Correcting Politico and Drudge on “Dreams From My Father”

/1 Comment/in , , , , /by

Happy to be quoted at length in this TPM story by Brian Beutler about the erroneous reporting by Politico, which mistakenly reported today that Barack Obama had failed in the earliest editions of Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance to acknowledge that he created composite characters in the book. I know otherwise because I published the first paperback edition of the book, in 1996, as I have written on this blog. I contacted TPM this afternoon to correct the record on the needlessly murky situation created by the false report that originated with today’s Politico story by Dylan Byers, then amplified on the Drudge Report. You may click on the TPM story or read it below.

A former executive of the original paperback publisher of President Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father weighed in on Wednesday’s manufactured controversy over whether Obama represented fiction as fact by using composite characters in his autobiography.
“It is unfathomable to me how Dylan Byers of Politico could have overlooked the very plain disclaimer that the book carried from the very start,” Philip Turner said to TPM via email. Turner was an editorial executive with Kodansha America, which published the paperback version of Dreams from My Father in 1996.
“The reference to ‘compression’ appears on page ix of the Introduction of the book I published then, which I have on my desk as I write this message,” Turner says. “What’s more, the 1996 paperback was an exact reprint with no changes of the hardcover edition that had been published a year earlier….” (emphasis added).
The fact that Obama used composite characters in his memoir — and that he disclosed this in the book’s introduction — was widely known before it was mentioned again in an excerpt from David Maraniss’ upcoming Obama biography, published Wednesday in Vanity Fair. It even featured prominently in a 2007 story by Politico’s top political reporter Mike Allen.
But on Wednesday, Politico published a story that made no reference to the disclaimer, suggesting Obama had misled his own readers. That piece has since been appended with a correction, but still reads as an indictment of the President.
—

For the record, this is the entire comment I sent to TPM which they quote from above:

As the first paperback publisher of “Dreams From My Father,” in 1996, I feel obliged to confirm everything in the above TPM story by Benjy Sarlin. The reference to “compression” appears on page ix of the Introduction of the book I published then, which I have on my desk as I write this message. What’s more, the 1996 paperback was an exact reprint with no changes of the hardcover edition that had been published a year earlier. For the record, I was editor-in-chief of Kodansha America then, and we acquired the rights to publish the book from Random House, whose imprint Times Books had done the hardcover. In the early 2000s Kodansha’s license to publish the paperback expired and rights reverted to Random House. Their Three Rivers Press imprint republished it in paperback in 2004 with a new preface by the author, and yet his original Introduction, with the disclaimer about “compression” remained in the book then.

It is unfathomable to me how Dylan Byers of Politico could have overlooked the very plain disclaimer that the book carried from the very start. I wonder if commenter @wpilderback isn’t right in his explanation below: “This was an opportunity for them to remind people that Obama slept with a white woman, and nothing more.” Even if Byers just made a stupid and avoidable mistake, I’m sure Drudge was only too happy to perpetuate the error.       

For readers interested in further information on the paperback edition I published, I refer you to a personal essay I published last month on my blog The Great Gray Bridge, via this link:  https://philipsturner.com/2012/03/11/dreams-father-circa-1995-96/

 

Read more

Remembering Nick Webb, a Bright Light in British Publishing

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Via the Guardian comes a lovely memorial by longtime British publisher Ion Trewin bearing the sad news that the sparkling, smart Nick Webb–who as science fiction editor of Pan Books commissioned Douglas Adams to turn his BBC radio drama “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” into an international bestselling book–has died at age 63. According to Trewin’s obit, the first book of what would become the multi-volume science fiction series sold 250,000 copies within three months of publication in 1979 and a million copies by 1984, in the U.K. alone. Meantime, in the U.S., where I was then running Undercover Books, my bookstore in Cleveland, we stacked up and sold the well-priced little hardcover from Crown Publishers, reordering it repeatedly for months.

Trewin, who now works as literary director of the Man Booker Prize, clearly knew and liked Webb, the voluble son of an Irish pop and a Jewish mom. “He had a vivid sense of humour, often word-based, and delighted in mixed metaphors, once relating hearing someone say: ‘I smelled a rat and nipped it in the bud.’ Many years later the memory would still make him chortle. In conversation he used words and phrases that were inimitably his own. The acquisition of the first Hitchhiker novel was hardly considered a big deal, he recalled, or as he put it: ‘I was not proposing that we spend serious sponduliks.'” I met Nick Webb once, at a Frankfurt Book Fair when I was with Kodansha America, and enjoyed telling him I’d sold Adams’ novels in my bookstores. I liked him instantly.

