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http://www.josephgpeterson.com/
Forthcoming from Wicker Park Press. Ltd in April 2011
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Gene Logsdon's new novel, POPE MARY & THE CHURCH OF ALMIGHTY GOOD FOOD reviewed in Akron Beacon Journal
Another person Kline quotes in his book is Gene Logsdon. The self-styled ''contrary farmer'' writes and blogs about sustainable agriculture and living in a ''sort of hostile harmony with the wild food chain.'' His nonfiction books have covered topics like organic whole grains and the relationship of alcohol and farming. His new novel Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food is a wicked satire of religion and small-town oddballs.
The central character is Father Ray Tulley, a modern-day circuit riding-priest who is quite satisfied with being assigned to the joint pastorage of two rural churches, as it will enable him to live in the country with a large garden and small flock of sheep, which interests him as much as his vocation does. The farmers markets he has added to each church's summer festivals have been popular, and Ray is happy to have encouraged the local economy.
But trouble is on the horizon. The bishop has told Father Ray that his parishes are going to be ''clustered,'' or merged into a third parish. Already, the door to one church has been locked, and at the beginning of the book an unseen person has broken the lock in defiance.
Just arrived back in Vinal County is Mary Barnette, who's been working in a Chicago commodities brokerage. She's a nonbeliever, but so self-assured that her family recruits her to be their spokesperson in a meeting Ray is holding about the situation. The confrontation does nothing but cause the church members to choose up sides: Those who will do whatever the bishop says, and those considering suing the church.
Logsdon's characters demonstrate greed, fanaticism, enterprise and a variety of other rustic traits. Mary's enlightenment is Logsdon's point: ''Small churches shutting down in favor of large ones was a reflection of the same kind of economy that shut down small farms in favor of large ones.''
Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food (193 pages, hardcover) costs $24.95 from Wicker Park Press. Gene Logsdon lives in Upper Sandusky.
— Barbara McIntyre
Special to the Beacon Journal
The central character is Father Ray Tulley, a modern-day circuit riding-priest who is quite satisfied with being assigned to the joint pastorage of two rural churches, as it will enable him to live in the country with a large garden and small flock of sheep, which interests him as much as his vocation does. The farmers markets he has added to each church's summer festivals have been popular, and Ray is happy to have encouraged the local economy.
But trouble is on the horizon. The bishop has told Father Ray that his parishes are going to be ''clustered,'' or merged into a third parish. Already, the door to one church has been locked, and at the beginning of the book an unseen person has broken the lock in defiance.
Just arrived back in Vinal County is Mary Barnette, who's been working in a Chicago commodities brokerage. She's a nonbeliever, but so self-assured that her family recruits her to be their spokesperson in a meeting Ray is holding about the situation. The confrontation does nothing but cause the church members to choose up sides: Those who will do whatever the bishop says, and those considering suing the church.
Logsdon's characters demonstrate greed, fanaticism, enterprise and a variety of other rustic traits. Mary's enlightenment is Logsdon's point: ''Small churches shutting down in favor of large ones was a reflection of the same kind of economy that shut down small farms in favor of large ones.''
Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food (193 pages, hardcover) costs $24.95 from Wicker Park Press. Gene Logsdon lives in Upper Sandusky.
— Barbara McIntyre
Special to the Beacon Journal
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
In Memorandum – Paul C Williams, 1959 – 2010
The world of publishing lost a giant yesterday when Paul C Williams past away at the tender age of 51. As operating director of the small publishing house Bunim & Bannigan, Paul developed an artistic vision of publishing house that offered “books for general and academic readers that embody progressive ideas, including contemporary fiction, literature, classics, children’s books, politics, philosophy & religion, and personal wellness.”
Paul had a leader's vision and energy, and his commitment to producing and distributing quality literature never wavered. He had deep integrity about his business practices. As the Executive Director of the National Association of Independent Publishers Representatives (NAIPR), Paul was proactive in reforming and streamlining that organization so that it ran seamlessly. Independent reps across the country owe Paul a debt of gratitude as he shored up the finances of NAIPR and spearheaded an innovative electronic ordering system that saved countless hours for reps and booksellers alike. His legacy will live on as this system, Frontlist Plus Universal, will continue to serve the book selling community, saving time and money and being brilliant in its simplicity and execution.
