Two Books for St. Patrick's Day: the Irish in America, and an American in Ireland

With St. Patrick's Day upon us I have to toot the horn, or the uilleann pipes, for two books that every good son or daughter of Erin should know about--one that I published, one that I didn't. 


The first is Jay P. Dolan's sweeping history The Irish Americans. It surprised me to learn, when I began talking to Jay about the book he was planning, that no general history of Irish-Americans had been written, at least for a trade audience, since the 1960s. Any field of historical research throws up new insights over such a span of time, but social history and ethnic history in particular have boomed in the past few decades. Jay, who had written pioneering works in this area, was an ideal author for the the topic. He drew on his own research and wove it together with the other recent scholarship in a richly colorful narrative. 


The Irish Americans follows the Irish from their first arrival in the American colonies through the bleak days of the potato famine that brought millions of starving immigrants, right up to the election of JFK, the triumphant moment when an Irish American attained the White House. The book manages to evoke the ghastly ships crowded with men and women fleeing the potato blight; the backbreaking toil of Irish navvies digging the Erie Canal; vibrant life of Catholic parishes in cities like New York and Chicago; and the world of machine politics, where ward bosses often held court in the local saloon.  It's a grand tapestry of the Irish experience in America,  and I might add, the perfect gift for your Irish da, gran, or brother-in-law. Don't just take my word for it--the Wall Street Journal's excellent review is here. 

If you'd rather read about the old sod itself rather than its diaspora, you might seek out a lovely, more personal book, The Irish Way: A Walk Through Ireland's Past and Present. Full disclosure: the author is my Irish (-American) da, Robert Emmett Ginna. A few years ago he walked across the whole island, north to south. To stroll across the Irish landscape is to travel through time, so his account becomes a mosaic in which encounters with history and encounters with a profuse variety of present-day Irish characters are interspersed.  (Again, don't take my word for it. James Salter wrote, "Ginna takes you along with him into the ruined abbeys, the villages and towns, the great houses with their extraordinary histories, the talk-filled pubs, and, more than this, into the soul of the country.")


Pour yourself a Jameson's, or if it's not that hour, brew a cup of tea--in my family we ask for it "strong enough to trot a mouse across"--and settle in. 

When the Publisher Gets the Last Word, It's Often "Goodbye"

In my last post discussing why publishers, in general, don't fact-check their authors' work, I mentioned that it's accepted in the business that the author has ultimate say over the text. While an editor may request, urge, pester, or cajole an author to make a certain change (I have done all of the above), the author gets to say yes or no to it. But as one reader, Judith Ingracia, pointed out, that's not the whole story. 


Publishers have one final recourse if the author refuses to make a change we think is critical: we can refuse to publish the book. Boilerplate contract language requires the author to deliver a manuscript that is "satisfactory" to the house. So if the author digs in her heels, and refuses to revise something that the editor feels will make the book unmarketable--or perhaps, may make it libelous or otherwise legally questionable--or again, let's say, untruthful--the author and publisher may simply part ways. 


Judith asked, 

the book belongs to the author, but if the author wants a *published* book, he/she better listen to the publisher, at least that's what I gather. Am I mistaken in this view? 

Good question. My answer is, you're not mistaken, but the threat of cancellation is almost too blunt an instrument to use as a tool in editorial negotiations. canceling a book amounts to using the "nuclear option," laying waste to the whole project and vaporizing the time everyone has invested in it. (Quite likely vaporizing the publisher's money, too, as on-signing advances can be difficult to recoup.) I'm happy to say this situation has arisen very few times in own experience, but it has happened--it's very unpleasant for all parties involved. 


In general, editors will sigh and let an author get away with some pretty misguided writing before they try reject a manuscript--threatening termination is so traumatic to an author that I at least rarely mention it unless it's a real possibility. In fact, with nonfiction, one would rarely cancel a book for mere differences of editorial opinion: it would most likely be over issues of veracity, accuracy, or legal liability. 

(National Lampoon cover from January 1973, 

photograph by Ronald G. Harris from a concept by Ed Bluestone)

Should Publishers Trust Their Authors? or, Hiroshima Mon Cul

[Thanks to the Huffington Post, which ran this piece on their lively Books page today. You may see future posts of mine there from time to time.]

The kerfuffle of the week has been the news that an acclaimed new book, The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino, had to be withdrawn by its publisher following the revelation that important details in it, including the testimony of a supposed eyewitness source, were apparently fabricated. 

As happened in earlier cases of authors doctoring the truth, some readers have raised questions about "quality control" problems in publishing, and asked, don't publishers fact-check their products?

Well, no, actually. A major difference between book and magazine or newspaper publishing is that publishers don't have fact-checkers on staff, and never have. This is not, as some cynics might suppose, because book publishers don't care about accuracy as long as a book sells. It's partly because, unlike those media where advertisers support (or used to) a large editorial staff, book publishing has been a far leaner enterprise (or as some would say, a cottage industry).  But a more important reason, I believe, is that in book publishing, unlike journalism, the content has traditionally belonged to the author, not to the house.

