Well-Read Life™

Reading Dickens aloud as Dickens did

Be careful what you say to publishers.

Our friends at The New York Public Library made the fortuitous mistake a few months ago of mentioning a treasure in their archives: the only known copy of A Christmas Carol that Charles Dickens had made for himself to hold when he performed on stage. It is known as the prompt copy.

We didn’t even know then what a prompt copy was (an annotated reading copy for the stage), or that Dickens had performed his books (big time, including a major U.S. tour in 1867). But that was all we needed to hear to know that publishing Mr. Dickens’s prompt copy was in order.

Common sense and several colleagues told us it would take to least another year to go through all the steps before we could publish such a prize. We cast all such sound advice aside.

 After all, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in just a few short, fevered weeks—much as Robert Louis Stevenson did his Jekyll and Hyde. Surely Levenger Press could publish The Prompt Copy of A Christmas Carol for our customers, in time for Christmas 2009. After all, this is a year that cries out for some Tiny Tim-style cheer. And so we have.

One of The New York Public Library staff members who made it possible was Isaac Gewirtz. Isaac is the curator of the Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, which houses the Dickens treasures. He told me how Dickens had his prompt copy made so that he could cross out sections and write in the margins, including stage cues to himself.

Then Isaac showed me the book and offered to let me hold it. Out of reverence, I declined. But I took this picture of Isaac cradling this one-and-only book in his curatorial hands.

Isaac, who holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance History from Columbia University, wrote the marvelous introduction for our book. After we read it, we wanted still more. So we interviewed him with some questions we thought our customers might ask, too. Here are excerpts of our conversation.

Why is Dickens’s work as a performer so little known among readers, even many of his fans?

If much of the general public is not aware of his performances, it’s probably because they weren’t taught about it in school. For quite some time now (judging from the students I encounter), high schools have not taught history with much enthusiasm, much less tried to acquaint students with the historical context in which authors lived and wrote. Recent film adaptations of A Christmas Carol have had commercial success, as have Broadway productions. But, not surprisingly, television commercials for the films don’t talk about Dickens’s performances, and I don’t know if the promoters of the theater performances include statements about them in their playbills.  It might make no difference if they did. Most people, naturally, are more interested in how a work speaks to them than in how it spoke to previous generations.

One reason that Dickens’s performances might be ignored by those who could tell us about them is that they know we like to put each other in boxes, even (maybe especially) the famous. A writer is a writer, a musician a musician, etc., though literary history is filled with instances of great writers who also pursued other arts or sciences at a very high level. In regard to Dickens especially we should break this habit, since his performances teach us a great deal about his attitude toward his writings.

His performing was radical for its day, as you note. What would be the present-day equivalent?

It wasn’t his manner of performing that was radical, it was the fact of it. Dickens “became” his characters, people said, but so did other good actors of his day. In truth, we would probably find his and their style too histrionic.

Authors did not perform their works before the general public. I don’t know if we can conceive of a present-day equivalent simply because the breaking of boundaries is now an expected feature of the artistic persona. Dickens did not perform in order to shock, but to make money, though the adulation he received on these occasions became addictive, and no doubt helped motivate him as well.

Do you read aloud from the prompt copy?

I often use the prompt book in presentations to elementary, high school, undergraduate, and graduate classes, as well as to non-academic visitors to the Berg. I occasionally read passages aloud to show how Dickens changed the original text, although I wouldn’t call those readings performances.

Are there excised portions you wished he'd left in?

This is impossible to say, since he would sometimes read excised passages. The complicated sentences that he rewrote for performance probably remained in their simpler form, but I wouldn’t second-guess his judgment about what needed to be rewritten for the stage. He knew how to seduce an audience.

What is the major difference between performing and reading A Christmas Carol?

When we read any novel or short-story, our imagination is intimately manipulated by the images of the characters we meet; the scenes they walk through, whether in streets or fields; the rhythms of descriptive passages and of dialogue; and the tension and release of plot development and character revelation.

With a writer like Dickens, the narrative voice also becomes a character—perhaps the most important—in our imaginative consciousness. This means that if the work is to be performed for an audience that already knows it, the performer needs to speak in a voice that each audience member can accept as the one that they heard in their heads and have come to trust and love.

The dialogue of A Christmas Carol is probably less challenging for the performer; hearing Scrooge or Crachit speak in a voice somewhat different from the one we imagined is not an affront. But Dickens’s voice is that of an old friend. This means that the performer has somehow to embody the wisdom and compassion of our friend’s narrative voice so that we accept the new one as our own.

An audiobook recording of A Christmas Carol, which is already a short book, still takes about three hours. Dickens, through successive edits in his prompt copy and more than 100 public performances, cut his gem down to 85 minutes, including a five-minute intermission. This may make the prompt copy the most authorized of all book abridgements in history.

And it makes the resulting script, which we print in the book immediately following the facsimile, about as perfect a piece as we know to read aloud to others. Modern performers can read knowing they are in the hands of a master, and carrying on a great tradition in storytelling.

