The Great Gray Bridge

Lawsuit blows whistle on corrupt conduct by Novartis&1000s of doctors, inc 24 on Long Island, reports @propublica. bit.ly/10dPEcv

— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) May 6, 2013

In 2011 a senior communications executive at Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, contacted me about editing a manuscript, their in-house history. I made a proposal for the job, we discussed a schedule, with me suggesting that I would bill them at different junctures as the edit moved forward and as he judged each segment of my work acceptable. We also discussed beginning the process with a signing payment, a portion of my total fee, as we got underway. For a few days it looked like we would be working together. Then I got surprising news from him. I guess he’d not earlier worked with independent contractors, because he informed me now that Novartis makes no payments to freelancers sooner than 60 days from when an invoice is accepted. It seemed beyond high-handed that this multi-billion dollar corporation would feel free to simply stipulate this odious policy to outside vendors doing work for the company. I objected but he told me there would be no flexibility on this point. Because I didn’t relish the prospect of working many weeks without pay–particularly when my work would still have to be deemed satisfactory at each milestone along the way before every new 60-day period would even commence–I declined to take the assignment.

Ever since–when I see Novartis mentioned in the news, whether it’s about a patent dispute in India over the medicine Gleevec, or the ProPublica story by Theodoric Meyer I tweeted about above, with a lawsuit alleging that Novartis paid “kickbacks—cash, meals and favors to relatives” of doctors who then improperly prescribed the company’s drugs to their patients–I feel relief, satisfaction, and a small measure of pleasure, knowing that I didn’t end up doing any work for this disreputable pharmaceutical giant.

I published a version of this post on May 4, 2012, and have now updated it for 2013 with additional material, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio,” as you’ll see below. The comments below are from the 2012 posting–you are welcome to add your own.
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May 4 is a big date on my personal calendar.

On this date in 1970 I was fifteen. That afternoon, around 4:30, I was standing on a sidewalk in downtown Cleveland, waiting for my sister Pamela to get off her job at Halle Bros., a local department store. Nearby, a delivery van pulled up, with the name of the evening paper, Cleveland Press, emblazoned across its side. The back door of the van rolled up and a worker began tossing bundles of that afternoon’s edition off the truck. It was a real “Front Page” moment, as in old movies when a swirl of numbered calendar pages and newspaper print resolves in to a splashy headline of bold, readable type and a brash reporter rushes off to get the rest of the story. Only this time, it was not a funny, Capraesque moment. In weirdly unfolding slow-motion I watched a particular bundle roll toward me until it landed above the fold, headline up. Like seeing a license plate in front of one’s eyes during a car accident–and remembering the combo of digits and letters forever–I read the inches-high black type: Four Students Shot Dead On Kent Campus. For several days prior, I had been following the antiwar demonstrations at Kent State, about thirty miles from Cleveland, and I knew that Ohio Governor James Rhodes had deployed armed troops to the campus. Pam soon joined me on the sidewalk and I told her the disturbing news. We shared our shock and dismpay and probably dropped whatever we had been planning to do, though I have no memory after telling her about the newspaper headline. I recall that little more than a week later I heard on local radio Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s recording of “Ohio.” It was as if Neil had written a musical version of an instant book, as is still done in the book world after a terrible catastrophe. In fact, in Neil’s recent memoir Heavy Peace he recalls quickly writing the song and then alacrity with which they recorded it, pushing the acetate copies of the song out to radio stations, before the vinyl 45s had even been pressed. Here’s a youtube version of the song with many photos taken that week on the Kent State campus. Thanks to Hard Rain Productions for assembling the photo montage with the song.

