From 2007, “The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption”

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When I was an editorial executive for Carroll & Graf Publishers from 2000-2007, among the most consequential narrative nonfiction books I edited and published was journalist Barbara Bisantz Raymond’s revelatory investigation The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption.” Publishers Weekly named it a Notable Book of the Year, in 2007.

The basic story—first chronicled by Raymond in an exposé for Good Housekeeping magazine, which inspired a “60 Minutes” segment and then a 1993 TV movie, “Stolen Babies,” with Mary Tyler Moore in an Emmy-winning performance as the titular figure Georgia Tann—was shocking. Tann (1891-1950), nationally lauded for supposedly arranging legal adoptions out of her Tennessee Children’s Home Society, was in reality a baby thief who stole, bartered, and brokered more than 5,000 children from unwed mothers and poor families throughout Appalachia and the South, selling them to wealthy clients around the country, including in Hollywood, where actors Dick Powell, Lana Turner, and Joan Crawford were among her clients, prominent names she would use with future customers. Protected by Memphis political boss Ed Crump, it is estimated that Tann sold more than 5,000 children, making about $5 million in mid-twentieth century dollars (equivalent to more than $100 million today).

Beginning in 1924, and ending only with Tann’s death in 1950, she virtually invented modern American adoption, popularizing it, commercializing it, and corrupting it with secrecy. To cover her crimes, Tann falsified adoptees’ birth certificates, sealing their original documents and issuing new ones that falsely claimed adoptive parents were birth parents. This secrecy was enshrined in law by legislators in the entire United States who claimed it was necessary to spare adoptees what they believed was the stain of illegitimacy.

As the years passed following the original explosion of interest in the story, Barbara Raymond continued to hear from Georgia Tann’s adult adoptees. She kept gathering string, and in 2006, Barbara’s then-agent Lynn Franklin submitted the manuscript of what would become The Baby Thief  to me. I quickly made an offer to acquire the rights.

Reading the manuscript for the first time—in those days still a printout on paper—conjured up a cascade of emotions as Raymond’s reporting included many accounts of anguished parents and adult adoptees who’d been separated against their will. She revealed dozens of instances where Tann schemed to separate newly born babies from poor parents, with fictions customized for each situation; a common one was to imply that the babies would be taken from destitute parents only while they got themselves on their feet. Editing the manuscript with Barbara, I also encountered the rich trove of documentation and sources on which she based her narrative. Reading it today, as I have been this week, I see its themes continue to reverberate, with many states still denying adult adoptees their original birth certificates, though other states are now operating under reformed practices. Arguably, the book has done a lot to create more open information-sharing with families by the states.

In a contemporary sense, it strikes me now, more than fifteen years after I edited the manuscript, that the baby trafficking Georgia Tann undertook, and the national baby sales network she developed, could be said to have been a sort of proto-version of QAnon—the mythology of this decade which purports that members of the Democrat party are engaged in stealing children from their parents—only Georgia Tann really did it.

When published in hardcover, the reviews were exceptional:

“An episode in American adoption history little remembered by the public at large, the crimes of nationally-lauded Memphis orphanage director Georgia Tann are skillfully and passionately recounted by freelance writer Raymond, herself an adoptive mom. The portrait of Tann that emerges is a domineering, indefatigable figure with an insane commitment to ends-justify-the-means logic, who oversaw three decades of baby-stealing, baby-selling and unprecedented neglect. Meanwhile, she did more to popularize, commercialize and influence adoption in America than anyone before her. Tann operated carte blanche under corrupt Mayor Edward Hull Crump from the 1920s to the ’50s, employing a nefarious network of judges, attorneys, social workers and politicos, whom she sometimes bribed with “free” babies; her clients included the rich, the famous and the entirely unfit (who more than occasionally returned their disappointing children for a refund). “Spotters” located babies and young children ripe for abduction-from women too uneducated or exhausted to fight back—and Tann made standard practice of altering birth certificates and secreting away adoption records to attract buyers and cover her tracks—self-serving moves that have become standard practice in modern adoption. A riveting array of interviews with Tann’s former charges reveals adults still struggling with their adoption ordeal, childhood memories stacked with sexual abuse, torture and confusion. Raymond’s dogged investigation makes a strong case for “ridding adoptions of lies and secrets,” warning that “until we do, Tann and her imitators will continue to corrupt adoption.” A rigorous, fascinating, page-turning tale, this important book is not for the timorous.—Publishers Weekly, a starred review

