While devoting much time and attention to this blog of late, I am also working as a manuscript editor so it was gratifying to find yesterday that on my LinkedIn profile one of my editorial clients left this blushingly good recommendation of the editorial services I provided him:
My now sadly gone parents–Earl Turner beaming and his pretty wife Sylvia Shiff Turner, with a gardenia in her hair. They were on a trip in June 1948 from Cleveland, to Niagara Falls and Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada, and to Detroit. The Turners liked Canada even then. Happy Mothers Day!
As some of my book biz friends know, in the 90s I had a good long tenure as an editorial executive with Kodansha America, the NY office of the largest Japanese publisher. Although we published some Asian-oriented titles, it was a mostly U.S. list with such books as the national bestseller al bestseller Having Our Say, by the centenarian Delaney sisters, and A Diary of the Century:Tales From American’s Great Diarist by Edward Robb Ellis, which sold well and got lots of coverage, including a rare hat trick when the author appeared on all three network morning shows the week of publication. I just blogged about Eddie a few weeks ago, on the anniversary of what would have been his 101st birthday.
During my five years with Kodansha, I also started a trade paperback series that in some ways anticipated the fine list published nowadays by the New York Review of Books Classics imprint. Kodansha Globe combined titles in cross-cultural studies, anthropology, natural history, adventure, narrative travel and belle lettres. I developed the program with my astute and affable Japanese boss Minato Asakawa, with valuable contributions from talented editorial colleagues Paul DeAngelis–who introduced me to the work of Owen Lattimore, whose 1950 anti-McCarthyite broadside Ordeal by Slander I would republish in 2003–and Deborah Baker, about whom I’ll say more below. By the time I left Kodansha in 1997 we had published more than ninety Globe titles, including the first paperback edition of Barack Obama’s debut book Dreams From My Father
The Globe list included revivals of notable books that had fallen out of print: Man Meets Dog, on the origins of the human-canine bond, by Konrad Lorenz, Alone, a harrowing account of survival near the South Pole, by Admiral Richard Byrd, Blackberry Winter, the youthful memoir of Margaret Mead, and All Aboard with E.M. Frimbo, a classic of train culture by New Yorker stalwarts Rogers E.M. Whitaker and Tony Hiss; originals like Sarajevo, Exodus of a City, a biography of the besieged city by Bosnian playwright Dzevad Karahasan, which the Voice Literary Supplement made a year-end best book during the Balkan Wars; and reprints of current hardcovers from major houses like Peter Canby’s The Heart of the Sky, on the resilience of Mayan culture in the Americas and Alex Shoumatoff’s The Mountain of Names, chronicling the history of human kinship and genealogy, which before dying last year Christopher Hitchens made the springboard for one his last columns. We also developed a strong list in books on Central Asia, including four books by the master chronicler of the region, Peter Hopkirk, whose The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia was the top-selling Globe title.
// more w/illustrations . . .
Last month, on January 14, I published a blog essay Three Years Ago Today, on my layoff from a publishing house job in 2009. It elicited widespread reaction, measured in sheer numbers of responses on Facebook and Twitter; on this blog, altogether totaling more than 200; in the engaged remarks from many friends and colleagues; and in the new contacts and readers it’s attracted to this website. The essay’s also attracted interest from a website that my friend and author Michael Goldfarb, former NPR correspondent, had referred me to, Over and 50 and Out of Work: Stories of the Great Recession. This a remarkable site and I’m very proud they’ve now published it on their site, among the company of extraordinary people featured on their web pages. You may see it here, and while you’re there, view some of the videos they’ve posted, with personal testimony from individuals like myself. Additionally, a magazine called NY______, or NY Underscore, is running a condensed version of the essay in their upcoming ‘Jobs’ issue. Clearly, the piece has struck a chord with many readers, and at least two web and magazine editors.
I should add that the essay also elicited one remark that wasn’t so kind, which I learned about from a friend. A person I shall not name, though I will say it was someone with a fulltime job, said to this friend, “He should stop talking about getting fired.” This was evidently meant as free advice, as if I should refrain from damaging my chances of regaining employment by being too open about my experience. I felt like a person with a serious illness might feel, who’s told not to speak of their malady in public, to spare those not afflicted the discomfort of learning about it. At first, I was stung by this, as if I’d been told to “Shut up,” and then I realized this person’s reading was so reductionist and witless that they didn’t even register the difference between getting “fired” and being laid off–of being one employee in a group of dozens in a corporation who’re all relieved of their jobs on the same day. After a few days, I laughed about it, and am now just bemused. It reminded me of Mitt Romney’s plea, made on January 11, just a few days before I published the essay, that income inequality and unfair tax burdens on the middle class may be discussed, but only “in quiet rooms.” Clearly, I haven’t entered any quiet rooms, I’m not “shutting up,” and the essay is proving to have an emerging afterlife; that is very gratifying indeed.
