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33

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.

 

 

34

Excited for Publication Day of “The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack on the Canadian Tundra”

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I’m thrilled that Alex Messenger’s book The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra will officially be published tomorrow, November 12 by Blackstone Publishing, in hardcover, ebook, and in an audiobook edition read by the author. I’ve been working with Alex since 2016, so it’s very heartening to know that his book is about to reach the reading public.

As editor and publisher in 2002 of the superb historical novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge by Michael Punke, later adapted for a Hollywood movie, it’s a happy coincidence for me to be involved with another book featuring the survivor of a near-lethal encounter with a grizzly bear. If you’ve enjoyed such books as Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (where by contrast the young protagonist did not survive his wilderness ordeal), Admiral Richard Byrd’s Alone, and Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure by James West Davidson and John Rugge, you’ll definitely enjoy Alex’s first-person chronicle.

The Twenty-Ninth Day is also a featured pick of the Midwest Booksellers Association.

For updates on Alex’s book tour, you can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @AMessengerPhoto and at The Twenty-Ninth Day website.

If you’re in Minnesota, there’s a full line-up of author events coming up:

11/12/19, 6pm, Bookstore at Fitger’s, Duluth.MN

11/23/19 Author signing at Midwest Mountaineering Outdoor Adventure Expo, Minneapolis, MN

11/23 6pm Excelsior Bay Books, Excelsior, MN

11/30/19 Author signing at Frost River, Duluth, for Small Business Saturday

12/7/19 Scout & Morgan Books, Cambridge, MN

12/8/19 Holiday Signing at Next Chapter Bookstore 11-1pm, St Paul, MN

12/14/19 Zenith Bookstore, Duluth, MN, with two other authors

Also, here are some excellent publicity hits and below them the video trailer Blackstone Publishing did to promote the book.

Duluth News Tribune, feature article 

Minnesota Public Radio, interview with the author

https://youtu.be/6Mb4NJcPtiI

35

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.

 

 

36

Sold: “SHATTERED MINDS: How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets” by Robert Bauman and Dina Rasor

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I first blogged about SHATTERED MINDS: How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets in 2016, linking it to a Washington Post story by Ben Guarino about an amazingly hard material found in nature:

“UC-Riverside scientists and engineers say they have detected a heretofore unknown natural structure in the outer layer [of the mantis shrimp claw]—the critical ‘impact area’— of the club. Were helmets or body armor to be created following this mantis shrimp template, they say, soldiers and football players could be protected from immense blows. When viewed under a microscope, the outer layer of the club has what the scientists describe as a herringbone structure. There, fibers of chitin and calcium compounds are arranged in a series of sinusoidal waves. When the shrimp strikes a prey’s shell, the researchers think this herringbone wave buckles, dispersing the impact throughout the club without causing catastrophic damage to the predator.”

Authors Robert Bauman and Dina Rasor were still working on their manuscript in 2016, and I was preparing to begin submitting the project to publishers. There’s an unusual backstory to the book, which I’ll outline below.

In 2008, when I was acquiring books as Editorial Director at Union Square Press, I read a stunning NY Times story about two whistleblowers at a defense contractor in North Dakota who at great personal risk revealed that their employer was knowingly shorting the amount of the protective material Kevlar in the combat helmets they were fabricating for the Pentagon, to increase their profits at the expense of troop safety. At the suggestion of Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. I commissioned a book on this grotesque boondoggle to be written by two ace reporters on military procurement and the Pentagon, Dina Rasor and Robert Bauman. In 2009, while they were working on the manuscript, and discovering yet another brave whistleblower to include in the narrative, I left that job and parent company Sterling Publishing canceled the contract, handing the rights back to the authors. Fast forward several years and Bob and Dina approached me to see if in my new role as an agent I would be game to try to help them re-sell the book to a new publisher, which I agreed to, with generous approval from their original agent Bonnie Nadell. This is exactly the type of “imperative nonfiction” I have long cultivated as a publishing professional, and I was very excited to accept the challenge of reselling it to a new publisher. This was part of my pitch letter to publishers:

This revelatory book, written by two authors who’ve covered the Pentagon for many years, reports that in the twenty-first century, while traumatic brain injury (TBI) has become the signature injury suffered by our troops, the defense establishment has failed US fighting men and women by continuing to issue them an antiquated military helmet that fails to mitigate the worst of this tragic harm, even though superior design and technology are increasingly available. This investigation by Dina Rasor and Robert Bauman, the first book to examine this most basic item of military equipment, features the stories of two sets of whistleblowers determined to expose the truth about the failures of the military helmet bureaucracy. Their book braids together the two stories of two sets of whistleblowers to chronicle the helmet scandal and its human impact.

