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#FridayReads, Oct. 4–Katie Hafner’s Exquisite Memoir “Mother Daughter Me”

October 5, 2013 /4 Comments/in , /by

Mother Daughter MeI began reading Katie Hafner’s journalism in the NY Times in the ’90s in what was known as “Circuits,” a section of the Thursday newspaper that covered the era of Web 1.0. Everything about tech was new, to me at least. Katie, and “Circuits,” helped make obscure things clear to me, then a not very tech-oriented book editor. Around 1999 I read a cover story Katie had written for Wired magazine and now I was really smitten by her work. Her story was a long one by magazine standards, about 40,000 words, on The Well, an early online community that emerged in the Bay Area starting around 1984. I was amazed–members of The Well had used a kind of proto-listserv and chat system that allowed them to share cyberspace together in a way no one had done before. But that historical first-ness wasn’t the only reason I wanted to make Katie’s article in to a book if I could. It was because of the extraordinary insight in to people that accompanied her reporting. In its early days, The Well had been a tight world where members supported each other like neighbors in a small town. They abided by founder Stewart Brand’s credo, “You own your own words.” Katie’s narrative, with used long threads of online conversations including multiple characters that the reader came to know and care about, was riveting.

In 2000–after a three-year stint for Random House, where the bulk of the time I worked at Times Books, with a big part of my job liasing with editors at the Times to make books with content from such departments as the Book Review, Real Estate, City, and Dining–I joined Carroll & Graf Publishers and contacted Katie with one of my first new book acquisition ideas. I asked if she’d be interested in turning the Wired article in to a book. I remember one day when she was in NYC from the Bay Area we met for coffee near Times Square. She was petite and had a great smile; I found her immediately likable. She talked like the voice of her journalism: a bit funny, and economical with her words that every so often sported a memorable phrase. Though she had not been trying to turn the Wired reporting in to a book, she was intrigued with my idea, and we made a deal to go ahead with it. I edited it with her revising and expanding the manuscript a bit and in 2001 we brought out The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in The Seminal Online Community. Among the many superb endorsements we printed on the back cover was this one from the proponent of communitarian philosophy Amitai Etzioni: “The best book ever written about communities and the Internet.” The book didn’t set any records, but it did well enough to justify C&G’s investment in it, and I was quite proud of it, as I believe Katie was, especially once the World Wide Web became such a big part of modern life that it was hard to remember a time before it existed. For anyone who wanted to know the prehistory of online interaction, it was right there in The Well.The Well cover

After the book had run its course, Katie and I stayed in touch, but only occasionally. In 2002 I was startled and saddened when I read that her husband Matthew Lyon had died suddenly while on a visit to Seattle for his job with the University of California. He was 45. Katie and their young daughter survived him. I found something to say and wrote her a card with my condolences, grieving with her from a distance.

Katie HafnerLast year, I read that Katie would be publishing a memoir with Random House. I was excited because I had never read anything by Katie about her own world. Mother Daughter Me came out in July and I was thrilled when I got a copy two weeks ago. After making it my #FridayReads last week, when I was only a little ways in to it, I now can say that it is gripping throughout, and likable, like Katie, even while it chronicles some pretty difficult and sad but ultimately transcendent Hafner family business. It begins with her mother’s move from San Diego to be with Katie and her now-teenaged daughter in San Francisco. I finished it the other day during a break while on a bike ride, and scrawled these words on a piece of scrap paper, anticipating I would use my first impressions in this #FridayReads essay:

“Exquisite, in many senses. Exquisitely painful, as it recounts the failures of her drink-addled mother to provide parental stability for Katie and her older sister when they were young. Exquisitely produced and edited with nary a typo or broken letter in the volume. Exquisitely truthful and unflinching in the way Katie examines her own behavior, no less than that of her mother and her daughter. As good a reporter as Katie is when writing about other people, she is somehow even more insightful and penetrating when the subject is herself, her widowhood, and her own family. I walked with her every step of the way on the difficult journey that she takes with her mother and daughter and am very glad I did. An amazingly honest book.”

