Disgrace is No Biggie, to Glenn Beck

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TPM’s Casey Michel has an excellent report today on the declining reputation of right-wing author David Barton, at least in the estimation of serious historians, even ones that are observant Christians. As reported last week by Publishers Weekly, Barton’s latest book, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson, with a Foreword by Glenn Beck, has been discredited for “factual inaccuracies and historical misrepresentations,” with Christian publisher Thomas Nelson pulling 17,000 copies from distribution and canceling publication. According to an August 10 Publishers Weekly story by Lynn Garrett, “Nelson confirmed it has severed its publishing relationship with Barton and reverted the rights to The Jefferson Lies to him. ‘Thomas Nelson does not expect to publish his works in the future.’”

Unfortunately, Michel, who wonders near the end of the TPM story if “Thomas Nelson’s decision will merely gird Barton’s supporters, rather than hurt his reputation,” already needs to update the article. Publishers Weekly reports today that Barton has bought all the recalled copies from Thomas Nelson and is “in negotiations to publish a new edition of the book with Mercury Ink, Glenn Beck’s publishing arm in partnership with Simon & Schuster.” According to Publishers Weekly, Barton added, “the new edition ‘will not include any substantive changes.'”

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Gone Fishin’

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I am away from my desk this week and next on a combined train and road trip with my family. I will be posting entries from time to time. Until later then, I hope you’re having a nice summer, and look for me later in this space.

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#FridayReads, July 27–“Two Lives” by Vikram Seth

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#FridayReads, July 27–Two Lives, Vikram Seth’s fascinating family chronicle of the singular marriage between his Indian uncle, Shanti–an improbable, one-armed dentist–and his German-Jewish aunt, Henny Caro, a mixed couple who managed to build a life together despite the difficulties imposed by circumstance and society, amid WWII and the Holocaust. Seth begins the narrative near the end of their lives, in the 1980s, and then works his way forward and back in time, employing interviews he conducted with Shanti and documentary materials he discovers (letters, photos, school papers, etc.). This is a remarkable book, published in 2005.

N.B.: I first read and enjoyed Vikram Seth’s work years ago, when I read and at Undercover Books sold his debut, a brilliant travelogue about China and Tibet, From Heaven Lake. He went on to write a novel in verse, The Golden Gate, inspired he explains in Two Lives, by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. He is an inventive writer, who seems to never repeat himself.

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The Latest on World Book Night 2013

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Happy to see news reported in Shelf Awareness, that World Book Night, which I had recently written about in this post when I bumped into WBN director Carl Lennertz (pictured below), is proceeding with plans for Spring 2013, to give away tens of thousands of copies of books worldwide in a unique extravaganza of social reading, as was done by the organization and thousands of volunteers on April 23, 2012. I don’t see an exact date yet for the 2013 giveaway, but will report it on this blog as soon as I get that info. Update: It will be April 23, 2013, same as the one this past year.

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Surprise in the City, Learning about World Book Night

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I had a meeting yesterday morning to present the excellent Web platform of my client Speakerfile, which I often tell people is like eHarmony for the conference industry, matching up event planners with authors who do public speaking. My meeting was with Gail Kump, Director of Membership Marketing for the Association of American Publishers (AAP). It was a fitting meeting, since it’d been Gail who’d referred Peter Evans, Speakerfile CEO, to me during the Digital Book World conference last winter. It is thanks to her that I’m working with them now. I’ve known Gail for a few years and we had a good talk, with each of us seeing ahead to many ways that the AAP and Speakerfile can work together. After sharing our ideas and swapping names of new contacts, I thanked Gail for her time and our meeting ended. Rather than immediately leaving the cool and pleasant AAP offices, I decided I’d sit on the comfortable couch in their lobby and do some work on my IPad and make a few phone calls before heading out to my next Manhattan meeting.