Paul had an impressive background as a bookseller. He starting out with Encore Books in Philadelphia in the 1980s, he moved onto Doubleday Bookshops in New York. He was sales manager at the publishing company Rizzoli, and then for Routledge, and Thompson. He knew the old legendary commission sales reps like George Scheer, Oscar Schonenfeld, and Ned Melman, and he had a deep respect for them. He maintained a membership for a time at the venerable Players Club in Manhattan (http://www.theplayersnyc.org/members/). His apartment at Stuyvesant Town on East 14th Street was always open to friends and colleagues. He was a gourmet cook, a wicked sushi chef, and a true renaissance man.
Paul was not adverse to taking risks. In the 1990s he founded Herodias, an eclectic publishing company that was a precursor to the current Bunim & Bannigan. One of the great books that Paul was responsible for was Art, Music and Education As Strategy for Survival: Theresienstadt 1941-45 by Anne Dutlinger, published in cooperation with the Payne Gallery of Moravian College, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This is an incredible book which is a testimony to the power of the arts to sustain life under the most brutal and inhuman conditions imaginable. It collected for the first time in one volume the children's art of Theresienstadt concentration camp in World War II, unpublished work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, and historical photographs, as well as numerous essays of interest to historians, art educators/therapists, and Holocaust scholars: – providing an important new interdisciplinary approach to exploring the power of art to teach, express, commemorate, and perhaps, most importantly, to heal.
I know that this book was one of Paul's personal favorites. The business of Herodias didn't work out, and Paul ultimately lost control of the inventory. But this setback didn't stop him from continuing to pursue his dreams of being a publisher. Paul made adjustments to his business and started B&B on a less grandiose scale. He learned important lessons running Herodias, and these served him well in developing the list for B&B, and for the business of NAIPR, where he made himself irreplaceable.
Highlights from the B&B list include Daniel Berrigan's, A Sunday in Hell: Fables & Poems, Eliot Asinof's dynamic novel Final Judgment, and a new translation of the classic 19th century novel Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, translated from the Russian by Stephen Pearl, with an introduction by Galya Diment, and a foreword by Tatyana Tolstaya. These books and others were consistently of the highest quality and had Paul's trademark style of being a book for the ages to come.
What more can I say? I've lost a dear friend and a dynamic colleague. Paul was a smart and enthusiastic practitioner in publishing and in life. A dedicated family man, a world traveler, a marvelous cook and host, a true friend. Paul will be sorely missed.
Paul had a leader's vision and energy, and his commitment to producing and distributing quality literature never wavered. He had deep integrity about his business practices. As the Executive Director of the National Association of Independent Publishers Representatives (NAIPR), Paul was proactive in reforming and streamlining that organization so that it ran seamlessly. Independent reps across the country owe Paul a debt of gratitude as he shored up the finances of NAIPR and spearheaded an innovative electronic ordering system that saved countless hours for reps and booksellers alike. His legacy will live on as this system, Frontlist Plus Universal, will continue to serve the book selling community, saving time and money and being brilliant in its simplicity and execution.
Paul had an impressive background as a bookseller. He starting out with Encore Books in Philadelphia in the 1980s, he moved onto Doubleday Bookshops in New York. He was sales manager at the publishing company Rizzoli, and then for Routledge, and Thompson. He knew the old legendary commission sales reps like George Scheer, Oscar Schonenfeld, and Ned Melman, and he had a deep respect for them. He maintained a membership for a time at the venerable Players Club in Manhattan (http://www.theplayersnyc.org/members/). His apartment at Stuyvesant Town on East 14th Street was always open to friends and colleagues. He was a gourmet cook, a wicked sushi chef, and a true renaissance man.
Paul was not adverse to taking risks. In the 1990s he founded Herodias, an eclectic publishing company that was a precursor to the current Bunim & Bannigan. One of the great books that Paul was responsible for was Art, Music and Education As Strategy for Survival: Theresienstadt 1941-45 by Anne Dutlinger, published in cooperation with the Payne Gallery of Moravian College, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This is an incredible book which is a testimony to the power of the arts to sustain life under the most brutal and inhuman conditions imaginable. It collected for the first time in one volume the children's art of Theresienstadt concentration camp in World War II, unpublished work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, and historical photographs, as well as numerous essays of interest to historians, art educators/therapists, and Holocaust scholars: – providing an important new interdisciplinary approach to exploring the power of art to teach, express, commemorate, and perhaps, most importantly, to heal.
