#FridayReads, Feb. 22–“Siege 13,” Stories by Tamas Dobozy

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siege13-web#FridayReads, Feb. 22–Siege 13: Stories by Tamas Dobozy, an innovative collection of short fiction that oscillates between the Nazi siege of Budapest in 1944 and the present day. I’ve just begun digging in to the book, but find I’m already astonished by the fluency of the writing, and the way the stories pull me right in. I don’t have too much to say about it yet, so I’ll note here the review of it that ran in Quill & Quire, the magazine of the Canadian book industry (Siege 13 was published simultaneously in the US and Canada). The reviewer is writer Robert Wiersema:

The stories are varied in tone: some emphasize the horrors of war, while others–like “The Society of Friends,” about two men in love with the same woman – are darkly humorous. Gripping realism is comfortably juxtaposed with fantasy in stories like “The Ghosts of Budapest and Toronto.” The pieces in Siege 13 are also unified by Dobozy’s skill as a writer. Carefully crafted, but executed with seeming effortlessness, every sentence in this collection, every paragraph, is a thing of beauty, and the stories themselves are without flaws. That said, the combination of the author’s abilities and the book’s subject matter means Siege 13 should come with a warning: take it slow. These are stories that should not be rushed through.

I will definitely take my time. Meantime, if you’d like to know more about the writer, here’s the web page for the book from its US publisher, Milkweed Editions. They sent me a review copy some months ago, I’m glad I’m finally getting to the book. The striking cover was designed by Michel Vrana, a friend who I met at the first Book Camp, an unconference about publishing.

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Remembering Edward Robb Ellis, Feb. 22, 1911-Labor Day, 1998

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[Editor’s Note, Feb. 22, 2013: The post below is a revised version of a piece I published on Feb. 22, 2012, the last anniversary of Edward Robb Ellis’s birthday.]
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Book business friends who’ve known me for some years may recall that I’ve been extremely fortunate in working with remarkable authors of advanced age. There’s the distinguished photojournalist Ruth Gruber, who turned 102 on her last birthday, with whom I’ve had the privilege of publishing six books over the past decade and a half, including Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman–a republication of Ruth’s 1931 seminal thesis on Woolf, the first feminist reading of the author, written before she’d become an international icon–and Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation and Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent. Ruth’s still going strong, with a bio-documentary out on her, also called “Ahead of Time.”

Another author I began working with who was then in their eighties was Edward Robb Ellis, who like Ruth Gruber, was born in 1911. In 1985, Ellis was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most prolific diarist in the history of American letters. By the time I met Eddie in the early 90s he had already published tremendously readable narrative histories, A Nation in Torment: The Great American Depression, 1929-39; Echoes of Distant Thunder: Life in the United States, 1914-1918; and one his adopted hometown, The Epic of New York City**. In 1995 I published his magnum opus, A Diary of the Century: Tales from American’s Greatest Diarist, with an Introduction by Pete Hamill, based on the diary Eddie began keeping in 1927 at age sixteen, which he kept faithfully until the year of his death seventy-one years later. This is part of the flap copy I wrote for a 2008 reissue of the book:

Press credentials granted the eagle-eyed Ellis a front-row seat to many major events of the twentieth century, and he captures them with candor and verve, in a vivid pictorial style–whether covering politicians like Huey Long, move stars and performers such as Grace Kelly and Paul Robeson, or history-making news events, including the creation of of the United Nations. He recounts his encounter with the legendarily witty Mae West–whose press agent turns out to be feeding lines to her. He chronicles a new Orleans jazz joint where he interviews a talented young trumpeter named Louis Armstrong. He writes of taking long strolls with Harry Truman, and of observing Senator Joseph McCarthy for the first time (“His mouth is thin and long, like a knife-gash in a melon.”).
Born in Kewanee, Illinois (“Hog Capitol of the World”), Ellis moved to New York City in 1947, and lovingly documents the city’s cosmopolitanism and post-war ebullience. The sparkle in Ellis’s writing comes not solely from his meetings with the rich and famous, but from his attentiveness to, and enjoyment of, everyday life. In Ellis’s own words, this is “not a record of world deeds, mighty achievements, conquests” but “the drama of the unfolding life of one individual, day after day after day.”