“A fascinating dark tale of Ms. Tann’s influence [that] gives voice to the brokenhearted children and their birth parents damaged by her actions. [R]iveting.’”—Dallas Morning News
 
“Raymond recounts this astonishing and horrifying true story with tremendous self-awareness and intrepid research into Tann’s ongoing legacy.”—The Tampa Tribune

“Fascinating, insightful, chilling and compelling. A very important book and a terrific read.”—Adam Pertman, Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and author of Adoption Nation

I thought so highly of the book that when I moved to a new editorial position early in 2008—to run Sterling Publishing’s Union Square Press imprint—I quickly acquired the reprint rights to the book, and published it in trade paperback later that year. In the years that followed the book attained elevated status among adult adoptees and their families. As one measure of its impact, web pages for the book on Amazon and Goodreads total more than 2000 comments from grateful readers, with remarks like this one:

“Thank you for lending your voice to those still seeking their families lost. I recommend this book. In memory of my precious father in law, Fred Crumley, who was an amazing dad, paw, I am still seeking truth for our family. His birth mother was Carrie Cates. He was adopted from The Tennessee Children’s Home Society, along with a sister.”

Sadly, agent Lynn Franklin, who’d represented many important authors along with Barbara Bisantz Raymond, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, died in 2021 at age 74. Barbara, who lives in my old hometown of Cleveland, and I have stayed in touch over the years. Recently, she contacted me when a documentary producer got in touch with her about the book and my company Philip Turner Book Productions is now her literary agent. In addition to possible adaptations for a documentary or a feature, and possibly a new paperback edition, I also hope to make a deal on the author’s behalf for an audiobook, as there has never been one.

In the meantime, if you have an interest in adoption, and want to know how our practices surrounding it developed in the last century, or if you just want to read a superbly paced narrative nonfiction book, a true crime thriller with a powerful social message, I suggest you pick up a copy of The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption.

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One Year Ago Today…

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One year ago today, July 15, 2023, was a Saturday. I had strapped on my helmet—and as is typical for me—taken a late afternoon bike ride around Riverside Park and the upper west side in Manhattan. As I got close to home, I rolled up to the edge of the crosswalk where W. 103rd Street crosses the northbound single-lane service road that runs parallel to Riverside Drive, and stopped to see if any cars were coming. I spotted a black car which seemed stopped at the intersection, which is marked on both sides of the road with red metal stop signs, with the same command  painted in white on the pavement. I waited to see if I could safely cross to the sidewalk on the other side. There were no other pedestrians or vehicles nearby, so I gave a wave of my hand to get the driver’s attention in the black car to indicate I was going to pedal across. Unbeknownst to me, the driver had apparently only come to a rolling stop, and may not have seen my wave at him. Suddenly he hit the gas and the car began accelerating through the intersection and into the crosswalk. In fragmented milliseconds, I experienced the sinking thought, “Oh, god, he’s probably gonna to hit me. I’m glad I have my helmet on!” I pedaled harder and almost got through to the other side of the crosswalk, but the car hit me with what I think was its left front bumper. It struck me on the right side of my body and I landed on the pavement on my left side—knee, elbow, forearm, shoulder—getting dragged along the road for several feet. I had almost gotten through the intersection, but the car’s speed had overtaken me before I could get through. I think he was going about 15 mph. He definitely did not observe the stop sign,

I bounced up as quickly as I could manage to get away from the now idling car and squatted on the curb, hauling my damaged bike along behind me. I started inspecting my body for injuries, immediately finding a bloody knee and calf. (I was wearing shorts so my leg was scraped raw.) The driver stopped and got out of the car, presumably to see how injured I was, looking mortified at what he’d done. In a controlled but raised voice I said: “You had a stop sign, but you didn’t stop, you rolled through it and hit the gas! Do you know you did that?!” He sheepishly agreed, though he later claimed to the cops when they arrived that he had stopped at the stop sign. This was false, and in the immediate aftermath of the collision that he caused, he admitted it. Later, I learned from the guy’s driver license, issued by the state of New Jersey, that July 15 was his birthday, and he volunteered to my son that he had been looking for a parking space as he drove around the neighborhood. There is no legal parking on the Riverside Drive service road, so he wasn’t going to find a spot there.

Since I was close to home, I phoned my wife and son who were alarmed of course and said they would come right over.

While waiting for my family to arrive I called 911. When I told the dispatcher that I had been hit by a car which knocked me off my bike and I landed on the pavement hard, they said they would send an ambulance and the police.

