Hilton Kramer

Hilton Kramer, the onetime chief art critic of the New York Times and in recent years the publisher of The New Criterion, died on March 26 near his home in Maine.  He had been ill for some time.

I had the privilege (I use the word carefully) of publishing two of his books, The Twilight of the Intellectuals and The Triumph of Modernism, and had the greatest admiration for his work.

I often told Hilton that I had never learned more about art and art history than I did when reading one of his essays.  He wrote his most important criticism at a time when the art world was balanced on shifting sands, and he was courageous in his defense of its higher forms.

His obit in the Times may be seen at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/arts/design/hilton-kramer-critic-who-championed-modernism-dies-at-84.html

Review of the Movie "Free Men"

I know this will date me, but watching “Free Men” sent me back to a black-and-white TV program of the 1960s, The Outer Limits. Each episode opened with a test pattern and some eerie music. “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture,” a menacing voice would announce.

“Free Men” is an effort to adjust our picture of the French Resistance during the Second World War to include the activities of North African Muslims who resisted the Nazis and rescued Jews. This is no small matter. Until fairly recently, the standard picture was completely FRENCH. Foreigners were left out, although early Resistance groups in occupied Paris and the Vichy zone contained large numbers of persecuted refugees from other parts of Europe, including Communists and Jews.

As for the many Arab and Berber migrants from France’s North African colonies who had come to the mainland seeking work in the 1920s and 30s, they might as well have been invisible. Yet they had their own mosque, the Great Mosque of Paris, built to commemorate the 100,000 Muslim soldiers who died defending France in World War I. Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit, the Great Mosque’s rector, is known to have saved the lives of a number of Jews, among them the Algerian-Jewish singer Salim Halali, by issuing them certificates of Muslim identity, which enabled them to escape deportation.

The story deserves to be told, and the Moroccan-French director Ismaël Ferroukhi tells it well. Younes, the young Algerian drifter who joins the Resistance somewhat against his will, is a hero by the end of the film. He helps save Halali, among others. We see him making his way through the crowd on Liberation Day, a battered hero, sadder and wiser. Unfortunately, that’s where the film ends.

Despite their sacrifices for France and the promises of independence given by Charles de Gaulle in recognition of their loyalty, Algerians did not attain their independence until 1962, after a long and bloody war. Younes and the film’s other idealistic North African characters would become casualties of this war. Some would be arrested by the French as potential terrorists, or massacred in the streets of Paris when they attempted to stage a peaceful demonstration on October 17, 1961. Others would be seen as too moderate by radical Algerian nationalists and killed by their own side.

“Free Men” makes a place for North Africans in the heroic pantheon, but the picture it presents is still in black-and-white and out of focus. The real story of the role Algerians and Algeria played in French history, including the Second World War, was not about heroism. It was about betrayal. Sadly, not much has changed.

Lisa Lieberman's translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's essay, "Paris Under the Occupation" can be purchased for $1.99 through Amazon Kindle Books, Apple Bookstore Quick Reads, Barnes and NobleNook Books and Google Books. Lost Belongings, her current nonfiction project, tells how Holocaust survivors coped with irretrievable loss.

Of Historians, Umpires and Generals

Merle Miller leads off this month's list with Firing the General, Harry Truman's candid account of why he'd had enough of General Douglas MacArthur. Excerpted from Miller's oral history of President Truman, Plain Speaking, Firing the General is available exclusively through Kindle Books and for free for Amazon Prime Members.  Historiographers can indulge or dispute the reality of J.H. Hexter's The Historian and His Day with an introduction by Gertrude Himmelfarb.  Then, with baseball season just around the corner, we're happy to have Peter Morris' fascinating look at the history of violence in baseball, Don't Kill The Umpire: How Baseball Escaped Its Violent Past to put things in perspective.