When I published the book with Eddie on Labor Day in 1995, we scored a rare kind of hat trick, booking interviews on all three network morning shows. Matt Lauer interviewed him on the TODAY Show, Cokie Roberts on “Good Morning America,” and Harry Smith on CBS’s “Early Show.” It was clear that Eddie’s status as a reporter from journalism’s golden age–or at least what morning show hosts and producers believed had been a golden age–had endeared him to them. I have videos of those appearances, but unfortunately haven’t transferred them to the Web and they are not on youtube. Picture Eddie wearing a red neckerchief with a khaki safari jacket and looking very dashing on TV.

In the 2008 reissue of A Diary of the Century I included an Editor’s Note explaining that at even 200,000 words and more than 600 pages, the book had constituted less than 1% of the entire Ellis Diary. A reference book aficionado, Eddie was fond of saying that his whole diary clocked in at more than 20,000,000 words, or roughly half the length of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. My Note explained that in his later years Eddie arranged for the Ellis Diary to find

“a permanent home with the Fales Library of New York University. Indeed, even before the last day of his life–which arrived on Labor Day 1998, so fitting for a man who always called himself a ‘working stiff’–more than five dozen oversize bound volumes, were hauled from his Chelsea apartment to the Greenwich Village campus of NYU. . . . It was my privilege to read into those bound volumes of the Ellis Diary, and I promise the reader that I found no dross there. With this revival, on behalf of Eddie’s literary executor Peter Skinner and literary representative Rita Rosenkranz, I take this opportunity to state that it is our intention to revive interest in A Diary of the Century, and then go on to create new books drawn from the Ellis Diary.”

With the possibilities afforded by the Internet clearer than ever, the above goal remains high among my personal priorities. Though Eddie was suspicious of new technology, and the World Wide Web was still new when he died, A Diary of the Century, with every entry  bearing the date he wrote it, will lend itself beautifully to blogging someday; in fact, it’d be fair to say that Eddie was a kind of proto-blogger before the term was known. In addition to this recollection of Eddie, I have posted a selection of readings from his diary, and here’s a link to a recent story I wrote about Eddie’s work with Letts of London, the diary publisher who’ve been selling blank journals since 1796.

** After publishing A Diary of the Century in 1995 I also republished the three backlist books by Ellis named above. The Epic of New York City has had more than ten printings since then.

 

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Readings from “A Diary of the Century” by Edward Robb Ellis

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[Editor’s Note, Feb. 22, 2013: The post below is a revised version of a piece I published on Feb. 22, 2012, the last anniversary of Edward Robb Ellis’s birthday.]
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Entries from A Diary of the Century by Edward Robb Ellis, about whom I blogged earlier today, on the occasion of what would have been his 102nd birthday, February 22.

Monday, October 5, 1931 This morning I got a letter from Mother saying that the First National Bank of Kewanee has closed. That’s the bank that has every cent I own. Mother also said that Grandpa Robb had all of his money there, and now Grandma is worried to death. Many of the people in Kewanee stood in front of the closed doors of the bank, weeping and cursing. One of Mother’s women friends ran up and down our street, bewailing the fact that her family has lost everything. . . . Here I am at age 20–absolutely penniless.

University of Missouri, Sunday, January 3, 1932 Today I saw my first bread line–200 starving men forming a gray line as they waited for food. The sight of them disturbed me.

Saturday, January 9. 1932 Nace Strickland is the best room mate one could have. Today he told me something that happened when he was a child. Raised in St. Louis, he didn’t know much about country life, so he was excited when two of his aunts took him for a drive on back roads. In one pasture he saw a bull mounting a cow, whereupon Nace exclaimed: “Hey, I didn’t know those things could milk themselves.”

