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113

Celebrating Valerie Plame’s “Blowback” & Recalling Tumultous Events of a Decade Ago

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Blowback frontKyle and Ewan and I had a great time last night at the book party for Valerie Plame’s terrific new spy novel Blowback, co-authored with Sarah Lovett. I  had picked up a galley of it at BEA last June, and really enjoyed it a lot. I’d been looking forward to the party for some weeks, as in 2003-04 I edited and published The Politics of Truth–A Diplomat’s Memoir: Insider the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity by Valerie’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. It was going to be a treat to see Valerie and Joe last night.

Joe and I had last met up in 2010 when he was part of a New York Times panel that included Nora Ephron, Anna Devere Smith, Roy Blount, Jr., and Garrison Keillor marking the 25th anniversary of the Times’ Op-Ed pages. It was moderated by then Op-Ed page editor David Shipley*, who invited Joe because he judged Joe’s July 6 2003 op-ed  What I Didn’t Find in Africa had been one of the most historically significant columns the newspaper published that decade. It led to the Bush administration’s repeated disclosures that Joe’s wife Valerie Plame was a CIA official and years of flimsy denials that the administration had doctored the intelligence that fueled their false claims about WMDs in Iraq, enabling the unjustified invasion of the country.

Publishing The Politics of Truth was a high-wire act for Joe, for me and for Carroll & Graf that lasted over a year. In July ’03, I heard about it right away when Valerie’s CIA employment was reported by columnist Robert Novak. A few weeks later indie book publicist Barbara Monteiro connected me with Joe. She had earlier worked on the book I did with Whitewater heroine Susan MacDougal. Barbara knew my sense of justice would’ve been offended by what was being done to Valerie, and Joe. He had been writing opinion columns about Bush’s misguided rush to war and was already thinking of writing a book. We quickly made a deal and got to work while the news story swirling around Valerie and Joe grew and grew.

Right off the bat, we were fortunate in that before retiring from the State Dept in 1998, following 25 years in the foreign service, Joe had sat for a full oral history of his career. He had the transcript and used it as an aide-mémoire and the basis of the historical portions of the book, later justifying our use of two subtitles on the front cover and spine! With this foundation, Joe then wrote practically every day and in February ’04 he delivered an excellent 150,000 word manuscript to me. C & G leapt in to action, as colleagues from several departments and I line-edited, copyedited, designed, typeset, indexed, and produced the book on a “crash” production schedule, for planned release only four months later, in what was going to be May ’04, less than a year after Novak’s column. From a marketing and strategic standpoint, it was like riding a tiger.

The toughest part of this as a publishing proposition was that though the story had only gotten bigger over the intervening months–and while we knew we’d be able to book Joe on tons of media–at the same time we wondered and worried:

  • What will be the state of the journalistic investigations and of the federal grand jury hearings looking into the unauthorized disclosure when we publish the book?
  • How can Joe in the book, in his public statements, and we in our press materials take advantage of new developments while still conforming to the latest important events?
  • How could we take advantage of breaking news but not have Joe get too far out on things that were constantly shifting?

Of course, for Valerie and Joe it was more than a publishing proposition, it was their lives. This was a dynamic in publishing a book I had never encountered before, a delicate strategic challenge. I was already a highly-tuned-in-to-news-person, especially after the 2000 presidential election and 9/11, but this tendency became even more pronounced the year I was actively working every day on Joe’s book. The book sold more than 60,000 copies in hardcover and spent more than a month on the NY Times Bestseller list. I have written about the lessons I learned working on it a number of times on this blog, in such posts as “Hubris”–10 Years Later, Run-up to the Iraq War Still Shadows the Media & the U.S. and On the Imperative of Publishing Whistleblowers.

Last night’s party for Valerie and Sarah Lovett was hosted by director Doug Liman, author Naomi Wolf, and producer Avram Ludwig. Liman had directed the 2010 movies “Fair Game” with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, based on Valerie’s 2006 book, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House and on The Politics of Truth.

We enjoyed meeting the three co-hosts and many of our fellow guests. Among the latter group was one of my favorite suspense writers Lee Child, with whom we happened to ride up in the elevator. About Blowback he’s said: “Great storytelling, real insider authenticity, and above all a fascinating main character in Vanessa Pierson. And maybe those initials are not a coincidence–sometimes fiction can reveal things nonfiction can’t.” The latter part of Child’s blurb–and the reference to “redaction” in my tweet above–are rueful nods to the unfortunate fact that Fair Game was heavily redacted by the Bush-era CIA, and though it had a well-reported Afterword by national security reporter Laura Rozen, the many blacked-out passages inevitably left readers in the dark in many areas. I’ve included three of Child’s books among my weekly #FridayReads essays, including Worth Dying For, a true corker of a suspense novel, the first of Child’s Jack Reacher books that I read. His latest is  Never Go Back, which I am eager to read. Guest Maggie Topkis–longtime co-proprietor of the NYC mystery bookstore Partners and Crime who nowadays works with Lee Child–told me she thinks it’s his best book yet, which is saying a lot.