I found that a neighbor woman had been walking by with her husband and she told me she saw it all happen. She confirmed to me what I wrote above, including that the driver hadn’t stopped, and added that she had actually seen me under the car for a moment. She gave her name and phone number to my wife and said to call her if we wanted her to speak to the police.

The ambulance arrived first so the EMTs put me on a stretcher in the back of their vehicle and drove me to Mt Sinai Hospital, at the Morningside Hts. location, while my family waited to speak with the police, or so I hoped. Had I known better—and this is the #1 lesson if you’re involved in a collision—I would have asked the EMTs if I could wait to give a statement to the police at the same time as the driver. As it turned out, the driver changed his story and lied to the cops, claiming he had stopped at the stop sign.  The cops wouldn’t take a statement from my family, because they hadn’t been there at the moment of the crash, and by then, the neighbor woman had also left.

About an hour later, by which time my wife had joined me in the ER, the cops came in to to take a statement from me. By then the ER staff had put me through a full body trauma checkup and given me some painkillers. They had also put a stabilizing collar around my neck. I was laying flat on my back, a bit woozy and very uncomfortable laying there with the stiff collar which made it difficult for me to talk. They asked me what happened and I told them the driver hadn’t stopped. They told me he claimed to them that he had stopped, and it was my word against his. Through the haze I became agitated and as forcefully as I could, insisted that what he had told them was not truthful, that he hadn’t stopped, and he’d admitted that to me. I remembered the neighbor woman and they said she wasn’t there when they arrived on the scene. This ended with the cops telling me that if I wanted to, I could go to the 24th Precinct Station House to add to my statement.

The doctors decided I could go home and I was discharged without being admitted to the hospital.

I rested a lot the next few days and called a family friend who is also a lawyer. He agreed to represent me in a claim against the driver and his insurer. When I felt well enough I went to the 24th Precinct with a copy of the incident report and explained that the driver’s claim that he had stopped was false. My contention was duly noted. I added that a witness had also seen the crash, but the police declined when I asked if they would take a statement from her. Their attitude seemed to be a driver and a cyclist are on equal terms, and the latter deserves no special deference from the former, even though they’re operating a machine that weighs many multiples more than the cyclist.

It took well over a month for the deep purple bruises, like the one on my arm shown above, to fade, and my knee was sore for months. I also had an internal problem a month to the day after the incident—I developed a kidney stone—which I thought might have been hastened or precipitated by the car crashing into me as it did, and from the resulting stress on my system. Suffice it to say, I had some health issues in the second half of 2023!

A few weeks after the crash I took my mangled bike—a sturdy Trek I had bought more than forty years ago, just as the fabled Wisconsin bike maker began selling bikes outside their home state—in for service. As is recommended after bike crashes, I also bought a new Bontrager helmet, which has a special “wave cell technology,” that is said to direct impact away from the head. and soon began riding again, albeit very carefully, with a skeptical eye cocked toward all drivers at stop signs and traffic lights. The wheels of compensation grind slowly, and a year later, we haven’t quite completed the process with GEICO. I’ll be relieved when it’s all settled.

Given the driver’s blatant disregard of the stop sign, and then his false denial of that to the NYPD,  I had hoped to see the incident report revised to reflect his violation, but unfortunately that’s not how things turned out. Even without that, I’m hopeful that the claim against his insurer will be apt to raise his cost for continuing coverage, a consequence he should have to endure for his reckless driving that injured me, and could have hurt me much worse than it did. I also hope it will deter him from further reckless driving.

I’ve been riding my bike in New York City since I came here from Cleveland in 1986, and I’m happy I can say I’ve only been in the one collision over all these years. It could’ve been a lot worse, and I hope it’s the only one I’ll ever have.

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Clara Reeve: My New Literary Hero by M. G. Turner

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Recently I had the good fortune of making a literary discovery, which was really the discovery of a new literary hero: Clara Reeve. For those who may be unfamiliar with her work, in 1777, Reeve—an Englishwoman born in Ipswich (1729-1807)—wrote a small masterpiece entitled The Old English Baron which is a clever, exciting, and thoroughly captivating retelling of Horace Walpole’s slim novella The Castle of Otranto, written more than a decade prior. Otranto is considered as the first gothic novel and should be thought of as a seminal work. But as is often the plight of anything that is the first it is also flawed, flawed in a way that Reeve took upon herself to openly correct in her own penetrating novel that seamlessly moved the setting from rural and rugged Italy to Medieval England during the time of the crusades. The plot centers around a knight who returns to his friend’s estate after a period of war only to find that it has fallen into a state of dilapidation. It is important to note that this would become a gothic trope, beginning with Otranto and continuing with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca—showing how time and neglect can take a piece of property formerly regal and beautiful and obscure its true nature. In this way the gothic writer laments the passage of time and does so by using style as a metaphor and trope as its device. The only difference for Clara Reeve was that she found Walpole’s novel too extreme in its many bold choices and thus tried to rectify them.