Indeed, in 2017 I sold the book to Potomac Books, a military and public affairs imprint at the University of Nebraska Press, as documented in the deal report below posted at the book industry site publishersmarketplace[dot]com.

 

Potomac has scheduled the book for publication in March 2019. I’ll post a cover when they have it ready. Meantime, the authors have already received these superb endorsements:

SHATTERED MINDS will set a challenge for technologists, designers, people who use 3D printers, materials scientists, and high level defense thinkers to finally design the most protective military helmet possible. Despite the Pentagon’s failures to this point, we hope to gain their attention to bring new talent and focus to the goal of producing a superior helmet. In the same regard, we are excited about the effort being undertaken by the Head Health Challenge, which also relates to football helmets, an effort that has been covered by Liz Stinson in Wired magazine. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to forge a constructive link between the Defense Dept and the NFL, in as much as the league often cites its cooperation with the US military. I recommend you read the fascinating article by Ben Guarino, which also has video from UC Riverside scientist David Kisailus.

37

South African Anti-Apartheid Activist Stephen Biko Died in Police Custody Forty Years Ago Today

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After Stephen Biko’s death following a brutal police interrogation in 1977, an atrocity that the South African government tried covering up, the anti-apartheid newspaper editor Donald Woods, who’d known Biko, quickly wrote and smuggled out of the country a manuscript* that was his combined biography of Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) he’d been a key leader of, and an exposé on the case. The book added fuel to the controversy in Western countries about the conduct of the corrupt regime. It was an amazingly timely and powerful book, and instilled in me a love for ripped-from-the-headlines books, the sort that I’ve been partial to ever since. Biko was published in 1978 around the time my siblings and parents and I were getting ready to open our bookstore, Undercover Books, and it was among the first books I ordered for our opening stock. With the scandal that ensued from Biko’s death, ownership of Woods’s book became a crime in South Africa. I was very proud we sold many copies in Cleveland. Woods lived many years in Britain, and was still on the scene when Nelson Mandela finally became free.

*When I said above that Donald Woods smuggled his manuscript for Biko out of South Africa, I could’ve added that he carried it out himself, in clandestine fashion, so it could be published in the West. He and his family fled the country in a land cruiser sort of vehicle, in back country, crossing a frontier to a neighboring country where there was no guard post. A brave man with nerves of steel—Woods was determined to honor the memory and sacrifice of a true human rights martyr by first writing the book, and then putting his life, and his family’s lives, on the line to make sure the manuscript would make it to publication. That’s commitment!

 

38

Some Social Sharing I Did on Canada Day

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In May 2014, soon after I began to publish and write my second website/blog, Honourary Canadian: Seeing Canada From Away, I wrote and assembled a personal essay titled “Why I Started this Blog and Call it Honourary Canadian.” It chronicles more than forty years of trips to Canada, first as a 12-year old traveling from Cleveland to Expo ’67 in Montreal, to many solo vacations when I was single and first working in NYC, to many trips with my wife and son, and since 2011, annual visits to Toronto for the NXNE music festival and for publishing activities, especially with author Elaine Dewar. The essay is longish, with almost 8,000 words of narrative text and more than 200 captioned photos, many taken on film back in the day, and scanned for the web.I’ll some day hope to fashion it as part of a book about Canada, seen from away. Having the chance to publish the essay is, in a sense, probably why I started the second site—to conjure up the experiences and landscapes I encountered in the nation to the north.

Canada Day 2017 was observed this past Saturday, on July 1 (sometime, I have to find out why US Independence Day, and Canada’s day, happen to be so close on the calendar). It was sort of a special one, as the 150th since Canada’s confederation. Many Indigenous groups weren’t keen to celebrate it, but it engendered widespread coverage, and debate about Canada’s colonialist past, a good thing. With the special anniversary in mind, I re-shared the link to the 2014 post on my  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn page, the first time I’ve done that on a Canada Day. There’s been a gratifying response, so I’m posting it here, too. Before I started the second site—no surprise—I published a lot of Canadian reflections here on The Great Gray Bridge.