Sadly, Douglas Adams also died, in 2001 at fifty-one. Happily, he and Webb left a remarkable legacy–one of the funniest, most brilliant pieces of science fiction published in the second half of the twentieth century.

Read more

Talking “The Cornbread Mafia” over Breakfast

/7 Comments/in , /by

This morning I met an author whose work I really admire. My breakfast mate was Jim Higdon, author of The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate’s Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History, which is officially released tomorrow. I’d never met Jim, though I had a role in insuring that his book had a chance to get published. When I read the draft manuscript I wasn’t in a position to publish it myself, but I really enjoyed this gonzo true-crime narrative, and so recommended it to longtime Carroll & Graf colleague and friend, Keith Wallman, now an editor at Lyons Press. It was precisely the sort of book he and I combined to edit and prepare for publication many times, with books like David Pietrusza’s Rothstein: The Life, Times, and and Murder of the Criminal Mastermind Who Fixed the 1919 World Series; Barbara Raymond’s The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption; Alan Bisbort’s “When You Read This, They Will Have Killed Me”: The Life, Redemption, and Execution of Caryl Chessman, Whose Execution Shook America; and Chuck Kinder’s Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Outlaw Honky-Tonk Life, to name only four of many dozen books we published together.

I was pleased when Keith did sign up Jim’s book, and awaited word of publication plans. Turns out, I was to be involved with the book again because Keith asked if I would be willing to receive a galley, and spread some good words about the book. A month ago, I posted my full blurb ** on this site, which reads in part,

Higdon has written a speeding bullet of a book that turns [pot] grower Johnny Boone into one of the most fascinating characters I’ve encountered in years. If Hunter S. Thompson were still with us I believe he’d be praising The Cornbread Mafia and telling his pals to read it.

Despite hearing from the author from time to time over the months since the book was put on a path to publication, Jim and I had never met, so today’s meeting took care of that. He’s a Kentuckian, where his book is set, but the book is not merely a product of his local knowledge. He’s a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism where he took Samuel Freedman’s demanding course on writing narrative nonfiction books. Cornbread Mafia is deeply reported with dozens of sources, featuring a protagonist who’s a fugitive from federal justice. Jim’s a big guy with a good sense of humor and a keen focus on his work. We talked about the book’s publicity campaign and story ideas that Jim may explore for newspapers and magazines in coming months, and I snapped a photo of him before he headed up to Columbia to see former colleagues. It was fun meeting Jim, a writer I’m proud to have encouraged in his work.

** Worth noting that after I posted my blurb on March 16, I got this comment from reader Kurt Mattingly: “This book is, without a doubt, the most rivetting account of central Kentucky history anyone has ever written. Being a native Marion Countian and growing up just a few miles from Raywick (between St. Mary and Lebanon), almost completely oblivious to the “counter-culture” that was inherent basically all around me, I cannot put this book down.”

Read more

The CIA, Patron of Abstract Expressionism

/0 Comments/in /by

Hiding in plain sight is confirmation in a 1995 story from Britain’s Independent newspaper that after WW II and continuing on throughout the ’50s the CIA promoted Abstract Expressionism, ostensibly to show America’s openness to cultural variety, as compared with the rigid Constructivism in Soviet arts. I had somehow missed the story by reporter Frances Stonor Saunders, which, thanks to fellow Tweeps @nwoah and @roc_cayard, resurfaced this evening on Twitter. Among many fascinating revelations it reports that

In 1958 the touring exhibition “The New American Painting”, including works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell, [Rothko] and others, was on show in Paris. The Tate Gallery was keen to have it next, but could not afford to bring it over. Late in the day, an American millionaire and art lover, Julius Fleischmann, stepped in with the cash and the show was brought to London. The money that Fleischmann provided, however, was not his but the CIA’s. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire’s charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds. So, unknown to the Tate, the public or the artists, the exhibition was transferred to London at American taxpayers’ expense to serve subtle Cold War propaganda purposes. A former CIA man, Tom Braden, described how such conduits as the Farfield Foundation were set up. “We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, ‘We want to set up a foundation.’ We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, ‘Of course I’ll do it,’ and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device.” Julius Fleischmann was well placed for such a role. He sat on the board of the International Programme of the Museum of Modern Art in New York–as did several powerful figures close to the CIA.

