Books I’ve brought out as publisher; essays and reviews I’ve published

#FridayReads, March 15–“The Big Book of Daring Swashbucklers” edited by Lawrence Ellsworth

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#FridayReads, March 15–The Big Book of Daring Swashbucklers an anthology assembled by writer Lawrence Ellsworth. Delightedly making my way through this terrific manuscript which I’m going to soon be presenting to publishers. It’s a spirited anthology of historical and adventure fiction that features generous selections from the work of such writers as Rafael Sabatini (best known for Scaramouche), Anthony Hope (of Prisoner of Zenda renown, Johnston McCulley (creator of Zorro), Conan Doyle (he favored his adventure yarns more than Sherlock Holmes), Pierce Egan (known for Robin Hood), Alexandre Dumas (there’s so much more than the Three Musketeers), and Baroness Orczy (creator of the Scarlet Pimpernel)–in all a total of 20 writers from what could be fairly be called the golden age of adventure fiction.

Evidence of continuing interest in the genre? Tom Reiss’s recent book Black Count: Glory, Reovlution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, on Alexandre Dumas’ father, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle annual award in biography. Here’s Reiss’s website, where you can learn more about his book. He read brilliantly at the NBCC awards a few weeks ago. His rediscovery of the elder Dumas affirmed for me my inclination toward this exciting new anthology. Delighted to be representing the supremely well-read Mr. Ellsworth.

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Excited with a New Assignment–Helping Protect the Freedom to Read/Part II

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As I reported on The Great Gray Bridge last month, I have a new consulting client, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), a non-profit organization that acts as the voice independent booksellers and the book community raise in opposition to censorship and book banning.

Today, the daily book biz outlet Shelf Awareness reported on the new arrangement, with the additional news of another hire for ABFFE–Kristen Gilligan Vlahos, who will be working as ABFFE’s auction manager–which I’m happy to link to here along with screenshots of the Shelf’s item.

The funds Kristen and I are helping ABFFE raise support the Foundation’s programs promoting free expression and freedom to read, like their signature initiative, Banned Books Week. ABFFE also advocates for bookstore customer privacy, which has become a flashpoint several times over the past couple decades. If you want to learn more about ABFFE and help support their initiatives, there’s more background at this blog post of mine, and at ABFFE’s own website. You can also ‘like’ their Facebook page and follow them on Twitter, @freadom, an apt handle.
Shelf ABFFE itemShelf masthead

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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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“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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Excited with a New Assignment–Helping Protect the Freedom to Read

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ABFFE logoI’m pleased to have a new consulting client, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), a non-profit organization that acts as the voice that independent booksellers and the book community raise in opposition to censorship and book banning. I’ll be working with them on fundraising and marketing, and over time, I hope their social networking. The funds ABFFE raises support programs promoting free expression, like their signature initiative, Banned Books Week. ABFFE also advocates for bookstore customer privacy. This has become a flashpoint several times over the past couple decades.

In the 1990s, Whitewater Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr subpoenaed the bookstore purchase records of Monica Lewinsky. Kramer Books & Afterwords in Washington D.C., was the target of Starr’s efforts. At a Book Expo America during the 1990s I recall picking up a t-shirt emblazoned with the message “Subpoenaed for Bookselling” that I wore for several years afterward.  Then, after 9/11 the Bush administration, in enforcing the Patriot Act, demanded that Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore and several public libraries hand over the purchase records and circulation history of some of their customers and patrons. ABFFE was in the trenches throughout these instances, helping booksellers and librarians resist the demands.

The first assignment I’m working on with ABFFE is the expansion of their affiliate program. Under this banner, companies that sell sidelines to bookstores, such as their  newest partner Filofax, contribute to ABFFE a percentage of the sales they make to American Booksellers Association (ABA) member bookstores. Sidelines from Filofax include journals,  and planners, as well as Lamy pens and pencils and diaries from Letts of London. Other affiliate partners supply bookstores with such items as reading glasses and bookmarks. I’ve drafted a press release announcing ABFFE’s new partnership with Filofax, which also mentions my new work with the foundation. The release, posted on the news portion of ABFFE’s website, is being circulated to book industry news outlets and bookstores around the country. I will be reaching out to sideline companies to recruit them for the program, and to booksellers, asking them who their best sideline suppliers are. If you’re interested in ABFFE’s work, I encourage you to follow them on Twitter where their handle is @freadom, or to like their Facebook page.

