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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Sold: “Heroes are Human: Lessons in Resilience, Courage, and Wisdom from the COVID Front Lines” by Bob Delaney with Dave Scheiber

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I’m delighted to announce the upcoming publication of Heroes are Human: Lessons in Resilience, Courage, and Wisdom from the COVID Front Lines by Bob Delaney with award-winning journalist Dave Scheiber, which will be the first book published in the US to tell the stories of healthcare workers struggling through the pandemic, with guidance on how they can heal from the herculean challenges they’re facing. It’s scheduled to come out in October 2022 from City Point Press, a distribution client of Simon & Schuster. Our deal for it was announced on Publishersmarketplace this morning.

Delaney’s first book was the 2008 USA Today bestseller Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob, also co-authored with Dave Scheiber, for which I was his editor and publisher at Union Square Press. During a dangerous undercover assignment while a New Jersey State Trooper in his mid-twenties, Bob fell victim to post-traumatic stress (PTS). He recovered with the aid of peer-to-peer therapy—a key ingredient of the new book—and afterward enjoyed a 25-year career as a referee in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Delaney and Scheiber are also co-authors of Surviving the Shadows: A Journey of Hope into Post Traumatic Stress (Sourcebooks 2011). Over the years he’s established himself as a nationally respected leader in dealing with PTS and recovery from trauma. He addresses members of the US armed forces and foreign military, law enforcement, firefighters, first responders, and since COVID began, healthcare workers.

Delaney served the NBA not only as a referee—making it to the top of the field as an “NBA Finals” level official—but also as a supervisor of referees and a spokesperson for the league’s philanthropy NBA Cares. He is known to sports and mainstream media all over the country. The authors will be working with the same high-profile publicity firm that made Covert a national bestseller, which has experience with the NBA and the USA Dream Team squads that won Olympic gold medals.

Heroes are Human is made up of oral history-style testimonials from nurses, doctors, techs, and family members relating their experiences—caring for patients, talking with the very sick, Face-timing with the loved ones of the ill, and trying to save lives the past two years—in Delaney’s empathetic voice, detailing how they can alleviate anxiety and reduce their stress, with examples of peer-to-peer dialogue. The combination of gripping first-hand accounts from doctors, nurses, and families in the COVID trenches joined with Bob’s message of healing and acceptance will be a balm to our fellow Americans from whom so much is being asked.

I’ve long admired and respected Bob’s salt of the earth wisdom and am grateful that we’re working together again to bring his healing message to a wide readership.

Bob Delaney accepting the 2014 Basketball Hall of Fame Human Spirit award.
(Copyright NBAE via Getty / Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler)

 

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Publishing November 15, “Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire From Guadalcanal To Vietnam”

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As mentioned on this blog, I’m a lifelong fan of reading biographies, and it’s a delight to work on so many good ones, like Ray E. Boomhower’s new portrait of the life and career of Richard Tregaskis, one of the most accomplished combat correspondents of the twentieth century. Here’s how the catalog copy for University of New Mexico Press’s High Road imprint describes the book:

In the late summer of 1942, more than ten thousand members of the First Marine Division held a tenuous toehold on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal. As American marines battled Japanese forces for control of the island, they were joined by war correspondent Richard Tregaskis…one of only two civilian reporters to land and stay with the marines, and in his notebook he captured the daily and nightly terrors faced by American forces in one of World War II’s most legendary battles–and it served as the premise for his bestselling book, Guadalcanal Diary.

One of the most distinguished combat reporters to cover World War II, Tregaskis later reported on Cold War conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. In 1964 the Overseas Press Club recognized his first-person reporting under hazardous circumstances by awarding him its George Polk Award for his book Vietnam Diary. Boomhower’s riveting book is the first to tell Tregaskis’s gripping life story, concentrating on his intrepid reporting experiences during World War II and his fascination with war and its effect on the men who fought it.

 

Richard B. Frank, author of Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle, says of the new biography:

“Alongside Ernie Pyle, Tregaskis was perhaps the most outstanding American war correspondent of WWII. [He’s] best know for…Guadalcanal Diary, but that book covered only one small chapter of his reporting from the front lines. Ray Boohmoer’s excellent new biography finally does justice to Tregaskis in this deeply researched, thoughtful portrait of the man and his times.”

 

The book’s official pub date will be November 15, and I’m getting an early start on congratulating the author, for whom I’ve already sold a second biography of an important journalist to UNMP, The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World. Congrats, Ray!