I recommend Mother Daughter Me to anyone who’s still trying to riddle out truths about their family; to anyone who’s ever argued with a sibling, child or parent; to anyone with an aging parent who ponders future options for them, from living with you to “aging in place,” a term you will encounter here. I will add that like a particular Vaughan Williams symphony that I love–I believe it’s his 6th–this book winds up with a beautifully orchestrated cascade of multiple endings that transit from tragic to reconciled to fulfilled. If you’re like me, your eyes will be very moist as you finish reading Mother Daughter Me. This is a great book.

Celebrating Valerie Plame’s “Blowback” & Recalling Tumultous Events of a Decade Ago

October 3, 2013 /2 Comments/in , /by

 

Blowback frontKyle and Ewan and I had a great time last night at the book party for Valerie Plame’s terrific new spy novel Blowback, co-authored with Sarah Lovett. I  had picked up a galley of it at BEA last June, and really enjoyed it a lot. I’d been looking forward to the party for some weeks, as in 2003-04 I edited and published The Politics of Truth–A Diplomat’s Memoir: Insider the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity by Valerie’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. It was going to be a treat to see Valerie and Joe last night.

Joe and I had last met up in 2010 when he was part of a New York Times panel that included Nora Ephron, Anna Devere Smith, Roy Blount, Jr., and Garrison Keillor marking the 25th anniversary of the Times’ Op-Ed pages. It was moderated by then Op-Ed page editor David Shipley*, who invited Joe because he judged Joe’s July 6 2003 op-ed  What I Didn’t Find in Africa had been one of the most historically significant columns the newspaper published that decade. It led to the Bush administration’s repeated disclosures that Joe’s wife Valerie Plame was a CIA official and years of flimsy denials that the administration had doctored the intelligence that fueled their false claims about WMDs in Iraq, enabling the unjustified invasion of the country.

Publishing The Politics of Truth was a high-wire act for Joe, for me and for Carroll & Graf that lasted over a year. In July ’03, I heard about it right away when Valerie’s CIA employment was reported by columnist Robert Novak. A few weeks later indie book publicist Barbara Monteiro connected me with Joe. She had earlier worked on the book I did with Whitewater heroine Susan MacDougal. Barbara knew my sense of justice would’ve been offended by what was being done to Valerie, and Joe. He had been writing opinion columns about Bush’s misguided rush to war and was already thinking of writing a book. We quickly made a deal and got to work while the news story swirling around Valerie and Joe grew and grew.

Right off the bat, we were fortunate in that before retiring from the State Dept in 1998, following 25 years in the foreign service, Joe had sat for a full oral history of his career. He had the transcript and used it as an aide-mémoire and the basis of the historical portions of the book, later justifying our use of two subtitles on the front cover and spine! With this foundation, Joe then wrote practically every day and in February ’04 he delivered an excellent 150,000 word manuscript to me. C & G leapt in to action, as colleagues from several departments and I line-edited, copyedited, designed, typeset, indexed, and produced the book on a “crash” production schedule, for planned release only four months later, in what was going to be May ’04, less than a year after Novak’s column. From a marketing and strategic standpoint, it was like riding a tiger.

The toughest part of this as a publishing proposition was that though the story had only gotten bigger over the intervening months–and while we knew we’d be able to book Joe on tons of media–at the same time we wondered and worried:

  • What will be the state of the journalistic investigations and of the federal grand jury hearings looking into the unauthorized disclosure when we publish the book?
  • How can Joe in the book, in his public statements, and we in our press materials take advantage of new developments while still conforming to the latest important events?
  • How could we take advantage of breaking news but not have Joe get too far out on things that were constantly shifting?

