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49

Great New Documentary on the Blues, “Born in Chicago”

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I tweeted this message last evening with a link to a trailer for the NY premiere of a new documentary I was heading out to see at the Lincoln Society Film Center.

 

The screening was for “Born in Chicago,” a new 90-minute doc on the blues. It was a thrill for Kyle and me to be there. We had learned about the one-night showing from a NY Times article yesterday that began like this:

“Late in his career, Muddy Waters recorded a song called ‘The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll.’ That, in a nutshell, is the story told in the new documentary “Born in Chicago” — how he, Howlin’ Wolf and other black blues musicians working in Chicago in the 1960s schooled young white acolytes from that city who went on to play on some of the most influential pop recordings of the era.”

After reading the paper we quickly went online and ordered tickets for the lone screening, luckily for us because when we arrived it had clearly sold out. It is a joyous film with superb archival footage, moving interviews, and high-quality audio of many great blues performances. It also narrates a moving story about how aspiring teenage musicians like guitarist Mike Bloomfield and keyboard player Barry Goldberg, from affluent parts of Chicago, began frequenting the clubs and bars where black titans of the blues like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were then in residence, well on to being the blues legends they ultimately would be known as. Despite their age–Bloomfield was only 17 at the outset in 1960–co-producer Goldberg chronicles the time the two boys borrowed Michael’s mother’s car, drove through the all-black neighborhoods on the South Side to the club, which was called Pepper’s, I believe. They found parking “four steps from the front door,” made their way to a front table, and began listening to the masters. Gratified by the respect shown them and their clear eagerness to learn the music, the musicians soon invited them to sit in with the bands and a fruitful and historic musical collaboration was born. The generosity of Muddy and Wolf, with their sidemen like Willie Dixon, Sam Lay, and others became a hallmark of the era. And, the youngsters really learned to play.

Goldberg recalled that soon when Otis Spann, who often played piano in Muddy Waters’ outfit, was invited to go on the road with another big bluesman of the time, say Little Walter, he was able to take the job because Barry could sit in and play keys for Muddy while Spann was out of town. The bench of blues performers in Chicago got a lot deeper.

Born_In_Chicago_Trailer_Screen_smAmong the musicians interviewed for the film are Bob Dylan, who later hired Bloomfield and Goldberg for his backing band; B.B. King, who remembered Bloomfield as one of the best guitarists he ever heard; Keith Richards, who with his Rolling Stone bandmates are shown here in hilarious footage with Muddy Waters and Mick Jagger (in a bright red track suit) swapping lead vocals; Buddy Guy, who we learn would stroll out the open door of a blues club playing his electric guitar on a “100-foot long chord” to make music right out in the streets; Hubert Sumlin, lead guitarist with Howlin’ Wolf, who’s shown here with the aid of medical oxygen, in what would be his last taped interview; Eric Burdon of the Animals, who remembers that growing up in Newcastle, England, new blues albums from Chess Records would arrive in local record stores, allowing him and his bandmates to hear and then play the blues; Charlie Musselwhite, a white southerner who migrated north to Chicago for factory work and soon found himself ensconced in a blues community; Elvin Bishop, who like Mike Bloomfield played in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and who tells such tales as wandering in to a Chicago pawnshop to buy a new guitar, and being waited on by young Bloomfield; Nick Gravenites, who wrote a signature song of the Butterfield Band, “Born in Chicago”; Harvey Mandel, who played in Canned Heat, with John Mayall and the Blues Breaker, and Bob Dylan; Sam Lay, drummer with many of the great blues bands; Jack White, who spoke about the influence of the blues on his music and the challenges young artists face today in gaining access to, say, senior players, in hip-hop or rappers, especially.