This is reflected in book contracts, where copyright is typically retained by the author; more to the point, it's firmly established in publishing culture that you never make editorial changes without an author's consent. As an editor you may lean pretty hard on an author to make revisions you feel are necessary (Gordon Lish's interventions with Raymond Carver being the extreme example)--but ultimately, "the book belongs to the author," and to change it or not is his or her prerogative. With that prerogative goes, inevitably, a greater responsibility for the quality of what you write.

Now, any good publisher wants to produce the best books possible. While we don't have fact-checkers, we have copyeditors who go through manuscripts with a fine-tooth comb, after the editor has already worked with the author to get the book in shape. I have done my own fact-checking from time to time when an author's statement seemed questionable, and the best copyeditors will frequently check sources as well as spelling and punctuation. Furthermore,  any manuscript that might raise issues such of defamation or privacy goes through a careful legal review. In the end, though, we have to trust our authors.

I don't take on a work of nonfiction, especially a controversial or even unconventional one, without satisfying myself, perhaps just at gut level, that the author is presenting the truth responsibly. But I have to recognize that I can be fooled. Reading about the case of Charles Pellegrino, who supposedly produced--or at least, said he had--documentation of his bogus souce (who was a real person, but apparently not present at the event he claimed to witness), I suspect I might well have accepted the author's account.

Once we have decided to trust an author, we usually give him or her the benefit of the doubt on matters of fact just as on matters of style or argument. Of course, this leaves us vulnerable. But in book publishers' defense, the impulse to trust the people you work with is a hard one to overcome. Look at the cases of Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, or Jayson Blair, whose fabrications sailed through the presumably gimlet-eyed fact-checking operations of the Washington Post, New Republic, and New York Times respectively.

(Photo of the Bocca della Verita, or Mouth of Truth, at the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome, via Wikimedia Commons. It's said that if you tell a lie with your hand in the mouth of the sculpture, it will be bitten off. Maybe every publisher needs one of these?)

Introducing a Terrific Young Historian

In my first post on this blog I promised not to use the word "excited" more than once a month. But sometimes there's no other word to describe how an editor feels about a book. I've just published a new work of history that quickened my pulse from the first time I read the proposal: Rawn James, Jr's. Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Huston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation. This book tells one of the most important, most dramatic, yet least known stories in American history, and makes it not only exciting, but deeply poignant.

     When we think of the Civil Rights movement, we tend to think of the 1950s and 60s, and scenes made famous by television-the bus boycott, the March on Washington, the Freedom Rides. But some of the most compelling, most dramatic, and most  important victories took place long before then, in America's courtrooms, where two determined lawyers waged a decades-long battle against racial injustice.

     The men were Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, attorneys for the NAACP. From the 1930s to the 50s, they crisscrossed the country, going from backwoods county jails to the Supreme Court to fight for the legal rights of African Americans.  In the Deep South, they sometimes slept in their car because no hotel would give them a room. They were heckled, threatened, and sometimes in danger of their lives. But in those days bigotry was not confined to the backwoods--it went all the way to the nation's capital. When Charles Houston argued his first case before the Supreme Court, one justice turned his chair to face the wall so he wouldn't have to look at a "colored" lawyer.

     What the justices could not ignore was the razor-sharp arguments, and the relentless preparation, of Houston, Marshall and their colleagues. Case by case, slowly, methodically, but relentlessly, they dismantled the legal principle of "separate but equal" that had kept blacks as second-class citizens even after they emerged from slavery.  Over some  two decades, they laid the groundwork for the landmark Supreme Court ruling, Brown vs. Board of Education, that outlawed segregation in public schools and led to the collapse of Jim Crow. Without Houston and Marshall, there would be no Barack Obama. 

     These two great advocates are also a great pair of characters. Charles Houston was a stern, buttoned-down, no-nonsense guy. As a dean of Howard Law School, he turned it from a rinky-dink night school into a rigorous institution whose mission was to turn out the lawyers that could meet the white elite on equal terms. Marshall was his brightest student and his protégé, but in personality his opposite. Thurgood was casual. He loved to lean back and tell off-color jokes over a glass--or maybe a bottle--of bourbon.  The two complemented each other perfectly. In effect, Thurgood became a surrogate son to Charlie. Sadly, Houston worked himself to death and died just before the Brown case, the one he'd been building toward, came to the Supreme Court. But Marshall did his mentor proud: not only did he win a historic victory in Brown, he would become the first African-American to join the Supreme Court.

     Rawn James Jr. is a lawyer himself, and an heir to the great legacy laid down by Houston, Marshall, and those that followed. He tells this story with gusto, with a great sense of pacing and rhythm, and it truly comes to life in his pages. This is Rawn's first book but I'm sure it will not be his last. It's the debut of a dynamic new historian-and, yes, I'm excited by it.

(You can see Rawn talking about his book below, or visit his website, www.rawnjames.com, for more about Root and Branch.)