Of course, for Valerie and Joe it was more than a publishing proposition, it was their lives. This was a dynamic in publishing a book I had never encountered before, a delicate strategic challenge. I was already a highly-tuned-in-to-news-person, especially after the 2000 presidential election and 9/11, but this tendency became even more pronounced the year I was actively working every day on Joe’s book. The book sold more than 60,000 copies in hardcover and spent more than a month on the NY Times Bestseller list. I have written about the lessons I learned working on it a number of times on this blog, in such posts as “Hubris”–10 Years Later, Run-up to the Iraq War Still Shadows the Media & the U.S. and On the Imperative of Publishing Whistleblowers.

Last night’s party for Valerie and Sarah Lovett was hosted by director Doug Liman, author Naomi Wolf, and producer Avram Ludwig. Liman had directed the 2010 movies “Fair Game” with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, based on Valerie’s 2006 book, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House and on The Politics of Truth.

We enjoyed meeting the three co-hosts and many of our fellow guests. Among the latter group was one of my favorite suspense writers Lee Child, with whom we happened to ride up in the elevator. About Blowback he’s said: “Great storytelling, real insider authenticity, and above all a fascinating main character in Vanessa Pierson. And maybe those initials are not a coincidence–sometimes fiction can reveal things nonfiction can’t.” The latter part of Child’s blurb–and the reference to “redaction” in my tweet above–are rueful nods to the unfortunate fact that Fair Game was heavily redacted by the Bush-era CIA, and though it had a well-reported Afterword by national security reporter Laura Rozen, the many blacked-out passages inevitably left readers in the dark in many areas. I’ve included three of Child’s books among my weekly #FridayReads essays, including Worth Dying For, a true corker of a suspense novel, the first of Child’s Jack Reacher books that I read. His latest is  Never Go Back, which I am eager to read. Guest Maggie Topkis–longtime co-proprietor of the NYC mystery bookstore Partners and Crime who nowadays works with Lee Child–told me she thinks it’s his best book yet, which is saying a lot.

I met co-author Sarah Lovett, and told her how much I’d enjoyed reading Blowback. From Blue Rider Press, I congratulated David Rosenthal, Valerie’s publisher, and Executive Editor Sarah Hochman. I was also glad to see the two sides of the recent Penguin Random House merger well represented, with Kent Anderson, a sales rep from Penguin (now Penguin Random House). He had been with Publishers Group West, distributor for Carroll & Graf, when I published The Politics of Truth there in 2004. With Kent, I saw Madeline McIntosh, COO of Random House, a senior executive in the merged company. I liked that she had come to this book party for a key title of a Penguin imprint.   

I was also glad to see book biz pal Will Schwalbe,* who after a distinguished publishing career has made himself in to a successful author most recently with The End of Your Life Book Club, which I wrote about here. Will explained that he and Naomi had been old college classmates, and said how much he’d enjoyed her poetry from those years. Naomi seemed touched by that. Will graciously introduced me to Naomi who asked how I had come to know Joe and Valerie, at which I mentioned The Politics of Truth . She said how glad she was to be able to show special support for Valerie and her new book. Those comments were echoed when a few minutes later she and Doug Liman convened the gathering for toasts and congratulations. Liman gestured toward a nearby portrait of his late father, the prominent lawyer Arthur Liman, a pivotal player in the Iran-Contra scandal who served as chief counsel to the Senate committee that investigated the Reagan’s administration’s notorious arms-for-hostages conspiracy. The younger Liman cited his father’s example as an inspiration to him in working with dedicated public servants like Valerie and Joe.

After the toasts, I approached Joe once more. As we chatted Ewan took a picture of us. Here it is, along with a few others from last night. (Please click here to see all pics) It was a fun book party and the three of us were very happy to be a part of the celebration.

If you’re looking for realistic and pacy suspense fiction with a smart and appealing female protagonist, I highly recommend Blowback , the first of a series featuring covert operative Vanessa Pierson. Valerie has done lots of media this week including “Morning Joe” (See video below.) One of Valerie’s next stops is going to be in Washington, DC this Friday night, October 5, when Laura Rozen will be interviewing her at Politics & Prose Bookstore.

*Will Schwalbe’s first book, SEND: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better was co-authored with the same David Shipley– Joe Wilson’s Op-Ed editor and moderator of the NY Times panel with Joe, Nora Ephron, etc.

