Archive - August 17, 2010

The  publishing world is full of rejected books that went onto find a home and great success. Joe Heller’s Catch 22 was turned down 50 times by mainstream publishers. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected by 121 publishers (the record!) and now has sold over 4 million copies. Also, remember, bad books also make best sellers. Take Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. It has sold millions. It is unreadable to anyone who reads English. Look at the Love Story by Erich Segal. Another huge bestseller. It’s a sappy, teenage love story written by a classics professor at Harvard. Segal wrote it as a movie script and the studio made into the first novelization ever done.  Remember The Bridges of Madison Country by Robert James Waller? It sold 50 million copies worldwide. Has anyone ever attempted to read James Patterson and the novels that are manufactured by his publishing factory? Then there is Nicholas Sparks who wrote . . .

The September issue of Vanity Fair carries a long article by Maureen Orth, special correspondent to the magazine, on designer Oleg Cassini. Journalist Orth has written articles for VF on Conrad Black, Michael Jackson, and Denise Rich, among others. Maureen says that she was ‘stunned’ by the “expanding cast of characters” she discovered while reporting “Cassini Royale.” Everyone is linked to the designer from financier Bernie Cornfeld to Geroge W. Bush. Maureen, in her other life, is the founder of the Marina Orth Foundation, a non-profit that serves underprivileged schools in Colombia. At the request of the secretary of education of Medellin, where Maureen was a PCV, she has developed a pilot program in English and Information Technology with teachers and students at the Marina Orth Rural School, a school of 350 students from kindergarten through high school. This program makes the Marina Orth school the first public bilingual school in the nation. It is . . .

Ron Schwarz (Colombia 1961-63) is an anthropologist who has been writing his Peace Corps story, Kennedy’s Orphans. Several years ago we met via the Internet when he took an on-line writing I was giving on ‘writing your Peace Corps memoir.’ This opening chapter was recently published in the Brooklyn Eagle. • From Kings Highway to Colombia By Ron Schwarz (Colombia 1961–63) BROOKLYN – June 8, 1961 . . . my mother answered the call. I’m playing tennis with Dickie Cowan on center court at Forest Hills where the U.S. Open was staged until 1978. It was not an officially sanctioned match and our access to the grounds was due neither to club membership, nor a USLTA ranking. Rather, it was an ancillary benefit of our first paid job after graduating from Colgate and Harvard … painting seat numbers on the wooden stadium benches. Match over and outside the stadium, Dickie, . . .