Books & Writing – Page 31 – The Great Gray Bridge

A Vanished Young Chess Master

Last winter, publishing reporter Sarah Weinman–who works for PublishersMarketplace.com and who writes for a number of other publications–asked me if I would try to help her with a story she was working on. Having learned that I attended Franconia College in the 70s, Sarah wondered if I had ever known fellow FC student, Peter Winston. he began in ’75, I began in ’73. His name didn’t ring a bell for me, but Sarah continued and told me about more him, ultimately asking if I would put the word out among the old College community for anyone who might’ve known him. I agreed readily. Sadly, there was a dark and tragic background to her queries, and to the story. She explained that Winston, for a time a promising talent in competitive chess, burdened with a history of mental health problems, had in 1978 simply vanished, never to have been seen since. Foul play or misadventure were of course suspected by his family and authorities, but no trace or record of him has ever been found. He was a kind of modern-day Judge Crater.

I put the word out on the Franconia College Facebook page, a 366-member strong group of former students, faculty and extended community members. Unfortunately, my request for information yielded not a single lead, which I told Sarah last March. She thanked me for trying to help, and went back to reporting the story through other means, and I made a mental note to watch her byline for the piece on Peter Winston. Yesterday, the result of her efforts appeared in the New York Observer, a fascinating 3,000 word article that was the last thing I read before falling asleep last night. Sarah also’s blogged about the writing of the piece on her excellent tumblr, Off On a Tangent. The Observer article is haunting and sad–kind of a nonfiction counterpart to Queen’s Gambit, the novel by Walter Tevis*, whose protagonist is a troubled female chess prodigy. Though Sarah’s piece can answer few questions about Winston’s disappearance, it asks many and is compelling reading, folding in a portrait of the chess scene in NY in the 70s, the milieu that produced Winston, and a character sketch of him. Publication of the piece may also produce some leads for Sarah, so I’m recommending that you read her story and share it widely among your contacts. Any Franconia College people who may not have seen my earlier call for information, please take note. If you knew Peter, or remember him, please let me know and I will put you in touch with Sarah.

I must say now as I keep looking at this photo, I believe I must have seen him at the College, his face and demeanor are somehow familiar, but I know I never spoke with him.

* Tevis clearly had a gift for writing about troubled, alienated protagonists, sometimes young. In addition to the chess novel, his last book, he also wrote the SF novels, The Man Who Fell to Earth (a classic film with David Bowie) and The Steps of the Sun (which I happened to publish in 1989), and the pool hall novels The Hustler and The Color of Money, also great movies with Paul Newman in both, and Jackie Gleason in the first. In 1983, when Tevis was on tour for Queen’s Gambit he happened to stop in my Cleveland bookstore, Undercover Books and my brother and sister and I talked with him for an hour, on a blizzardy day. He died just a year later, in 1984. The Peter Winston mystery is one to which he would have definitely related–had it been reported in local news outlets, but according to Sarah Weinman, Winston’s disappearance barely registered in local media, or even with NYPD, who she writes have “no record of anyone by his name disappearing from the city.” Records for her piece were very sparse, with open requests to police and city authorities officially unanswered at this point.

#FridayReads, July 13–“The Double Game” by Dan Fesperman

July 13, 2012/1 Comment/in Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

#FridayReads, July 13–Finished The Double Game, a brilliant and compelling espionage novel by Dan Fesperman. I loved the end as much as the first half. The mark of quality here is defined by the appendix of 218 books at the back of Fesperman’s book that he read and drew from in writing his latest work. As I posted in my #FridayReads last week, “Terrific dialogue, characters, and use of dozens of classic espionage books as clues and plot points. Sonny Mehta’s letter on the back of the galley is right: ‘For anyone who loves a good spy thriller–and who has loved them for years–this will be a treat.’”

