Sold: Four American History Classics by Ken Ackerman Coming Back into Print

In the early to mid-2000s, while an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers, one of my chief enjoyments was editing and publishing four stellar books of American history by Kenneth D. Ackerman. I found him to be a terrific researcher, and more adept than any writer I’d ever worked with at utilizing the text from carefully cited original sources, which he then paired with his own prose, often in the same sentence or paragraph.

The books we did then included a biography, Boss Tweed: The Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York, which Pete Hamill reviewed on the cover of the NY Times Book Review, and Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield, on the tragically abbreviated presidency that contributed to the premature end of Reconstruction. The others were The Gold Ring, on Jay Gould and the financial scandal of 1869, and Young J. Edgar, on the early rise of the all-powerful FBI director.

I’m delighted to now have Ken as an agency client of Philip Turner Book Productions. Under that rubric, I’m excited to announce that we’ve licensed his backlist titles to Open Road Media for their Re-Discovery Lit program. It’s great to be working with Ken again!