This is a particularly welcome assignment for me, having started out in the book business as a retail bookseller. Undercover Books, which I ran with my sibling and our parents, was an active member store in the ABA. My late brother Joel served as an ABA board member. We were activist booksellers, and Joel especially relished working on issues like those that ABFFE often confronts. In 2000 he ran for Congress as a Libertarian party candidate, placing reader privacy high on the list of issues he campaigned on. When Joel died in 2009, my sister Pamela and I made ABFFE one of the organizations that friends of the family and longtime Undercover customers were encouraged to donate to in his memory.

Happily, yet another personal connection pertains here. Readers of this blog may recall my longtime association with author and notable diarist Edward Robb Ellis (1911-98), who stands still as the writer remembered for having kept a diary longer than anyone else in American history, from 1927 until the year of his death. Between 1995-98, I edited and published four of Ellis’s books, including  A Diary of the Century: Tales From America’s Greatest Diarist, with an Introduction by Pete Hamill, and The Epic of New York City, both of which are still in print today.

Eddie, as all his friends called him, was a passionate advocate and ambassador of diary-keeping, so much so that after the Guinness Book of World Records recognized him and his diary in their 1981 edition for his achievement in American letters, the aforementioned Letts of London, in the business of making diaries since 1796, arranged with Eddie to publish “The Ellis Diary,” a handsome red leatherette bound, gold-ribbon bookmarked blank diary. You can imagine then how tickled I was when as part of this new assignment I scanned the catalogs and materials ABFFE director Chris Finan gave me to read up on Filofax’s business, happily discovering their association with the venerable Letts of London. Moreover, when I called and introduced myself to Filofax USA’s Paul Brusser, I learned that Letts of London is actually now Filofax’s parent company–it’s clear this long-living British company is still going strong. I wonder if anyone with Letts of London today remembers Eddie Ellis and “The Ellis Diary.” One of the nice things about this new gig is it may offer me the chance to find out! Below you’ll find some artifacts illustrating my work with Eddie Ellis, and his relationship with Letts of London. Click here to see photos.

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Judge David Sentelle, a Ghost of Whitewater & Iran-Contra, Hip-checking DEMs since 1987

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Saturday Update: Since Friday night when I began tweeting and blogging about the Judge Sentelle-led ruling–that if upheld on appeal could block virtually all recess appointments by President Obama–I’ve seen a lot of coverage. Here’s one the best pieces, a brief one by Scott Lemieux, of the blog, Lawyers, Guns, and Money. It’s called Neoconfederate Judges Rule Recess Appointments Unconstitutional. I recommend it.

Also not to be missed is Charlie Pierce, over at Esquire.com, railing against Judge Sentelle with his typically colorful flair and articulate opprobrium in a post titled simply “David Sentelle is a Hack”.
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Thanks to the reporting of Robert Draper and Frontline we know that REPUBs began plotting President Obama’s downfall on the first day of his first term. Well, for a comparable artifact from the Clinton Years, cast your mind back to the early days of Bill Clinton’s first term. Whitewater, little more than an annoyance for the Clinton campaign during the ’92 presidential race–became a nuisance once the new president took office, owing to Republican insistence of corruption or worse, and media enabling. Stupidly, papers like the New York Times, notably under the byline of reporter Jeff Gerth–who weirdly was the grown son of a couple friendly with my parents back in the day in suburban Cleveland’s Jewish community–created a froth of interest and curiosity about the failed real estate deal.  To bat back the idea that anything nefarious had happened, the young administration acquiesced to demands for a special prosecutor to investigate the venture, and Robert Fiske was appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno. Reno, who had been Clinton’s third choice for the spot, coming to the fore after two earlier nominations flamed out (remember Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood?). The tall Floridian had little fealty to the Clintons, and had not lacked for independence when she named Fiske, a career attorney, not a partisan. Still, when media began reporting that Fiske was finding little of concern in the land deal, and no wrongdoing by the First Couple, right-wing poobahs claimed Fiske’s selection by Reno had been suspect, and that he was a lackey of the administration.

Senators Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth, both from North Carolina, began pulling strings, soon enabling a three-judge panel of the D.C. circuit to remove Fiske. One of those three judges was David Sentelle, also of North Carolina. To the vacated position, the judges appointed Kenneth Starr, a sanctimonious legal prig, who over the next decade would spend more than $100 million on his ever-growing investigation of the Clintons and other DEMs. The rest, unfortunately, became modern history, including ultimately the impeachment and acquittal of President Clinton.