I know that this book was one of Paul's personal favorites. The business of Herodias didn't work out, and Paul ultimately lost control of the inventory. But this setback didn't stop him from continuing to pursue his dreams of being a publisher. Paul made adjustments to his business and started B&B on a less grandiose scale. He learned important lessons running Herodias, and these served him well in developing the list for B&B, and for the business of NAIPR, where he made himself irreplaceable.
Highlights from the B&B list include Daniel Berrigan's, A Sunday in Hell: Fables & Poems, Eliot Asinof's dynamic novel Final Judgment, and a new translation of the classic 19th century novel Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, translated from the Russian by Stephen Pearl, with an introduction by Galya Diment, and a foreword by Tatyana Tolstaya. These books and others were consistently of the highest quality and had Paul's trademark style of being a book for the ages to come.
What more can I say? I've lost a dear friend and a dynamic colleague. Paul was a smart and enthusiastic practitioner in publishing and in life. A dedicated family man, a world traveler, a marvelous cook and host, a true friend. Paul will be sorely missed.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
State Sen. Rickey Hendon's book BACKSTABBERS makes the New York Times
August 6, 2010 New York Times
Settling Scores and Looking Out for No. 1, Hendon-Style
By JAMES WARREN
James Warren is a columnist for the Chicago News Cooperative
As President Obama was back in town Thursday, in part to raise millions of dollars, Rickey R. Hendon, a k a Hollywood Hendon, was surely green with envy. The qualms of Mr. Hendon, the West Side state senator, about his onetime colleague have been thinly veiled and are now memorialized in his unbridled political primer, “Backstabbers: The Reality of Politics.”
“A wannabe will usually try to form a clique within your organization, a small group of people who band together against you,” wrote Mr. Hendon, a Democrat who besides a life in politics also fancies himself a musician-filmmaker. “There was a time when President Barack Obama was a part of Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer’s organization.”
“She got kicked off the ballot by members of that organization, and Obama became their candidate,” he wrote. “The rest is history. I know Senator Palmer, and I know she feels as if someone stabbed her in the back.”
Well, Mr. Obama gets treated just a tad more charitably than Emil Jones, the former State Senate president, of whom Mr. Hendon wrote, “He stabbed me in the back on the way out the door, after my years of loyalty.” Or Maria Pappas, the Cook County treasurer, whose first campaign Mr. Hendon ran. He wrote that she “dropped me and many of her close friends as soon as she won” the treasurer job.
Or Senator Roland W. Burris, whom Mr. Hendon said let him down more than anyone else when Mr. Burris did not support him for lieutenant governor in the Democratic primary in February, which was won, briefly, by Scott Lee Cohen. Or an unnamed Hispanic political organization that “played games and did not help me” in the primary.
But those are mere asides in a street-level, how-to guide by an author as hot and raucous as Mr. Obama is cool and restrained. Mr. Hendon’s world is all tactics, scant policy and driven by all-consuming suspicions and a craving to bring home the pork.
His credo is that one has no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.
“Watch those whom you trust, including even your family and friends,” he wrote. It’s shaft or be shafted, a somewhat less aspirational notion than what took Mr. Obama to the White House.
Mr. Hendon’s book provides local political wannabes with a tour d’horizon of the game, at least as played in his neck of the woods, including pages of dos and don’ts of petition drives. For example, it advises aspiring candidates to personally double check that their petition circulators aren’t producing “garbage.”
There are tips on the best places for billboards and posters; on rehearsing for debates in front of a mirror but not feeling compelled to answer a moderator’s questions; on using low-cost buffets for fund-raisers rather than pricey sit-downs; and on how to uncover “saboteurs” and “informants” in your organization.
When it comes to a politician’s most important moment — Election Day — the stylistic devotee of the upper case urges candidates not only to “GRAB SOME LAST MINUTE CASH” to have on hand, but also to be wily in procuring the favor of election judges, especially in a close race.
“If you’re in a situation where you must do these kinds of things, remember that men will let their guard down with attractive women, especially if the woman flirts with him and pretends to like him.”
No one, certainly not any board of elections, can be trusted. “IF THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH CHEATING YOU, THEY WILL CHEAT YOU,” Mr. Hendon wrote.
Published by Academy Chicago Publishers, the book concludes with a self-pitying passage in which Mr. Hendon calls his February loss the day “my political life ended.” But he is serving out his State Senate term and may well run for re-election, “to protect my district from the vultures who lie in wait for my political carcass.”
