Scott Martelle

My first book -- I love that phrase, with its implied list of books that follow -- has been out for almost two years, but still occasionally gets some nice notice. A few months back it received a positive mention in a review/essay in The New Yorker (a rush for any author). And a reviewer in the newest issue of Dissent also has some nice things to say about it.

The review is only available online to subscribers, but here are a couple of salient graphs:

Scott Martelle is the latest journalist to tackle one of the epic
stories of bloody conflict in labor history—stories passed over by
academic historians who assumed they “had been done before.” But
newspaper writers who wrote history knew these were great American
dramas and jumped on them. Top New York Times journalists William
Serrin and J. Anthony Lukas were the first out of the gate with big
books on the Homestead steel workers and the Idaho mine wars—both
published in the 1990s. Other journalists followed with popular
histories of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: the Lawrence,
Massachusetts, Bread and Roses strike; and the Los Angeles Times
bombing of 1910, which was blamed on the McNamara brothers, two
militant iron workers whose case became a cause célèbre for the labor
movement.

Martelle’s account of the Ludlow affair is the best of these labor
history books by journalists. The author’s research is extremely
impressive, because he combines the skills of an investigative
reporter and a well-read historian. No previous account of the
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I'm in New York City for a few days, staying with a friend in Brooklyn and then moving to a hotel in Manhattan while attending/covering the annual Book Expo America (BEA), the trade show for the publishing industry.

It's a massive gathering of book publishers and book buyers (mostly commercial and for libraries) focusing on books to be published late summer trhough the fall/winter season. This is my fourth or fifth time -- I lose track -- and it's always a lot of fun, if a bit overwhelming. Among the notable authors on tap: Joyce Carol Oates, Francine Prose, Pat Conroy, Tracy Kidder and rockers Steven Tyler (Aerosmith) and Clarence Clemons ("The Big Man" sax player from Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band).

I'll be posting a bit while here, and will also be contributing to the Los Angeles Times' book blog, Jacket Copy. Read More 

So you travel to a remote corner of the world, one of many trips you've made to the region, and stumble across a man with some bold and self-indicting stories about tribal feuds, vengeance and mass murder. What do you do?

Well, if you're Jared Diamond, you write the story up for The New Yorker. But now Diamond, the UCLA professor and author of the best-selling Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, and The New Yorker are being sued by the source for the story -- who says none of it is true.

The New Yorker has taken the story down from its public access layer (we subscribers can still get at it): “Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?” in the April 21, 2008 issue. And it's a good story about old ways persisting into modern times, with perhaps a bit too much gullibility born of a Western view of the world. Maybe Diamond bought the guy's story because it fit within his view of tribalism in Papua New Guinea, where he has made many trips researching birds. Or maybe it just fit his overarching point about vengeance.

There are many other interesting facets to how the story was handled, and the source's very modern and Western response -- filing a lawsuit. Diamond is a respected researcher, public intellectual and author -- I once profiled him for the Los Angeles Times -- and he can tell a good story. But the vetting of the article seems to have been very weak, both by Diamond and by The New Yorker. Columbia Journalism Review has a nice overview here, and over here you'll find the initial takedown of the piece by Stinkyjournalism.com.

My money would be on an eventual out-of-court settlement with no admission of fault. But that the story was written and published in the first place is troubling, to say the least. As the linked pieces point out, this was essentially a single-source story in which the source implicated himself in heinous criminal acts. I can't count the number of red flags that should have raised. And, if it turns out Diamond was wrong, or was lied to by the source, I wonder if the lure of an intriguing story about savage acts in a third-world jungle blinded him and The New Yorker to their core responsibility to verify the story. Read More 

Well, the California Supreme Court did the expected this morning and upheld Prop. 8, which bans gay marriage in California. With no legal background, I'm not going to try to parse the details of it -- I'll leave that to Maura Dolan, a former LA Times colleague.

But given how each state has a different take on this issue, it's clear this needs to get to the Supreme Court -- where, admittedly, the deck seems stacked against gay marriage. But I would hope the Loving v. Virginia case would be precedent here. In that case, from 1967, the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a state ban on interracial marriage.

That decision held that marriage is a basic civil right and thus eligible for federal protection. A civil right is a civil right, and it defies logic that the federal protections would be limited to opposite-sex marriages. At its heart a legal marriage license, which grants all the perks (tax, survivorship, etc.) is a contract, and such it should be available to all.