Please do let me know what your experiences are like if you perform A Christmas Carol—whether to one listener, or a thousand.

Also—is there a living author whom you’d like to see perform his or her work? Tell me about it. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

Are we prejudiced against books just when we need them most?

There is book learning and then there is real-world learning, and we tend to think that learning in the real world is more valuable and genuine. As Ishmael boasted in Moby-Dick, “A whale ship was my Yale college and my Harvard.”

But I believe this is prejudice of the worst kind. Even those of us who love books frequently underestimate their power to teach us nearly anything we might want, or need, to know.

I’m one of my own converts. Books taught me the most unlikely of lessons: the counterintuitive physical movements required to safely enjoy three water sports. This is just the kind of learning we might think would come only through doing.

Here’s what I learned not through doing but by reading first—and then doing.

Lesson  No. 1: If you run out of air, exhale

Like many other humans, I’m certified to breathe pressurized air under water. In fact, being a slow learner, I got SCUBA certified twice—first with the NAUI method and then with the alternative PADI method. Whenever I learn a new sport, I make it a point to ask myself, “What’s the absolutely worst thing I could do?” (This is a pertinent question in my case since I do not possess what Tom Wolfe would call the Right Stuff, and must do everything wrong first.)

As it turns out, the worst thing you can do while scuba diving is precisely what would be quite natural if you found yourself under water with no more air. Your instinct would be to hold your breath and try to get to the surface as quickly as possible. If you’re scuba diving and you do this, you might well get yourself killed.

When you breathe under water, you’re breathing compressed air. It feels like a normal breath, but it’s not, and if you rise to the surface while holding your breath, this air will expand and your lungs can burst. Funny thing is, you won’t feel it because your lungs don’t have nerves.

I’m happy to report that I didn’t learn this by doing. I learned it by reading my scuba books.

(In case you’re curious about what you should do in such an emergency, after your last breath of pressurized air, gently hum as you make your way up to the surface, to make sure bubbles escape from your mouth. I hasten to add that I haven’t actually tested this, nor do I recommend you do, but if you’re interested in knowing how even the most experienced divers can meet or escape disaster, I recommend the riveting and true book Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson.)

Lesson No. 2:  If you want to come up, stay down

After enjoying kayaking for many years, I decided I should learn how to do an Eskimo roll. That’s the neat maneuver of capsizing and then righting yourself. It’s a necessary maneuver for whitewater kayakers, which I am not (see lack of Right Stuff, above), and a nice trick to know for ocean kayakers, which I am.

Now I ask you, if you found yourself upside down in a kayak, what is the first thing you’d want to do? If you said, “Get my head out of the water,” you would be quite normal. And also quite wrong.

Turns out there are three necessary actions to perform:

1. Position your paddle at 90 degrees to your boat, with the blade near the surface (you’re under water, remember).
2. Pull down strongly while flicking your hips.
3. Keep your head as close to the submerged deck of your boat as possible, to keep your center of gravity low.

The surprise is that you’ll only be able to roll back up if your head is the last thing that comes out of the water and into the blessed air.

I learned this not from a book exactly, although plenty of kayaking books describe it, but in a catalog produced by a San Diego kayak maker named Seda.

Only by knowing what I was supposed to do and why—and then practicing in my pool with my sons taking turns rolling their flailing father back up if he didn’t manage it himself—did I succeed in learning how to do an Eskimo roll. Then I helped them learn to roll, and we’ve since been able to impress our friends and exasperate their ever-suffering mother.

Lesson No. 3: If you need a life raft, read a book

It seemed like a good idea at the time. My deranged adventure buddy Rob had already gotten me into cycling, and I’ve jogged all my life, so why not try a triathlon? “All it adds is swimming,” he said. And I’m from San Diego, and a pretty good swimmer.

Well, I learned why not the hard way. In my first triathlon, with the swim in the ocean near my home in Delray Beach, Florida, I nearly died.

Before I made it to the first buoy, I was gasping like a wild-eyed wildebeest. All these guys were kicking and clobbering me. I flopped over on my back and just tried to keep afloat.

I would have signaled to one of the lifeguards leisurely paddling their boards nearby, but the effort of waving my arm was too much. I was just concentrating on gulping air and moving in the general direction of finishing. I prayed the other swimmers wouldn’t splash too much water into my panting mouth as they went by.

It was scary as well as mortifying, since I thought I could swim well enough. I made a promise to myself that, should I live, I would never, ever do this again. 

After my near-death experience, someone told me about a swimming course called Total Immersion. I Googled it and found they sold a book with the laughable title Triathlon Swimming Made Easy, by Terry Laughlin. It reminded me of something the Coyote would order from Acme.

But order it I did, and then I read it with amazement. It was a revelation, and is now one of my favorite how-to books of all time, right up there with Strunk & White.