 

Vancouver’s Said the Whale, Rocking Out at Mercury Lounge

October 2, 2013 /0 Comments/in , /by

Said the Whale, a power-pop 5-piece from Vancouver, BC, was in town last week and they put on a great show on the Lower East Side at Mercury Lounge. Here’s a pic of Tyler Bancroft and Ben Worcester–songwriters, lead singers and guitarists in the band. For my full post on the show, please read it at my new blog Honourary Canadian. The second pic is of me with Ben, taken by my gig buddy Steve Conte.7 Tyler, BenBen, Philip

Celebrating Photojournalist & Author Ruth Gruber’s 102nd Birthday With Her

September 30, 2013 /8 Comments/in , /by

LIFE magAs some readers of this blog may know, I’ve had the personal and professional privilege to edit and publish photojournalist and author Ruth Gruber’s books over the years. I’ve done six of her eighteen books. Her first publication was a thesis on Virginia Woolf, written in Cologne, Germany in 1931, while an exchange student there. She was then just 20, a young woman from Brooklyn on the verge of what became an amazing career as a refugee advocate, chronicler of the displaced, humanitarian, and journalist. She met with Woolf in London around 1935, a story she’s told in her book Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman, which I wrote about at this link on The Great Gray Bridge.

In the early 1940s, Ruth was a member of the FDR administration, under Interior Secretary Harold Ickes as his special field representative in Alaska. She is doubtless one of the administration’s eldest surviving staffers. To read Ruth Gruber’s work I recommend any of the six books I worked on, five of which are currently available from Open Road Integrated Media. The titles are Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 WWII Refugees and How They Came to America; Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent (also the title of a documentary on Ruth); Inside of Time: My Journey from Alaska to Israel; Raquela: A Woman of Israel; the Virginia Woolf book named above; and Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (the only one of these not available from Open Road, it’s currently published by Union Square Press).

There is also this link to a post I wrote when the International Center of Photography (ICP) gave her their lifetime achievement award in 2012. After a stop in Alaska, the ICP’s exhibit of Ruth’s photojournalism is now traveling the country. The picture above, of an Inuit girl reading LIFE Magazine with Ted Williams on the cover, is part of the ICP exhibit. It is one of her most whimsical; by contrast, she also photographed Holocaust survivors in DP camps after WWII. Those pictures are also part of the ICP exhibit. Here are a dozen pictures from a birthday party that my son Ewan and wife Kyle Gallup attended with me yesterday. (Most pictures by Kyle.) You may click here to see all images.

Word of an Important New Book on Bob Dylan By a ’60s Confidant

September 30, 2013 /1 Comment/in , /by

October 2 Update: Earlier this story about a new Dylan book was only reported on a subscription-required only website. Now it’s also been covered in Publishers Weekly and here is a link to that story.

dylanmaymudesWord comes from BookBrunch’s Liz Thomson (subscription required) of a new memoir about Bob Dylan, by a hitherto little-known associate named Victor Maymudes who reportedly served as tour manager, driver, and Dylan confidant beginning in 1961. The photo here by Daniel Kramer shows the two playing chess in Woodstock, NY. Reportedly, he was at Newport when Dylan controversially went electric for the first time, and also on the UK tour that led to D.A. Pennebaker’s classic documentary “Dont Look Back” (sic). Maymudes died before he could finish the manuscript. The photos, tapes, film, and papers passed to his son, Jacob, and then barely survived a fire that wrecked the younger Maymudes’ home. He will now complete the manuscript. The book already has an editor and publisher in the States, George Witte of St. Martin’s Press, who’s been following the fate of the manuscript since the beginning of the century. According to Thomson, Jacob Maymudes and his agent are still seeking a UK publisher, and other foreign partners. A documentary is also reported to be in the works, with this video trailer prepared to introduce Victor Maymudes’ work to interested parties.