I met co-author Sarah Lovett, and told her how much I’d enjoyed reading Blowback. From Blue Rider Press, I congratulated David Rosenthal, Valerie’s publisher, and Executive Editor Sarah Hochman. I was also glad to see the two sides of the recent Penguin Random House merger well represented, with Kent Anderson, a sales rep from Penguin (now Penguin Random House). He had been with Publishers Group West, distributor for Carroll & Graf, when I published The Politics of Truth there in 2004. With Kent, I saw Madeline McIntosh, COO of Random House, a senior executive in the merged company. I liked that she had come to this book party for a key title of a Penguin imprint.   

I was also glad to see book biz pal Will Schwalbe,* who after a distinguished publishing career has made himself in to a successful author most recently with The End of Your Life Book Club, which I wrote about here. Will explained that he and Naomi had been old college classmates, and said how much he’d enjoyed her poetry from those years. Naomi seemed touched by that. Will graciously introduced me to Naomi who asked how I had come to know Joe and Valerie, at which I mentioned The Politics of Truth . She said how glad she was to be able to show special support for Valerie and her new book. Those comments were echoed when a few minutes later she and Doug Liman convened the gathering for toasts and congratulations. Liman gestured toward a nearby portrait of his late father, the prominent lawyer Arthur Liman, a pivotal player in the Iran-Contra scandal who served as chief counsel to the Senate committee that investigated the Reagan’s administration’s notorious arms-for-hostages conspiracy. The younger Liman cited his father’s example as an inspiration to him in working with dedicated public servants like Valerie and Joe.

After the toasts, I approached Joe once more. As we chatted Ewan took a picture of us. Here it is, along with a few others from last night. (Please click here to see all pics) It was a fun book party and the three of us were very happy to be a part of the celebration.

If you’re looking for realistic and pacy suspense fiction with a smart and appealing female protagonist, I highly recommend Blowback , the first of a series featuring covert operative Vanessa Pierson. Valerie has done lots of media this week including “Morning Joe” (See video below.) One of Valerie’s next stops is going to be in Washington, DC this Friday night, October 5, when Laura Rozen will be interviewing her at Politics & Prose Bookstore.

*Will Schwalbe’s first book, SEND: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better was co-authored with the same David Shipley– Joe Wilson’s Op-Ed editor and moderator of the NY Times panel with Joe, Nora Ephron, etc.

 

114

The National Book Awards–Debating How to Move Forward

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Here’s an excellent literary commentary from Publishers Weekly, by indie book publishers Chris Fischbach and Fiona McCrae, on how the National Book Awards could be reformed–and equally important, the direction they believe the reforms should not take. The 2012 Awards were given last week, so this is very timely, with Fischbach and McCrae noting a recent NY Times article which reported that “the National Book Foundation is reviewing changes to its procedures in order to ‘create more splash’ and in particular to address criticisms that ‘in recent years judges had preferred little-known authors, which diminished the award’s stature.’”

They urge the Foundation not to make the annual awards into a contest that merely rewards “big books’ by “big authors” from “big publishers,” which most of the year “get the lion’s share of attention.” By contrast, they say, “the annual national awards provide an opportunity to audit the year’s books and to come up with lists that either echo the year’s noise and/or illuminate books that for whatever reason have remained under the mainstream radar. The element of surprise and discovery, we would argue, is absolutely part of the value of these awards.” I also found that the Times article mentioned some good ideas that are being contemplated, such as involving younger book industry people at award-related events during NBA week. For my part, I think the Foundation should continue doing more to reach out beyond the book industry to involve avid readers.

I recommend you read the excellent column by Fischbach and McCrae which affirms the vibrancy of the independent publishing spirit.
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Nov. 28 Graywolf Press Update: Speaking of Graywolf, PW‘s Claire Kirch has also published this profile of them, Graywolf Press in a New Era. Last, I made one of Graywolf’s current titles, Mary Jo Bang’s new translation of Dante’s Inferno, my #FridayReads last April 27.  

