Word: authority
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...novelist selected Sherry for the job after reading his 1971 book on Joseph Conrad, Conrad's Western World. Greene was taken with the scholar's unbiased approach and willingness to travel to the remote and hazardous regions that inspired the author of The Heart of Darkness. And indeed, Sherry makes a fuss about his field investigations for this book: "Risking disease and death as he had done, I went to those places and in most cases found people Greene had met and put into his novels." He tells us that he developed gangrene in South America and got dysentery...
Take Joni Evans, publisher of adult trade books at Random House. Two years ago, when she worked in a top editing job at rival Simon & Schuster, Evans was so determined to keep author Mario Puzo in her literary camp that she offered him a $3 million advance for his next book, sight unseen. A competitor outbid her by $1 million, so she matched the offer. "When I have to have it, I have to have it," she explains. The Godfather author, who jumped to Random House when Evans moved there in late 1987, is expected to deliver his pricey manuscript...
...bidding wars are particularly challenging for the few remaining independent companies, most notably Houghton Mifflin and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. When longtime Farrar, Straus author Tom Wolfe scored a blockbuster in 1987-88 with his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (hard-cover copies sold: 750,000), rival publishing houses were rumored to be making offers of $15 million or more for his next book. Farrar, Straus, which had total revenues of only about $30 million last year, managed to assemble a deal with paperback publisher Bantam Books that paid Wolfe an estimated $5 million to $7 million. Says Roger...
...RUSSIA HOUSE by John le Carre (Knopf; $19.95). A document discounting Soviet missile capabilities is smuggled to the West. Never mind glasnost, perestroika and the cold war thaw. Are these grubby notebooks full of facts and figures true? The quest for the answer produces the author's most hair- raising thriller since The Spy Who Came In from the Cold...
...They're creating a new political class that knows how to administer but doesn't know the people in the neighborhood," the article written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author J. Anthony Lukas quoted White as saying. "They talk about competence. I'd rather not be called competent. I'd be offended by that word...