In the audience last night were “Born in Chicago” director John Anderson; Chicago bluesman Corky Siegel, of the Siegel-Schwall Band; Marshall Chess of Chess Records, who narrates “Born in Chicago” (not his late father Leonard, as I had mistakenly tweeted); and co-producer of the film, Barry Goldberg. After the film they took seats in front of the audience and Siegel played a blistering harmonica solo, which got everyone pumped for the spirited conversation and Q&A session that followed. During the Q&A, Marshall Chess recalled how eager he was to make an outpost in Britain for Chess Records by forging a relationship with record distributors there. Chess also remembered that Howlin’ Wolf could be stern with a musician who played a wrong note, but was also a gentle giant. Corky Siegel remembered that between sets of music outside of clubs such as the Blue Flame he and Wolf would talk, sip whiskey, and walk the nearby alleys. Siegel said that Wolf’s generosity showed him the blues is not just about music, but a way of living one’s life, with love and freedom.

The film’s theatrical release is still being plotted by the producers. It clearly warrants widespread distribution and I expect it to have major exposure in the months to come. In the meantime, I suggest you ‘like’ their Facebook page, read this Chicago Blues Guide review of a recent reunion concert that brought together many blues musicians from the film, read Larry Rohter’s NY Times story from July 26 and view the accompanying slideshow of great B&W photos, share the above trailer widely with your friends. Here are photos I took after the screening and shots of some of my treasured blues LPs from Chess Records and one I’ve had for years by the Siegel-Schwall Band. Please click here to see photos.
Since you got all the way down here in this post, you must love the blues. So, I recommend my personal essay about Cleveland bluesman Mr. Stress, who I wrote about in the book Rust Belt Chic: A Cleveland Anthology. Stress was a great local bluesman I followed all the drinking-age years I lived in my old hometown, from 1972 to 1985. A harmonica player, singer, and bandleader Stress was the Paul Butterfield of Cleveland. He still lives in Cleveland.

50

#FridayReads, July 5–Amy Grace Loyd’s “The Affairs of Others,” & Jaime Joyce’s Longform Report, “Burn”

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IMG_0733IMG_0734#FridayReads, July 5–The Affairs of Others, Amy Grace Loyd’s novel of domestic manners set in a Brooklyn widow’s small apartment house where residents become much more to her–and readers–than mere tenants. I made this part of my #FridayReads last week, and continued enjoying it this holiday week, finishing the book a couple days ago. I relished Loyd’s mesmerizing sentences, many of which begged to be read out loud, with a plot that I knew from the Editor’s Buzz panel at BEA would explore the the sensual and erotic. There was great restraint in the writing, and characters I came to really care for, like the resident of the top floor, Mr. Coughlan, a longtime ferryboat captain in NY Harbor. I have lived in a NYC apartment building for more than 20 years with lots of strange neighbors, so the subplots and side characters in the book were very real to me, and remain so having finished it. No spoiler here, but I’ll say it ends, as great works of art sometimes do, with a memorable meal. The novel by Loyd, who is the fiction editor of byliner.com, will be out in early September.

I’ve now moved on to read the timely piece of narrative nonfiction, “Burn” by reporter Jaime Joyce. It’s on the 1990 Dude Fire in Arizona, where professional firefighters and inmates from a nearby prison risked their lives in confronting the dangerous blaze. “Burn” is published on a new website collecting longform journalism called The Big Roundtable, where I am a reader participating in their process of selecting new stories.  The Big Roundtable is the brainchild, in part, of Michael Shapiro, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and an author whose book, Solomon’s Sword: Two Families and the Children the State Took Away, I edited some years ago.

51

#FridayReads, June 28–Valerie Plame & Sarah Lovett’s “Blowback,” & Amy Grace Loyd’s “The Affairs of Others”

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Working my way through my BEA piles for this week’s #FridayReads: Blowback by Valerie Plame & Sarah Lovett; quite a good, pacy thriller setting an American female operative amid a covert operation to apprehend a villainous underworld puppetmaster  who’s selling clandestine nukes to dangerous international players, and killing off the operative’s sources. Coming out in October from Blue Rider Press, this is Plame’s first novel, after her 2007 Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. That book 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. Because I had worked on her husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s 2003 book, The Politics of Truth: Insider the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity, which with Fair Game had formed the basis of the Naomi Watts and Sean Penn 2009 movie of the same name, I was of course interested to read Valerie’s latest book. I had hoped it would be good, and happily have found that her first thriller, written with Sarah Lovett, has an intriguing plot with lots of surprising twists and great insight in to, and empathy for, the complex and sometimes troubled lives of undercover agents, women and men. No redactions this time around!IMG_0657IMG_0656IMG_0655