One of the counterintuitive things I learned in the little book reminded me of Eskimo rolls: Don’t try to lift your head out of the water. That will just force your body down. Instead, allow the water to push up your head so you can breathe. Voilà!

I’ve since done more than a dozen triathlons, and I thank Terry Laughlin for his talented on-the-page coaching of misfit swimmers like me.

Bonus Lesson No. 4—the most important of all

It should be obvious from the three tales above that I am no athlete. What I am is inquisitive, stubborn, and a lover of books. But even I have to remind myself when I’m curious about something that there must be a book for that. Are you like that too?

The smartest thing our species has done is to become literate, and the best of literacy is contained in books. Books, it turns out, have all the Right Stuff.

Isn’t it time to slough off our age-old prejudice about book learning and revel in it? Shouldn’t we expect to learn surprising truths from past authors, and critical new truths from the writers of today?

In The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, the author gives a startling and disturbing account of plastics throughout our oceans. Understanding our oceans and their role in our survival is just one of many critically important things our species must learn quickly—things we cannot learn from real experience ourselves, but only from the virtual experiences made possible by our literacy.

My question for you

How about you—have you learned something from a book that you thought you could learn only from personal experience? I’d love to hear.  Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

Stealing souls and saving history

Each time I have visited China there seems to be a new country—new roads, new factories, new cars, new restaurants. The new things, which amaze even the locals, are typically the first topic of conversation over dinner.

But where is its history?

Uncovering Lost China is one of the things we’ve been working on this year at Levenger Press.  The result is the largest book we’ve ever published, The Inmost Shrine: A Photographic Odyssey of China, 1873, by John Thomson.

Mim Harrison, our editor of Levenger Press, tells you why we felt his photographic history was so important now. Then I have a question for you…

—Steve

If you know Levenger Press, you know that often our books look back with fresh forewords. Our collection of E. B. White’s essays was one such look back, to White’s uncanny observations 50 years ago of the future. They were so appropriate for today that we asked the futurist Paul Saffo to write the new foreword. For The Inmost Shrine, we asked Michael Meyer,  a young and current chronicler of Chinese culture, to write the foreword to this old text. Michael is the author of The Last Days of Beijing, and has borne witness as the new China layered itself over the old.

This was the first time Levenger Press would look back through photographs rather than words, and we felt it was the right time to do so. This was the year, after all, that Kodachrome officially faded from the picture, eclipsed by the wonders of digital photography. We would be showcasing an even older, lost-to-history form of photography with Thomson’s black and white images.

Appropriately enough, we landed at the jewel-like museum that now preserves the legacy of the founder of Kodak, the George Eastman House.

A Scotsman looks into a soul

George Eastman was a collector of rare books, and the volumes containing John Thomson’s photographs of China are among them. Thomson was a Scottish explorer and an adventurer, and he dared to steal the souls of his subjects. That’s how many of the Chinese viewed his bizarre activity with his ungodly-looking equipment. And yet they let him take their picture anyway.

 Perhaps they knew that in stealing their souls, he was giving them their history.

Here is the schoolboy with his long queue and the musicians with their mysterious instruments, there is the mendicant priest and the Buddhist abbot. We see what a lady uses to make up her face, the way gunpowder tea is rolled (by feet) and how silk is reeled (in great secrecy).

Thomson did something else remarkable for his time: he created a work of photojournalism. A short essay accompanies each picture, and it’s as much through Thomson’s words as the images that this past comes to life. Otherwise, we would have no way of knowing that the men bent intently over baskets of coins in one photograph are not counting the coins but schroffing them—testing them to see if they’re counterfeit.

Reflection of a time and place

The Inmost Shrine is an enhanced facsimile of George Eastman’s original book. The Eastman House painstakingly re-created it through digital remastering. Thus new technology was applied to old, and yielded a most happy result. We were able to enlarge some of Thomson’s photographs for the first time in print, revealing hidden detail.

Thomson was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a part of the Empire era. His viewpoint reflects his time and place in the world. We may not always agree with his perspective, but this, too, is part of the history.

For me the secret beauty of The Inmost Shrine lies beyond its intimate photography and gold trim and red and gold binding. This is not history that’s been rewritten; it’s history as it was becoming so, uncensored and utterly forthright. It is a book that gives history back its soul.

—Mim

And now to you, dear reader. Are there books you treasure because of the way they present history? I’d love to know what they are. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

—Steve

You choose: the best novel of the past 60 years

Choose the best book of award-winning fiction of the past 60 years? Impossible!  Yes, but let’s do it anyway. The National Book Foundation, keeper and presenter of the National Book Awards, invites you to step up to the challenge.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the National Book Awards, so the board of directors (of which I am the weakest link) decided we should ask all living winners, finalists and judges to look back at the National Book Award fiction winners over the past 60 years and—somehow—come up with the best six books.

Then, emboldened by our own audacity, we thought: Why not invite the American public to vote on the one single book among these six that would be elected as (gulp) the best novel of the past 60 years?