After a productive half-hour, I packed up my kit and prepared to leave. But first, peering back into the conference room where Gail and I had met, I noticed a familiar figure seated at a table. It looked like longtime book biz friend Carl Lennertz of World Book Night. Walking back that way, sure enough, it was him. Voicing a surprised “hello” greeting, I greeted Carl and we shared a few minutes of conversation. I learned that he and a colleague there with him, Laura, were assembling results of the enormous book giveaway they’d engineered this past April, when 23,000,000 copies of thirty different books were handed out gratis in North America, Ireland, and Britain. The non-profit program’s motto is “Spreading the love of reading, person to person.” The titles included Just Kids by Patti Smith, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. Carl and Laura showed me the Manhattan phone directory-sized bound volume that covers the myriad international locations where volunteers gave away books, with maps, charts, graphs, and narrative summaries of volunteer reports. Carl mentioned it will be made available as an ebook. I told them I’ll be eager to learn more about World Book Night’s plans for 2013.

It made for a pleasant morning, seeing Gail and Carl, and meeting Laura. I hope to see them again soon!

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Jonathan Krohn’s Political Evolution & a Couple Welcome Updates

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Day Later Update: Jonathan Krohn went on Last Word w/Lawrence O’Donnell Monday night and did a great job explaining the evolution of his political views over the past few years. He’s a very mature 17-year old and I can’t help being a fan of his, and admiring his transformation. You can watch it via this link.
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Late Afternoon Update: After I tweeted out my blog post about Jonathan Krohn I heard from him, and the Twitter exchange we shared is below. I must say I admire his candor and his broad-mindedness in continuing to quest for a political philosophy that suits him. For proper sequence, the tweets should be read from top to bottom.


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Onetime young favorite of the conservative movement, Jonathan Krohn, now 17, has largely disowned the doctrinaire ideological positions he seemed to favor at age 13, when he gave a widely covered speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Politico‘s Patrick Gavin has the story on Krohn’s transformation into a gay marriage-favoring, healthcare-supporer who would probably vote to re-elect President Obama voter, if he were of age in November.  From Gavin’s article, partly in Krohn’s own words,

“’I think it was naive,’ Krohn now says of the speech. ‘It’s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.… I live in Georgia. We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.… The speech was something that a 13-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions. You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were 12 or 13. It’s impossible. You haven’t done enough. . . .  One of the first things that changed was that I stopped being a social conservative,’ said Krohn. ‘It just didn’t seem right to me anymore. From there, it branched into other issues, everything from health care to economic issues.… I think I’ve changed a lot, and it’s not because I’ve become a liberal from being a conservative—it’s just that I thought about it more. The issues are so complex, you can’t just go with some ideological mantra for each substantive issue. . . . I’ve been trying to tell people,’ he added, ‘but it’s a lot harder to get stuff out there when your mind changes on things because a lot of people who supported you when you’re on one side of the issue aren’t really going to help you get your changing ideas out there when people still think I’m that conservative kid. . . . People don’t realize I was 14 when I wrote that book.'”

Soon after the speech and all the coverage Krohn garnered, publisher Roger Cooper of Vanguard Press signed him up for a book. Roger, for whom I’ve edited manuscripts, asked if I would be interested in working with Krohn and editing his book. I had seen the speech, which I watched it with my own son Ewan, who’s a year younger than Krohn. Ewan found his beliefs and his celebrity, weird and unappealing. Though committed to the idea that every author has a right to tell his story, I declined to make a bid for the editorial assignment, largely because I didn’t want to work on political material I found inimical to my own or Ewan’s views; nor did I anticipate I could have a vigorous exchange of ideas with the smug boy I’d seen on C-Span. He seemed so convinced of his ideological positions, I just didn’t relish the thought of working with someone like him. The weird thing for Krohn now is that he’s got this unenviable Youtube and Internet history that he can’t escape, and which he’s already tired of dealing with, and being forced to explain to people. He’ll soon be going to NYU where he plans to study philosophy and filmmaking. The last word in the story is from Krohn:

“‘People don’t realize I was 14 when I wrote that book. I’m 17 now. In terms of my life, three years is a long time in a 17-year-old’s life. . . .  Come on, I was thirteen,’ he said. “I was thirteen.’”
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