Have moved on to read The Affairs of Others, Amy Grace Loyd’s novel of modern manners set in a Brooklyn widow’s apartment house, with fascinating cross-currents among her and her tenants. Elegant and smooth sentence-making, with a plot that I know from the BEA Buzz Editors’ panel presentation on the book is going to soon turn toward the sensual and erotic. Knowing that’s to come, it’s all the more notable for its restraint in the first 70 pages. It’s worth adding that I live in a New York apartment building with lots of strange neighbors, so the subplots and side characters in the book are starkly real. The novel by Loyd, who is the fiction editor of byliner.com, will be out in early September.

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52

Jonah Lehrer’s Reputation Falls Another Rung, as Plagiarism is Seen Again

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As reported in the Daily Beast, Jonah Lehrer’s publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is going to ask bookstores to take How We Decide off their shelves and return the book to their warehouse for credit. The title will no longer be available from them. Having earlier pulled Lehrer’s book ‘Imagine,’ they’re now doing the same with HWD after seeing evidence of Lehrer’s plagiarism in it provided by journalist Michael Moynihan, who earlier exposed egregious authorial misdeeds by Lehrer. HMH says they see no problem with Lehrer’s first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, and they will keep it in print.

HMH’s latest announcement comes only two weeks after Lehrer appeared at a public venue for the first time since his reputation crashed, when he gave a paid address at the invitation of the Knight Foundation. He apologized during that talk and in a tweet, but it only raised more criticism of him, since he was paid $20,000 for the occasion.

Knight, which beforehand evidently had no problem with rewarding a plagiarist with an ample payday, should have known better. After the news of the hefty honorarium was disclosed, they backtracked as rapidly as they could, though they’d damaged their own reputation, as well.

A round-up of Lehrer coverage can be found at the Poynter.org website, at this link.

It’s been a sad shameful chapter for Lehrer who’s also lost magazine posts at the New Yorker and Wired. I hope Lehrer, 31 years old, can someday rehabilitate himself as a writer and a trusted journalist. He’s dug himself a big hole.

53

“Hubris”–10 Years Later, Run-up to the Iraq War Still Shadows the Media & the U.S.

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Tonight MSNBC will broadcast “Hubris: Selling the Iraq War,” narrated by Rachel Maddow, based on the 2006 book of the same name by Michael Isikoff and David Corn. Coming nearly ten years after the US invaded Iraq, on March 19, 2003, I’ll be watching with great interest.

Politics of TruthI retain vivid recall of how the Bush administration pushed the country, and as much of the world as it could hector along with them, into invading that country. 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 a notorious 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. 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 trip to Niger, where he was sent by the CIA to investigate the claim that Iraq had sought 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 diligently working on the manuscript.

Fortunately, when Joe retired from the State Department a few years before the war fever he had sat for a series of lengthy interviews with an interlocutor from State–a good custom at the 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. 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 I edited this draft, and Joe made key revisions to it. Meantime, we also 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, The Politics of Truth–A Diplomat’s Memoir: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity, 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. 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 TODAY . His most interesting TV appearance was on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” when KO 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 brandished the sheaf of talking points, like a sword. 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 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. I just heard from Joe today. He and Valerie sat for interviews with the MSNBC producers and they will also be watching “Hubris” tonight. I hope you will be, too. Please feel free to leave comments here about the program, this post, and this period in our recent history. Joe and Valerie played a significant role in these events, 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.