Of course it’s an outlandish notion. Just how preposterous can be seen by the books that didn’t win the National Book Award and thus were ineligible, including the likes of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1958), and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).

Furthermore, look at the pantheon of National Book Award-winning authors that would have to be winnowed down: Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Wallace Stegner, John Updike, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Susan Sontag, Cormac McCarthy, and that’s just for starters.  

That this is an impossible task is true, but it’s no more impossible than what the judges of the National Book Awards do every year when 300 or more mostly marvelous works are submitted for the annual award for fiction, from which five finalists must be selected, and then an ultimate winner. (The same scenario repeats itself for nonfiction and other categories.) We expect—and get—the impossible every year for the Awards.

The six finalists and their surprise

So by the same inscrutable means, over this past summer 140 writers who were winners, finalists or judges played the game and narrowed the legacy of luminaries down to a measly six. It worked, but resulted in a big surprise. Here’s the list of the final six:

1.    John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever
2.    Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
3.    William Faulkner, The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
4.    Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
5.    Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
6.    Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

And here’s the surprise, as described by executive director Harold Augenbraum:

“When we tabulated the results of the writers’ poll, four of the top six books were collections of short stories. It may be that writers almost all teach now, and they use the best short stories in their classes so they are regularly exposed to their brilliance. It may be that collected stories represent a lifetime of work, and so are in a different category from novels. In any case, the authors of the six books selected truly represent the best of American literature in the past sixty years.”

Harold knows better than anyone the folly of what we do—and also why we should do it:

“We realize, of course, that to select the best of any work of art is, even under the best conditions, an absurd exercise. But our purpose is to bring back awareness of many of these titles to a broader public, to get people to read ‘the good stuff’ from the past sixty years. The first step is to get people to talk about them, and what better way than to get them to argue, to politic, even to electioneer about which of them is the best?”

More reason to vote (hint: black tie)

Vote at the link below and you become eligible to win two tickets to the National Book Awards Gala dinner and ceremony, where the winner will be announced. It’s held at the swank Cipriani’s in Manhattan, with about 800 of the Who’s Who of American publishers, authors and agents all in black tie. (I’ll be there, too, at the Levenger table.) The winner will also receive two free nights at the New York Marriott hotel.

Of course the other reason you should vote is because it will encourage you to read some or all of these books. That’s just what my book group, The Mules, is going to do. We’re reading all six over three months, this October through December.

So here’s the link. I encourage  you to vote and thereby enter the contest; the deadline is October 21^st.  Mostly I encourage you to join me in reading these authors and be taken lands away.

And as always, I welcome your comments. (Translation: tell me who you voted for.) Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

What not to read this summer

This summer, as we feel the heat of the Great Recession, many of us are sweating about finances. My doctor says he’s never seen so much stress in his patients. And so the usual summer-reading suggestions of escape fiction would seem to hold special sway. What a fine summer to let books be our frigates and take us lands away.

Yet as enjoyable and worthy as novels can be, I’d like to suggest something different. I suggest that you read history and biography.

Why read history on the beach?

First, superbly written histories and biographies can be every bit as entertaining as formula page-turners. History can be the ultimate escape, actually, for it does not merely take us lands away, but to real lands and real times. As my favorite historian David McCullough says, histories give us time travel just as airplanes give us geographic travel. They make the past as interesting as it actually was.

The second reason has to do with perspective. The ideas of the great philosophers, says the contemporary philosopher Tom Morris, and the paths of prior civilizations and prior lives, implant in the eyes of readers new lenses through which to view our own place and time. Perspective is a kind of mental sunblock that, provided we apply it properly, prevents us from getting burned by past mistakes.

Even with my own limited reading of history, I’ve been awed by the parade of human misery: war, famine, disease, genocide, starving refugees, economic calamity. My reading has left me with the perspective that as bad as things are right now, our own time is relatively safe and secure for most Americans.

All it takes is reading a few biographies to learn that even those who seemingly had the most charmed of lives have typically confronted profound obstacles. Admiral Horatio Nelson, perhaps the most famous of England’s naval heroes, battled chronic seasickness. Teddy Roosevelt suffered from severe childhood asthma. Al Jolson, the “world’s greatest entertainer,” suffered debilitating stage fright. Churchill overcame a lisp and “black dog” depression to become one of the world’s greatest orators and leaders. The actor James Earl Jones, one of the most famous voice-over artists of our time, stuttered.

“Overcoming adversity is such a common part of achieving personal success that it’s nearly a universal companion,” says Tom Morris.

And here’s some bright financial news you won’t read in The Wall Street Journal: the nation’s stock of amazingly good histories and biographies has never been higher. This asset—far off any balance sheet drawn up for our economy—is a national treasure, if only we’d lift the lid of our communal treasure chest and dig in.

But who has the time these days to read history?

What would Clifton do?

The late famous advisor on American reading, Clifton Fadiman, used to say that the time to read the newspaper is when you’re walking by the newsstand. I shudder to think what the author of The Lifetime Reading Plan would say if he were back with us now. (He passed away in 1999.)