Don't Kill The Umpire

by Peter Morris

Violence plays a peculiar, sublimated role in the sport of baseball. In stark contrast to the play of football and other widely appreciated American games like basketball and ice hockey, baseball players are schooled to take their aggressions out on the ball, not on other players. Yet the game was not always one of quiet courage played by gentlemen, as Peter Morris shows in this fascinating historical profile of the rise and fall of violence as a part of our national pastime.

Buy for Kindle
Buy for iPad
Buy for Nook

Firing the General

by Merle Miller

No episode during the administration of President Harry Truman caused a greater uproar than his firing of General Douglas MacArthur. After continuing friction between his military aims in the Korean War and the administration’s policy of avoiding a larger conflict, MacArthur began to state publicly his complaints about being handcuffed. Truman’s patience wore thin and finally ran out. In this excerpt from Merle Miller’s Plain Speaking, the always candid former president explains what happened.

Buy now on Amazon

The Historian and His Day

by J.H. Hexter with an introduction by Gertrude Himmelfarb

Deceptively mild and modest in tone, J. H. Hexter's "The Historian and His Day" is bold in conception and execution. Hexter was venturing upon a subject—the nature of the historical enterprise—that has engaged the most eminent historians, raising the perennially vexing question of past- and present-mindedness in the writing of history. It is also memorable because it addresses that issue in a notably down-to-earth, commonsensible, personal manner. .

Buy on Amazon
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Free eBook of the Month

This month's Free eBook will be The Quintessential American featuring selections from Benjamin Franklin's autobiography.  Check for it later this week.

The Quintessential American: Selections from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

In his famous Autobiography, Franklin displays the iconic American virtues of thrift, ambition, hard work, self-improvement, and common sense.  But, like many of the Founders, aspects of Franklin’s character remain something of a puzzle. In these selections from his Autobiography, Franklin reflects upon his rise in the world and the self-taught lessons that brought his success.

Publishing Perspectives on peddling e-trash

Ivan R. Dee, Now & Then Reader

Our venerable chief editor Ivan R. Dee put his own words out there today with a guest article on Publishing Perspectives.

Speaking of his transition from 30+ years publishing hardcover and paperback serious nonfiction to launching Now and Then Reader and publishing short form nonfiction books and essays for e-readers:

The other day, I was accused by an old publishing friend of traitorous activities. 

Even though I'm digital born and bred, I often feel traitorous as I switch back and forth between unfinished print books that have been lying on my shelf for months and the latest Kindle book I downloaded after reading a review in the New York Times.  From a reader's perspective, it's all about convenience and immediacy. I can read it now.  From a publisher's perspective, it's the same idea.  We can publish it now:

I needn’t remind those in traditional publishing about the agonizingly slow process of contracting for a book, developing the manuscript, seeing it through the editorial and design and manufacturing processes, getting it into the stores with adequate publicity — and finally trying to move it off the bookstore shelves. In my publishing house, once the manuscript was in hand, we usually accomplished this in five to six months — and we pushed. Many publishers of similar serious materials require a year or more  

By contrast, Now and Then can get a long piece ready for publication within two weeks, including editing, cover design, production, and publicity materials. Using two to three people. Compared with book publication, it’s a piece of cake — like the difference between a meal in the Gulag and tea at the Mayfair.

With the actual publishing side of things reduced to a simple, streamlined process, the challenge remains in reaching the audience.  We founded Now and Then Reader on the belief that there is a large audience of serious readers out there.  Recent studies states that the e-reader format itself is helping to nurture and expand the audience for serious reading.  And some would argue that the world will be a better place with more people reading serious nonfiction over novels.  Unfortunately, with the ease of publishing that the new format brings, also comes a deluge of content, good and bad, that readers must wade through to find something worth their while.  The same convenience and immediacy that we herald is actually making the job of finding the reader that much harder.

Sometimes I'm not sure it is possible for topics like ours to stand above the growing fray. But then I'm re-inspired by the words of support we get from new visitors to our site, new readers, new much needed media coverage.  Time will tell.  In the meantime, I have to finish the cover for our next title.