54

A Memoirist Can Go Home Again, and Not Get Shot

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A good article in the Saturday NY Times zeroes in on memoirist Domingo Martinez whose book The Boy Kings of Texas is one of five nonfiction finalists for the National Book Award, which will be handed out this Wednesday in a black tie ceremony here in New York City. Laura Tillman reports that Martinez’s book is a frank and raw portrait of his troubled young life and violent upbringing in Brownsville, TX. The dateline on the article is Brownsville, which is key, because Tillman had the opportunity be with Martinez on a recent trip he made to his hometown. Tillman writes,

“It was the first time Domingo Martinez had returned here in nearly 10 years, and it seemed as if nothing and everything had changed. His street, once rutted caliche, was now potholed pavement. Favorite stores had shuttered, but new mom-and-pops still sold tamales and tacos, and the 18-foot border fence between the United States and Mexico slashed rust brown through farmland panoramas.

Mostly, Mr. Martinez marveled at how the decade had worn on his grandmother Virginia Campos Rubio, softening that gun-slinging lioness into a slow-moving 85-year-old with a gentle smile. Ms. Rubio is one of the central characters in Mr. Martinez’s book. . . . In the book Mr. Martinez describes how an abusive, starvation-plagued childhood filled Ms. Rubio with rage, making her both loved and feared in the barrio where he grew up. She still keeps a pistol on her bed, alongside a copy of the Bible, a doll and a bag of cheese puffs.”

Martinez approached the visit with some trepidation, actually fearing possible reprisals from people he’s written about.

“’I was terrified about coming back to Texas,” Mr. Martinez said. “I was afraid that I was going to have a violent confrontation—that I’d get shot.’”

In short, not everyone is happy with the portrait he’s painted. Lecherous neighbors and abusive relatives populate the memoir’s pages. Mr. Martinez said the accounts themselves hadn’t been disputed, but that didn’t make the public airing of dirty laundry easier to bear. . . . No brawls took place on the trip. Instead Mr. Martinez was fed caldo de res, a beef-and-vegetable soup (prepared by his father) and mole with chicken and rice (prepared by his grandmother). He was applauded by more than a thousand students, visited by old teachers and given many congratulations. His immediate family supports the book, though he said it had been too painful for his parents to read. His grandmother doesn’t speak English, and Mr. Martinez said he hoped she wouldn’t be exposed to the book’s contents.”

I’m eager to read such an honest memoir, and more than happy for the author and the people involved in its publication. His literary agent is Alice Fried Martell, whom I mentioned on this blog when we both attended the Publishing People for Obama fundraiser last June. As an in-house acquiring editor I always enjoyed reading submissions from her clients. I learned from Keith Wallman, a longtime editorial colleague when we were both with Carroll & Graf, now at Lyons Press, that Alice sold the book to another editor there, Lara Asher. Lyons Press is a Connecticut house that has never before had a National Book Award nominee. There I’m friendly with publisher Janet Goldklang, who last year brought out James Kunen’s superb Diary of a Company Man: Losing a Job, Finding a Life.

The Boy Kings of Texas is nominated alongside books by fellow finalists Robert Caro, Anne Applebaum, Katherine Boo, and the late Anthony Shadid. I congratulate Mr. Martinez for the acclaim he’s receiving, and for his candor in exploring this personal terrain so movingly. I’m also happy for my publishing friends involved with such an exceptional book

 

55

A Beautiful Saturday at Brooklyn’s Green-wood Cemetery

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Green-wood Cemetery is a NYC landmark I’ve been keen to visit for years and last weekend an ideal opportunity arrived for my wife and son and myself to finally get there. The complex, 478 acres of rolling hills (making it more than half the size of Manhattan’s Central Park), big hardwood trees, and sparkling views of Manhattan and NY Harbor, was founded in 1838 as a non-denominational burial ground that also offered what was described then as a “rural” location. To the urbanites who conceived Green-wood*, it was important to create a pastoral, soothing place for mourners to say goodbye to their loved ones. The three of us discovered on Saturday that it is still pastoral and still a balm to the daily cares of city-dwellers.