He would see how virtual newsstands have infiltrated our lives like some sci-fi plague. It’s harder to walk past the newsstand when it’s in our bedrooms and bathrooms on 24-hour news channels, when it’s forced on us at airport gate areas and wired in front of our noses in the airplanes. Worse, our phones have morphed into Web-enabled, emailing-spitting demons. Having chewed off the leashes that used to tether their predecessors to kitchens walls and office desks, our so-called smart phones yap incessantly in our pockets and purses.

If Clifton looked around today he’d see a nation of people gazing into their hands and the phones they hold, appearing for all the world like they were praying to fetishes.

Try sipping the good stuff

The truth is, most of what’s dished up as news isn’t that important. News and its variants is mostly distraction. History, on the other hand, distills the past into its meaningful essence.

News is grape juice; history is wine.

Now before you run me out of town, I’m not saying to give up completely on your news and captivating social networks. Giving up news is like giving up coffee or single- malt Scotch. As Mark Twain said, “Habit is habit, not to be thrown out the window but walked down stairs a step at a time.”

I have this simple suggestion: try cutting back this summer. Be your own parent and think of ways you might limit your own TV and computer time. Make up rules for how frequently you’ll check email, newsfeeds, Facebook and the like. Perhaps it will help if you train your mind so that every time you see the word “news” it substitutes “noise.”

Then give yourself a present: buy or borrow three books of history or biography and put them in your Library of Candidates—that library you build of books you think you want to read. This summer, commit to starting each of the three candidate books you’ve selected. Promise yourself to read to page 50; if you’re not hooked by then, fine—give up and switch to another history book candidate.

A tasting menu for you

To help out, I asked a few people in the know for their suggestions of ravishingly good histories.

Try Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time, suggests Harold Augenbraum, the executive director of the National Book Foundation. This 2006 winner of the National Book Award tells the story of the people who stayed in the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and didn’t flee to California. “It uncovers the quiet despair and heroism of a generation of forgotten individuals,” says Harold.

Scott Eyman, the book editor of the Palm Beach Post, says Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup is very good. “And I just finished a good book about the German and Austrian composers who washed up in L.A. after Hitler took over: A Windfall of Musicians by Dorothy Lamb Crawford,” he adds.

Morgan Entrekin, the chairman and CEO of Grove/Atlantic publishers, recommends The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow. “This book tells the story of the shift of the capital markets from London to New York and the rise of Wall Street, through the story of the Morgan bank from its founding in mid-nineteenth century London through the glory years under JP Morgan and up to the end of the 1980s. The book won the National Book Award and has become a classic.”

Morgan also recommends A Splendid Exchange, by William Bernstein. “This book looks at the history of mankind through the history of trade. Starting with the earliest evidence of trade in prehistoric times through the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Mesopotamian basins, on up through the Age of European exploration and colonization to today’s globalization, trade has played a central role in the political, social, technological, cultural and economic development of human civilizations.”

To these expert picks, I’ll add three of my all-time favorites: William Manchester’s little gem, A World Lit Only by Fire, about Magellan and the medieval mind; Barbara Tuchman’s The First Salute, about the role of the Caribbean in the American revolutionary war; and A. Scott Berg’s captivating biography, Lindbergh.

 I can also report being in deep book love with Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire, another National Book Award winner. It’s about a boy’s bittersweet memories of Cuba before and immediately after Castro.

And (excuse my shameless commerce here) I’m happy to report that our own cache of Levenger Press offerings includes histories of three of the great ones: Lincoln, Churchill and Kennedy  (who was influenced by both Lincoln and Churchill).

Let me know your thoughts, dear reader, if you decide to turn to history books this summer, and what you discover. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

The best how-to book turns 50

A friend of mine has begun a new career writing for an online financial newsletter. He came to me for advice, knowing that I’ve been a commercial writer, and I passed on the recommendation my journalism instructor gave to my class in 1977.

My instructor was a fulltime newspaperman who taught journalism in an extension course at the University of California, San Diego, where I had just graduated. He held aloft a copy of The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White and said, “Buy it, read it, memorize it.”

Then he set the slim book back down on the table and went on with his talk, of which I remember nothing else.

Uncharacteristically, I actually did read the little book. And became so entranced that I did, indeed, practically memorize what is affectionately known among writers and editors as “Strunk & White.” As it turned out, I would be teaching the little book myself just two years later, as a graduate teaching assistant at the very place where the book was born: Cornell University.

And so I pass the good word to you, dear reader, if you like to write: “Buy it, read it, memorize it.” The advice is as useful today, as this nearly ideal how-to book celebrates its 50th birthday, as it was a generation ago.

Writing, as most everyone who does it will agree, is hard work. Last month I had the honor of sitting on a panel at David Allen’s Getting Things Done Summit with one of this country’s most accomplished journalists, James Fallows. He told the audience that writing was still hard for him, yet he did it every day, as his many articles and bestselling books can attest.