Indeed, Reeve’s conceit is one I try to take to heart myself and apply to my own writing. It is simply that when reaching out to portray the supernatural it is important not to go too far, to remain as it were on the “razor’s edge” between unbridled fantasy and stultifying reality. She recognized with the precision of a true artist something that I innately felt about Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: it was overdone, there was too much mayhem, too much absurdity; why does a giant helmet fall out of the sky and happen to crush the groom? Why are people walking in and out of tapestries as if it were the most natural thing in the world? Why is the father, after the death of his beloved son, so instantly possessed with such lusty rage that he must attempt to marry the young man’s bride? Feeling courageous and sure of herself, Reeve tried her hand at addressing some of what she saw as Walpole’s errors. For my part, I have to admit I like Otranto just fine. But that’s just it: I like it fine. I can distinctly recall rolling my eyes at the exact points Reeve took issue with and felt compelled to explore in her own much more considered way. Reeve is an artist; Walpole is an inventor. He deserves credit for pulling together the disparate strands of style and inventing the gothic genre, but she deserves to be recognized for having written a better book, a work she herself referred to as Otranto’s “literary offspring.”

And it seems she was, in some sense, recognized for this. Though there is not much known about her life and her literary output is small—she did translations, wrote a book of poetry, and penned histories—The Old English Baron deeply offended the man she had written it in emulation of. Walpole was simply aghast than anyone, particularly a woman, would have the temerity to take his form and do something spectacular with it. Of course, both he, and later Walter Scott, claimed that her efforts were not spectacular; they put down The Old English Baron as frivolous, boring, and charmless. Walpole, in a letter to the Reverend William Cole, decreed that Reeve’s novel is: “stripped of the marvelous…, except in one awkward attempt at a ghost or two, that it is the most insipid dull thing you ever saw…” From my own perspective it is hard to see this judgement by Walpole as little more than paternalistic bitterness. Where he failed, she succeeded; where she failed, he succeeded. The two works complement each other and offer something that the other does not have; in the case of Baron a more deft way of deploying the supernatural that does not feel forced or cartoonish but instead makes you shiver with genuine fright due to its well-composed restraint; while Otranto possesses more style than its successor. Either way, these early gothic works led to Mary Shelley, to Bram Stoker, to Edgar Allan Poe, and much later, to Jorge Luis Borges. Here is a continuum that Walpole and Reeve both ushered in, and which matters in the context of our times. For the gothic has been referred to as the most “anxious” of styles and we are now in the most anxious of ages. It recognizes the innate darkness that subsumes so much of our world; estates that were once beautiful and grand can, with the passage of only a few years and within even one generation, fall into decay and utter ruin. The honor of the past is often supplanted by an insipid criminality that is always trying to get away with something. The gothic is not old fashioned, nor is it new-fangled. It is the most present of styles because it acknowledges that change is the most supreme truth of human life. All empires crumble, all families break apart. People fail to live up their promise and due to innate hubris are struck down. These are all themes that filter through both Otranto and Baron and it is our pleasure as readers—and appreciators of style—to debate which one we think did it best.

But there is something even more important in all of this, something even more topical. In this age wherein we are rediscovering voices from the past who were traditionally overlooked, neglected, or wholeheartedly ignored let us not forget the daring Clara Reeve who had the audacity to challenge a powerful man—and carve out her own not insubstantial piece of literary history; for she is the reason for the essay having been written at all! She made Walpole’s rather lurid fantasia something more profound, something that I could recognize as of a kind with greatest works of horror fiction. Because she was a woman writing in an era dominated by men doesn’t mean she should remain unappreciated. And like the ghosts which she deployed with such deftness and alacrity she can rise again, to be known as she should be known: as a pioneer of the macabre and a writer of immense talent, as fearless and brave as the champions of virtue she set down on the page.

M. G. Turner

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Publishers Lunch Spring 2023 Book Buzz Panel—Including Dava Sobel, on Madame Curie and the Women Scientists She Hired and Inspired

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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.