Kewanee, Illinois, Saturday, June 11, 1932 Last night I dreamed I held my diary under a shower and was delighted when the words did not wash off. Does this mean I think my diary may make me “immortal?”

Monday, February 19, 1934 Some of my favorite songs: My Silent Love . . . Lullaby of the Leaves . . . I’ve Got the South in My Soul . . . Time on My Hands . . . Old Rockin’ Chair . . . Piccalo Pete . . . Harmonica Harry . . . I Kiss Your Hand, Madame . . . Somebody Loves Me . . . I Surrender, Dear . . . Body and Soul . . . All of Me . . . You’re My Everything . . . Mona Lisa . . . The Man I Love . . . What Wouldn’t I Do That for Man . . . Mood Indigo. / / more . . .

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Turk Pipkin’s Documentary “Building Hope” Builds Empathy & Community

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Turk Pipkin 2On a recent Tuesday night I went to the Tribeca Cinema for a screening of “Building Hope,” a documentary written, directed, and narrated by actor and author Turk Pipkin, who with his wife Christy also operates  The Nobelity Project. The film chronicles the building of the Mahiga Hope High School in rural Kenya, which now completed, is educating more than 800 students  each year. The film got an Audience Award at SXSW in 2011 and it’s easy to see why–it’s very watchable and moving, with a genuinely uplifting message, all without lapsing into saccharine simplicities. The school they designed and built with the labor of local tradespeople is also a model for sustainability, as they engineered an adjacent basketball court whose roof catches and saves rain water, providing much of what’s needed for the entire facility, in this region prone to drought. I highly recommend the film for anyone interested in education, the progress of young people in the developing world and sustainable design. It’s also a tight narrative with many memorable characters, just a fine nonfiction film.

At a restaurant near the Tribeca Cinema afterward I met an Austin native now living in Brooklyn, musician and singer Kat Edmonson, who wrote a song that’s in the soundtrack of “Building Hope.” It was fun talking with Kat and her boyfriend, Aaron, also in the music biz. Since that night I’ve enjoyed listening to her music. At Kat’s website, you can listen to a free download of her winsome love song, “Nobody Knows That.” When Turk sat down at our table, it was clear that she and Turk go back a ways. A thoughtful, friendly Texan, Pipkin’s visit to NYC coincided with the availability of the companion Building Hope book, and the imminent availability of the documentary in ITunes. I’m surprised to say, though Pipkin has written 10 books, I wasn’t familiar with him until Jette Momant of PR by the Book in Austin invited me to the screening. I’ve since learned he had a stand-up career doing comedy on the road with Rodney Dangerfield; appeared as the ping pong ball juggler in “Waiting for Guffman,” Christopher Guest’s 1996 mockumentary; written many TV shows; played a recurring character in “The Sopranos”; published two novels, one with Algonquin Press; and co-authored The Tao of Willie, with Willie Nelson, who also appears on-screen in “Building Hope.” Here’s a clip from this exceptional documentary, and below the video are photos, most of which I took at the screening, some of the film itself on screen: (Please click here to see all the photos.)

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“Hubris”–10 Years Later, Run-up to the Iraq War Still Shadows the Media & the U.S.

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Tonight MSNBC will broadcast “Hubris: Selling the Iraq War,” narrated by Rachel Maddow, based on the 2006 book of the same name by Michael Isikoff and David Corn. Coming nearly ten years after the US invaded Iraq, on March 19, 2003, I’ll be watching with great interest.