115

Publishers Weekly on Political Books, w/My Take on the National Climate

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A couple days after President Obama’s re-election last week, I was invited by Rachel Deahl of Publishers Weekly to comment on the current and future climate for political books.  She asked “what narratives seem to be emerging, or what narrative(s) you might be looking for.”  I heard from a friend today that this week’s print issue of the magazine has Rachel’s story, and though I haven’t seen that version yet, she just sent me a link to the story on line. It’s posted at the PW site, under the headline:  “Let’s Get Political”. I invite you to read the published story–there are seven publishing people quoted in it. Due to space I’m sure, the email comment I’d submitted was abridged, so I’m glad I can post my full remarks below, edited lightly for this space. Rachel also asked for a head shot, and since I’m not sure if the magazine used it, I’ll pasted in here at the bottom of the post.
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Hi Rachel,

I’ve been through many presidential book cycles, and it is true that books published for the benefit of the out-party (anti-Bush books from 2000-08; anti-Obama books 2009-2012) tend to flourish in these times.

However, what I’d like to be seeing now as an author’s representative, a political blogger, an editor, and a reader is a break from the more vituperative titles. I think even rabid partisans are tiring of these titles and are beginning to show less suport for them than in the past. I think what we need, and what the politically engaged reading public craves, are vigorously reported books in which the author, while not reining in his opining or editorial comment, nonetheless allows a pointed narrative to emerge from the facts of their story. An example from years past of what I’m looking for now is typified by Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickled & Dimed.

For the many authors, and publishers, who’ve featured criticism of Pres. Obama in their books, I think they need to look in the mirror and offer work that is as much self-critical as it is bashing of the president. I suggest this not as a partisan from the other side, but as a way for them to establish and enhance their own credibility with a more diverse readership. After all, there must be some critical self-assessment in the wake of an election that did not go the way of their advocacy, lest they lose all credibility with a more general readership, and remain in the bubble that bred their lack of prescience.

For authors on the left or from the more traditional center, I look at Michael Grunwald’s The New New Deal (S&S, August 2012, my Oct. 12 #FridayReads blog entry), as an example of the kind of book I’d be looking for. Extensive reporting of facts (about the 2009 Federal stimulus) that build a case for his thesis that the Recovery Act was the most consequential legislation since the New Deal. The point of view in Grunwald’s book emerges from the reporting, not the other way around.

I will add that one genre I’ve not tired of is the traditional, Theodore White-style “Making of the President” narrative. My longtime author David Pietrusza has done books like this for such years as 1920, 1948, and 1960. I think it’s too late now for me to work on one of those about 2012, but I’d sure like to read one. That is, not a magazine piece, but a deeply reported and full textured portrait of the campaign.

Thanks for asking for my input, Philip

The Great Gray Bridge
Philip Turner Book Productions
Speakerfile profile page

116

Neil Young, K’Naan in Central Park for the Global Citizen Festival

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Hadn’t realized until today that a big benefit concert’s going on today in Central Park. K’Naan, Band of Horses, Foo Fighters, Black Keys, and Neil Young with Crazy Horse are all playing on the Great Lawn. Might’ve tried to go, but I have other plans for the rest of the day. Some free tickets were drawn by lottery at teh site of the worthy organization coordinating this push to end “extreme poverty” worldwide. Many organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Earth Institute are coordinating to pull it all together, under the rubric of GlobalCitizen.org. So far, K’Naan has played, brilliantly. Also, Band of Horses, who were good too. It’s all being livestreamed at this link, and maybe cached there later, too. I hope so, because I’m going out in a few minutes, and would really love to see Neil and Crazy Horse. Meantime, here’s a photo I took of K’Naan in the livestream. He only played three songs, but he absolutely killed with those three, including with a rousing finale of his global hit, “Wavin’ Flag,’ telling the crowd he was at last reclaiming the song as his own, after seeing it used in so many different situations, like at the World Cup. He sang the personal passages in the lyrics, about leaving Somalia as a youngster, very quietly and intimately. He is a very inspirational figure.
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Got home just in time to hear Neil and Crazy Horse’s two closing songs, “Fucking Up” and “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World,” on which the bands from earlier in the concert joined in. It’s been a Neil Young kind-of-weekend, with his new book, Waging Heavy Peace, one of my #FridayReads for this weekend.

117

Suzzy Roche’s Sensitive Reading of Edith Wharton

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Kyle and I took the bus to Bryant Park yesterday to hear singer, musician and novelist Suzzy Roche* lead a discussion of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth in the Park’s long-running Reading Room series. We arrived just in time to corral two chairs near the front of the outdoor space and settled in as Suzzy was tuning her guitar for what would later be an original song to close the program. Suzzy began by sharing some notes and interesting facts she had learned about Wharton.