 

 

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Recommending “The Most Precious Gift: Memories of the Holocaust, a Legacy of Lisette Lamon”

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Readers of this blog may recall that I worked with photojournalist Ruth Gruber, editing her work and helping her publish six of her eighteen books during her career as a trailblazing woman photojournalist and chronicler of displaced persons (DPs) after the Holocaust. Books we worked on together include Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1000 WWII Refugees and How They Came to America (Carroll & Graf Publishes, 2000) and Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (Union Square Press, 2008).

In the same vein, in 1999 while Executive Editor at Crown Publishing, I acquired rights to IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black. And in the early 1990s, I edited Solly Ganor’s affecting wartime memoir, Light One Candle: A Survivor’s Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem, which recounted his survival in the Kaunas (Kovno) ghetto and as a teenaged forced to labor underground in a dangerous mine. Let it suffice to say that Holocaust-themed titles are very much a part of my publishing persona.

That is why I was excited recently when we had the opportunity to edit a remarkable first-person primary source narrative of the Holocaust titled The Most Precious Gift: Memories of the Holocaust, A Legacy of Lisette Lamon.

Lisette Lamon was nineteen and engaged to Benno, the young man she loved, when with her parents she fled from Amsterdam to New York City prior to the Nazi invasion of Holland. Unable to bear the separation from her fiancé, she returned to Amsterdam so they could marry. Soon after their wedding, the Nazi occupiers of the Netherlands came to their home, to arrest a young man who had been rooming with them. In his absence, Benno was arrested instead and deported to the Mathausen concentration camp in Austria, where he would die  under Nazi captivity. Lisette became a motivated member of the Dutch Resistance, a courier for the movement. However, her work was discovered by the occupiers. She was arrested and sent to the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, then to Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

These shattering developments are established in the first few chapters of this emotive book, followed by a clear-eyed report on daily life in the camps, chronicled in thirty-five vignette-length chapters. In one chapter, “Euphemisms,” Lamon writes about the vocabulary inmates coined to express what they endured—a “Slipper Parade: the shuffling of inmates in the morning on the way to the washroom”; “Transport Noir: a trip to a death camp”; and “Vitamin R: a right connection that might help an inmate gain an extra ration of food.”  She writes about achingly beautiful children and stalwart adults who struggled to survive amid deprivation, overwork, malnourishment, and cruel treatment; the decline of the German fighting machine; and the survivors’ hope that if they could only stay alive long enough, they might be liberated by the Allies.

As Allied armies closed in on Bergen-Belsen, Lisette was placed with hundreds of other prisoners on a train car that was driven to the middle of a high bridge. The Germans intended to blow up the span, sending the inmates crashing into the river below and preempting the Allies’ push across the vital link into Nazi-held territory. But liberation came an hour before the explosives could detonate. When an American soldier asked the English-speaking Lisette if she would serve as an interpreter, she seized the opportunity to ask if a note could be sent to her parents in New York City informing them that their daughter was still alive. The officer gasped in astonishment when he looked at the address she gave him and saw it was the same Upper West Side apartment building where his own parents lived in Manhattan!

Lisette Lamon (1920-1982) remarried in the United States, and had a family with her new husband. She became a psychologist who pioneered in providing trauma counseling to survivors of the Holocaust, at a time when the category of survivors of the Holocaust was still a relatively new phenomenon, around the time that journalist Helen Epstein published her seminal book, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (G.P. Putnam, 1979). The manuscript of The Most Precious Gift came to me from David Mendels, the adult son of the author. David and I were friends and classmates at Franconia College in the 1970s, when I often heard from him about his remarkable mother and her Holocaust stories. After we edited the manuscript in consultation with David, the book was recently published in a handsome edition (French Hill Publications, hardcover with jacket, book design by Neuwirth & Associates, 195 pages, 11 photos, $19.45) and we’re gratified to help him get the word out about his mother’s written legacy. We consider the title an ideal expression of what makes this book so special—it is indeed a most precious gift, an ideal Mother’s Day present, for instance. It is available as an ebook, as well as the handsomely printed and bound hardcover, which you may order it via this link.

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Sold: “The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World” by Ray E. Boomhower

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One of the pleasures of having been an active literary agent for several years now is the satisfaction I get from selling a subsequent book by an author whose earlier book that I sold is already on the way to being published. This is the case with Ray E. Boomhower, whose biography of combat reporter, Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire From Guadalcanal to Vietnam will be published this November under the High Road Books imprint of the University of New Mexico Press. Yesterday we announced that Boomhower’s next book, The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World, has also been acquired by University of New Mexico Press. The book will detail how Browne—a most unlikely war correspondent who switched from life as a chemist to a journalist, and became the Associated Press’s bureau chief in Saigon at age 32—was the only Western reporter on June 11, 1963, to capture, with a cheap Japanese Petri brand camera, the image of Thich Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who immolated himself to protest the Catholic-dominated administration of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem.

