I was delighted to bump in to this quotation from my longtime author Edward Robb Ellis on a digital kiosk on Broadway the other night. All my blog posts about Eddie Ellis are collected here on this site.
A fascinating report by PW’s editor Jim Milliot from booksellers in the field on the editions of The Mueller Report now coming out. Scribner, Melville House, and Skyhorse had each announced print/ebook versions during the many months leading up to the report’s intensely anticipated release. Because they were only finally able to get their hands on the manuscript last Thursday—when corrupt Attorney General Barr finally deigned to let it be published—it’s been very challenging for them to get the book in to stores. Of the three I’ve only seen Scribner’s in a store so far. I found it it in a B&N yesterday, a big fat trade paperback printed on not-great paper with a white cover. I intend to buy the one coming from Melville House, which according to the article should be in stores Monday. It will be close to a mass-market size paperback. I’ve been following a multi-day thread live-tweeting the design, typesetting, and production of the Melville House edition by co-publisher Dennis Johnson (a great follow on Twitter, @mobylives), which he began writing last week as he and colleagues received the text in PDF and embarked on making it in to their distinctive rendition of of this vital document, an imperative book, indeed.
Publishing the Mueller Report, cont.: Design is a point worth lingering on. There will be multiple editions of this public domain doc by publishers who look at it & see nothing but $$ — esp if they get it out fast. They won't spend a moment on design or layout …
— Dennis Johnson (@MobyLives) April 22, 2019
Crashing Mueller, cont.: We nailed it. Beautifully designed, easily searchable. much more readable typefaces and layout. This is going to be the ebook version of the Mueller Report to beat. It took us longer than the other publishers, but readers will say it was worth the wait. pic.twitter.com/KSU19tyEPY
— Dennis Johnson (@MobyLives) April 26, 2019
The Skyhorse edition may have begun landing in stores, but I haven’t seen it yet. That edition displays a questionable choice for Introducer: the odious Alan Dershowitz, frequent Trump partisan and FOX News regular. An ill-advised choice when you consider that FOX News viewers, even ones fervently appreciative of Dershowitz’s rhetorical support of the dangerous prez are not apt to buy a copy of The Mueller Report at all. They tell themselves and each other that the Trump-Russia connections are all made up anyway. Those FOX people would buy a report on Hillary Clinton, but that’s definitely not what we have here.
OTOH, the great majority of people buying the Mueller Report in book form are going to be critics of Trump who’ve been following #TrumpRussia avidly for more than two years; folks who detest Trump and want to see the end of his presidency will be apt to want either the Scribner edition, with commentary by Post reporters, or an edition that has nothing but the text of Mueller’s report, intelligently designed and typeset for an optimal reading experience, the Melville House edition. Why would they want to buy an edition with Dershowitz’s questionable gloss on it—a very-likely-to-be-tendentious view of events apt to let Trump off the hook despite his egregious misdeeds and transgressions? Indeed, there’s a funny line in the penultimate graf of Milliot’s story:
James Fugate, co-owner of Eso Wan Books in Los Angeles, also believes the report will sell very well. “There is huge demand for this book, and I have at least 10 preorders for this,” he said. “We ordered 50 each of the Scribner edition and the Melville House. I won’t touch the Skyhorse edition with the Dershowitz introduction.”
I’m excited that Shattered Minds: How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets will be published by Potomac Books on March 1, 2019. In 2016, I wrote about research in to new materials that could improve the safety features of military helmets. And as I explained in a 2018 blog post, I originally commissioned the book in 2008 when I was acquiring new titles for Union Square Press. After I left that job, the contract was canceled, and almost a decade later I ended up as the agent for the book, placing it with Potomac Books last year. A circuitous path, indeed. Below are the superb pre-publication blurbs the book by Robert H. Baumann and Dina Rasor has received. I’m delighted to see this early reception for the book.