Eight years later, on May 4, 1978, Pamela, our brother Joel, our parents Earl and Sylvia, and I all opened Undercover Books, the bookstore that would define our lives for many years. When I was graduated from Franconia College a year earlier, with a BA in Philosophy of Education and History of Religion, I had imagined I might work for the Anti-Defamation League or some similar organization. I certainly hadn’t thought of working in a bookstore, but my siblings–with Pam having worked in department stores, and Joel at Kay’s Bookstore in downtown Cleveland–had the idea of opening a bookstore in our home suburb of Shaker Heights, where despite it being an affluent and well-educated community, no bookstore had ever been located. We were fortunate in our timing, for in Cleveland, as in several other midwestern cities, book retailing was migrating from the downtown core to the suburbs. Undercover Books caught on right away, and I got what amounted to a graduate education, provided by bookselling. As buyer for adult books for what would become our three-store indie chain, I met every day with bookbuying customers and browsers. We were regularly called upon by publishers’ sales reps, and became a go-to store for houses eager to break out books on the national scene. Notable authors who launched books at the store included Mark Helprin (Winter’s Tale), Richard North Patterson (The Lasko Tangent), and Walter Tevis (Queen’s Gambit). I was with the bookstores for seven years before moving to New York City, and have written more about the transition here on this site. The bookstore proved to be a gateway to my career in the book business and it all began on this date thirty-five years ago today.

On May 4, 1987, now working as an editor at Walker & Company, my first full-time position with a publishing house, I was in the happy position of telling author Ellen Hunnicutt that her novel, Suite For Calliope: A Music and the Circus–the first book I signed up on arriving at the company, and which was to be published that summer–had just received a starred review in Kirkus. Ellen was very excited as I read her the whole review with lines like these, “An extraordinary first novel that, in its remarkable inventiveness, intelligence, and charm-struck humanity, should draw–and more than richly reward–readers of almost every inclination. . . . A prodigiously masterful novel of profundity, breadth, and continual delight: waiting now only for what ought to be its very, very many readers.” Note I read it to her, and didn’t fax it, probably because neither one of us had one. What added to the special quality of the occasion however was that this day, May 4, was also Ellen’s birthday. You can read more about how I came to discover Suite for Calliope in this essay elsewhere on the blog.

Nowadays, when May 4 rolls around again, even if nothing so deeply tragic or personally historic is occurring in that given year, I marvel at it all. For now, I’m just really glad I created this site over the past couple years, so that this year, I have a proper venue to share my memories of May 4, from 43 years ago, from 35 years ago, and from 26 years ago.

The pictures seen here were taken in what we called “the middle room” at Undercover Books, where we placed a comfortable rattan couch. The black Labrador is our dog Noah, whose ear Joel is massaging. I am wearing the same style of pink eyeglass frames as I wear nowadays. I’ve told the story of how Joel and I came to get Noah at a dog pound in Deadwood, South Dakota, on a cross-country road trip in the summer of 1970, on a biographical blog post I tweeted out it a few months ago, with a picture of Noah and me that I cherish. I miss them both, Noah who passed in 1982, and Joel in 2009.

Here’s a personal essay chronicling my years age 15-30, in part on the black Lab Noah, shown here. bit.ly/PjsgGJ twitter.com/philipsturner/…

— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) January 29, 2013

In 2005 while an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers of the Avalon Publishing Group, I brought out the U.S. edition of Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire’s brave book, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. In it he gives an anguished account of the period when, as a member of the Canadian armed forces he served as commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda. He saved the lives of approximately 30,000 civilians even while 800,000 people died in the genocide. When I acquired U.S. publication rights from Random House Canada, it had already been a huge bestseller up there, where Dallaire was a public figure. He was not yet well known in the States, but publication of the book here coincided with release of the movie, “Hotel Rwanda,” in which Nick Nolte played a Hollywood version of the general. The movie portrayal, though very inaccurate, elevated Dallaire’s notoriety, and enabled us to generate major reviews and book him on shows like Charlie Rose, and many NPR programs. Many U.S. publishers had declined to publish the book here, including Random House in in New York, but when the book came out here–with an added Introduction by Samantha Power, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning, The Problem From Hell: American and the Age of Genocide–it became a Washington Post bestseller and sold very well around the country. It is still very much in print today, from the Basic Books imprint of the Perseus Book Group, which bought Avalon in 2007.