She said that 2012 marks the 150th year since Wharton’s birth in to a wealthy family in New York City. The family name was Jones, and some believe their conspicuous upper-class status may be the origin of the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses.” Early on, Edith’s mother forbade her from reading novels, lest her daughter’s intellect expand in ways that would make it harder to ensure a proper marriage for her. Suzzy reminded everyone how fitting it was to be in Bryant Park with a view of the main branch of the New York Public Library, since the novel we were discussing includes a scene set in the lovely park. From her youthful days, Wharton exhibited a high degree of sensitivity, and Suzzy read a quote she found in Wharton’s autobiography: “The owning of my first dog woke in me the long ache of pity for animals and for all inarticulate beings which nothing has ever stilled.”

Wharton’s first full-length piece of fiction, a novella finished at age 18, was accompanied by several passages of self-criticism where she assessed what she judged to be the weaknesses of her own work. Suzzy quoted this early comment of Wharton’s on the subject of criticism: “After all, one knows one’s weak points so well it’s rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.”

With these details of Wharton’s life in our minds, Suzzy turned the discussion to the novel itself. After reviewing contemporary critical reaction to the book, which often emphasized Wharton’s gender, she asked “Does this book have something to say to us right now about the place of women and money in society? She pointed out that just this year, Jonathan Franzen ignited a controversy when he wrote in the New Yorker about “Edith Wharton’s looks.” Suzzy continued that Franzen wrote “it was hard for him to warm to her novels because she had every advantage of wealth and privilege and was extremely socially conservative. But, he said, ‘she did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty.’  On the surface, there would seem to be no reason for a reader to sympathize with Lilly; she’s profoundly self-involved and incapable of true charity.  She pridefully contrasts other women’s looks with her own. She has no intellectual life to speak of. She’s put off from pursuing her one kindred spirit because of the modesty of his income. She’s basically the worst sort of party girl, and like Wharton, she didn’t even try to be charming.” There was a gasp among the Bryant Park crowd as Suzzy read the remarks of the award-winning novelist, which whether said about Wharton or Lily Bart, struck many of us as chauvinistic. Please click through for rest of post and all photos

118

This Week at The Great Gray Bridge

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In the past week at this blog, I’ve written about the best TV ad of the presidential campaign thus far; a brave woman in Alaska who fended off an aggressive grizzly bear; the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema of Austin, TX, which is entering the NYC market only a couple blocks from my office; the great Canadian band Library Voices; Sarah Silverman’s bawdy video that pokes fun at right-wing casino magnate Sheldon Adelson; a new album from Bob Dylan; the award-winning CBC radio host, Jian Ghomeshi; Greenland’s worryingly shrinking Petermann Glacier; a young chess master and Franconia College classmate of mine who vanished in 1978 under mysterious circumstances; the late, great baseball writer, Robert Creamer, who chronicled the life of Babe Ruth; the sweet severance deal Mitt Romney arranged for himself from Bain Capital; the moving book I’ve been reading by Rob Sheffield, my #FridayReads yesterday; and my own personal history, including the story of how during a teenage road trip my brother Joel and I happened to adopt our longtime black lab Noah, pictured here with me.

119

Annals of Urban Wildlife–Meeting a Skunk in the City (or a Sturgeon)

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Update: A day or two after my encounter with the skunk chronicled below, I read of a wild urban encounter involving my friend, CBC Radio host and author Grant Lawrence. In the coastal waters washing around Vancouver, B.C., where he lives, he saw a huge, prehistoric-looking fish whose presence in water he had been about to swim in alarmed him and a young nephew until they determined that the marine creature was actually dead. He took the photo shown here and sent it out on Twitter, crowd-sourcing identification of it. Grant’s discovery turns out to have been a sturgeon, the world’s largest freshwater fish. This one was seven or eight feet long, as shown in Grant’s amazing picture. Now, a local paper has written up the account in full, which I invite you to read at this link. Not so coincidentally, this summer Grant is hosting CBC Radio’s The Wild Side, all about encounters with creatures and the wilderness. As Grant’s discovery shows, and even mine with the little skunk, our cities are also the scene for brushes with the wild side.
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I ride my bicycle nearly every day in New York City, even during this current heat wave. Biking is my preferred form of exercise, and has been for years, going back to my days at Franconia College, near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, when I rode all over the White Mountains. I was never in better shape than in those years.