Advance Praise for SHATTERED MINDS:
How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets
“No one is better than Dina Rasor and Bob Bauman in connecting the intricacies of the Pentagon’s politics of budget-and-bureaucracy with real world consequences for the men and women who wear United States uniforms and fight the nation’s wars. Their latest project gives the startling details of how the bureaucracy has failed in providing that most basic part of a soldier’s protective gear, the helmet. Dina’s and Bob’s previous work has been highly influential, and this should be too.”—James Fallows, National Correspondent, Atlantic Magazine
“Dina Rasor and Robert Bauman are some of the most experienced and tenacious advocates in America. Year after year, Dina and Bob have been sounding the alarm and demanding accountability on behalf of our troops and veterans. They have changed policies and helped save lives. And they always have our back. Dina’s and Bob’s critical voices must be heard—now more than ever.”—Paul Rieckhoff, CEO and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and author of Chasing Ghosts
“Robert Bauman’s and Dina Rasor’s richly detailed account of how military bureaucrats and greedy contractors have callously risked the lives and health of soldiers and marines for the sake of their own selfish interests is both riveting and horrifying. We are used to learning about multi-billion dollar defense procurement scandals, but that our military leadership could not, or would not, provide troops on the front lines with something as basic as an effective helmet is truly shocking. Shattered Minds should be required reading for congress, press, and concerned citizens everywhere.”—Andrew Cockburn, Washington Editor, Harpers Magazine
“Rasor and Bauman weave together the gripping stories of individuals who were all determined to provide a helmet that would better protect our troops from traumatic brain injury. If you really want to ‘Support the troops,’ read this book.”—Danielle Brian, Executive Director, Project on Government Oversight (POGO)
“You go to war with the helmet you have, not the one you wish you had. With apologies to Don Rumsfeld, that is the sad tale Robert Bauman and Dina Rasor tell in Shattered Minds. It’s the infuriating story of how a sclerotic U.S. military bureaucracy has failed to protect young troops from traumatic brain injury after they answered their nation’s call in the wake of 9/11. For anyone who has ever worn a U.S. military helmet, or loved someone who has, this book will hurt your head. For the rest of us, it’s a traumatic heart injury.”—Mark Thompson, former Time Magazine reporter
I first blogged about SHATTERED MINDS: How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets in 2016, linking it to a Washington Post story by Ben Guarino about an amazingly hard material found in nature:
Authors Robert Bauman and Dina Rasor were still working on their manuscript in 2016, and I was preparing to begin submitting the project to publishers. There’s an unusual backstory to the book, which I’ll outline below.
In 2008, when I was acquiring books as Editorial Director at Union Square Press, I read a stunning NY Times story about two whistleblowers at a defense contractor in North Dakota who at great personal risk revealed that their employer was knowingly shorting the amount of the protective material Kevlar in the combat helmets they were fabricating for the Pentagon, to increase their profits at the expense of troop safety. At the suggestion of Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. I commissioned a book on this grotesque boondoggle to be written by two ace reporters on military procurement and the Pentagon, Dina Rasor and Robert Bauman. In 2009, while they were working on the manuscript, and discovering yet another brave whistleblower to include in the narrative, I left that job and parent company Sterling Publishing canceled the contract, handing the rights back to the authors. Fast forward several years and Bob and Dina approached me to see if in my new role as an agent I would be game to try to help them re-sell the book to a new publisher, which I agreed to, with generous approval from their original agent Bonnie Nadell. This is exactly the type of “imperative nonfiction” I have long cultivated as a publishing professional, and I was very excited to accept the challenge of reselling it to a new publisher. This was part of my pitch letter to publishers:
Indeed, in 2017 I sold the book to Potomac Books, a military and public affairs imprint at the University of Nebraska Press, as documented in the deal report below posted at the book industry site publishersmarketplace[dot]com.
Potomac has scheduled the book for publication in March 2019. I’ll post a cover when they have it ready. Meantime, the authors have already received these superb endorsements:
SHATTERED MINDS will set a challenge for technologists, designers, people who use 3D printers, materials scientists, and high level defense thinkers to finally design the most protective military helmet possible. Despite the Pentagon’s failures to this point, we hope to gain their attention to bring new talent and focus to the goal of producing a superior helmet. In the same regard, we are excited about the effort being undertaken by the Head Health Challenge, which also relates to football helmets, an effort that has been covered by Liz Stinson in Wired magazine. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to forge a constructive link between the Defense Dept and the NFL, in as much as the league often cites its cooperation with the US military. I recommend you read the fascinating article by Ben Guarino, which also has video from UC Riverside scientist David Kisailus.