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First Reviews of “The Kremlin’s Noose: Putin’s Bitter Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia”

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“The Kremlin’s Noose: Putin’s Bitter Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia”, Northern Illinois/Cornell Univ. Press, May 15, 2024 —

Update: On the publication date of The Kremlin’s Noose, May 15, we received this outstanding starred review in Kirkus. The key lines are

“An in-depth examination of the rise and fall of a Russian oligarch….Knight’s thorough research and broad comprehension of Russian politics since the Soviet era allows her to deftly draw linkages between the events that led to Berezovsky’s downfall as she also notes aspects of Berezovsky’s personality that contributed to his demise….A chilling, compellingly written exploration of Russian politics.”—Starred review, Kirkus

Here’s a screenshot of the review:

 

I’m excited with the upcoming publication of our agency client Amy Knight’s latest book, The Kremlin’s Noose: Putin’s Bitter Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia, as we’ve seen the first full review of the book. In Foreign Affairs, critic Maria Lipman writes, “Knight tells the riveting story of the Russian tycoon and political operator Boris Berezovsky and his role in the rise of Vladimir Putin to the presidency in 2000.” (Full review screenshot below)

And in Theater Mania—in a review of the new play “Patriots” by Peter Morgan (“The Crown” and “Frost/Nixon”), which also chronicles the testy relationship between oligarch Boris Berzovsky and Putin—critic Ian Stewart writes, “In a book, like Amy Knight’s excellent forthcoming history, The Kremlin’s Noose [the story of the two men is] a thriller.”

Along with the North American print edition of The Kremlin’s Noose (May 15, Northern Illinois/Cornell University Press), we’ve also licensed an audiobook edition to Tantor Media, also due out in May; and foreign editions of the book are coming out from a publisher in Britain (Icon Books, June 2024), and Brazil (2025).

Amy Knight has been called “the West’s foremost scholar” of the KGB by The New York Times. She is also the author of How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt of Soviet Spies (Carroll & Graf, 2006, for which I was the editor back in the day), and Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (St Martin’s Press, 2017), the first book for which I was her agent. Orders to Kill is now available in paperback.

Foreign Affairs review

How the Cold War Began

Orders to Kill

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A Citizens’ Initiative in New York City—Ending All Non-Essential Helicopter Flights in the Five Boroughs

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Chopper hearing, April 16 2024. (I’m seated second from the left.)

If you live in New York City, you’ve probably noticed the growing plethora of noisy helicopters flying above our five boroughs, often taking wealthy people to area airports and to second homes in the Hamptons and Upstate. I engaged in some local civic activism on April 16, going to a rally and testifying at a City Council hearing, advocating the end of all non-essential helicopter flights.

I’m glad Spectrum News NY1 covered the rally and hearing. I’m pictured here in a screenshot from their coverage, with New Yorkers like me who testified about the damaging impact of non-essential helicopter 🚁 flights over NYC.

I was there with members of a group called @StoptheChopNYNJ. After the rally at City Hall, we attended and testified at a hearing chaired by City Council Leader Amanda Farias and other City Council members who presented details of six bills and resolutions they’re sponsoring to stop the choppers. Representatives of the aviation industry were there, as well as staffers for the Adams administration.

While the industry reps (no surprise) shilled for companies like Blade (whose celebrity pitchman is the actor Liev Schreiber, to his shame), Adams’ people came ill-prepared with no ready administration response to the proposed laws, wrongly claimed there’s no good way to measure chopper noise, touted an absurdly high figure for the supposed economic benefit to the city from the flights, and overlooked real damage to quality of life and the environment from the thousands of non-essential tourist and commuter flights that are taking place every year. Shockingly, though it’s been many years since lead was removed from automotive gasoline, many of the choppers are still powered by leaded aviation fuel. The hearing also discussed the possibility of electric-powered helicopters, which it is hoped would be far less noisy, the advent of such an alternative is still at least a couple years in the future, and meanwhile the noisy choppers could continue apace, if nothing is done by government officials.

If your tired of your peace of mind and quality of life being disturbed by these incessant flights, I urge you to let your NYC City Council member know how you feel, and urge them to vote affirmatively on the six proposed bills and resolutions shown here. You may also consider volunteering with Stop the Chop NY/NJ. Other people you can contact to voice your opinion include FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker; Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg; Rep Jerry Nadler; NY Governor Hochul; NJ Governor Phil Murphy; NYC Mayor Adams. Shoutout for their good work to City Council Majority Leader Amanda Farias, plus City Council Members Lincoln Restler, and Gale Brewer. #noisepollution

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In Conversation w/Canadian Author Ken McGoogan at The Explorer’s Club in NYC

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In the early 2000s, when I was an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers, I had the good fortune to acquire the US publishing rights to a book first published in Canada, Fatal Passage: The Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Who Time Forgot and Ancient Mariner: The Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean, what would prove to be only the first two books on polar exploration by Ken McGoogan, who has continued to immerse himself in the subject over the past twenty years, now having published a total of six Arctic books. A key development in that immersion has been his role as a resource historian for many sailings with Adventure Canada, a travel company that takes visitors on voyages to Canada’s northern reaches and in to the Arctic itself.