To coerce testimony from Susan MacDougal–former wife of Jim MacDougal, who had in the 80s inveigled the Clintons to buy Whitewater property–Starr charged her with civil contempt and had her jailed for 18 months.*  Once it was clear that Starr would never find a smoking gun amid the Whitewater folderol, moved on to place his investigative weight behind the Paula Jones case and the Monica Lewinski affair.  At the time Bill Clinton’s second term ended Starr’s investigation was ongoing, even though he had long since stopped looking primarily into Whitewater.

All that is prologue to today, when the NY Times reported along with other news outlets that a three judge panel of the D.C. district court, a body headed up by the same David Sentelle, had ruled that President Obama’s 2012 appointment of three officials to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was unconstitutional. The president had appointed those officials during a 20-day break in the Senate’s business, a hiatus during which he also appointed Richard Cordray to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. REPUB senators had stalled consideration of these appointments, and scores of others.

The court claims that the Senate was not really in recess, and thus the administration could not make these ‘recess’ appointments. The Times adds,

“Legal specialists said [the ruling’s] reasoning would virtually eliminate the recess appointment power for all future presidents [at a time] when it has become increasingly difficult for presidents to win Senate confirmation for their nominees. . . . ‘If this opinion stands, I think it will fundamentally alter the balance between the Senate and the president by limiting the president’s ability to keep offices filled,’ said John P. Elwood, who handled recess appointment issues for the Justice Department during the Bush administration. ‘This is certainly a red-letter day in presidential appointment power.’ The ruling, if not overturned, could paralyze the NLRB, an independent agency that oversees labor disputes, because it would lack a quorum without the three Obama appointments [made] in January 2012. . . . The ruling also called into question nearly 200 years of previous such appointments by administrations across the political spectrum. The executive branch has been making intrasession appointments since 1867 and has been using recess appointments to fill vacancies that opened before a recess since 1823. Among other things, Mr. Elwood noted, it called into question every ruling made by several federal appeals court judges who were installed by recess power. ‘You know there are people sitting in prisons around the country who will become very excited when they learn of this ruling,’ he said.”

AP reports that Jay Carney, Obama administration press secretary said, “The decision is novel and unprecedented. It contradicts 150 years of practice by Democratic and Republican administrations.”

I don’t pretend to be a lawyer, but I find it hard to believe that this ruling will be upheld. Judge Sentelle and his two cohorts have simply invalidated too much precedent with this radical pronouncement. What interests me more at the moment is how characters like Sentelle–little known outside the halls of government, and not all that well-known even inside them–exert so much authority over our lives and the fate of the nation. The wikipedia page on Sentelle reports that in 1987 to the D.C. District Court, taking the seat just vacated by Antonin Scalia who went on to the Supreme Court. In 1991, Sentelle invalidated the criminal convictions of Oliver North and John Poindexter arising from their illegal conduct in the Iran-Contra scandal. I don’t know the man, so I’d normally be loathe to diagnosis his motives, but it is hard to not see Sentelle as a longstanding and ardent operative promoting right-wing, partisan causes, and doing his utmost to sabotage and confound DEM presidents when he has the opportunity to do so. I must add too that if this decision is upheld, it will become even more difficult for President Obama to run the government in the face of REBUB opposition, particularly that emanating from the Senate. This ruling today makes all the more regrettable the partial measures taken in the Senate yesterday, when DEMs there failed to adequately reform the filibuster. If the Sentelle ruling is not overturned, and soon, Senate REPUBs will have even less reason to work with President Obama. It makes me wonder if Sentelle–a Zelig-like figure on the conservative bench–and his colleagues held the release of their ruling until the day following the announcement of the Senate’s weak measures. lest the urgency of filibuster reform seem truly imperative to wavering DEM senators like Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Here’s an excellent piece by TPM’s Brian Beutler that reports on the constitutional issues at stake.

*In 2000 Susan MacDougal became my author, when I acquired and edited her book The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk: Why I Wouldn’t Testify Against the Clintons and What I Learned in Jail, with a forceful Introduction by Helen Thomas, a NY Times bestseller. In addition to Susan’s book, recommended reading on this topic is The Hunting of the President by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons.Susan McDougal

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Today’s Work–Teaching Journalism Students at CUNY Grad School

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Enjoyed myself today, team-teaching in a nonfiction book writing seminar with a dozen students at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism on W. 40th Street. I first presented the evolving book world–digital and print–and filled in my book biz background, from retail bookselling to years as an editorial director at major houses publishing topical nonfiction. In the 2nd half of our session, the students presented book project ideas they’re thinking of launching into. With Prof. Glenn Lewis, who’s invited me to join him at least 5 years in a row, we listened to their pitches, hearing some really good ideas. Encouraged them to be in touch going forward, and hope to hear from them again, particularly a few.

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