This Week at The Great Gray Bridge

July 13, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing, Music, Bands & Radio, Philip Turner's Books & Writing, Urban Life & New York City /by Philip Turner

In the past week I’ve blogged about an urban skunk I encountered in Riverside Park; a great new espionage novel called The Double Game by Dan Fesperman; the shameful lack of recognition for women in tech, as revealed by Change the Ratio’s Rachel Sklar; a well-deserved honor for Jim Tully: American Writer, Hollywood Brawler, Irish Rover, my fave biography of 2011; the lack of public transportation for wage-earners which means they often can’t get to jobs they would otherwise be able to fill; a new genetics study that may shed light on how the Americas were peopled in prehistoric times; a personal essay I’m contributing to a new book called Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology; Mitt Romney’s most secret offshore investment, Mitt and Ann’s Jet-Ski vacation, and a NY Times Editorial that hit Mitt. I also put up a guest post by my son Ewan Turner, a blended short story that fuses an actual incident from Bob Dylan’s career with an imagined episode involving the singer.

Over at The Great Gray Bridge tumblr, my site for quick hits and diverting photography, I put up a photo of Donald Trump that the Scots must find hilarious (h/t TPM and Zuma Press/Newscom and a post about the personal effects of lawman Eliot Ness , which have been put for auction.

Surprise in the City, Learning about World Book Night

July 13, 2012/1 Comment/in Books & Writing, Philip Turner Book Productions /by Philip Turner

I had a meeting yesterday morning to present the excellent Web platform of my client Speakerfile, which I often tell people is like eHarmony for the conference industry, matching up event planners with authors who do public speaking. My meeting was with Gail Kump, Director of Membership Marketing for the Association of American Publishers (AAP). It was a fitting meeting, since it’d been Gail who’d referred Peter Evans, Speakerfile CEO, to me during the Digital Book World conference last winter. It is thanks to her that I’m working with them now. I’ve known Gail for a few years and we had a good talk, with each of us seeing ahead to many ways that the AAP and Speakerfile can work together. After sharing our ideas and swapping names of new contacts, I thanked Gail for her time and our meeting ended. Rather than immediately leaving the cool and pleasant AAP offices, I decided I’d sit on the comfortable couch in their lobby and do some work on my IPad and make a few phone calls before heading out to my next Manhattan meeting.

After a productive half-hour, I packed up my kit and prepared to leave. But first, peering back into the conference room where Gail and I had met, I noticed a familiar figure seated at a table. It looked like longtime book biz friend Carl Lennertz of World Book Night. Walking back that way, sure enough, it was him. Voicing a surprised “hello” greeting, I greeted Carl and we shared a few minutes of conversation. I learned that he and a colleague there with him, Laura, were assembling results of the enormous book giveaway they’d engineered this past April, when 23,000,000 copies of thirty different books were handed out gratis in North America, Ireland, and Britain. The non-profit program’s motto is “Spreading the love of reading, person to person.” The titles included Just Kids by Patti Smith, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. Carl and Laura showed me the Manhattan phone directory-sized bound volume that covers the myriad international locations where volunteers gave away books, with maps, charts, graphs, and narrative summaries of volunteer reports. Carl mentioned it will be made available as an ebook. I told them I’ll be eager to learn more about World Book Night’s plans for 2013.

It made for a pleasant morning, seeing Gail and Carl, and meeting Laura. I hope to see them again soon!

An Honor for Jim Tully’s Biographers

July 11, 2012/1 Comment/in Books & Writing, Philip Turner's Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

I am very pleased for authors Paul Bauer and Mark Dawidziak that their biography Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, and Hollywood Brawler has won a Gold award in Foreword Magazine‘s annual recognition of the best books of the past year. Winning books were selected by a panel of librarians and booksellers.

I had put the book on my best list for 2011, blogging about in a foundational post called Lost American Writer Found: Jim Tully and again after the authors gave a presentation at NYU last April when I posted A Book Talk on Jim Tully. In the first post I wrote that the authors,

steep the reader in Tully’s lifelong struggle to make himself into a significant person; glimpsing his continual act of self-creation is what I found thrilling about this book. The authors chronicle how even in relatively prosperous years, he continued striving to create himself and forge his work. Family agonies–his son Alton served several jail terms for brutal assaults on women–sapped Tully’s energies and darkened many of his latter days. Sadly, he lived along enough to see his reputation and book sales decline, leaving him to ponder what kind of country no longer cared to read about the travails of its have-nots, even while America roared ahead into the second half of the century. I felt Tully’s sorrow as his reputation ebbed and editors no longer kept him in demand for assignments.

It’s a great book and along with the judges at Foreword Magazine, I recommend it highly.