Boomhower, who began publishing books long before we began working together (in fact, The Ultimate Protest will be his nineteenth title), has made a speciality of tracking the work of journalists at war, with earlier books on Ernie Pyle and Robert Sherrod, and the forthcoming book on Tregaskis, best known for publishing Guadalcanal Diary, the 1943 bestseller that was the first book in the US to emerge from the Pacific theater.

Chronicling the impact of the gruesome photo inside the Kennedy administration, from the draft manuscript:

“Jesus Christ!”

The sharp expletive uttered by President John F. Kennedy interrupted the telephone conversation he had begun early on the morning of Tuesday, June 11, 1963. The president was talking with his brother, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States, who had called to discuss what to do if Alabama governor George Wallace made good on his promise to deny the entry of two African American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, into the University of Alabama.

The impetus for the president’s exclamation had not been Wallace’s intransigence, but a photograph he saw splashed on the front pages of newspapers delivered to him that morning. Since May 8, 1963, when a company of Civil Guards had killed Vietnamese civilians protesting a new governmental decree outlawing the flying of the Buddhist flag on Buddah’s birthday in Hue, South Vietnam had been wracked by demonstrations. The awful image that had so startled the president showed a man—a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk named Thich Quảng Đức—engulfed in flames while calmly, it seemed, sitting in the lotus posture on a street in Saigon, South Vietnam.

Browne, who had been tipped off about the demonstration the evening before, was the only Western reporter on the scene to photograph the horrific event. Although the monk, as he burned, uttered no sound nor changed his position, Browne could see that his “features were contorted with agony” and could hear moans from the crowd that had gathered, as well as the ragged chanting from the approximately 300 yellow-robed monks and gray-robed Buddhist nuns who had joined the protest.

“Numb with shock I shot roll after roll of [35mm] film, focusing and adjusting exposures mechanically and unconsciously,” Browne recalled. “Trying hard not to perceive what I was witnessing I found myself thinking: ‘The sun is bright and the subject is self-illuminated, so f16 at 125th of a second should be right.’ But I couldn’t close out the smell.” The AP correspondent was almost overwhelmed by the smells of joss sticks—incense burned for religious rituals—mixed with burning gasoline and diesel fuel and the odor of burning flesh.

 

 

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Two Articles with Insight into the Interior Lives of Men

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I want to recommend a couple articles to you, Dear Reader.

The first was in the Washington Post by reporter Samantha Schmidt, regarding men who’ve found that amid the lingering pandemic, without sports and bars, they’ve lost access to their friendships, and are struggling for companionship. (Linked to here.)

Second, in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine there was a fascinating profile of a psychology researcher about happiness I’d not known of, Philip Brickman, who directed a famous study about auto accident victims and lottery winners which compared their long term later life experiences. The brilliant Brickman later died by suicide. The NY Times writer, Jennifer Senior, does a great job of talking with Brickman’s old colleagues and family members, to make a rich profile of a brilliant and complex person. Note: it’s long. (Linked to here.)

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A Raucous Salute to Doctors, Nurses, Frontline Workers

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Over the past seven weeks, most nights of the lockdown imposed during the pandemic, when 7pm rolls around—the time when New Yorkers have been saluting essential workers—I’ve been in my apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan, where I ring a small bell I have, or bang a letter opener on my metal travel mug. However, tonight I had gone out for a walk around 6:40, and stayed outside to experience tonight’s clamor at the top of the hour from ground level. It’s an enjoyable release when everyone gets to share their appreciation of people who can’t stay locked in, who go to work, save lives, drive public transit, and make sure we can buy food. When this is over, there won’t be much to miss about it, but I’ll be happy to remember the raucous celebrations.