Politics of TruthI retain vivid recall of how the Bush administration pushed the country, and as much of the world as it could hector along with them, into invading that country. It was a mad, misguided rush, one that I was upset about at the time, and soon after became involved with personally and professionally. In July 2003, after Valerie Plame’s role as a CIA official was revealed in a notorious column by Robert Novak, I contacted Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Plame’s husband. In the months before the invasion of Iraq, he had become a vocal critic of the rush to war, publishing a number of Op-Ed columns that drew on his experience of twenty-five years as an American diplomat, including his service as the last American official to meet with Saddam Hussein before the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991. In my role as an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers I was referred to Wilson by publishing friend, Barbara Monteiro. I contacted Joe and found he was interested in writing a book that would chronicle his years as an American foreign service officer; more recent events involving his trip to Niger, where he was sent by the CIA to investigate the claim that Iraq had sought yellowcake from that African country; and the unprecedented exposure of his wife’s CIA employment. Joe, as I soon came to know him, agreed to the offer I made, a contract was quickly signed, and he began diligently working on the manuscript.

Fortunately, when Joe retired from the State Department a few years before the war fever he had sat for a series of lengthy interviews with an interlocutor from State–a good custom at the agency–setting his memories down in a proper oral history. He drew on this aide-memoir as he composed the diplomatic memoir that made up about 1/3 of the final manuscript. As for his trip to Niger, the positions he took in opposition to the Bush administration while they were twisting intelligence and co-opting media during he run-up to the war,  and events after the invasion, including the outing of his wife, he had little need of reminders. Joe delivered a very readable manuscript, and with a team of colleagues at Carroll & Graf I edited this draft, and Joe made key revisions to it. Meantime, we also kept a keen eye on breaking developments in the investigation in to how and why Valerie’s CIA employment had become a subject that administration officials felt free to discuss openly with reporters. Getting the manuscript ready for the printer was like aiming an arrow at a moving target.

The launch for the book, The Politics of Truth–A Diplomat’s Memoir: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity, was in early May 2004, less than a year after Novak’s fateful column. Joe went on the TODAY show, Charlie Rose, and he did a ton of public radio shows. I went with him to many of those interviews, sat in green rooms with him, fancy and plain. It was as cool when he did Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, as when we went to Rockefeller Center one morning before 7 AM, to do TODAY . His most interesting TV appearance was on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” when KO shared with Joe and the audience White House talking points supposedly rebutting the book. These had been sent to virtually all news outlets, including even to programs like Countdown, ones that weren’t having any of the BS from the administration. Olbermann brandished the sheaf of talking points, like a sword. With Joe’s opposition to the war, and most of all the fact he’d been to Niger and vigorously debunked the fraudulent yellowcake claim, Joe had stepped across a tripwire that loosed Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby like a pack of dogs, with Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer chasing close behind. None of their talking points refuted Joe’s claims. John Dean gave the book a great review in the New York Times Book Review and it became a national hardcover bestseller in the Times and Publishers Weekly for about six weeks. This was Dean’s opening paragraph:

“THIS is a riveting and all-engaging book. Not only does it provide context to yesterday’s headlines, and perhaps tomorrow’s, about the Iraq war and about our politics of personal destruction, but former Ambassador Joseph Wilson also tells captivating stories from his life as a foreign service officer with a long career fostering the development of African democracies, and gives us a behind-the-scenes blow-by-blow of the run-up to the 1991 Persian Gulf war. As the top American diplomat in Baghdad, Wilson was responsible for the embassy, its staff and the lives of other Americans in the region – not to mention the freeing of hostages in Kuwait. He goes on to relate his eye-to-eye encounter with the wily sociopath Saddam Hussein; his return home to be greeted as a ‘true American hero’ by President George H. W. Bush; his stint advising America’s top military commander in Europe; and his time as head of the African affairs desk of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, where he assembled the president’s historic trip to Africa while the ”Starr inquisition” into the Monica Lewinsky affair developed. Along the way he fell in love with and married a C.I.A. covert operative – a ”’willowy blonde, resembling a young Grace Kelly.”’

