Steve Goddard's History Wire

45 Years A Senator, Ted Kennedy Snags $8 Million For Memoir Advance

WBUR-FM (Boston):

"New York -- The memoirs of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the youngest and last surviving brother of the country's most famous political siblings and for decades an eminent liberal statesman and legislator, have been acquired by an imprint of the Hachette Book Group USA.

"Financial terms were not disclosed, but a publishing official with knowledge of the negotiations said Monday that the agreement was comparable to the $8 million Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton received for 'Living History'' and the $9 million former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will reportedly get for his planned memoir. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, following standard industry practice.

"'I've been fortunate in my life to grow up in an extraordinary family and to have a front row seat at many key events in our nation's history,'' Kennedy, 75, said in a statement. 'I hope my reflections can contribute to a deeper understanding of many events in the history of this great country and to a more in-depth picture of an American family.'

"Hachette's acquisition came after a six-day auction involving nine publishers. Kennedy was represented by Washington attorney Robert Barnett, whose other clients include Clinton and Tony Blair. The book, currently untitled and tentatively scheduled to come out in 2010, builds upon the oral history project that Kennedy has been working on through the Miller Center of the University of Virginia. The project, launched in 2004 and expected to last several years, will include interviews with the senator, family members, colleagues, journalists, foreign leaders and others."

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University of Wisconsin Med School Marks Changes Over Its First Century

Wisconsin State Journal:

"It was a time when professors at some of the country's medical schools sold tickets to class. Antibiotics were merely a pipe dream, and hospitals connected to medical schools were an uncommon luxury. It was at this time, in 1907, when the UW School of Medicine was established; that biology and science classes were taught in the attic of Science Hall; some classes were also held in the Chemical Engineering Building.

"The first students, who attended the 'Attic Medical School,' as it was commonly called, included 29 students, three of whom were women. Most were Wisconsin residents. And they literally saw skeletons in the attic, since the Science Hall attic is where gross anatomy, accompanied by a skeleton on the desk, was taught.

"Ronald Numbers, professor of history and science and medicine in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the UW, says, 'Early medical schools primarily taught science; the students had to learn to do medicine by being an apprentice.' When the UW Medical School was established 100 years ago, it was a two-year program. Charles Bardeen was appointed the first dean of the college."

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Out in Paperback / Other South

Other South -- Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariategui Tradition by Hosam Aboul-Ela, Pittsburgh UPress '07, $24.95, 224 pages, ISBN #0-8229-5976-3. Index, works cited, source notes, unillustrated.

A University of Houston English professor thinks outside the box in this new trailbreaking analysis of the world of William Faulkner. While Faulkner has been regarded by most as a Southern writer in the Euro-American modernist tradition, Hosam Aboul-Ela argues that he is more accurately linked to the Mariategui tradition, whose literary works from the "Global South" are drawn from Southern India, the Arab World and Latin America as well as from such Southerners as Faulkner. If accepted, the author's theory would afford a Third World cultural prism through which to view the history and culture of colonial peoples.

25 Years Ago, Dan White Murdered Harvey Milk In Politically-Charged San Francisco

American Heritage:

"At about 10:25 on the morning of November 27, 1978—29 years ago today—William Melia, an engineer at San Francisco’s City Hall, noticed a man pacing nervously outside his first-floor window. He recognized the man as Dan White, until recently a San Francisco city supervisor—the equivalent of a city council member. Melia stepped out of the room to take a phone call, and he heard a window open and someone climb through it. He returned and saw that it was White.

“' had to get in,' White said. 'My aide was supposed to come down and let me in the side door, but she never showed up.' He turned and left, heading to the mayor’s office. Unknown to Melia or anyone else, White had a loaded .38 revolver in his jacket pocket. Over the next half-hour, he would murder the mayor and one other man.

"White, a former policeman and firefighter, had resigned his position several days before, citing financial concerns and his low supervisor’s salary of $9,600 per year. But then he had changed his mind and asked Mayor Moscone to reappoint him. Several supervisors, including the popular, openly gay Harvey Milk, had urged Moscone to refuse.

"Milk and White had clashed politically on many occasions. White represented a conservative, working-class part of the city, while the liberal Milk represented the predominantly gay Castro district. The two disliked each other intensely, particularly after White cast the only dissenting vote on a gay-rights ordinance that Milk championed and Moscone signed into law."

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Why Are Evolutionary Biologists Bringing Back Extinct Deadly Viruses?