Fatal Passage chronicled the mystery of the ships HMS Terror and Erebus, which under the command of Royal Navy captain John Franklin, set off with more than 125 officers and crew on board in search of the Northwest Passage, but then disappeared never to be heard from again, at least not among Euro-centric people. Many search parties sought to learn the fate of Franklin and his men, including one helmed by John Rae, from Orkney in northern Scotland. He was the first European-based explorer to value highly the local knowledge of Inuit guides, hunters, and interpreters, who led him to eyewitnesses who’d seen hungry white seamen trekking across their lands in dire straits. They reported to Rae their understanding that to them these desperate men had engaged in cannibalism, feeding on the dead to try and save themselves. Rae’s discovery, though vetted by him with careful cross-questioning of the native witnesses, earned him a vituperative rebuke once back in England from Franklin’s wife, Jane Lady Franklin, who even enlisted Charles Dickens to editorialize against Rae. Fatal Passage effectively rehabilitated the reputation of John Rae, more than a century after it had been trashed by poobahs in Victorian England.

When it was published in the US, in 2002, the book won a Christopher Award, given to authors who produce works that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” McGoogan traveled from his home in Toronto to New York for the ceremony, and we began to get better acquainted as author and publisher, and as friends. Later, I made a road trip with my wife and son to Toronto and we enjoyed a dinner at Ken’s home with him and his artist wife Sheena. Another guest that night was Ken’s literary agent Beverley Slopen, from whom I’d acquired the rights to Ken’s books, and from whom I would later acquire rights to books by other Canadian authors, such as the mystery master Howard Engel, creator of the Benny Cooperman detective series.

Last December, Ken got in touch with me to extend an invitation. His latest book, Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery, was published in Canada last fall, and he explained to me it would be coming out in the US in the Spring of 2024. He would be coming down to New York to make a presentation on March 22 at the NY Public Library, in connection with a new exhibit, “The Awe of the Arctic” in the historic main library from March 15-July 13. A day prior to that, Ken said, he would be giving a talk at another public venue. He asked, in so many words, “Would you be interested in reading the new book, preparing some questions, and interviewing me at the first event?” After learning a few more details, including the fact there would be an honorarium to cover my preparation and for serving as his interlocutor, I readily accepted the exciting invitation.

In January, I was even more excited to learn from Ken that the venue for our joint event would be The Explorer’s Club, a venerable institution on the east side of Manhattan established in 1904. On Honourary Canadian, the sister website to this one, I put up a post promoting our talk, chronicling my longtime association with Canada and Canadian authors, and drafted what I dubbed my Canadian-adjacent bio, touching on my longtime immersion in #CANLit and in reading and publishing tales of polar exploration.

From Ken’s publisher—Douglas & McIntyre of Madeira Park, British Columbia, Canada—I received a copy of Searching for Franklin, and dove right into it. Rather than immediately noting possible questions for Ken while reading the book, I instead read it with a pencil in hand, scratching out asterisks in the margins next to passages that intrigued me, which I anticipated going back to once I’d finished the whole book, to mine them for the most resonant themes and to form the most stimulating questions I could think of for our discussion.

I found the book quite engrossing, and appreciated that it was written in multiple, contrasting styles of narrative nonfiction, though it’s all done without becoming jarring or off-putting. While most of is written in past tense, the norm for this sort of book prose, there are occasional passages in present tense, as when Ken and his fellow adventurers were actually touring the Arctic on an Adventure Canada cruise, and when they disembarked from the ship to traverse the ground where Franklin, his officers and crew, and their Inuit hunters, interpreters, and guides had trekked almost two centuries ago. Ken also presents some fascinating counter-factual possibilities that contrast with the known historical record, as he offers his best theory about what led to the tragic demise of Franklin and his two ships and the entire crew. Note with no spoiler: this new theory of his, appearing for the first time in Searching for Franklin is supported by medical reporting and highly informed speculation.