I should add the book was also a plea for Americans to be actively engaged in their citizenship, and to be unafraid if it became necessary to call one’s government to account. In 2010 The Politics of  Truth and Valerie’s 2008 book Fair Game: How a Top CIA Agent was Betrayed by Her Own Government, were jointly adapted for the feature film, “Fair Game,” with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts. I saw Joe and Valerie in NYC for a premiere reception and we have remained friends, more so than other authors I’ve published over the years. I just heard from Joe today. He and Valerie sat for interviews with the MSNBC producers and they will also be watching “Hubris” tonight. I hope you will be, too. Please feel free to leave comments here about the program, this post, and this period in our recent history. Joe and Valerie played a significant role in these events, bringing the Bush administration before the judgment of history for its deceptions. I am proud of the role I had in bringing their story before the public. To read about other aspects of this case, especially the federal trial of Scooter Libby for his obstruction of justice, and the book I brought out in 2008, The United States v. I. Lewis Libby, along with Patrick Fitzgerald’s legacy as a federal prosecutor, please see this post.

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#FridayReads, Feb 15, “Worth Dying For,” a Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child

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#FridayReads, Feb 15, “Worth Dying For,” a Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. I’ve been hearing about Child for quite a while, and now have finally picked up one of his books.  It’s a corker, I can see why they’re so popular. Reacher is a marauding justice-seeker who knows no limits, physical or psychological, in avenging those who’ve been wronged. In this case, it’s about justice for an 8-year old girl who went missing 25 years before the primary events in this story, with her disappearance having gone unsolved all this time. Reacher shows up in a desolate Nebraska county unsuspectingly, and soon gets drawn in to a tangled web with the corrupt Duncan family at the center of it all. The violence–and there’s quite a bit of it with Reacher being one of the toughest badasses I’ve ever come across in suspense fiction–is thick and visceral, and though very realistic, somehow hasn’t made me avert my eyes, figuratively or literally. It’s a bit like the mayhem in a comic book–thunderous and full of punch. Still, unlike the Road Runner, who always gets up again after having an anvil land on him, the blows sustained by Reacher’s opponents leave them down for the count.Reacher backReacher front

As usual, also reading book proposals from prospective author clients, in this case, a manuscript about the recently excavated Richard the III, translated into English from Dutch. Timely, and if good enough, could be something publishable here in North America, and perhaps in other English-speaking countries.

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#FridayReads, Feb. 1–Kem Nunn’s “Pomona Queen” & Mike Dash in Smithsonian on a Brave Siberian Family

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#FridayReads, Feb. 1–Kem Nunn’s Pomona Queen, an engrossing California novel by the writer dubbed the originator of “surf-noir.” I had earlier read his best-known book “Tapping the Source,” and am glad I’m reading another. His sentence-making is worth savoring, and he creates out of luck characters you tend to care about, despite their dysfunction. Here, his protagonist is Earl Deen, descendant of an orange-growing family that’s seen better days. I see Nunn as a sort of Cormac McCarthy for southern California.Pomona Queen backPomona Queen

Also read and marveled over Mike Dash’s article in Smithsonian, on a Russian family, members of a sect persecuted by Stalin that fled in to Siberia’s vast reaches, and were discovered 40 years later, barely aware of civilization and oblivious to modern history. I blogged about the story earlier in the week, and have been sharing it widely. An amazing story, the kind of true tale I loved publishing in book form when I edited the Kodansha Globe series in the 1990s.

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Under Will Storr’s Microscope–David Irving, Still Denying the Holocaust

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Although David Irving has continually lost in the courts of countries where denying the Holocaust is a crime, he keeps at it. As documented in an article now behind the Sunday Times of London’s paywall, which I read about last weekend in a tweet from UK journalism prof Emily Bell, reporter Will Storr traveled with Irving to former concentration camps where the disgraced historian preached his gospel to true believers that masses of Jews and other minorities were not annihilated during WWII. Storr’s forthcoming book, Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science, will be published in the UK soon. His journalistic enterprise seems reminiscent of the work of Jon Ronson, author of several engrossing books including Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Psychopath Test. Ronson is an affable traveler who is able to ingratiate himself with fringe characters, hang out with them, and plumb the depths of their irrationality.

Do you have favorite authors in the States engaged in reporting like that of these two British authors? Chuck Palahniuk? Any others?

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