Brooklyn Book Festival, 2013 Edition–w/Thirty Photos

September 28, 2013 /0 Comments/in , , /by

Brooklyn Book Festival GuideLast Sunday, which happened to be my birthday, Kyle and I headed out to the Brooklyn Book Festival, the third year in a row we’ve attended this urban book extravaganza. We had a great time at this event which for us has replaced BEA as the most enjoyable book occasion on our literary calendar. We spent nearly 3 hours in Brooklyn, enjoying the crisp autumn air, blue skies, bright sunshine, and many serendipitous encounters with friendly bookpeople. If you’re in the NYC area, and you’ve never been to the Brooklyn Book festival, I urge you to go next year. It was a great way to spend a birthday, especially because we followed it by having a meal at a new restaurant we were eager to try, A Taste of Persia, covered yesterday on this blog. All the photos in this post were taken by Kyle Gallup. Click here to view them.

Taste of Persia, Flavorful New Restaurant Near Union Square

September 27, 2013 /1 Comment/in , , /by

A few weeks ago I read a restaurant review of A Taste of Persia, a new eating spot near Union Square in Manhattan. The review was by Ligaya Mishan, who writes a NY Times column called Hungry City. The piece was delightful, with paragraphs like this:

“For two decades, Mr. [Saeed] Pourkay, a Tehrani émigré, ran a print shop across the street from the pizzeria. After cashing out his share in the business a few years ago (to go “searching for my happiness,” he said), he started selling ash reshteh, a wondrous, wintry, outrageously thick Persian soup, at the Union Square Holiday Market. Fans clamored. Happiness was found. This past March, he returned to 18th Street and set up under his former neighbor’s roof. Here, in an imposing vat, is the justly fabled ash reshteh, a result of the eight-hour communion of five kinds of beans, a riot of herbs and onion cooked down to a sweet density. Dark and luxuriant, it has no broth and only a trace of oil. Broken strands of linguine snake through it. Fenugreek lurks, faint but insistently bittersweet, underscoring cinnamon, cardamom and ginger. But it is the garnishes that turn it into poetry: caramelized, verging-on-burned garlic; dried mint flicked in a pan; crispy fried onion; and a swirl of kashk, a Persian whey more sour than yogurt, with a bite like feta.”

This was a chef whose food I really wanted to taste.

Last Sunday, which happened to be my birthday, Kyle and I headed out to the Brooklyn Book Festival. We had a great time at this event which for us has replaced BEA as the most enjoyable book event on our literary calendar. I’ll post some pictures from the fair later, and meantime here’s just one of the shots that Kyle took.Reader

After nearly 3 hours in Brooklyn, enjoying the crisp autumn air, blue skies, bright sunshine, and many serendipitous encounters with friendly bookpeople, we took the subway back in to Manhattan and walked over to 18th Street for our first meal at A Taste of Persia.

Not as spicy as some overly familiar Indian fare, the dishes we tried were distinctive and different from any similar food we’ve encountered in the city. The tastes and textures left no doubt that the dishes had simmered for hours. There was a smoothness and total mingling of flavors that only comes from slow and patient cooking. We met Chef Pourkay, as genial and hospitable as any maitre’d you’ll ever be greeted by in a four-star hotel dining room. He exudes genuine warmth and takes great pride in serving this food. Even after we’d finished our angus beef stew with celery and a chick pea dish cooked with tomato and cilantro, he offered us a gratis take-away sample of a lamb stew he’d just finished preparing.

We met two other diners, one of whom said he works in the fashion industry. These Iranian New Yorkers were breaking up pieces of a soft flatbread and dunking them in a savory soup. Chatting with them while Chef Pourkay readied our take-away, I told them that I enjoy listening to Iranian-Canadian Jian Ghomeshi, host of CBC Radio’s daily culture and current affairs program “Q”, which is carried in New York City on WNYC FM weeknights at 10 PM. I told them and Chef Pourkay that I will urge Jian to visit A Taste of Persia the next time he comes to NY for a live taping of “Q.” I’m sure he’ll love the food. Below are photos Kyle and I took during our visit to the restaurant. What a great way to spend my birthday!