On January 14, 2009, I was laid off as the editorial director of Sterling Publishing’s Union Square Press, an imprint of narrative nonfiction books I had been recruited to run two years earlier. I recall the anxiety I felt upon being summoned to the office of the HR director; the sick-making sensation that shot through my gut upon receiving the news; that my email was shut off by the time I returned to my office; and the way I was instructed to leave Sterling’s office for the final time, informed that whatever personal effects I couldn’t grab then would be shipped to my home. If you’ve never had this happen to you, I must say it is not something you can prepare yourself for. Even though I was not surprised to get laid off in the middle of the worst financial crisis in eighty years, it nonetheless registered as a deep shock. Later that dark week, I sent an email to all my contacts, headed “Moving on From Sterling,” for that’s what I had already begun to do. In the weeks that followed, I incorporated a business in the state of New York, Philip Turner Book Productions LLC, and began cultivating clients for what would be my new editorial services business. // more. . .
In June 2006 I was sitting in a parked car listening to Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air” while my wife and son were in a store finishing up some shopping. I didn’t mind the wait because I was transfixed by the interview and the voice of her compassionate guest. Dr. Paul Epstein was speaking about what for me were the hitherto unknown effects of climate change on public health. He described the advent of startling conditions such as malaria occurring at high elevations in Africa where mosquitoes were previously not even known to breed; tick-borne diseases occurring at latitudes where they were never known before, fueling the growth of Lyme disease and West Nile virus; and diesel particulates attaching to ragweed that was proliferating because of increased CO2 in the atmosphere and lodging in the airways of asthmatic city-dwellers. These signs all pointed to warming temperatures enabling the spread of disease vectors that were unknown until recent years. 
I recognized this was the special voice of a healer, for patients and the planet, and I was eager to sign him up to write a book on this imperative subject. When I cold-called him in his office at Harvard, he was very open to speaking with me, though he knew little about me at first. It would take a couple years, and a change in publishing houses for me, but I finally paired him with a co-author and commissioned a book that would be titled Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do About It. The authors had delivered virtually the entire manuscript and I’d nearly completed my edit when my job with that publisher ended in 2009, and the book contract was then canceled. Fortunately, it was soon resettled and finally published this past April by the University of California Press, with a Foreword by Jeffrey Sachs and endorsements from Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Dr. Paul Farmer. Paul sent me a copy of the book and I was proud to note his personal acknowledgment of me. We exchanged congratulations and shared the satisfaction of knowing that after five years the book was at last making its way into the world.
Sadly, I learned yesterday that Paul had been ill for some time, and died last Sunday in Cambridge, MA. I am so sorry for the loss of Paul and very grateful for the chance to have known him and worked with him. His humanistic contributions have been detailed in a New York Times obituary, on Joe Romm’s Climate Progress blog at Think Progress, in a Toledo Blade column by Tom Henry, and in this message from Physicians for Human Rights, which concludes with these words:
“For several generations of medical students and young professionals, he was a model of the physician activist, caring for the individual, one patient at a time, and at the same time crusading for the world so that we might leave behind us a chance for the health and well-being of entire populations and of the planet itself.
His knowledgeable and daring voice inspired countless health professionals and activists to campaign for basic human rights, to ban landmines, to prevent disease, and to preserve the planet. We will always remember opening up the paper and reading yet another important piece from Paul—he will be sorely missed.”
Dr. Paul Epstein investigating human rights violations among Kurdish refugees in 1991
In 2008 I edited and published NBA referee Bob Delaney’s first book, Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob. Co-written with Dave Scheiber, it was named a USA TODAY Best Book of the Year. While relating the dangerous undercover assignment that led to multiple indictments and convictions of organized crime figures, the book also chronicled how the assignment led to undiagnosed post-traumatic stress for Bob. This was in the 1970s, before PTSD was a familiar term in our lexicon. Bob’s path through treatment to healing has now led to his second book, Surviving the Shadows: A Journey of Hope into Post-Traumatic Stress, which I represented with Bob’s longtime agent, Uwe Stender, placing it with Sourcebooks. In a new op-ed Bob writes that vet-to-vet, first responder-to-first responder, peer-to-peer therapy is an effective bulwark against post-traumatic stress and full-blown PTSD. This is just one of many promising treatments described in the new book. I’m so proud of Bob, now retired from the NBA, for working with medical professionals, veterans’ groups, and law enforcement and first responder associations to promulgate these treatments for survivors of stress and trauma.
I’ve known my friend George Gibson since 1979 when he paid a call as a sales rep on Undercover Books, the bookstore I then ran in Cleveland with my sibling and our parents. George, now publishing director of Bloomsbury USA, hosted an event Nov. 1 at the Grolier Club, one of NY’s most distinguished book […]