How a practically perfect writer wrote

E.B. White himself, who may have come closest to being the perfect writer, had a devil of a time traveling from his initial draft to his final—even with a work as (deceptively) simple as Charlotte’s Web.

Cornell archivist Elaine Engst explains what it was like to examine all the drafts of Charlotte’s Web: “…the first draft is completely different from the finished book. What’s wonderful about looking at his drafts is that you see that even for somebody who was pretty close to a perfect writer, how much work went into his books: a ton of it.”

Yet eclipsing White’s gifts to young readers is his enduring gift to writers of all ages. His spare additions to his old English professor’s classroom guide, abiding by the now-famous precept “omit needless words,” produced something as close to the perfect how-to book ever published.

(Brief pause here for a commercial break: Have you read Levenger’s very own E. B. White work? We unearthed some of his early essays from The New Yorker and published them as a freestanding book for the first time. We were awed both by what he said and how he said it. Check out Notes on Our Times if you haven’t already. It’s uncannily timely for today.)

The alluring possibility that other nearly perfect how-to books exist, and searching for them, is one of the most enjoyable quests we have in leading our well-read lives. And so, dear reader, I ask you: do you know of other nearly perfect how-to books? Please share with the rest of the class.

Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Re-Living Your First Literary Love Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell

The twelve-year-olds were hot and boisterous funneling back into their classroom after lunch recess. They had been dodging balls and swinging on bars out on the playground of crushed granite. Standing at the door, shooing them inside, was a gray-haired woman with a kindly smile. She had little trouble because the kids knew it was time to hear her read the next chapter of the book that had captured their imagination over the previous weeks.

The woman’s name was Mrs. Geissler and she taught the sixth grade at San Miguel Elementary School in Lemon Grove, California. The book she was reading was Island of the Blue Dolphins, and one of those students eager to hear the next chapter was me. (That's me in the second row from the bottom, second from the right with the blue shirt.)

 

When I started in Mrs. Geissler’s class I hadn’t been doing well in school, nor was I much of a reader. I spent more time watching Batman and the space program on TV, listening to my transistor radio, and annoying our unfortunate neighbors with my new trumpet. But Mrs. Geissler’s reading of Island of the Blue Dolphins caught me. For the first time, I was in book love—I couldn’t wait to hear what happened next.

What led me to recollect this long-ago time was Facebook. Through Facebook, I reconnected with former classmates from my San Miguel Elementary Class of 1966. We got to reminiscing and lit upon the subject of Mrs. Geissler’s after-lunch readings.

I remembered only a few details of the book—that an island girl and her brother had become stranded on an island, that he had died, and something about dogs. Mostly I remember the feeling of the story. There was beauty and desolation, and the girl had to do everything herself or die.

One of my classmates from San Miguel is Paula Novell Straus, who is now a teacher herself. She remembered Mrs. Geissler’s reading this way:

She used to read after lunch, usually a chapter, but we occasionally got her to read more because we were so engrossed in the plot. She fell for it when we begged her. If a chapter was really long, we didn't get to hear the whole thing, and were impatient for the next day. It took us a good month to get through the book it seems. We didn't have to stop and discuss it like I now have to do as a teacher. We just got to lay our heads down on our desks and be carried away to another time. She didn't ask us the author's purpose, have us look for similes or metaphors, find supporting details, or figure out the resolution of the conflicts. We just got to be.....

Four decades later, still in love

It occurred to me during these Facebook exchanges that I should read the book again—42 years later—and see what I thought of it today. Because I’m such an audiobook fan, and because originally we heard the book, I downloaded Island of the Blue Dolphins from Audible. Also, I ordered two copies of the printed book—an original 1960s-era version with its familiar dust jacket, and a modern hardcover, beautifully illustrated by Ted Lewin.

After I hit play on my iPod, it took only moments to be taken in again. A few bars of music set the stage and then the magical voice of Tantoo Cardinal carried me back to the island that had captured my imagination as a lad.  Cardinal is a Canadian film and television actress, with Dances with Wolves and Legends of the Fall to her credit. Her first-person reading of the young Karana is perfectly cast.

As for the writing, it has a spare, simple, E. B. White style that is well-suited to a story as it might actually have been told by a young Native American. As an adult, I can see why the book has lasted. It deals with enduring themes of wilderness versus civilization, peacetime and war, lives balanced with nature versus nature’s exploitation, gender prejudice and smashed stereotypes.

When he penned this tale, the author Scott O’Dell was in his 60s. He was a career newspaperman and local historian. He had sailed the waters off the California coastline and heard a story of a young girl who had been stranded on her island. The Island of the Blue Dolphins was his first children’s book and it won the Newbery award in 1961. He wrote plenty of children’s books afterwards, but this remains his most well known. I see from the old dust jacket that O’Dell had lived in Julian, California, a few miles inland from our school. He could have driven over after breakfast and visited when Mrs. Geissler was reading.

How do you thank a teacher?