His unfettered rhetoric is in sync with a man who once asked a female colleague on the Senate floor if she was a “true blonde.” His West Side office is festooned with giant blow-ups of state checks he has arranged for churches, businesses and individuals.
If only it had been him, not Mr. Obama, to have soared from the muck of the state legislature, imagine a different course for America — or just the parceling out of federal stimulus dollars.
One can imagine a President Hendon, “Hollywood” style, repaving every street in the Fifth District and proudly buying a Cadillac Escalade for each of his old precinct workers — though not necessarily in that order.
Settling Scores and Looking Out for No. 1, Hendon-Style
By JAMES WARREN
James Warren is a columnist for the Chicago News Cooperative
As President Obama was back in town Thursday, in part to raise millions of dollars, Rickey R. Hendon, a k a Hollywood Hendon, was surely green with envy. The qualms of Mr. Hendon, the West Side state senator, about his onetime colleague have been thinly veiled and are now memorialized in his unbridled political primer, “Backstabbers: The Reality of Politics.”
“A wannabe will usually try to form a clique within your organization, a small group of people who band together against you,” wrote Mr. Hendon, a Democrat who besides a life in politics also fancies himself a musician-filmmaker. “There was a time when President Barack Obama was a part of Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer’s organization.”
“She got kicked off the ballot by members of that organization, and Obama became their candidate,” he wrote. “The rest is history. I know Senator Palmer, and I know she feels as if someone stabbed her in the back.”
Well, Mr. Obama gets treated just a tad more charitably than Emil Jones, the former State Senate president, of whom Mr. Hendon wrote, “He stabbed me in the back on the way out the door, after my years of loyalty.” Or Maria Pappas, the Cook County treasurer, whose first campaign Mr. Hendon ran. He wrote that she “dropped me and many of her close friends as soon as she won” the treasurer job.
Or Senator Roland W. Burris, whom Mr. Hendon said let him down more than anyone else when Mr. Burris did not support him for lieutenant governor in the Democratic primary in February, which was won, briefly, by Scott Lee Cohen. Or an unnamed Hispanic political organization that “played games and did not help me” in the primary.
But those are mere asides in a street-level, how-to guide by an author as hot and raucous as Mr. Obama is cool and restrained. Mr. Hendon’s world is all tactics, scant policy and driven by all-consuming suspicions and a craving to bring home the pork.
His credo is that one has no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.
“Watch those whom you trust, including even your family and friends,” he wrote. It’s shaft or be shafted, a somewhat less aspirational notion than what took Mr. Obama to the White House.
Mr. Hendon’s book provides local political wannabes with a tour d’horizon of the game, at least as played in his neck of the woods, including pages of dos and don’ts of petition drives. For example, it advises aspiring candidates to personally double check that their petition circulators aren’t producing “garbage.”
There are tips on the best places for billboards and posters; on rehearsing for debates in front of a mirror but not feeling compelled to answer a moderator’s questions; on using low-cost buffets for fund-raisers rather than pricey sit-downs; and on how to uncover “saboteurs” and “informants” in your organization.
When it comes to a politician’s most important moment — Election Day — the stylistic devotee of the upper case urges candidates not only to “GRAB SOME LAST MINUTE CASH” to have on hand, but also to be wily in procuring the favor of election judges, especially in a close race.
“If you’re in a situation where you must do these kinds of things, remember that men will let their guard down with attractive women, especially if the woman flirts with him and pretends to like him.”
No one, certainly not any board of elections, can be trusted. “IF THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH CHEATING YOU, THEY WILL CHEAT YOU,” Mr. Hendon wrote.
Published by Academy Chicago Publishers, the book concludes with a self-pitying passage in which Mr. Hendon calls his February loss the day “my political life ended.” But he is serving out his State Senate term and may well run for re-election, “to protect my district from the vultures who lie in wait for my political carcass.”
His unfettered rhetoric is in sync with a man who once asked a female colleague on the Senate floor if she was a “true blonde.” His West Side office is festooned with giant blow-ups of state checks he has arranged for churches, businesses and individuals.
If only it had been him, not Mr. Obama, to have soared from the muck of the state legislature, imagine a different course for America — or just the parceling out of federal stimulus dollars.
One can imagine a President Hendon, “Hollywood” style, repaving every street in the Fifth District and proudly buying a Cadillac Escalade for each of his old precinct workers — though not necessarily in that order.
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