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.

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A Great Music Video–Library Voices, Unplugged

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Library Voices is an absolutely great band from Regina, Saskatchewan. They’ve been through New York City twice on tour since I discovered them a bit more than a year ago. The video below is an acoustic version of their song “Traveler’s Digest,” from the website of Green Couch Sessions. Library Voices plays with a boisterous enthusiasm, whether unplugged as here, or with full compliment of amps and synths in tow. I hope you enjoy the video. Their albums are great, including the most recent, “Summer of Lust.”

Green Couch Sessions says  it’s “a place where music lovers come to listen. Found abandoned in an alley it has transformed into a hub of local and awesome music. Reviews, Interviews and anything else we want to talk about!”

Green Couch was also responsible for the Tracks on Track musical extravaganza this past June, when 10 bands, including The Matinee, and Shred Kelly, CBC Radio 3 host and author Grant Lawrence, plus a couple dozen fans of Canadian indie music traveled by rail from Vancouver to Toronto. I was unable to join that journey from west to east, but I met many friends from the trip in Toronto for the annual North by Northeast festival (NXNE). There’s lots of cool video from Tracks on Tracks online.
Special thanks to CBC Radio 3 pal Rebecca Gladney for posting “Traveler’s Digest” on Facebook tonight. //end//
 

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How (Not) to Make the Most of an Empty Chair

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Author Jonathan D. Moreno has a fascinating Op-Ed in Saturday’s NY Times, What the Chair Could Have Told Clint, offering unexpected insight into the use of an empty chair in an imagined dialogue, and the opportunity that Clint Eastwood missed when he gave his unscripted talk at the RNC Thursday night. Turns out that Moreno’s father, J.L. Moreno, was a psychotherapist who developed the use of an empty chair in therapeutic work, leading to use of the term ‘psychodrama.’

A technique that the younger Moreno points out Eastwood could have undertaken would have been to take a turn sitting in the empty chair himself–a suggestion that his father encouraged and which psychiatrists still make to their analysands, in hopes of having them truly comprehend the other in their midst. Moreno regrets

Mr. Eastwood wasted an important educational and therapeutic moment from which our deadlocked political system could benefit: putting himself in the role of the other person of whom he is critical and coming to understand that person’s point of view “from inside.”

Moreno also points to a missed opportunity from the 60s and the Vietnam era. His father offered the Johnson administration his professional services in a bid to conduct a psychodrama with LBJ and Ho Chi Minh. He laments that

Perhaps the deaths of so many tens of thousands of men, women and children could have been averted. But my father got a curt brushoff from Bill Moyers, then the White House press secretary, informing him that diplomacy was not a psychotherapy theater game. But of course any practitioner or historian of diplomacy knows that often that’s exactly what it is.

Moreno knows these fields very well, and I urge you to read his entire column.

According to the bio on his 2012 book, Mind Wars: Brain Science and the Military in the 21st Century, he has been “a senior staff member for three presidential advisory commissions and has served on a number of Pentagon advisory committees.” For the sake of full disclosure, I want to note that I am connected to Moreno through my friendship with Erika Goldman, his book editor at Bellevue Literary Press. In June, when I began consulting with Speakerfile–the Toronto company that connects conference organizers with authors, experts, and thought leaders who do public speaking–Erika recommended the platform to Jonathan and he became one of the first authors to sign up for Speakerfile during my tenure as a consultant for them.
//end//

 

 

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August Sign-off

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Bye, bye August, it was nice knowing ya.

The George Washington Bridge, aka The Great Gray Bridge, taken during a bike ride along the Hudson in upper Manhattan, August 30, 2012.

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#FridayReads, August 31–“Wilderness” by Lance Weller + Matt Taibbi

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#FridayReads, August 31–“Wilderness” by Lance Weller. This is a novel occurring post-Civil War, though set not in the south like Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain or The Sands of Pride by my own author William R. Trotter. Instead, this is set in 1899, more than thirty years after the end of the war, with a protagonist, Abel Truman, who is scratching out an existence for himself in the Pacific Northwest, on the edge of the western-facing ocean. Coming from Bloomsbury in September, I am reading and really enjoying an advance reading copy (ARC) I got at Book Expo America (BEA), back at the beginning of the summer.