Read Ivan Dee's guest post on Publishing Perspectives.

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Chandos Erwin is the co-founder of Now and Then Reader.  He lives in Venice, California where there are occasional serious reader sightings.

The Historian and Her Day

I wasn’t yet born when Jack Hexter wrote “The Historian and His Day.” By the time I was in MY early forties and teaching in a minor college, the world had changed significantly. The day of a historian in the 1990s—a female historian with three young children—did not begin with a leisurely scan of the newspaper headlines over breakfast, and it certainly did not end at midnight, after countless uninterrupted hours of intellectual work.

I too rose early. My first class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday was at 8:30, but before my husband and I could make our way to the college where we both taught, we had to pack lunches, get our son off to elementary school, and drop our daughters at the daycare center on campus. At lunchtime, I hurried over to the daycare center to nurse our baby. Conversations with colleagues took place on the fly, although my husband and I talked shop a good deal of the time at home, in and around “domestic matters.”

Somehow I managed to carve out time to read, research, think, and write about my scholarly field: 19th- and 20th-century France. But, in contrast to Hexter, I could not keep the clutter of my present-day life from intruding upon the past events I studied. Was this a bad thing?

I take heart from Hexter’s recognition that “each historian brings to the rewriting of history the full range of the remembered experience of his own days, that unique array that he alone possesses and is.” This is true, in my case, although maybe not in the way he meant.

I do find that my historical investigations have been influenced by my real-life experiences. My first book explored the cultural meaning of suicide, beginning in antiquity and continuing right up to the present. I chose the topic because I’d been haunted since childhood by the suicide of my grandfather, whom I’d never met (he killed himself during the Depression, when my father was a boy). As a parent, I wondered how he could have abandoned his family.

More insights came through my work as a counselor on a suicide hotline. Listening to the reasons callers gave for wanting to end their lives, I was struck by their willfulness. Many were depressed—and who could blame them, hearing their problems? But these people were anything but victims. They saw dying as their only means of reclaiming control over their lives, and of course it was my job to convince them that there were less drastic ways of solving their problems.

These insights led me to challenge our society’s most comforting assumption about suicide: that individuals who kill themselves are entirely passive, that they do not seriously intend to die. But as I explored the sources of this assumption, I was guided by Hexter’s commandments for responsible historical inquiry:

1. Do not go off half-cocked.
2. Get the story straight.
3. Keep prejudices about present-day issues out of this area.

Present-mindedness, I would say, need not lead to sloppy scholarship. Caught up in the preoccupations of his or her day, the historian can ask questions about the past that help us to make sense of today’s world.

____________________

Lisa Lieberman is the author of Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide. Her translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's essay, "Paris Under the Occupation" can be purchased for $1.99 through Amazon Kindle Books, Apple Bookstore Quick Reads, Barnes and Noble Nook Books and Google Books. Lost Belongings, her current nonfiction project, tells how Holocaust survivors coped with irretrievable loss.

Leaping Historians and Firing Generals

Yesterday, to celebrate the extra day brought on by the leap year, we released two new titles  to add to our ever-growing list of nonfiction books and essays.

Firing the General

FIRING THE GENERAL by Merle Miller

Excerpted from Merle Miller's oral biography of President Harry Truman, 'Plain Speaking,' Now and Then's  Firing the General gives eBook readers the opportunity hear first-hand how Truman had had enough of General Douglas MacArthur.

Perhaps no episode during the Truman's administration caused a greater uproar than his firing of the much lauded general. As Truman candidly tells it, the decision came after MacArthur began to publicly complain about the administration's unwillingness to expand the war in Korea.

Firing the General is available exclusively through the Amazon Kindle bookstore and can be purchased here.

The Historian and His Day

THE HISTORIAN AND HIS DAY by J.H. Hexter

Available for the first time for e-readers, The Historian and His Day by renowned historiography J.H. Hexter offers a remarkably down-to-earth, commonsensible look at the vexing question of  past- and present-mindedness in the writing of history.

