growing cynicism'' (January 21, 1974)
* ''The Time of Illusion'' (1976)
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* ''The Real War'' (1988)
* ''Observing the Nixon Years'' (1989)
* {{cite journal <!--|author=Schell, Jonathan |
* ''[[The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now]]'' (1998)
* ''[[The Unfinished Twentieth Century]]'' (2001)
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* ''The Jonathan Schell Reader: On the United States at War, the Long Crisis of the American Republic, and the Fate of the Earth'' (2006)
* ''[[The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger]]'' (2007)
———————
;Notes
{{reflist|40em|group=lower-alpha}}
==See also==
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*{{IMDb name|4200189}}
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20141228083105/http://www.ycsg.yale.edu/activities/schell_bio.html Biography] from the [[Yale Center for the Study of Globalization]]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20090714060216/http://www.theglobalist.com/AuthorBiography.aspx?AuthorId=390 Biography] from ''[[The Globalist]]''
*[https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/books/review/Walker-t.html?_r=1&fta=y&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin Smoking Guns and Mushroom Clouds]
*{{C-SPAN|
* {{Internet Archive author |sname= Jonathan Schell}}
{{Authority control}}
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[[Category:American people of German descent]]
[[Category:The Atlantic (magazine) people]]
[[Category:Harvard University alumni]]
[[Category:The New Yorker staff writers]]
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