#FridayReads, July 6–“The Double Game,” Dan Fesperman

July 6, 2012/3 Comments/in Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

#FridayReads, July 6–Reading a galley of “The Double Game,” Dan Fesperman’s terrific homage to spy fiction, a Knopf novel coming late August. Terrific dialogue, characters, and use of dozens of classic espionage books as clues and plot points. Sonny Mehta’s letter on the back is right: “For anyone who loves a good spy thriller–and who has loved them for years–this will be a treat.”

Jonathan Krohn’s Political Evolution & a Couple Welcome Updates

July 2, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing, Philip Turner Book Productions /by Philip Turner

Day Later Update: Jonathan Krohn went on Last Word w/Lawrence O’Donnell Monday night and did a great job explaining the evolution of his political views over the past few years. He’s a very mature 17-year old and I can’t help being a fan of his, and admiring his transformation. You can watch it via this link.
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Late Afternoon Update: After I tweeted out my blog post about Jonathan Krohn I heard from him, and the Twitter exchange we shared is below. I must say I admire his candor and his broad-mindedness in continuing to quest for a political philosophy that suits him. For proper sequence, the tweets should be read from top to bottom.

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Onetime young favorite of the conservative movement, Jonathan Krohn, now 17, has largely disowned the doctrinaire ideological positions he seemed to favor at age 13, when he gave a widely covered speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Politico‘s Patrick Gavin has the story on Krohn’s transformation into a gay marriage-favoring, healthcare-supporer who would probably vote to re-elect President Obama voter, if he were of age in November. From Gavin’s article, partly in Krohn’s own words,

“’I think it was naive,’ Krohn now says of the speech. ‘It’s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.… I live in Georgia. We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.… The speech was something that a 13-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions. You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were 12 or 13. It’s impossible. You haven’t done enough. . . . One of the first things that changed was that I stopped being a social conservative,’ said Krohn. ‘It just didn’t seem right to me anymore. From there, it branched into other issues, everything from health care to economic issues.… I think I’ve changed a lot, and it’s not because I’ve become a liberal from being a conservative—it’s just that I thought about it more. The issues are so complex, you can’t just go with some ideological mantra for each substantive issue. . . . I’ve been trying to tell people,’ he added, ‘but it’s a lot harder to get stuff out there when your mind changes on things because a lot of people who supported you when you’re on one side of the issue aren’t really going to help you get your changing ideas out there when people still think I’m that conservative kid. . . . People don’t realize I was 14 when I wrote that book.'”

Soon after the speech and all the coverage Krohn garnered, publisher Roger Cooper of Vanguard Press signed him up for a book. Roger, for whom I’ve edited manuscripts, asked if I would be interested in working with Krohn and editing his book. I had seen the speech, which I watched it with my own son Ewan, who’s a year younger than Krohn. Ewan found his beliefs and his celebrity, weird and unappealing. Though committed to the idea that every author has a right to tell his story, I declined to make a bid for the editorial assignment, largely because I didn’t want to work on political material I found inimical to my own or Ewan’s views; nor did I anticipate I could have a vigorous exchange of ideas with the smug boy I’d seen on C-Span. He seemed so convinced of his ideological positions, I just didn’t relish the thought of working with someone like him. The weird thing for Krohn now is that he’s got this unenviable Youtube and Internet history that he can’t escape, and which he’s already tired of dealing with, and being forced to explain to people. He’ll soon be going to NYU where he plans to study philosophy and filmmaking. The last word in the story is from Krohn:

“‘People don’t realize I was 14 when I wrote that book. I’m 17 now. In terms of my life, three years is a long time in a 17-year-old’s life. . . . Come on, I was thirteen,’ he said. “I was thirteen.’”

#FridayReads, June 29–“Brain on Fire,” Susannah Cahalan

June 29, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

#FridayReads, June 29–Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, Susannah Cahalan’s frightening first-person account of the autoimmune disease that rendered her catatonic for a month, drove her nearly mad, and almost killed her. Riveting and disturbing, this was one of the books featured on the BEA Buzz panel at Book Expo America earlier this month. I’ve scanned the cover for this post, but I have a feeling that Free Press is still working on the jacket, because there seems no evidence of a final cover online. During the Buzz Panel I tweeted the message below.

Next up, Panorama City, a novel by Antoine Wilson, also one of the BEA Buzz books.