The New Yorker:

"Thierry Heidmann’s office, adjacent to the laboratory he runs at the Institut Gustave Roussy, on the southern edge of Paris, could pass for a museum of genetic catastrophe. Files devoted to the world’s most horrifying infectious diseases fill the cabinets and line the shelves. There are thick folders for smallpox, Ebola virus, and various forms of influenza. SARS is accounted for, as are more obscure pathogens, such as feline leukemia virus, Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, and simian foamy virus, which is endemic in African apes. H.I.V., the best-known and most insidious of the viruses at work today, has its own shelf of files.

"The lab’s beakers, vials, and refrigerators, secured behind locked doors with double-paned windows, all teem with viruses. Heidmann, a meaty, middle-aged man with wild eyebrows and a beard heavily flecked with gray, has devoted his career to learning what viruses might tell us about AIDS and various forms of cancer.

“'This knowledge will help us treat terrible diseases,' he told me, nodding briefly toward his lab. 'Viruses can provide answers to questions we have never even asked.'"

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Book Alert / The Discovery of France

The Discovery of France -- A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War by Graham Robb, Norton '07, $27.95, 455 pages, ISBN #0393059731. Geographical index, general index, works cited, source notes, chronology, two groupings of b&w and color glossy images.

"France has often discovered its own past," writes author Graham Robb, "like a traveller forced to cross a remote and dangerous region without a map. Decades passed before the savage extermination of Paris Communards by government troops in 1871 was recognized as historical fact. It took even longer for the state to acknowledge the fact that the Vichy regime had rounded up Jews even more enthusiastically than the Nazis demanded. While memorials to heroic Resistance members killed by 'the Germans' are a common sight all over France, there is nothing in Vichy to remind a visitor of the genocide."

Robb, biographer of Hugo, Rimbaud, and Balzac, has written a tour guide of sorts, but one would never confuse it with Fodor's. It describes a world largely outside Paris. Now Provence is outside Paris and so is the Cote d'Azur, but the France Robb introduces us to is largely a more primitive place off the tourist maps. Consider his book's beginning:

"One summer in the early 1740s, on the last day of his life, a young man from Paris became the first modern cartographer to see the mountain called Le Gerbier de Jonc. This weird volcanic cone juts out of a nempty landscape of pastures and ravines, blasted by a freezing wind called the burle....It was a geometer's dream -- almost one-thirteenth of the land surface of France spread out like a map." Yet surely, the young man would have traded it in an instant to avoid what would befall him before nightfall.

A century later, a traveler's guide book would describe this region, 30 miles west of the river Rhone: "There is scarcely any accommodation on this route, which can hardly be performed in a day; and the people are rude and forbidding." Strangers were considered to be up to no good; things seemed to get worse -- crops withered, animals went lame -- after they visited. So on this summer day in the 1740s, the locals set upon the young man and hacked him to death.

Robb recounts similar folk tales as he escorts the reader on epic journeys with mapmakers, scientists, soldiers, intrepid tourists, itinerant workers, pilgrims and herdsmen as France came to be explored and charted and recreates daily life under such conditions.

Book Alert / ZigZag -- The Incredible Wartime Exploits of Double Agent Eddie Chapman

ZigZag -- The Incredible Wartime Exploits of Double Agent Eddie Chapman by Nicholas Booth, Arcade '07, $26.99, 386 pages, ISBN #1559708603. Index, further reading, a note on sources, grouping of b&w glossy images.

The release of records, including one spy's personal M15 file, pursuant to the British Official Secrets Act, has freed London journalist Nicholas Booth to tell the tale of Eddie Chapman, career criminal turned WWII double agent. As Booth recounts it, the Germans found Chapman in a Channel Islands jail in 1940 and accepted his offer to spy for the Nazis. Trained by the Abwehr (Germany military intelligence), Chapman's task was to destroy the British De Haviland Aircraft Factory, which made the Mosquito bombers that were then raking Germany.

"How Chapman and M15 convinced the Abwehr that he had accomplished his mission," writes Booth, "stands as one of history's great acts of counterintelligence. Later, he brilliantly misdirected German V2 rockets away from their targets in London and into the surrounding countryside, saving countless lives." However, one has to suspend belief in reading Booth's narrative since his subject was a tricky con man and safe cracker with a zero credibility rating.