Dallaire had returned home to Canada from the Rwandan mission a nearly broken man, suicidal and afflicted with severe PTSD. Yet he rebuilt his life and psyche and has gone on to do very important work in conflict resolution. I accompanied him to several of the NY interviews in 2005, sitting in the back of taxicabs and in green rooms with him. We became friends. Despite everything he’d endured, he showed a good sense of humor with an often merry glint in his eyes. I mentioned this to him, and he said, “A commander without a sense of humor will not be respected by his troops.” He’s a soldier-humanitarian and an extremely kind and sensitive man, rather Gandhi-like. From the position he holds now as a Canadian Senator he has moved on in his life to advocate for the end of the practice of armies conscripting child soldiers. Yesterday, Huffington Post Canada reported on a new project of his, The Roméo Dallaire Child Soldier Initiative, and an accompanying documentary called “Fight Like Soldiers, Die Like Children,” drawn from the activism that led to his second book, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers, published  in 2011.

According to Huffington Post Canada’s Ryan Maloney, the movie “captures the innovative way Dallaire’s group is attempting to end this scourge of humanity, not just through research and training, but by staring down and shaming the commanders who put kids on the battlefield in the first place. Dallaire says the use of children in Rwanda was prevalent. He recounts watching packs of ‘wild-eyed, drugged-up’ kids use machetes to slaughter with reckless abandon. ‘It was interesting that the adults always seemed to be more in the back,’ he says.”

The article continues, “Where other programs focus on convincing kids to put down their weapons, the Initiative appeals to militia leaders directly and attempts to convince them it is disadvantageous, from a purely tactical side, to use a child in war. ‘That’s something that nobody else is attempting to do on this issue globally,” says Shelly Whitman, executive director of the Initiative. A key part of that process involves sending Dallaire to challenge these men on a personal level, often by appealing to their very manhood. ‘When another military leader sits down… and says (he) has no respect for you because you use kids, it’s a very macho thing,’ [director of the documentary Patrick] Reed says. Dallaire is confident that speaking with militia leaders directly will ultimately reduce the use of kids as instruments of war. He says his group has already been given the mandate to train the Sierra Leone army and police, as well as write curriculum for the primary school system to show children how to avoid recruitment.”

I’ll be eager to watch “Fight Like Soldiers, Die Like Children” when I can find it. Meantime, below is a trailer for it. The company that made the new film, White Pine Pictures, also made a powerful documentary based on Dallaire’s first book, also called “Shake Hands with the Devil.” I commend this brave and sensitive man to your attention. His important work could lead us to a better world.

Jack Hoffman, the boy shown here meeting with President Obama, is being treated for brain cancer. The ball he’s holding had been autographed by the president and given to young Jack. He recently was befriended by the University of Nebraska football team, who in the video below is shown on the day he took the field with his player friends. He was handed the ball in a scrimmage and given a chance to run for a touchdown. I’ve watched the minute-long video twice and reached for a tissue both times. Thanks to TPM for their report on Jack this morning.

Gilbert King, whom I happen to know as a publishing acquaintance, got some welcome and unexpected news last week. His book, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the general nonfiction category. King didn’t know that his publisher HarperCollins had submitted his book for consideration of the prize. A NY Times story published tonight profiles the unpretentious King, who was on a golf course in Florida when he got the news from a friend’s text: “Dude. Pulitzer.”

With refreshing modesty, King, whose book was published in March 2012, told the Times reporter William Grimes, “‘I’m sure people who write the big, critically acclaimed books know if they’re in the running. . . . But I’d just gotten a notice from my publisher that the book had been remaindered.’” The book tells a story of a too-little known incident of racial injustice, when in 1949 four black men were falsely accused of raping a white woman. The villain of the tale is the local sheriff in Groveland, Florida, Willis McCall, who King told Grimes compares unfavorably even with another notorious lawman: “’He made Bull Connor look like Barney Fife,’ the author said, “referring to the notorious commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Ala., during the civil rights era. ‘Connor used dogs and fire hoses. McCall actually killed people,’” including one of the accused in this case.

King faced a daunting research challenge. While he did have the FBI case files to draw on, he also really needed to see records of the case housed at the NAACP, as Thurgood Marshall, then with the civil rights organization, had defended the accused. Though the organization had never shared such case files, even with eminent academics–because of attorney-client privilege–King persuaded them in this instance by insisting he was only interested in this one case, and none of their other historic cases. It sounds like a remarkable book, one with a terrible miscarriage of justice at the heart of the story that it seeks to redress, just the sort of book I have always enjoyed acquiring and championing as an editor for publishing houses.