Last Thursday, the night of our discussion finally arrived. I was glad to be joined by my wife, artist Kyle Gallup, and my adult son Ewan Turner, who operates Philip Turner Book Productions with me; he is a creative writer publishing under the pen name M.G. Turner. After a friendly reception in the historic rooms of The Explorer’s Club, Ken McGoogan pulled on the rope that sounds the Club’s bell, calling the meeting to order, and an audience of what looked to be about seventy-five people took seats in the main hall. Following an introduction by Cedar Swan, the CEO of Adventure Canada, Ken gave a talk outlining his long association with the Franklin saga, going all the way back to the writing of Fatal Passage. Using slides, he described how Margaret Atwood had introduced him to Swan’s father Matthew, the founder of Adventure Canada; the many voyages he’s made with them over the past twenty years; how Franklin’s candidacy to lead the search for the Northwest Passage had been championed to the Royal Navy by Lady Franklin, even though his earlier expeditions had produced less than stellar results; John Rae’s discovery of Franklin’s fate; and the medical and dietary travails that he now believes led to the demise of so many of Franklin’s men. When he finished his presentation, it was time for our discussion.

I began, asking such questions as these (with appendices from my research in parentheses):

  • Why did the idea of the Northwest Passage become so central to British myth-making about itself, and later to Canada’s own self-image? (In a discussion a day earlier when we met for a convivial dinner and to discuss the following night’s program, I referred Ken to such evidence of the rousing example from pop culture of Stan Rogers’ song “Northwest Passage,” a veritable Canadian national anthem, sung lustily by the barrel-chested musician (1949-83) on his debut album in 1981. So as to not lengthen the duration of our discussion unduly, I refrained from mentioning it then, but do so now for the sake of sharing more of my research.)
  • How was it that young boys went to sea so young, including Franklin himself, at age twelve? (In another example from cultural history cited in camera to Ken, but not at the Club is the haunting folk song “The Captain’s Apprentice,” collected in 1905 by my favorite English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose lyrics tell the sad tale of a boy treated roughly.)
  • Can you contrast the leadership styles of John Rae and Franklin, with Rae seeming to show special regard for the well-being of his fellow expeditioneers, more so than Franklin?
  • It’s amazing to me, as you write, that ships had libraries—1700 volumes on Franklin’s ship, which would have taken up a lot of room on board. Aboard ship, where living and sleeping quarters were notoriously tight, how did they accommodate so many books? (And, was there such a thing as a ship librarian? That would be the job for me.)
  • You write that Charles Dickens at least allowed John Rae to publish a rebuttal to Lady Franklin’s accusations about him, but I wonder: Why did Dickens believe Lady Franklin’s slanders about Rae, at all?
  • Can you explain why when Erebus and Terror were found in 2014 and 2016, they were forty miles apart in the Arctic Ocean?
  • The caloric demand for portagers and voyageurs while doing all the enormously strenuous work on the trail must have been very high for them—while they carried 80-pound packs, in contrast to the sailors who carried a fourth of that weight—yet they often didn’t get the food they needed. How did they manage?

The discussion between the two of us transitioned into questions from members of the audience, with me calling on seven or eight people to stand and ask their questions, which were good ones. I enjoyed this part of the program very much, taking me back to my days when I moderated the community meeting of my college, Franconia College. After about an hour and twenty minutes, we concluded what had been a very enjoyable and stimulating program. The Explorer’s Club has posted it on their youtube page, so if of interest, you may view it via the link below.

I will conclude this post by making one more observation that I didn’t take the time to say last Thursday night. As my author Ruth Gruber (1911-2016)—about whom I’ve written often on this website—who I’ve observed with her spot reporting during and after WWII, and in such books as Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation, became, in my opinion, the most prominent chronicler of DPs (displaced persons) following the war, Ken McGoogan has over the course of his six books on the Arctic become our foremost chronicler of the explorers who sailed across the Atlantic seeking navigable waterways spanning northern seas that would take them all the way to “Cathay”—a Pierre Berton for the twenty-first century. I’m glad I’ve been in a position to carry on a dialogue with Ken these past many years.

And here is a gallery of photos from the whole night, from the reception through Ken’s talk, and then from our discussion. All photos taken by Kyle Gallup.