It was in Mrs. Geissler’s class that I started, for the first time, doing well in school. We had to write a paper on a country. I chose Mexico and got an A. Another student accused me of being “a brain.” It was the first time anyone had cast such an aspersion my way, and it shocked me.

Mrs. Geissler gave me my first drink of literature and it was salty and wild tasting. It came with the sound of waves crashing and the iridescence of clothes made of cormorant feathers. My classmate Paula looked up Mrs. Geissler in school records and found she passed away in 1978, long before I thought to thank her.

Now I’m buying Island of the Blue Dolphins for some parents I know. Perhaps if they read it to their children, they too will be transported.

Have you re-lived your first book love? I’d like to hear your story. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

Churchill’s ‘Finest Hour’: Calling Those Who Heard

Guest blog by Mim Harrison, Editor, Levenger Press

A note to our readers—

In order to have heard Prime Minister Winston Churchill deliver live over the radio what would become known to history as the “Finest Hour” speech, you would have had to be listening on 18 June 1940. A 12-year-old at the time would today be 80.

Most of those who were already waging war—or, in the United States, were soon to be fighting for the Allies—now have passed away. Before it is too late, we ask your help. If you know someone who heard the speech live, will you reach out to that person and ask what he or she remembers?

We would be most honored if you would share these stories from ear-witnesses, so we can help preserve and pass them on to others.

Our Levenger Press book, The Making of the Finest Hour, shows how Churchill crafted, edited and re-edited his famous speech, which you can hear on the CD that’s included. I’ve asked the editor of Levenger Press, Mim Harrison, to recount how the book came to life. She shares her recollections—including her own personal regret—in the story below.

—Steve

It was in the elegant dining room of London’s Royal Automobile Club, where one does not conduct business of any sort if one wishes to be invited back, that the idea of publishing a book about Sir Winston Churchill’s famous “Finest Hour” speech of 1940 first took hold. Levenger Press had just successfully published our second Churchill book in 2005, and we were eager to do more.

My host, a seasoned U.K. publisher of art books, felt Levenger could handily publish a book containing facsimile pages of Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech drafts, along with a CD of his BBC radio broadcast. Because Levenger sells directly to readers, the book would be spared the rough-and-tumble of shelf life in bookstores.

Had we been in L.A., we probably would have mapped out the idea on a napkin and made a few calls on our mobiles. Instead, we sipped on liqueurs and ordered dessert.

Then I legged it back double-time to my not-so-elegant hotel, and madly scribbled down the many ideas we’d talked about before they vanished into the damp March air.

The making of the book

The Making of the Finest Hour took some doing to make. Good fortune was on our side, though. The great leader’s namesake and grandson, Winston Churchill, gave us a green light on the project. Churchill Archives, the repository of Sir Winston’s papers, produced superb facsimiles of the speech drafts—the first draft, marked up and redlined and crossed through and rewritten by Sir Winston himself; and then the final draft, on the smaller pieces of paper and typed in the specific line sequence that Churchill insisted on.

Visuals were a challenge. We didn’t want to use a photo of Churchill—too predictable. What, then? The answer came in one of those aha moments: his typewriter, of course, the noiseless Underwood his secretary used to type the speech. For that we sought the help of the staff at Chartwell, Churchill’s country home. They gamely tracked down the typewriter and took shot after shot until we had what we wanted.

The Churchill Centre’s Richard Langworth drew upon his encyclopedic knowledge of Churchill for his introduction. He capped it with a remarkable statement by Churchill’s daughter Mary about the way her father wrote speeches.

As for the radio broadcast—you would think it would be easy to get hold of Churchill’s historic BBC broadcast of 18 June 1940. But because of various issues surrounding ownership, rights and recording dates, it was a bit like groping through an English garden maze and hoping you’d eventually find your way out.

Eventually we did. Just to be sure we had what we were looking for, though, I went to the BBC offices in New York and asked my sales rep, Nelda Gil, to play the recording for me.

The call to a generation

Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech was also one of Churchill’s finest hours. On 18 June 1940, most of Europe had succumbed to Hitler’s madness, leaving only Britain to fight. Churchill proved to be the free world’s secret weapon on a public stage, his genius for oratory being a galvanizing force first for the people of Britain, then for Americans as well.

But 18 June 1940 happened sixty-eight years ago—more than half a century. That time in our history is reaching its penumbra, passing daily out of living memory, as the number of people who heard Churchill’s speech live over the radio rapidly diminishes.

I am not of that generation—that Greatest Generation—but consider myself fortunate to be of parents who are. One of my uncles, career Army, fought in that war of Finest Hour. So did his daughter-in-law’s father, whom I met for the first time just as we were finishing The Making of the Finest Hour.

I showed him my working copy of the book, as I thought he might find it of interest. It was when I placed it in his hands that I realized it was, for him, more than a history book. It contained a part of his history.

Churchill had moved him to action as a soldier. Now Churchill moved him again, more than half a century later, almost to tears. The look of reverence on his face as he held that book is now a part of my history.