And if, instead, it is deemed to be a function of religion -- which is the undercurrent of the anti-gay marriage argument -- then you have to wonder what business any level of U.S. government has in sanctioning a religious rite.

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I was saddened to see that Jay Bennett died yesterday. I still listen to old Wilco albums, and this morning tossed on Bennett's "Bigger than Blue." Great songwriter with a voice that can haunt.

Here he is with Jeff Tweedy in better days (they had a rather acrimonious fall out).

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UPDATE: Ruth Padel now says she tipped off journalists to the old harassment complaint. So much for the early denial ....

Ruth Padel, the first woman to ever be elected Oxford Professor of Poetry, has resigned the post over allegations she was involved in a smear campaign that earlier led fellow poet Derek Wolcott, a Nobel Prize winner, to withdraw from consideration.

The smear campaign involved anonymous letters detailing a sexual-harassment allegation against him from 1982, while he was teaching at Harvard. Padel denied involvement in the letter campaign, but stepped down anyway.

And I thought presidential politics was a full-contact sport.  Read More 

Lord I hate that "The O.C." stuff, but that's the price you pay for a cheap rhyme ...

Lisa See, who has built up a solid body of fiction over the past decade or so, has a new book coming out this week, Shanghai Girls, exploring the lives of two sisters in 1937 Shanghai as the region is consumed by war. I have yet to read it (hint to the Random House publicity team), but loved her earlier works, including Peony in Love and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.

See is breaching the Orange Curtain on June 6, taking part in Barbara DeMarco-Barrett's new Pen on Fire Speaker Series. This event will be at the Scape Gallery, 2859 East Coast Highway in Corona del Mar. Barbara, among other things, is co-host of "Writers on Writing," aired on KUCI and available by podcast. Earlier, Barbara hosted Carolyn See, Lisa's mother, and Merrill Markoe, as well as a session with Martin J. Smith, author and editor of Orange Coast magazine (I do freelance for him).

I have yet to attend one of these sessions -- due in no small part because they keep selling out too fast. But maybe I'll some of you at this one. Read More 

Well, the desk is clean, a freelance assignment is just about done, and it's back to the book. At least in theory. You writers out there will understand this -- I'm looking at a stretch of time that has to be written about, but that at its core is as dull as a sidewalk. I have to find some way to bring it to life against the much more scintillating context of the story itself, the trial of the Communist Party leaders.

But, well, this part is just plain boring.

Part of the defense strategy in the trial was to delay and drag things out. At the opening of the trial they launched into a weeks-long attack on the jury-selection system, in which they paraded dozens of witnesses through the court room. The judge was indulgent. The witnesses were redundant. The challenge failed. The days dragged on ...

I'll make this work and by the time I'm done it will all sing and make sense. But for now, I come out to the desk and, instead of rubbing my hands together in excitement to get launched on the day's work, sit down with a groan. And straighten the papers on my desk. And check Facebook. And check the weather. And check a friend's blog. And check Facebook. And make the coffee. And check Facebook. And pour a cup of the freshly made coffee. And check Facebook.

And update my blog.

Knock it off, Scott, and get back to work... Read More 

UPDATE: There, it took a while but I can confirm the desk is indeed made of wood.

Running out of things to procrastinate over...





I've been looking at this mess on my desk for the better part of a week now (okay, several weeks). It's on the daily list of things to get to but, obviously, hasn't quite been accomplished. Today, for sure, after the farmer's market this morning.

Maybe.

The row of books is part of the research material for the current book project, The Fear Within, which has had me buried in the immediate postwar years. It's a fascinating era in which national fear of foreign enemies -- communists, in this case -- had a major impact on government policy and led to an erosion of basic civil rights.

Sound familiar?
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I have to admit to a certain fascination with the trial underway in Manhattan over the alleged plundering of the late Brooke Astor's estate. The drama falls somewhere between Tom Wolfe and Rex Stout, the creator of the one-seventh of a ton genius detective Nero Wolfe.

At its heart it's a throwback story, drawing in the top layers of Manhattan's high society, beginning with Astor, at one point the hostess in New York City. Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair's legendary editor, and Henry Kissinger (a war criminal in some quarters; the hero of American diplomacy in others).

But it's also a deeper tale of crumbling families, greed, probably a little jealousy and, deepest of all, betrayal. And that the victim was elderly and infirm takes the story out of all those zones and places it in the heart of nearly every American family that has dealt with a matriarch or patriarch reaching such advanced, and debilitated years.

Damn, it should be a novel.
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