 

 

 

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Proud to Have Been a Judge for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Works-in-Progress Awards, Announced Today

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May 1, 2024—I received this message from administrators of the Lukas Prize at Columbia Journalism Graduate School regarding the ceremony scheduled for May 7 to honor the recipients of the awards:

“Out of an abundance of caution and with deep regret, we have decided to cancel this year’s Lukas Award Ceremony. With the volatile circumstances on campus, we feel it is in everyone’s best interest to delay this celebration until a later date when we can properly honor the winners, and thank you for your stellar work in judging these prizes.”
—
Since early fall last year, I’ve been serving as one of three judges for the Works-in-Progress Awards of the J. Anthony Lukas Prizes, sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Collectively, we read nearly 100 nonfiction book proposals and mission statements submitted for consideration, with each of us reading approximately one-third of the entries, then arriving at a shortlist of fifteen titles, which was announced last month.

Following more discussion among the three of us, we chose two works-in-progress—whose authors will each receive $25,000—which have been announced today. The works-in-progress awardees are Body Weather: Notes on Illness in the Anthropocene by Lorraine Boissoneault (Beacon Press), which was in my original tranche of proposals, and The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company by Alice Driver (One Signal, Atria).

Here are the citations we wrote for the books:

Body Weather is a visceral work of reported essays, masterfully braided with narrative research. Lorraine Boissoneault tells the story of living with chronic illness at a time when the planet is in a state of dire suffering. Climate change is bringing more hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, fires and landslides. How will a distressed planet affect stressed, ill or disabled bodies? In poetic and haunting prose, Boissoneault unearths intersections between her unique experience living with illness, while also illuminating universal questions lodged within all of us: How do we learn to live with discomfort? “How do we seek refuge from our own bodies, from weather that wraps itself around the world?” The Lukas Prize will enable the author to travel from her home base in Chicago to the Saguenay fjord in northern Quebec, to Death Valley in California and to Australia’s outback to complete reporting for the book. Body Weather is a singular work of literary reportage, a firsthand, intimate account drawing profound connections between the body and the planet.

The Life and Death of the American Worker is a rigorously researched work of narrative nonfiction that exemplifies the spirit of holding powerful institutions accountable, while humanizing the individuals who have been systematically dehumanized by immigration law and unregulated labor practices. Powerful forces have tried to silence the project and the people who are part of it. Yet with deep access and empathy, Alice Driver tells the multifaceted stories of families who have filed a class-action lawsuit to hold Tyson responsible for the working conditions that caused the deaths of their loved ones. She conducted interviews in the various native languages of subjects, and the Lukas Award will go toward some of those translations. Although many journalists have held temporary jobs within meatpacking plants to write about the industry, Driver (who is from Arkansas and grew up around Tyson employees) is solely focused on the longterm experiences of immigrant workers who have been at Tyson for decades. Driver has performed a remarkable feat of investigative and narrative reporting in telling the stories of these essential yet often overlooked and exploited workers.

It was a pleasure to serve with my fellow judges, Chris Jackson, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, One World Publishing, Penguin Random House, and Erika Hayasaki, Professor at the University of California, Irvine, in the Literary Journalism Program, and author of Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity and the Meaning of Family (Algonquin Books, 2022). I also want to thank publishing friend Peter Ginna, who had been a Lukas juror in previous years, who recommended me for this assignment. I’m also grateful to Program Manager of Professional Prizes at Columbia Journalism School Susie Marples for her deft and genial handling of many matters.

I want to add that a great majority of the projects submitted to us were worthy of support and consideration. In the course of our deliberations, on many occasions one of us said to the others, “I wish we could recognize and support all these books!” As an affirmation of that reality, the graphic with this post shows the fifteen books shortlisted for all Lukas Prizes this year, including the five works-in-progress.

The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards are given annually to aid in the completion of significant works of nonfiction on American topics of political or social concern. These awards assist in closing the gap between the time and money an author has and the time and money that finishing a book requires. J. Anthony Lukas (1933-1997) was the author of many books, including Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (Knopf, 1985), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Two other Lukas Prizes were announced today:

Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed by Dashka Slater (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, August 2023), the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000).

A finalist for this prize was also recognized: Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State by Kerry Howley (Knopf, May 2023)

and

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (Yale University Press, April 2023),
the Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000)

A finalist for this prize was also recognized: Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary Bass (Knopf, October 2023)

Congratulations to all the authors, as well as their editors and their literary agents! There will be a public ceremony on May 7 at the Columbia Journalism School, honoring all the authors and their work.

From the prize website: “Established in 1998, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project honors the best in American nonfiction writing. Co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and sponsored by the family of the late Mark Lynton, a historian and senior executive at the firm Hunter Douglas in the Netherlands, the Lukas Prize Project annually presents four awards in three categories.”

 

 

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