Word: goulden
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...service aimed at grocery shoppers. Knight-Ridder lost about $50 million in a failed home-shopping service. And in its ambitious effort to make paper vanish, Wang Laboratories itself almost disappeared when it bet the ranch on manufacturing expensive document-scanning and imaging systems that nobody wanted. Says David Goulden, a Wang vice president: "The market's been a disappointment...
Originally commissioned by Simon & Schuster, the manuscript of Fit to Print was rejected there and at a number of other top publishing houses. Goulden, author of 15 other books, including the 1972 best seller The Superlawyers, ultimately turned to Lyle Stuart, an imprint with a reputation for taking chances. Stuart claims that Simon & Schuster backed away because the book is too hard hitting and would offend the proprietors of the country's most influential book review. Not true, says Simon & Schuster; Goulden's work simply fell below its standards...
There are strong arguments for both sides. Charting Rosenthal's rise at the Times from campus stringer at the City College of New York, Goulden provides a harsh account of his subject's personal life, including his prolonged extramarital affair with actress Katharine Balfour, whom, says Goulden, he promised to marry but eventually abandoned. Still, Fit to Print is at times as sympathetic as it is damning. Goulden clearly shares many of Rosenthal's conservative political views, and the author provides a sensitive account of the editor's painful childhood, during which Rosenthal lost his father and three sisters...
Unfortunately, Goulden fails to pull together his reporting and explain what made Rosenthal such a great newspaperman and what exactly Rosenthal's legacy is. The book is sloppily edited and riddled with factual errors and misspellings of the names of prominently by-lined Times reporters. At one point, Goulden refers to Rosenthal's semiweekly "On My Mind" column as "On My Head...
...read it: "From what I can tell, it's like walking into a mess in the street. You step in it; you try to wipe it from your foot." Ironically, some of the best material in the book comes from Rosenthal, who at first refused to talk to Goulden but ultimately spent 20 hours with the author. "If you call Abe Rosenthal anything," he told a mystified Goulden as their first meeting drew to a close, "call me anti-authoritarian...