Publishers Weekly, weighing in on Booth's tale, writes, "Whether rogue or patriot, his story makes for intriguing reading, but Booth's transparent cheerleading for Chapman detracts from an otherwise enjoyable biography." Adds Booklist, "Booth also takes pains to remind us, from time to time, that Eddie, who wrote or authorized several autobiographical works in the 1950s and 1960s, was a habitual and expert liar and that nothing he says about himself should be taken at face value. The book, therefore, has an air of mystery about it, and despite the author's extensive documentation, we wonder at the end if we have yet heard the real story of Eddie Chapman."

Booth, the author of six books, now divides his time between London and California as a broadcaster and writer.

Book Alert / Hard Call Book Alert / Hard Call

Hard Call -- Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them by John McCain with Mark Salter, Twelve '07, $25.99, 456 pages, ISBN #0-446-58040-6. Index, notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

"Victory has a thousand fathers," John F. Kennedy famously said, "but defeat is an orphan." It's a good adage to keep in mind while reading Sen. John McCain's latest book, which isolates six qualities -- Awareness, Timing, Foresight, Confidence, Humility, and Inspiration -- "typically represented in the best decisions.

Had JFK's ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion turned out differently, it's easy to imagine that one or more of these qualities would have been attributed to the President as typifying his exceptional leadership. But Bay of Pigs was a bust, and McCain might have added a seventh quality in decision-making -- the ability to own up to a bad decision and learn from it. For, unusual among leaders, JFK publicly recognized the campaign as a disaster right away and analyzed its shortcomings out in the open. Now there's leadership.

That said, there's much to learn from McCain's analysis, and the examples of each quality that he cites are evocative: Branch Rickey's awareness of the opposition he'd face in using Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier, Winston Churchill's foresight in preparing the British Navy for war, the timing of Sadat and Begin in risking their lives and careers in their quest for peace, Gertrude Ederle's confidence in bucking the wishes of her coach to swim the English Channel, Reinhold Neibuhr's humility in endorsing violence over his natural pacifism in the face of persecution by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and Abe Lincoln's inspiration to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

NY Public Library Acquires Papers of A. Schlesinger -- Both A Historian And A Political Player

The New York Times:

"In a 1976 letter accompanying seven chapters of his biography of Robert F. Kennedy, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. advises his editor at Houghton Mifflin to prepare for 'a very long book and promote it. After all, Caro’s ‘Moses’ did well,' he writes, referring to Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. 'Moses was not involved in nearly as many things or people as RFK; and this book, I trust, is a good deal better written.'

"The letter, with its characteristic mixture of candor and confidence, is just a fraction of an inch in the 280 linear feet of Schlesinger documents — from his travel diaries of the 1930s to his phone message log from the 1980s — that have been acquired by the New York Public Library in a deal to be announced today. (The dollar amount was not disclosed.)

"In October the Penguin Press published almost 1,000 pages of excerpts from Mr. Schlesinger’s journals. The library’s acquisition includes about 5,000 additional journal pages, along with datebooks, research files, sound recordings, clippings and correspondence between Mr. Schlesinger and noteworthy figures including Dean Acheson, Truman Capote, Lauren Bacall and Bill Clinton.

“'He was a great historian and an incomparable witness,' said Paul LeClerc, president of the library. 'I can’t think of any other historian who had the level of access he did. Voltaire was the historian of France, but he didn’t get in the inner circle the way Schlesinger did.'”

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Remembering California's Jesse Unruh -- A Larger Than Life Politician

The Los Angeles Times:

                                                             Big Daddy

                                        Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics

                                                          By Bill Boyarsky

                                     University of California Press: 266 pp. $29.95

"It's been a long time since Jesse M. 'Big Daddy' Unruh was a household name in California politics. Unruh was, as the cliché goes, 'the powerful speaker' of the state Assembly from 1961 to 1969, candidate for governor in 1970 -- he lost to then-Gov. Ronald Reagan by 500,000 votes -- and state treasurer from 1975 until his death in 1987.

"So why would anyone want to write Unruh's biography now? Bill Boyarsky, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, columnist and editor, who covered him and the Legislature for 30 years, asked that same question of the late journalist John Jacobs, biographer of another political big daddy, Phillip Burton, the Democratic congressman best remembered as the 'artist' who in 1981 drew California's modern political map.

"Fortunately for us, Jacobs urged Boyarsky to take it on. Not only was Unruh a central player in the forging of California's great postwar highway, university and water systems and the creation of its progressive governmental institutions, he also was a man with a voracious appetite for food, drink, sex and power -- a larger-than-life personality that matched his political career. It's those two things combined that makes this story so compelling."

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