The Book Buzz panel put on by Publishers Lunch last night was terrific. Four great new novels and one science biography, with the authors appearing one after the other in conversation with their editors. The picture to the left shows the lone nonfiction author, Dava Sobel whose upcoming book is The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science. She discussed it with her editor George Gibson of Grove Atlantic. The narrative focuses on the Polish-born two-time Nobel Prize-winner (in Physics and Chemistry) Madame Curie (1867-1934) and the forty-five women scientists whom she mentored and did pioneering research with in her laboratory in Paris.

For the record, the four novels presented were Penitence by Kristin Koval (with editor Deb Futter, Celadon Books); Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell (with editor Olivia Taylor Smith, Simon & Schuster; City of Night Birds by Juhae Kim (with Helen Atsma, Ecco Books); and The Ancients by John Larison (with editor Emily Wunderlich, Viking Press).

Back to Dava Sobel, in 1995 I was at the book launch for what became her international bestseller Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time in a book talk at the South St Seaport Museum bookshop in lower Manhattan. That event was also hosted by George Gibson, then her editor at Walker & Co. I am reminded by the inscription in the copy of the book I bought that night that it was September 22, 1995. That happened to be my 41st birthday, though I don’t recall going that night to celebrate, particularly. 

What a fateful night it was, birthday or not, because I also had the good fortune then to meet Dava Sobel’s aunt, who like me, had come to celebrate the publication of Longitude. This was Ruth Gruber (b. Brooklyn 1911-d. Manhattan 2016), a humanitarian, photojournalist, and foremost chronicler of the DPs (displaced persons) after WWII. With her I would ultimately publish six books, titles like Ahead of My Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2000) and Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (Times Books, 1997; Union Square Press, 2008; Ruth’s spot reporting in the postwar period on the real-life Exodus ship was the basis of Otto Preminger’s movie “Exodus”).

Dava’s mother was Ruth’s sister, and had long known of her aunt’s exploits and inspiring work. I commissioned her to write a new Introduction to the first trade paperback edition of Ruth’s 1983 book Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2001). It came out around the time CBS broadcast a two-night miniseries based on the book, with Natasha Richardson playing Ruth’s part. The rest of the cast included Martin Landau, Anne Bancroft, and Hal Holbrooke. The backstory to the book and miniseries was that from 1940-46 Ruth had been a staffer in the FDR administration, and throughout that whole span she served as an official of the Interior Department under President Roosevelt’s longest-tenured cabinet secretary, Harold Ickes. In 1944 Ickes assigned her to undertake a dangerous mission. After first being made a temporary general—so if she was captured, she’d benefit from the rights of the Geneva Convention—she was flown on military aircraft to war-torn southern Italy and then met and screened and escorted one thousand (mostly, but not all, Jewish) refugees on a ship called the USS Henry Gibbins across the Atlantic. They were bound for a safe haven in Oswego, NY, a former army base called Fort Ontario, where they were when WWII ended some months later in ’45.

For readers who want to know more about Ruth Gruber, this link will take you to the approximately half-dozen posts I have published about her on this blog.

I am so glad I met Dava that night in 1995, and her aunt Ruth Gruber, through the always stellar ministrations of George Gibson, a friend in bookselling and publishing for many years.