I couldn’t be happier for Gilbert King, whose two books have “enjoyed only modest sales.” Grimes writes that King “is undecided what the next project might be. When the Pulitzer news came, ‘I was sort of lying low.’” I hope his next book, whatever he writes about, and whenever he publishes it, will gain recognition from the start. With the Pulitzer in his back pocket, it’s a good bet it will.

Readers of this blog may recall earlier posts in which I explained that in the mid-2000s I was a colleague for several years at Avalon Publishing Group with David Wheeler, whose 6-year old son Ben was a first-grade student at Sandy Hook Elementary School, one of the twenty children murdered in Newtown, CT, last Dec. 14. With heavy heart but much pride and encouragement I’ve watched over the past four months as David and his wife Francine, along with other Sandy Hook parents, have become activists for new laws that will diminish the likelihood of other similar tragedies occuring in the future. They and the other parents have met several times with President Obama and this week Francine was invited to deliver the administration’s weekly address. This would be the only time that someone other than the president or vice-president gave the weekly address. Last night NPR reported that Francine wrote the address with the help of David, and together they recorded it in the WH library.  The Wheeler’s have vowed that their son’s life and death will have import and meaning, and they are working with great dedication to ensure this. I admire them and their older son Nate, and share their grief for Ben.

This morning the White House emailed this message from President Obama, explaining why he asked the Wheelers to take his place today.
To lend your voice to this effort, here’s the fact page the president mentions in his email.
Here is the White House video of Francine’s talk:

This satire on Exxon’s nasty oil spill in Arkansas was aired on the Rachel Maddow Show last night. It imagines a world where oil is conveniently brought right to your door, by letting it burble right up through your lawn. Sad to think this is what’s happened over the past two weeks in Mayflower, AR, as chronicled in stories like this NY Times article by reporter Michael Schwirtz. It must be noted that the material from this spill is a form of tar sands oil, similar to what’s being mined and extracted in Alberta, Canada, and possibly being brought in to the US if the Keystone Excel pipeline is given a green light. This dark devastating spoof, under a minute long, was produced by Heavy Crude Video with Andy Cobb appearing as the unhinged narrator. Watch it and weep.

Emily Bazelon’s new book Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy has been a lightning rod for criticism among educators and parents who believe the author shows too much understanding for all parties in the social equation, the bullies and the bullied, even while it has won much praise among readers who praise its comprehensive and nuanced examination of these very complex issues. Last night at one of the New America Foundation’s excellent programs, Bazelon was interviewed by journalist Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, published in 2009. The two conducted quite a probing conversation, in which the tension of the reception over Bazelon’s book was played out for an audience of about forty people.

Cullen was an occasionally rambling but very animated moderator. His odd style fueled the conversation, lending it an unpredictable air and keeping everyone a bit off balance. He disclosed that as a teenager, one who only would later realize he was gay, he’d endured a lot of ridicule and meanness. One time the conflict escalated in to a fistfight with an antagonist. Cullen added that after this the two of them got along better. While Bazelon did not of course endorse fighting, she did remind the audience that aggression is an unavoidable part of adolescence, and we ought not be so delusional as to believe it can be programmed out of teenage behavior. The Q&A with the audience continued in the same provocative vein.

Right off the bat, an African-American woman asserted that much bullying has a racist impulse–a useful point to hear since it seems nowadays much of the bullying reported in mass media lately is over gender and sexual identity issues; a gentleman asked about bullying in the workplace, citing a recent instance where as a manager he’d had to handle a complaint by one female  employee about another who had been critical of her performance. He didn’t think there’d been bullying, or anything improper, but he couldn’t be sure. A third audience member told Cullen how much he’d appreciated his sensitive interview with Rachel Maddow on the night of the Newtown shootings, and then asked him to weigh on the gun safety debate. Cullen made a remark I tweeted about. He rapped the pro-gun crowd’s axiom, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” with an alternate spin: “Guns and people kill people.”