Also reading Matt Taibbi’s investigative article in Rolling Stone, “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital,” full of revelations on how Mitt Romney manipulated Federal regulators in to allowing Bain & Company (as distinct from Bain Capital) to reclaim money that ought to have been returned to the Treasury.

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Judith Butler, Under Attack, Responds to her Critics

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I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, where our family’s dentist was Dr. Danny Butler, a gentle man whom I never minded having take care of my teeth. He was a pleasant-looking fellow, who in retrospect I remember looking a little bit like Jack Paar. When I moved to New York in 1985, Diane Butler, one of Danny’s daughters, was living in the city, studying dance. I met up with her in Gotham, and traded old Cleveland stories. Remembering that my family had run Undercover Books, Diane told me her about her smart sister who was starting to make waves in academia, and as an author. Her sister was Judith Butler–who went on to become well known as a philosopher, UC Berkeley professor, and author.

Soon after I got settled in New York I began working in publishing, and began hearing about Judith’s written work in the fields of women’s studies, gender, philosophy, and related topics.  One of her latest books is Parting Ways: A Jewish Critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press, 2012), in which she grapples with the ideas of earlier thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Edward Said, and Mahmoud Darwish, to arrive at her own critique of Zionism. She is a serious thinker, and not a hater.

I was intrigued this week to see that she’d written a personal essay for the website Mondoweiss, in which she responds to critics who object to her stated beliefs and opinions about the Middle East conflict. Right-wing elements in the Jewish community have objected to her for some time, but it seems the objections have become more vocal recently with the news that she would be the recipient of the Theodore Adorno Prize, awarded every three years by the city of Frankfurt, Germany.

I was struck by Judith’s cogent and temperate response to what I take to be inaccurate attacks by her critics. Below is the first paragraph of her rebuttal. If you find it reasonable and well-reasoned, I urge you to read her entire statement.

The Jerusalem Post recently published an article reporting that some organizations are opposed to my receiving the Adorno Prize, an award given every three years to someone who works in the tradition of critical theory broadly construed. The accusations against me are that I support Hamas and Hezbollah (which is not true) that I support BDS (partially true), and that I am anti-Semitic (patently false). Perhaps I should not be as surprised as I am that those who oppose my receiving the Adorno Prize would seek recourse to such scurrilous and unfounded charges to make their point. I am a scholar who gained an introduction to philosophy through Jewish thought, and I understand myself as defending and continuing a Jewish ethical tradition that includes figures such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. I received a Jewish education in Cleveland, Ohio at The Temple under the tutelage of Rabbi Daniel Silver where I developed strong ethical views on the basis of Jewish philosophical thought. I learned, and came to accept, that we are called upon by others, and by ourselves, to respond to suffering and to call for its alleviation. But to do this, we have to hear the call, find the resources by which to respond, and sometimes suffer the consequences for speaking out as we do. I was taught at every step in my Jewish education that it is not acceptable to stay silent in the face of injustice. Such an injunction is a difficult one, since it does not tell us exactly when and how to speak, or how to speak in a way that does not produce a new injustice, or how to speak in a way that will be heard and registered in the right way. My actual position is not heard by these detractors, and perhaps that should not surprise me, since their tactic is to destroy the conditions of audibility.

For my own part, I believe in co-existence and a two-state solution. In 2008, I lamented the return of Netanyahu to power in Israel, as I feared that his settlements policy would marginalize reasonable voices on all sides, and make a peaceful solution an ever-diminishing prospect. I  condemn intolerance, hateful rhetoric, and violence. I do not endorse all of Judith Butler’s positions, but I emphatically support her right of self-expression and applaud the decision of Frankfurt to award her the Adorno Prize.

