JAMES  BALDWIN  1979  Berkeley

Click the text link below for Baldwin's  full 28 minute address.  Thank you

1979  Speech at the University of California, Berkeley

OLIVER  SACKS

PRODIGIES


PRODIGIES: 10 Year Old British Boy Draws Like Rembrandt

The Secret Life of Andreas Alrea  1977
     

Andreas Alrea (aka Patrick McDermit) was a freelance carpenter 

from Southern California and an aspiring writer.  He'd finished high school,  bounced around community colleges.  Drifting but not rudderless.    One day he was at a local library leafing through college brochures and spotted one from Yale.  He decided to to apply.  

He planned and executed an elaborate hoax that involved fabricating a nearly

perfect High School Transcript (a feat of breathtaking ingenuity)  and  an exotic personal history that began with the "tragic death" of his Peruvian parents who were anthropologists and spoke several "dead languages"  He'd raised his younger brother by himself and had made extra money  raising and selling goldfish at local pet stores and street fairs.  He'd won science prizes for prosthetic limbs, built a business selling used excavation equipment in Alaska, had made 20 million dollars. All by the age 20.

   Yale Admissions swallowed the story hook line and sinker and rolled out the red carpet.   As McDermit put it:  "It was just too incredible NOT to believe"   

Here is how he did it. 

Please click this text link to read the full account

The Secret Life of Andreas Alrea