I made a mental note to send him a copy. But I waited too long, and like so many of his generation, he passed away.

From shared sacrifice to shared memory

Ken Burns once told an audience that the impetus for making his 2007 documentary of World War II, “The War,” was to honor that generation before it disappeared; approximately 1,000 WWII veterans were dying every week. He spoke with that remarkable passion of his of the “shared sacrifice” of that generation.

Each generation’s code is its own, perhaps never to be fully understood by another. But I would like to think that as long as Sir Winston’s “Finest Hour” is heard, some part of his generation, and my parents’ generation, will live in our shared memory.

I believe I caught a glimpse of this possibility on the bright December day I went to the BBC offices in New York, to meet Nelda and check the CD of the speech.

Nelda’s desk was one in a vast bullpen of desks, most inhabited by people of a still younger generation—twenty- and thirty-somethings who, by virtue of their job, were inured to hearing all kinds of recordings.

Nelda slid the CD into her machine, pressed play, the announcer said “Ladies and gentlemen, the Prime Minister,” and then there it was: Churchill’s voice, rising from more than half a century ago above the radio static.

The entire room went quiet. They stopped, and they listened, and I think it’s safe to say that more than one of those young people heard something they had not heard before.

One generation passes and another comes of age. And somewhere in that changing of the guard is the voice of a finest hour.

Do you have a Finest Hour memory to share? Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments). We will endeavor to share and preserve all stories as part of the living history surrounding this speech that meant much to the course of history.

—Steve

The Last Lecture

Perhaps you have heard of The Last Lecture. Randy Pausch a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, delivered one in 2007. The lecture created a sensation.

As I’ve come to understand it, the idea of a last lecture has been around for a while in academic circles. It’s an opportunity for professors to pretend they have only one last lecture to give, and therefore must sum up their life’s work in a final message for the ages.

In the case of Randy Pausch, it wasn’t pretend. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was given only months to live.

His lecture became a touchstone on YouTube, where the number of views at the moment I write this has just reached…let me check again… 2,212,434. The lecture has also been turned into a charming book, which I’ve just finished and recommend. The book contains 60 short chapters, two of which I’d like to mention here.

Service worth its salt

One chapter is titled “The $100,000 Salt and Pepper Shaker.” It tells the story of how when Randy was a boy, he and his sister bought an expensive set of ceramic salt and pepper shakers for their parents, as thanks for taking them to Disney World. Alas, the bag slipped from Randy’s fingers as he walked from the store, and the shakers broke.

Passing adults suggested to the crying Randy that he might tell the store what happened.  To his amazement, the store staff replaced the shakers for free.

When Randy’s father heard the story and its happy ending, it made him determined to do his own good deed. For many years afterwards, at his own expense, he arranged to bus economically disadvantaged young people to Disney World.  He spent an estimated $100,000 over the years, despite being of modest means.

Original digits—the ones on our hands

The other chapter is titled “The Lost Art of Thank-You Notes,” and its message is about the benefits of an old-fashioned, handwritten note of thanks. Randy tells the story of how a certain handwritten note from an applicant to an elite technology program—a note sent to a secretary who had helped her—ended up changing everything. Coming from a computer science professor who specializes in virtual reality, this tribute to our original digits carries special weight.

The last lecture that will last

Randy continues to wage his battle against cancer, but even when he is gone, the golden rings of positive influence will emanate from that Last Lecture for as long as people watch Randy’s lecture, or read his little book, and apply his lessons in their own lives.

On Randy’s website, www.thelastlecture.com, you’ll find links to the video of his lecture, plus more previews of the book.

The audiobook, which contains an interview with Randy at the end, is available for download at www.Audible.com. 

If you have seen the lecture or read the book, let me know what you think. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

Charming Boovie preserves the old world of hard-to-find books

With the rapid pace of technological change, the old way of struggling to find out-of-print books is a fading memory. Fortunately, the old way has been marvelously preserved in a delightful boovie that also happens to be a true story.

The book is 84 Charing Cross Road. Set in the years immediately following World War II, it chronicles the transatlantic correspondence between Helene Hanff, a New York City booklover, and Frank Doel, a straight-laced British bookseller. The uncertainty and serendipity of the old ways come through with humor, pathos, and love. Published in 1970, the book was made into an equally heart-tugging movie in 1986, starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.

Tight finances and her busy writing life kept Hanff from visiting England. In the end, when she finally does, Doel has passed away and the shop is empty. And so an inefficient yet sweet chapter in the evolution of reading has passed into history as well.

What’s a boovie, you may ask? It’s simply a movie adapted from a book. The conventional practice is to read the book first and then see the movie, but there may be equal (perhaps even greater) merit in seeing the movie first and then reading the book—a reverse boovie.

Now it’s my turn to ask. What are your thoughts about boovies, and those boovies that give one last toast to a way of life that is no longer?  Let me know what you discover while pursuing your viewing and reading. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).