A must-read for anyone interested in the nature of historical enterprise, The Historian and His Day is available through Amazon for $2.99.



These two new titles bring our list of short form nonfiction titles to a total of fifteen. Tell us what you think of these new titles as part of our list as a whole. Post a comment here or join the discussion at our website www.nowandthenreader.com

Apple and Amazon content restrictions: Convenience or control?

As we go through the process of creating bookstore specific "You Might Also Like" lists to include in each of our nonfiction books, Seth Godin's Paid Content post Who Decides What Gets Sold In The Bookstore? strikes a chord today.

Lamenting the fact that his book was rejected by Apple because it contained links to Amazon books, Godin writes:

We’re heading to a world where there are just a handful of influential bookstores (Amazon, Apple, Nook…) and one by one, the principles of open access are disappearing. Apple, apparently, won’t carry an ebook that contains a link to buy a hardcover book from Amazon.

That’s amazing to me. It must be a mistake, right?

First, because the web, like your mind, works best when it’s open. Second, because once bookstores start to censor the books they carry (business reasons, personal taste, etc.) then the door is open for any interest group to work hard to block books with which they disagree. Where does the line get drawn?

Since we have to do everything possible to keep potential readers coming back to us for more, we are adding links to browse our other nonfiction books and essays in the back of each release.  To do this, we now have to create unique lists and corresponding ePub files for the iBookstore, Barnes & Noble Nook Bookstore and Google Books.  And, of course, a separate list for Kindle Books.  It's not an outrageous task and we've now set up a process to automate the list generation, but it adds time and cost to the production process which, in a time-pressed and budget strained startup like this, just makes the real task at hand, getting the word out about our books, that much harder.

Whining aside, this would seem to be a common sense best practice to create the shortest possible hop to get the reader back the purchase funnel.  And, if you look at in terms of reader convenience, it also makes sense to include platform relevant links.  If I'm reading a Now and Then nonfiction ebook on a Kindle, it's highly likely that I'll probably read my next Now and Then nonfiction ebook on a Kindle.  I don't need a link to buy it on Nook or the iPad. In fact, I'd probably be annoyed if I clicked on non-relevant link.

While it should be a decision left up to the author or publisher, the control is in in this case, convenient.

The issue become a bit murkier, and much less convenient, when you move beyond the dedicated e-reading devices like the original Kindle and the Nook. There's been much made of Apple's move to restrict the reading apps made by Amazon and Barnes and Noble and others from in-app purchases unless they pay the 30% commission.  For those users who choose to read Kindle books on their iOs devices, this restriction makes the purchase process a complete pain in the neck, requiring the user to switchover to Safari, login to Amazon, enter a credit card and then send the purchase over to their Kindle iPad app.   You lost me at "login."   It makes sense that usage is up on the iBookstore (at least for us). Even with Amazon's counter-attack Cloud Reader and Ipad Bookstore solutions, Apple's restrictions have made iBookstore a lot easier to use than Kindle or Nook.

Since the appeal of devices lies mainly in their capability, and capability is more and more provided by third party applications, I agree with Godin and think that it behooves Apple and Amazon to take a step back and look at what lies down the road in terms of competition.   The fact that I can make the choice to purchase books through Kobo, Kindle, Nook OR Google Books apps on my Android tablet makes it that much more appealing to me than my uber-restricted iPad2.  Google's Eric Schmidt today predicted an Android for everyone on the planet.   I honestly don't think that the prediction is that far-fetched.  Even if he's only partially correct, Apple and Amazon will be forced to open up their devices to give the reader the choices to they want.  Otherwise they're going to turn to an Android device that inherently has that much more capability.

Until then, we'll continue to toe Apple and Amazon's respective lines - for our reader's convenience and simple survival in this monopolized industry.  Will Android world dominance lead to the rebirth of the independent bookstore? I certainly hope so.  In the meantime, I wish one of them would come up with an automated "Also by" tool.  Please. It would make things so much easier for us.