39

RIP Tyler Drumheller, CIA Operative & Iraq War Truthteller

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With President Obama rightly sounding a cautionary tone during his speech yesterday promoting the Iran nuclear deal—by citing the many examples of flawed judgment shown during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq—I note with rue and sadness the death this week of Tyler Drumheller, longtime CIA operative and an Iraq War truthteller whose book, On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence written with Elaine Monahan, I edited and published with him (Philip Turner Books, Carroll & Graf, 2006). Tyler wrote about how he and other US intelligence officials had spotted early on that the Iraqi source Curveball was a serial fabricator whose claims about mobile biological weapons labs should not be believed. Yet Curveball’s claims remained in the inventory of malarkey from unreliable Iraqis that Bush administration officials exploited, with his bogus info being inserted into Colin Powell’s disastrous speech at the UN. As Greg Miller’s excellent Washington Post obit on Drumheller reports, Tyler was flabbergasted when he heard Powell’s speech, and bravely tangled in print and on “60 Minutes” with the CIA Director George Tenet about Curveball. It was a distinct pleasure for Tyler when I suggested to him that we use the agency photo of the two of them for the back cover photo that you see below.

I worked on Tyler’s book amid an amazing, energized period of six years during which I also acquired, edited, and published Susan McDougal’s The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk: Why I Wouldn’t Testify Against the Clintons and What I Learned in Jail (Carroll & Graf, 2001), which sort of stamped ‘paid-back’ to the Whitewater years, and Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s blockbuster book The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity, (Carroll & Graf, 2004) a story that was in the news for months, bridging Bush’s first and second terms. Following Tyler’s book—a true insider’s account that showed definitively how determined the Bushies had been to find and cultivate intelligence that would give them a pretext for invading Iraq—with journalist Murray Waas I brought out The United States v. I. Lewis Libby (Union Square Press, 2007), a compendium of public documents that featured the transcript from the trial that saw Scooter Libby, Chief of Staff to VP Cheney, prosecuted for obstructing justice in the circumstances surrounding the release of Valerie Plame Wilson’s CIA status. I’ve written more here about these books and the years when rogue prosecutors, the Bush administration, and determined adversaries were targeting authors with whom I worked.

I’m thinking of Tyler today, who less than ten years ago was devoting his reluctant retirement from the CIA to exposing how the agency had been used and abused by Bush administration officials to justify the tragic invasion of Iraq. I’m so relieved that a decade later President Obama is in charge of our foreign policy, determined to use diplomacy to make peace with adversaries.

40

#FridayReads, Harvey Araton’s Newspaper Novel, COLD TYPE

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#FridayReads, Harvey Araton’s newspaper novel, COLD TYPE, being published July 2014.

Memorable and likable characters dominate this realistic and very enjoyable novel by longtime New York Times sports reporter Araton, who also spent years at the NY Daily News. The progtagonist is Jamie Kramer, son of Morris, a longtime printer and union member at a NY paper called the Sun, which has recently been acquired by a marauding Anglo-Irish press baron, Leland Brady. Jamie works at the paper, too, though his one big story, on covert policies in his native Brooklyn that limit the sale of real estate to white people, a well-reported expose, earned him nothing but trouble. He hasn’t received the laurels bestowed on his hotshot cousin, Steven, a heroic columnist, at least in his own eyes. The book is set during a newspaper strike, apparently resembling in some respects a strike that occurred at the Daily News in the early 1990s. Araton makes entirely believeable the tension among the eight different unions striking the paper, triggered by the intemperate drivers.

Other characters include Jamie’s wife, Karyn, from whom he’s separated; their son, two-year old Aaron; and Jamie’s Latina colleague Carla, a savvy ally in the newsroom, and a sympathetic soul who knows Jamie’s secrets, even while she has many of her own. One subplot concerns Karyn, who’s in the midst of being recruited by a talkative entrepreneur in Seattle who’s starting a new business selling books on the Internet, still so new at this point in the ’90s. He even wants to recruit Jamie, who wants desperately to maintain a connection to Aaron, and so flirts with the idea of moving across the country. Araton never gives this Jeff-Bezos avatar a name but he hardly needed to do so. One irony that Araton doesn’t seem to have anticipated for his novel is that Bezos is now himself a newspaper owner, of the Washington Post, an inheritor of the world that Jamie Kramer and his father inhabit.

I will say very little about the ending, except that it’s a treat, as just desserts are served all ’round. This is a really enjoyable, sort of old-fashioned novel, offering a social portrait and a really rich story. Kudos to Mr Araton and Cinco Puntos Press, of El Paso, Texas, for writing and publishing this worthy novel. Thanks to Bobby Byrd of Cinco Puntos, who at BEA gave me the autographed copy I finished reading today. I’m going to be recommending COLD TYPE for weeks.

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