Eisenhower-era support of boundary-busting art seems ironic now, but the article also points out the truth that the CIA, notwithstanding its Cold Warrior status, it

sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America’s anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.

In this regard, I recall that the first publishing house I worked for in New York was Walker & Company, whose founder Samuel Walker was long rumored to have been a member of OSS during the war, the CIA’s forerunner, and involved with Radio Free Europe during the Cold War. I remember seeing books in the Walker company library, titles published in the ’50s and ’60s, that were labeled as printed in Poland, suggesting to me that the company still had some level of involvement with America’s outreach to Eastern Europe during the Cold War. This may even explain how Walker happened to be the first American publisher of John Le Carre bringing out Call for the Dead in 1961 and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold in 1963, long before he was well known.

Read more

#FridayReads, March 30–Caro on LBJ

/0 Comments/in , /by

#FridayReads The New Yorker‘s excerpt from Robert Caro’s fourth volume in his long-running LBJ bio. Powerful narrative of the day JFK was killed and LBJ took office, and how this picture came to be taken by WH photographer Cecil Stoughton. As readers of this blog may recall, I’ve had opportunities to converse with Caro and I’m a huge admirer of his 1974 book The Power Broker. It will be a treat to read his latest book when Knopf publishes it in May. I am also finishing James Kunen’s remarkable Diary of a Company Man, which I posted on for my last #FridayReads. Think Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for a Common Man,” only it’s not set to music, it’s in prose.

Read more

Comics and New York City–A Beautiful Friendship

/1 Comment/in , , /by
Last weekend I was privileged to attend a great event celebrating the comic arts, graphic novels, and New York City for PW Comics World, the online comics home of Publishers Weekly. The event was called Comic NY-A Symposium and my article, “Comics, New York City And History at Columbia’s Low Library,” has now been published at the PW website. If you love the comic arts and graphic novels, enjoyed watching Paul Giamatti play Harvey Pekar in “American Splendor,” or ever chuckled over MAD magazine, I invite you to read my piece at the PW site or here on my blog. FYI–the rendition below is illustrated with photos of mine that do not appear on the PW site, which has other, excellent pictures.
—
Comics, New York City And History At Columbia’s Low Library
by Philip Turner, Mar 29, 2012


Are the creators of comics and graphic works storyteller-artists inspired by the drive to imagine the urban landscape? Or are they journalists, motivated by an impulse to document the cities where they live? As considered by a bevy of comic talent at Columbia University, the answer is they are both—imaginative artists and chroniclers reimagining and reflecting their worlds—and more. The scene for these dynamic discussions was Columbia University’s Low Library where “Comic New York-A Symposium” was held March 24-25. With thirty panelists participating in six panels, plus a keynote discussion with acclaimed X-men writer and collector Chris Claremont, more than 250 comics fans were treated to in-depth conversations about how the comic arts have been influenced by New York City and how the metropolis has absorbed the influence of the comics.  Claremont was honored for donating his archive to Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The opening panel, “New York, Real and Imagined,” began with Kent Worcester, co-editor of A Comic Studies Reader, sharing five comics images that showcased New York’s tremendous verticality; in “Gasoline Alley,” where Skeezix and Walt ride on a magic carpet high above the city, and in Superman, when the Man of Steel dangles a villain over a yawning chasm between skyscrapers. Along with the verticality the city has lent to comics, Worcester also asked his audience to consider Manhattan’s street grid, a visual analog to the panel format of comic books. Molly Crapabble, illustrator, cartoonist, denizen of New York’s downtown art scene, conceded she’s an outsider to the comics world and said that she makes frequent reference to Thomas Nast and Heironymous Bosch for the crowded scenes of ribaldry she draws. Asked about New York’s underground life, she observed that the subway is “the hair shirt” of the city, contrasted with “the sparkly, silver Babylon” above ground. John Romita, Sr., who drew Spider Man with Stan Lee, said he made New York a veritable “co-star” with the web-spinner, while his son, John Jr., aka JRJR, who drew Daredevil, spoke of the dark and “moody” look he deliberately brought to the series. TV writer and autobiographical comics artist Ariel Schrag told an improbably hilarious story about a brawl at a gay prom she attended at Columbia, events she chronicles in her coming-of-age graphic memoirs. / / read more with many pictures . . .

Read more