 

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RIP Ambassador Joseph Wilson—Proud Progressive Patriot and Friend to Many

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One of my most treasured authors whom I cherished working with across three decades as an in-house acquiring editor for publishing houses was Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who died today in Santa Fe, NM, age 69. When Joe was on book tour for his 2004 bestseller THE POLITICS OF TRUTH–A Diplomat’s Memoir: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (Carroll & Graf Publishers), he really enjoyed giving public talks, especially to students and faculty on college campuses. He would tell stories from his career as a 25-year US Foreign Service officer, with pinpoint memories of the countries he worked in, including in Niger and Iraq, which had so much topical relevance then, after America’s invasion of  Iraq was based in part on the false claim that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in the landlocked African country. Joe extolled having a career in foreign service, and all but recruited  people to go take the State Dept’s Foreign Service exam. Of course, he also discussed what from his perspective had happened in the run-up to the tragic invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Notwithstanding the war we were entangled in, he espoused an uplifting message, a proud progressive patriotism that was a counterweight to the jingoism of his critics. Audiences found his talks very inspiring.

On MSNBC this afternoon, at the end of “Deadline White House,” host Nicole Wallace lowered her voice in respect, and offered a tribute to Joe. Relevantly, you’ll recall she had worked in the George W Bush White House. She began a little sheepishly, a nod I think to the fact that administration colleagues of hers—Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby—had been in on the targeting of Joe and his wife Valerie Plame*. Nonetheless, through some surprising circumstances she didn’t specify, she said that she and Joe had become friends at some point. (She didn’t say exactly when.) Turns out, that like me over this past summer, Wallace told her audience that she’d heard from Joe in recent months, with word of diagnosis of a terminal illness he’d received.

In the years since 2004 Joe and I would occasionally be in touch via email, and more than once after I became an independent provider of editorial services, he referred authors to me, including a retired ambassador like himself. From time to time we got together when Joe visited NYC**, but this past June Joe’s outreach came as a surprising message on the answering machine of my landline phone. His voice sounded a bit weak, and I feared he might be unwell. I called him back and he took little time to tell me he was very ill, with not a lot of time left to live. He told me he was surrounded by family and was at peace. He told me how proud he remained of the book we had worked on together, and said that whenever people praised it, he thought of me with gratitude. We texted each other periodically over the summer, and he wrote me after the Robert Mueller hearings. Judging by Wallace’s moving tribute, when she read from one of his messages to her, which was also about the Mueller hearing, it seems he let many friends know that he was ill, and reached out across his broad network of friends, sometimes opining on issues critical to our democracy.

It is especially poignant that Joe died today, when the emergence of another whistleblower is having a seismic impact in the politics of the day. A fateful NY Times op-ed by Joe, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” blew the lid off the Bush administration’s falsification of intelligence before the Iraq War. It is galling to me that Dick Cheney is still alive, and Joe Wilson is dead, a cosmic injustice of the first order. Below is text of a blog post I published in 2013, when MSNBC broadcast a special program called “Hubris,” based on the book of the same name about the Iraq War by David Corn and Michael Isikoff. I took that occasion to write a post about working with Joe, and am happy to also share it below.

—–

I vividly recall how the Bush administration pushed the country, and as much of the world as it could hector along with them, into invading Iraq. 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 an infamous 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, and earlier, as a junior foreign service officer in Niger. 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 fateful trip to Niger, where he was sent by the CIA to investigate the claim that Iraq had sought uranium 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 working diligently on the manuscript.

Fortunately, when Joe retired from the State Department, a few years before the Iraq war fever, he had sat for a series of lengthy interviews with an interlocutor from State—a good custom at the government 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. From the width of the spine in the attached shot of the book cover (designed by longtime Carroll & Graf colleague Linda Kosarin), you can tell it was a substantial volume, more than 500 pages, the heft aided by that oral history. 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 we edited this draft on a crash schedule, and Joe quickly made key revisions to it, based on fast-moving events in the CIA leak controversy. Throughout, we 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, 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 settings. 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 the TODAY Show. His most interesting TV appearance was on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” when Keith 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 held up the sheaf of talking points and tossed the papers around his set, as mockery of the Bush administration. The book became a bestseller on the NY Times, Washington Post, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. 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 actually 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. Joe and Valerie played a significant role in the events of our times, 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.

*
Valerie Plame is currently a candidate in the Democratic primary campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives from New Mexico for the 2020 election and I have contributed to her effort.

**
In 2010, when Joe Wilson appeared at the NY Times Center for a panel discussion pegged to the 40th anniversary of the newspaper’s op-ed section, he invited me to come as his guest, and arranged so that I could share the green room with him, and the other panelists, Nora Ephron, Anna Deavere Smith, Roy Blount Jr., and Garrison Keillor. It was quite a heady night. Joe’s contribution to the Times op-ed page had come on July 4th weekend in 2003, with “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” Here’s a NY Times video of Joe talking about how he came to write the op-ed.

 

 

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