Bob Delaney, Helping People Live With Stress and Trauma

Covert, Bob DelaneyIn 2008 I edited and published NBA referee Bob Delaney’s first book, Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob. Co-written with Dave Scheiber, it was named a USA TODAY Best Book of the Year. While relating the dangerous undercover assignment that led to multiple indictments and convictions of organized crime figures, the book also chronicled how the assignment led to undiagnosed post-traumatic stress for Bob. This was in the 1970s, before PTSD was a familiar term in our lexicon. Bob’s path through treatment to healing has now led to his second book, Surviving the Shadows: A Journey of Hope into Post-Traumatic Stress, which I represented with Bob’s longtime agent, Uwe Stender, placing it with Sourcebooks. In a new op-ed Bob writes that vet-to-vet, first responder-to-first responder, peer-to-peer therapy is an effective bulwark against post-traumatic stress and full-blown PTSD.  This is just one of many promising treatments described in the new book. I’m so proud of Bob, now retired from the NBA, for working with medical professionals, veterans’ groups, and law enforcement and first responder associations to promulgate these treatments for survivors of stress and trauma.Surviving the Shadows, Bob Delaney

#fridayreads/Nov. 4

Better late than not all: a last-minute #fridayreads, ‘The Abramsky Variations,’ Morley Torgov, an acerbic comic novel about a Toronto Jewish family.

Discovering the American Philosophical Society

I’ve known my friend George Gibson since 1979 when he paid a call as a sales rep on Undercover Books, the bookstore I then ran in Cleveland with my sibling and our parents. George, now publishing director of Bloomsbury USA, hosted an event Nov. 1 at the Grolier Club, one of NY’s most distinguished book […]

Richard Nash Tells All–Or At Least Quite A Lot

Richard Nash is a very smart publishing person, and plenty smart enough to know when an experimental direction he’s taken isn’t working out. As a result, he gave a talk this week at the Books into Browsers conference in San Francisco conceding that Cursor, the enterprise he announced with great anticipation in 2010, hasn’t really […]

All Kinds of Superheroes

In recent months there have been a number of terrific graphic novels released, including Kate Beaton’s Hark, Vagrant, Michael Kupperman’s rendition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography 1910-2010, Ludovic Debeurme’s Lucille, and Nick Bertozzi’s Lewis & Clark. Last April, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival I had the privilege of covering a special comics reading […]

Hitchens’ Book of Mormon-ism

Excellent Slate article by Christopher Hitchens on Mormonism, its core beliefs, and how it should be discussed in the context of the presidential campaign. Hitch’s piece includes a reference to a terrific book I republished in 1995, by Facebook friend Alex Shoumatoff. It’s his superb study of human kinship and genealogy, The Mountain of Names. […]

A Global Readership

Happy to see the U.S. State Dept. sees value in placing Pres. Obama’s books in embassy libraries in Egypt, S. Korea, Indonesia, etc. The Moonie-run right-wing Washington Times is trying to stir up a controversy with a story on this, “But State Department spokesman Noel Clay said the book purchases followed regular government procurement rules. […]