New York City doesn’t offer quite as many topographical challenges as the North Country but I get my miles in every week, and there are some lovely spots to ride in the city. Some days I ride on the Central Park loop that goes around the perimeter of the big park; other days I pedal along the Hudson River on Manhattan’s west side, all the way up to the George Washington Bridge, where readers of this blog may recall the Little Red Lighthouse resides under the Great Gray Bridge, which I wrote about in a foundational post, How This Blog Got its Name.

Today I was on the west side but in the 95 degree heat, I took a reading break at what are called the Harlem West Piers, about even with 125th Street, near the uptown branch of the Fairway market. Sitting on a bench, I read three engrossing chapters in the spy novel I’m currently enjoying, The Double Game by Dan Fesperman, which I’d made my #FridayReads yesterday. Looking at my watch I finally decided it was time to head home, so picked up my cell to let my wife know. As our phone at home began to ring, I was startled to see a creature stirring in the shrubbery and bushes just near my bench. I thought at first, ‘a rat,’ since they are common sights in New York these days. But, no, the coloring was wrong. When it emerged from the bushes, I could see it was black & white, and I said to Kyle just as she answered the phone, “Holy shit, I see a skunk!” She was taken aback, and I quietly explained what was in front of me. Neither of was completely shocked, as we have occasionally detected a skunk-like odor that wafts up from Riverside Park at night, though we were never certain that’s what we were smelling. I quickly added that I’d soon be heading home and ended the call so I could pull out my IPod-Touch and take some pictures of the sleek little creature.

I observed that it was almost certainly immature in growth, though not a pup, or whatever baby skunks are called. It seemed unafraid of me and there was not a moment where I thought it was riled up or likely to spray or, even run away from my observance of it. I took quite a few pictures and followed it as it crept along the path in front of the fence. Once it disappeared into the shrubs, I prepared to strap on my helmet and ride away, but saw a Parks Dept. worker nearby. This is a very well-maintained park so I walked over and asked her if it was known to her and her colleagues that skunks are living right here in front of the river.  She blanched a bit and said, “You saw what? Oh, no the landscaper is going to be here tomorrow and we’re supposed to work in those beds. I’m so glad you told me, I don’t want to be stirring up any angry skunks!” I explained to her that it had been a young one I’d seen, and that it didn’t appear to have been made at all nervous by being near me. She was glad of that, but mentioned there must be more than just the one. Her name was Penny Hyman and I gave her my card which I’d been using a bookmark in my novel, as she said her supervisor might want to see my photos of the little creature. For you, my dear readers, here are several of those pictures, proof that I had a close encounter with a surprising example of Manhattan wildlife. All this goes to show, you never know what may happen when you leave your house for some exercise and quiet reading time.

120

A Star for Dante’s Inferno

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I was delighted to see this new, modern translation of Dante’s Inferno received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. I had made the book one of my #FridayReads on April 27. PW writes, “This will be the Dante for the next generation.” Here’s the entire review:

♦Starred review♦

Inferno

Dante Alighieri, trans. from the Italian by Mary Jo Bang. Graywolf, $35 (352p) ISBN 978-1-55597-619-4

Bang has done for Dante’s most famous poem something akin to what Baz Luhrmann did for Shakespeare in his 1996 film of Romeo and Juliet: updated the presentation of a classic for a contemporary sensibility without sacrificing its timelessness. Bang (The Bride of E) has preserved the feel and tempo of the original—and the many English translations that readers will be familiar with: ”Stopped mid-motion in the middle/ Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky—/ Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost,” she begins. She has, however, modernized the metaphors; where Dante looked to the politics and culture of his contemporary Italy for allusions to illustrate his sense of faith and morality, Bang mines American pop and high culture. Yes, traditionalists and scholars may shriek upon seeing Eric Cartman (of South Park fame), sculptures by Rodin, John Wayne Gacy, and many others make anachronistic cameos in Bang’s version of Hell, but this is still very much Dante’s underworld, updated so it pops on today’s page. The result is an epic both fresh and historical, scholarly and irreverent: “ ‘Pope Satan, Pope Satan, Alley Oop!’ ” begins Canto VII with a line in which Bang mines various previous translations of Dante and the roots of the phrase “Alley Oop” in French gymnastics and a newspaper comic about “a Stone Age traveling salesman from the kingdom of Moo who rode a dinosaur named Dinny,” according to Bang’s comprehensive notes. This will be the Dante for the next generation. Includes illustrations by artist Henrik Drescher. (Aug.)