In my work as a literary agent, I represent former Prague police detective Vladimir Dzuro, author of THE INVESTIGATOR: JUSTICE AND DEMONS OF THE BALKAN WARS, which I’ve recently sold to Potomac Books*, a division of University of Nebraska Press, for publication in Fall 2019. In the 1990s, while the wars in the former Yugoslavia were still raging, Dzuro began investigating war crimes. Thanks to publishing friend Janice Goldklang of Other Press, who introduced me to the author. His book is a view-from-the-ground narrative account of the brutal conflict fought among Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians. It combines insight from his investigations of war crimes cases while the brutal war was still unfolding, and the search for and capture of war criminals after the conflict ended. The book was first published in the Czech Republic by Grada (pictured below). Author Dzuro is now Chief of New York Headquarters Office at the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services.
I’ve long been horrified and grimly fascinated by the Balkan Wars, and in 1995 edited and published a remarkable book titled Sarajevo, Exodus of a City, by Bosnian playwright Dzevad Karahasan. The back cover copy explains that the author “Sketches a cultural portrait of Sarajveo, describing the city plan, its domestic architecture, even its culinary styles—all intertwined with searing descriptions of the siege, and anecdotes about how his life and those of his neighbors were ravaged by war. A Muslim, Karahasan invokes the Sarajevo that was once ‘a microcosm, a center of the world that contained the whole world within itself,’ a ‘new Jerusalem’ where people of different languages, faiths, and cultures lived together harmoniously.” For the author, Sarajevo was a shining city, a second Jerusalem, from an explicitly philosemitic viewpoint. The Village Voice Literary Supplement named it one of their best books of that year. The book’s had a long shelf life, as in 2015, an Indian travel writer named Abhijit Dutta visited postwar Sarajevo and in a beautiful essay on a website called LiveMint closely read Karahasan’s book and used it to gauge what has been lost since the Balkan Wars began in 1991.
Despite the horrors of our calamitous century, and the last one, I derive meaning and purpose from helping authors like Dzevad Karahasan and Vladimir Dzuro contribute to the historical record about the recent war that gave rise to one of the darkest phrases in our modern lexicon, “ethnic cleansing.”
*Earlier this year I sold Potomac Books Shattered Minds: How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets by Robert Bauman and Dina Rasor, which will also be published in 2019.
Just attended a really enjoyable quartet of author readings for three books-in-progress, and one that just been sold to a publisher this week, at Books Are Magic in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. An MC informed members of the audience that the Brooklyn Writers Space, with two locations in the borough, was a sponsor of the reading series. The four participants, and evidently many other local scribes, find space to work and write there, at what we heard are “humane” rents.
I had come primarily to hear journalist Diantha Parker read from what I understood would be a memoir about her father. I’m enthralled by a lot of first person writing, so I went eager to hear some of the work. Parker read first. She set up her excerpt by explaining that in the very early days of WWII, before the US was in the war, her father, a rather proper Bostonian, had enlisted in the Canadian forces to join the fight against fascism. He fought in and survived the lethal battle of Dieppe, where he was captured and made a Canadian POW for the next three years.
She read well, with many deft strokes about his life and dark habits, a complicated man whose postwar life was shadowed by his brutal years as a captive, and the near-death march he and other Allied prisoners endured just before war’s end. Other passages showed how she’s fleshing out what this all means to her now, so many decades later. I was fascinated by the Canadian aspects of the story, and can imagine that many Canadian editors I know, and reader friends there, would likely be interested in the story. Fair to say, I will now be eager to read or hear more from her work.
The other readers were also excellent: Ryan Harty, Joanna Hershon, and Julie Orringer, all published novelists. Their work was also all very strong, and quite varied one from another. Bravo to the Brooklyn Writers Group, which is clearly helping writers produce great work. First pic here is Diantha Parker. Books Are Magic is a very nice bookstore, with a superb vibe for readings!
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