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Sally Kohn, FOX News Contributor, Dismantles Paul Ryan’s Lies/w/ NYT Update

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Saturday Update: I shared Sally Kohn’s FOXNews.com scathing demolition of Paul Ryan on Thursday, and am glad to see that her column is continuing to be widely read and shared. Late Thursday, on Facebook Sally wrote that her piece had by then already had 46,000 shares/reads. Today, Charles M. Blow of the NY Times mentioned it up high in his column recapping the RNC. Blow quotes my fave sentence from her piece, the one I also excerpted below: 

Sally Kohn, a contributor to Fox News, said:
“Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.”
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Evening Update: Along with the critiques of Ryan’s speech that I cited below, Daily Kos has come up with an even more list, readable here. H/t friend and colleague Phil Gaskill.
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A number of excellent critiques of Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech have appeared since he gave it last night, such as this one by Jonathan Cohn on the New Republic website and Jonathan Bernstein’s takedown at the Plum Line, and Adele Stan’s at AlterNet.

My fave so far is this excellent column by FOX News contributor and Facebook friend Sally Kohn, itemizing all the lies and self-serving statements in Ryan’s speech. With Sally publishing the piece at FoxNews.com, it’s great to imagine many FOX readers being shocked at their conservative hero being knocked down several pegs. Among Sally’s best lines is this one:

“Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was  Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.”

I recommend you read the whole column and share it among your contacts. It’s an excellent rebuttal to the lying Romney/Ryan ticket.

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Mitt & his Minions, Sticking it to Coal Miners/w Romenesko update

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Second Update, two days later:  At Jim Romenesko’s media site, it’s reported that Murray Energy is suing a reporter in Charleston, WV, Ken Ward, Jr. for supposedly defaming CEO Bob Murray.  Murray is the boss in the two posts below, responsible for docking the pay of workers and who were pushed to attend a pro-Romney rally on Aug. 14. Ken Ward, Jr. had written:
“renegade coal operator Bob Murray played a major role recently in a campaign fundraiser in Wheeling, W.Va., for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney” and that “the question for Governor Romney, of course, is whether he thinks criminal behavior by coal companies, especially when it kills workers and damages the environment, is acceptable. If not, why is he buddies with Bob Murray?”
H/t Jim Romenesko 
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I posted the story below at about 2PM this afternoon, and see this evening that ThinkProgress has already pushed the story beyond what I knew earlier. Bob Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, the coal company that in some fashion compelled their employees to attend an Aug. 14 rally for Mitt Romney, and then docked workers’ pay for the day, is a prolific denialist of climate change, someone who claims that scientists are trying to make money off climate change.  That’s rich–a guy who’s made his own fortune digging and shipping coal is accusing other folks of trying to cash in on cleaning up his mess. 
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You may have recently seen this photo, taken near a coal mine in Beallsville, Ohio, with a story on Mitt Romney bashing President Obama’s energy policy.  Turns out, according to a segment broadcast by West Virginia radio show host David  Blomquist and a report by Sabrina Eaton in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, those miners were docked a day’s pay when the mine closed for the day so their employer, Murray Energy, could hand over their facility to the Republican candidate for the day. What’s more, the miners may have been compelled by their employer to attend the pro-Romney event–Blomquist heard from miners who told him this, while  the company denied it with a perfectly Orwellian statement: “Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore . . .told Blomquist that managers ‘communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend.’ He said the company did not penalize no-shows.”

Got that? “Attendance. . . was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend.” Aren’t people embarrassed to say stuff like this? According to Blomquist’s interview with Moore, which you can hear via this link to the show on radio station WWVA, the executive seems to want people to believe that after the event the company decided they wouldn’t enforce the rule, and would let any no-shows off the hook. Mitt and his minions commit crimes against language as handily as they exploit workers.

Eaton’s Plain Dealer article ends with this telling piece of information:

“Records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show that Murray Energy has contributed more than $900,000 to Republican candidates in the last two years.”

Please share this story widely as possible among your social networks–it’s emblematic of the whole campaign and why the fate of the middle class is at stake in this year’s election.

 

 

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