Among its more than “560,000 permanent residents”–as Green-wood’s literature refers to those interred there–is Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-69), a New Orleans composer and pianist whose kinetic and tuneful music provided our nation’s first examples of such styles as ragtime and stride piano, amid a fusion of African, Haitian, and Cuban rhythms joined with Western music. I get periodic emails from Green-wood and had learned from one message that in the 1970s, a memorial figure then gracing Gottschalk’s burial plot had been vandalized and destroyed. Saturday had been announced as the unveiling of a new figure at his gravesite. Not satisfied to merely place it there, Green-wood planned a program of live piano music in the bright autumn air, played and presented by John Davis; a talk by Frederick Starr, former president of Oberlin College and author of the Gottschalk biography, Bamboula!; an introduction of the sculptors who made the new figure; and finally, the unveiling of “The Angel of Music.” All this was offered to the public free of admission charge.

We emerged from the ‘R’ subway stop at 25th Street and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, walking a block east toward 5th Avenue and Green-wood. Even before reaching the cemetery, we spotted a cool-looking complex of low buildings. Fenced around on all sides, this establishment was topped with a sign reading “McGovern Weir.” We wondered if it had been a business selling gravestones and monuments, though have since learned from the blog “Lost New York City” that it was for many years a florist. This handsome old wreck of a place was constructed in 1880, and was bought for $1.6M by Green-wood in April.

Walking past the Green-wood gatehouse we were met by a friendly young woman whom we’d later see again selling books from an outdoor kiosk. Here, she was handing out programs for the Gottschalk event. Ewan and I made it up the hill first where we saw the crowd gathered, with Kyle a bit behind taking pictures. Soon the three of us were settled comfortably on a grassy slope just a few yards from where a shiny black Steinway piano–lent by the Steinway company, whose forebears are buried at Green-wood–sat gleaming in the sun. Just the novelty of seeing a grand piano outdoors was exciting.

Green-wood President Richard J. Moylan quickly introduced John Davis, who, as he removed his gloves against the chill said he hoped we wouldn’t think he was pulling a pre-performance trick as Gottschalk was wont to do–carefully pulling off his white gloves one finger at a time as he sought to draw the attention of his audience to the very hands that were about to strike the piano keys. Davis launched in to his first Gottschalk selection, “Bamboula,” a sprightly piece based on a Creole song that warmed up the audience. One could hear shades of Chopin, as well as an anticipation of melodies that we’d later identify with Stephen Foster. Introducing “Danse Cubane,” he described Gottschalk as the “father of world music” and the first classical composer in America to break away from an exclusively European model. All this reminded me of what a relatively enlightened and open urban culture New Orleans was in the first half of the 19th century, with free people of color landing up there from the Caribbean and South America. Gottschalk, with a German-Jewish father and a Haitian mother, tapped into and reflected influences from the New World and the Old. Davis also amazed us when he described that in 1938–around 80 years after the peak of Gottschalk’s influence–Jelly Roll Morton wrote of “the Latin tinge” that pervaded his music, in a thread of influence that began with Gottschalk. Davis closed this part of the performance by evoking Mark Twain’s partiality toward the banjo and then playing one of Gottschalk’s signature compositions for solo piano, “The Banjo,” which thoroughly commingled African, Caribbean and European motifs. Here I’m glad to insert the front and back cover of an LP I acquired in the 1980s, with the music of Gottschalk played by Edward Gold. It still sounds great!

With these sounds still echoing in our ears, the program moved through Frederick Starr’s biographical presentation and the introduction of sculptors, Giancarlo Biagi and Jill Burkee. They bid us to walk a few yards along the slope to Gottschalk’s gravesite, ringed with a black wrought iron fence. As Mr. Moylan assured us even he had not yet seen the finished cast of “The Angel of Music,” we saw a pedestal in the middle of the grassy square topped with a figure enshrouded in a green tarpaulin. As we stood expectantly, hands reached out to shuck off the tarp, exposing an elegant bronze figure that looked as if it had set there for much longer than just this day. Applause and shouts of congratulations to the sculptors were heard as we all admired the delicate figure.