When I was called on, I used my moment to say  that as a young person the only fights I ever got in occurred when I was defending someone being picked on. I remarked that by definition, most bullying incidents occur when adults are not around, then asked whether adult mediation efforts in schools can be helpful. Bazelon responded by citing statistics that show kids intervene when someone’s being picked on only 20% of the time, though that helps reduce the bullying in more than half the cases. Still, people are hesitant, lest they be the next one targeted. She told a story about a recent incident in the NYC subway, when she defended an older man who was being hassled by a group of kids.  As she put it, she thought, “I’m writing a book about bullying, I have to do something about this.” Turned out the kids left the man and turned on her with scary intensity, calling her names and following her out of the subway system at her stop. She said that too often an attempted mediation–one with an implicit “Can’t we all just get along” subtext–will put the bully and the victim on the same level of responsibility, which takes the former off the hook for his abusive conduct, and makes the latter feel worse than before the intervention. Another member of the audience asked about resiliency among young people, a topic that Bazelon eagerly grasped, saying that it is really the theme of much of her work–our capacity to endure mistreatment, slough off hurt and rise to a new level of maturity. She published a NY Times Op-Ed in March headed, Defining Bullying Down, which advances many of the ideas in her book.

Through it all, Bazelon insisted on a key distinction that not all mean behavior is bullying–defined as harassment of a victim conducted in view of others, persisting over a length of time, often involving physical abuse. She didn’t diminish the merely mean, but said not all bad conduct is on the same level. It is this part of her thesis that has drawn fire from critics who believe, I guess, that she doesn’t sufficiently condemn all bad actors. Bazelon and Cullen agreed that mass media often sensationalizes reporting on this topic, often escalating situations beyond where they were before the coverage. Cullen added that in doing the reporting for Columbine, he discovered many myths about the incident, stories that had become sturdy urban legends–he learned that the Columbine killers hadn’t really been bullied, and were never members of the so-called ‘trenchcoat mafia” in their high school. Bazelon said that both she and Cullen have been called “bullying denialists,” and is resigned to be judged that way. She published a NY Times Op-Ed in March headed, Defining Bullying Down, which advances many of these nuances.

I tweeted throughout the discussion and you can go back and follow the timeline at this link, under the hashtag #NANYC. Even after an hour covering this topic, most of the audience felt there was much more to discuss, and many people stayed around to talk further. While Bazelon signed books, I mingled and met several fellow members of the audience. I had been seated near journalist Jon Ronson, whom I recognized from social networks we both occupy. He’s the author of several books I’ve enjoyed and have written about it here–The Men Who Stare at Goats; The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry; and Them: Adventures With Extremists. We talked about a new film he’s written on, a feature called “Frank.” He’d come with his teenage son whom I also met, the only young person I noticed in the group.

I also met and spoke with Harsha Murthy, a congenial man who works in the pharmaceutical industry. He was there with three attorney friends. Two of them, Jennifer Freeman and Robert Lewis, have their own firm, Freeman Lewis, whose Twitter page explains they “represent victims of child trafficking, child sex abuse, online child sexual exploitation, and child pornography.” Harsha introduced me to Jennifer and Robert, and a third attorney, James Marsh, who coincidentally knew the work of an author of mine, Montreal reporter Julian Sher, whose book Caught in the Web: Inside the Police Hunt to Rescue Children from Online Predators I published in 2007. They had all come this night because in January Emily Bazelon profiled pathbreaking legal work in a lengthy cover story for the New York Times Magazine, The Price of a Stolen Childhood. Bazelon’s story focused on novel legal strategies undertaken by James Marsh seeking financial restitution for victims of child pornography. At the time of Bazelon’s article early this year, the Times did a blog interview with her. At the end, Times reporter Rachel Nolan asked a question that elicited a fulsome reply which I will allow to close this report.

“You’ve done past reporting on bullying and have just finished a book on the topic. Is there some connection between this piece [on child pornography] and that work?”

“Working on this article alongside the book made me think about all the different ways of being a victim, and how you can both reckon with that identity and not let it overwhelm you. Some targets of bullying recover, and others don’t. One of the things I have been most interested in all of my work is human resilience. Recovering from trauma is not easy, nor does it come naturally, nor does it always happen. It’s unimaginable what Amy and Nicole went through, truly. I do want readers to feel what it is like to be these women, even if just for a moment. But I also wanted to show the benefit of the legal process for Amy and Nicole and that it has helped foster their resilience.”