With that, we went back to our earlier spots as John Davis sat again at the piano, joined by clarinetist Jeffrey Lederer and vocalist April Matthis. The trio performed “Slumber on, Baby Dear,” a lullaby composed by Gottschalk. As a final round of clapping rang out, Richard Moylan invited everyone to Green-wood’s nearby chapel where refreshments and coffee would be served. We walked down the hill and around the property to the chapel. Along the way, we stopped at the book kiosk where maps of Green-wood are also available. There we asked the same young woman who’d greeted us earlier if she could possibly help us determine where we’d find the grave of one’s of Green-wood’s “permanent residents,”  Thomas C. Durant, who was instrumental in building the trans-continental railroad in the years immediately after the Civil War, and through his corruption became embroiled in the infamous Credit Mobilier scandal of the post-Civil War years. We’d learned about the real-life Durant from the TV series, “Hell on Wheels,” a fictional treatment of the building of the railroad, in which the Irish actor Colm Meaney plays the striving rail baron. One plot thread in the TV series–which is actually true to history, as far as I can tell–is that Durant had corruptly enriched himself at the expense of the US government and investors in the railroad, and very possibly ended his life in some disrepute. In the program, he runs his enterprise with a great deal of secrecy and intrigue, and again, this seems to conform with what I’ve read about the real Durant. Colm Meaney’s Durant is a scheming, self-interested, angry figure who, I daresay, most TV viewers come to distrust and even loathe. The friendly greeter-bookseller helped us locate Durant’s burial plot number and we made a note on our map, indicating where we ought to be able to find Durant’s memorial.

Following some coffee and a snack in the chapel, a vaulted space where mourners at Green-wood gather for indoor memorial services, we thanked our hosts and walked toward Section H, Lot 10400, in search of Durant. After passing some beautiful Civil War-era memorials, we hunted around for quite a while, to no avail. Growing frustrated, but no less determined, and refusing to leave disappointed, the three of kept walking and looking until I finally found a mausoleum bearing the legend, “T.C. Durant.” The form of the memorial was entirely in keeping with the Durant we’ve come to know from the program and our research. Sealed up tight behind a gated door flashing spear points, a stolid and impregnable edifice squats in the brow of a low hill, with trees looming protectively over it. Like the man interred there, it gives off no secrets and yields virtually no information. It doesn’t even use his full first or middle names, no year or birthplace is etched in the stone, and likewise no death date, though we’d read it was 1871. In the dappled light of mid-afternoon, we found it was even difficult to photograph the letters of his name mounted above the gate, and had to take many pictures before we got images that decently bear the legend of Durant’s initials and last name. The successful outcome to our searching left us with more questions than answers about the real Thomas Durant, and we will continue trying to learn about him what we can.

With that, we walked back toward the gatehouse and out on to the ordinary streets of a quiet Saturday in Brooklyn, grateful for the fine program celebrating Gottschalk put on this special day, and struck by the charm and splendor of Green-wood Cemetery, a bucolic urban retreat we hope to return to soon. I hope these photos, most of them taken by my wife Kyle Gallup, will give you some sense of the occasion. And, if you can, check out the music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a worldly musical pleasure.

*Green-wood shares the hyphen in its name with the New-York Historical Society, a particularly 19th century sort of spelling.
Please click through to see all photos.

56

What Were Editors & Executives at Dutton & Penguin Thinking?

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This post has been updated. New material in bold.

For more than a week I’ve been following coverage of the forthcoming book, No Easy Day, by the pseudonymous Mark Owen and a co-author, supposedly detailing the undercover mission Owen was part of that led to the death of Osama Bin Laden. While it seems that Penguin is going ahead with publication Sept. 4–and news organizations have been reporting on the book’s contents, after purchasing copies ahead of the official on-sale date–I am pretty much flabbergasted that editors and executives at Dutton, the Penguin division bringing out the book, evidently allowed the book to go to press even though the author had failed to submit the manuscript for the vetting required under his non-disclosure agreements with the military.

Reporter Husna Haq writes in the Christian Science Monitor, “According to the terms of Bissonnette’s non-disclosure agreements, he would have to submit any manuscript for pre-publication review and obtain permission before publishing it. . . . The book was not vetted by government agencies prior to publication. Disclosure of classified information is a crime and the US government may be entitled to all ‘royalties, remunerations, and emoluments’ from [the author]’s disclosures, the [Pentagon] letter warned.” To be clear, the Pentagon’s letter was addressed to the author, and not to his publisher. He stands to lose the most from all this, but if the Pentagon does rule in the next week that the book’s disclosures go beyond what he was entitled to reveal, and that they’re harmful to national security, Penguin will be under some pressure to cease distribution of the book. If they defy the government after that, they run some risk too, at least to their reputation, and maybe financially, as well.*

Eli Lake in the Daily Beast/Newsweek reports that a “spokeswoman for . . .  Dutton, said the book was vetted by a former special-operations attorney provided to the publishing house by the author. It was not, however, reviewed by the military, according to Pentagon spokesmen.”

This is really lame. So staff at Dutton decided to just accept the author’s representation that everything with the ms. was okay because he had shown it to an attorney of his own choosing who gave it a pass? If that is what happened, and multiple news accounts indicate it did, this was truly amateurish.

In my years editing and publishing topical nonfiction, I had a number of sensitive books that required careful handling with government agencies. One of them was On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence by Tyler Drumheller, former chief of CIA clandestine operations, Europe. Well in advance of publication in 2006, the author submitted the ms. to the agency’s Publications Review Board. After they read it, a two-way communication ensued and we edited the final ms. to accomodate their concerns. We didn’t necessarily like that this was necessary, but that was really beside the point. It had to be done, and it was. I should add, however, that even though the book was by implication and inference critical of the Bush administration, none of the edits requested had anything to do with political sensitivities; it was entirely about operations and maintaining security.

Let me make clear, so that there’s no doubt here. I’m not ‘siding’ with the government–I’m an editor and publisher by temperament and experience. I’m for information being shared as freely and openly as possible. But when an author has a prior legal agreement with any agency–be it governmental, corporate, or just between himself and another individual–as a publishing house you can’t just blunder forward, with some stupid ‘let the chips fall where they may’ attitude. The risks of non-compliance are too great.

Penguin/Dutton may get their big launch date this Tuesday, but they also may have sown an enormous hassle for themselves by failing to ensure that their author had had his manuscript properly vetted. I’d dare say Penguin has enough troubles with the Department of Justice right now, in the ebook agency pricing lawsuit, they didn’t need this one too.

* H/t Mike Shatzkin who suggested a helpful revision to this paragraph, clarifying that it’s the author who has the most exposure to the Pentagon’s claims. I had an email exchange with another publishing friend, who, feeling waggish, said maybe Dutton and Penguin planned all this, to get the book maximum publicity. Friends on Facebook, where I shared the first version of this piece have said the same thing. But I can’t conceive this is correct, though that may show my own risk-aversion and lack of imagination. I think the editing and publishing broke down and shows incompetence. Weirdly, publicity and sales of the book may even be fueled by the controversy, at least for a while, but if this has been a deliberate strategy, it seems a crazy, high-risk way of going about it all.

* H/t Mike Shatzkin who suggested a helpful revision to this paragraph, clarifying that it’s the author who has the most exposure to the Pentagon’s claims. I had an email exchange with another publishing friend, who, feeling waggish, said maybe Dutton and Penguin planned all this, to get the book maximum publicity. Friends on Facebook, where I shared the first version of this piece have said the same thing. But I can’t conceive this is correct, though that may show my own risk-aversion and lack of imagination. I think the editing and publishing broke down and shows incompetence. Weirdly, publicity and sales of the book may even be fueled by the controversy, at least for a while, but if this has been a deliberate strategy, it seems a crazy, high-risk way of going about it all.