Here’s a startling fact: This year alone, the United States will publish about as many books as it did in the entire previous century.
This coming Thursday, Sept. 4, my new memoir, Broadcast Live: 71 true stories, including some I’d just as soon forget, will join them.
Given the number of titles vying for attention, I should feel like a single firefly flickering in Times Square. Yet I’m humbled and grateful for the readers who’ve already pre-ordered Broadcast Live and tell me they’re really looking forward to their copy (or copies!) arriving later this week.
Amazon, as we all know, largely sets the stage in today’s book world, and pre-order numbers play a huge role in determining how visible Broadcast Live will be there in the days ahead.
So…there’s still time for you to give my little book a big boost before launch day. You’ll find pre-order details on my website, stevevogelauthor.com—not only for Amazon but for two other retailers offering special deals (BookBaby coupon code= FNHW93).
Thank you for your support. It means more than you know.
Serendipity on wheels
I love serendipity. I really do. It’s a beautiful word. Lyrical, fun to say—and fun to experience.
My report on a recent happenstance in a moment. First a word about the word itself.
It’s attributed to Horatio Walpole, son of an 18th Century British prime minister. In a letter, he likened an unexpected, fortunate happening to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. Serendip is an old name for Sri Lanka, also once known as Ceylon. Somehow it stuck. Serendipity is “the occurrence of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.”
Okay. TMI.
So I’m dropping off Mary’s car at the dealership for what turns out to be a major repair. I readily accept the service guy’s offer to get me a lift home.
“Wait there in the customer lounge and you’ll be on your way just as soon as we clear out some of this traffic.”
That’s fine, because I’ve come prepared with reading material.
Forty minutes later I approach the service desk to see what’s up. Body language tells me I’ve been forgotten. But immediately:
“I can take you right now.” The offer comes from another guy behind the desk, not too many years younger than me. We hop in the dealership’s customer service van for the brief drive to my home.
After the obligatory observations about the hot weather, he mentions, almost in passing, “I retired a few years ago, and I found I needed something to do once I finished writing my memoir.”
Bingo! Just that week I’d signed off on the final proofs of my own memoir. And just like that, the 10-minute drive home turned into an impromptu author-to-author exchange.
The next day the driver was watching for me to come in to pick up the repaired vehicle. As it happened, Mary was picker-upper. He spotted her as she claimed her SUV and handed her a copy of his freshly-minted memoir to hand to me.
Turns out his early years were spent in a Chicago suburb, literally only a couple blocks from where Mary grew up, and his first real job after graduate school was in the high desert northeast of Phoenix—not far from where Mary and I spend winters.
On a “coincidence scale” of 1 to 10, that might get you only about a 4.6. But throw in the fact that two retired guys—both fresh from finishing memoirs—happened to meet because of a delayed ride, it inches up to a 4.9. Not exactly a lottery win, but definitely enough to earn the label I love so much: serendipity. And cause for us to meet for coffee a couple weeks later.
Also turns out Joel Kenneth Bankes’s book is a good one.
Joel was just four years old when his father succumbed to kidney failure, leaving behind Joel, his mother and three older siblings to navigate life without him.
“I was unable to grasp the explosion of his death, much less the fallout that was yet to come,” he writes. “I did not understand my feelings of the emptiness that consumed me.”
It was a detachment that shaped him but also propelled him forward.
Driven by a need to understand loss and help others cope with it, he earned a graduate degree in clinical psychology. He went on to build a career in counseling, mediation and leadership of a national organization with a mission of supporting families and children in vulnerable circumstances.
It also led him to write Father’s Day Marathon, a deeply personal and practical guide, especially for men who grew up fatherless.
Bankes’s story demonstrates the differences between having and not having a dad.
“Our personalities, dispositions, physical prowess, and life’s trajectories are a function of those vast differences in our experiences of ‘Dad,’” he writes. In his own life, the absence of a father left him battling low self-esteem and depression. For others—especially those who grow up in poverty without role models and opportunities—the fallout can lead to emotional struggles and even criminal behavior.
But there is hope, Bankes writes. Intervention, encouragement and inspiration from others can change the outcome.
Writing Father’s Day Marathon was, for him, a healing journey. For others who were father-less for whatever reason, the book can be a source of renewal and restoration. For those lucky to have a caring dad, it’s a call to action—perhaps to step in as a mentor or father figure for a young person who needs one.
Near the book’s conclusion, Bankes shares 17 concrete steps to help readers cultivate strength, compassion and healing. Throughout Father’s Day Marathon, Bankes’s voice remains open-hearted and encouraging, reminding us that with empathy and intentional action, we can not only mend ourselves, but we can also help heal a generation.
“Mad Men” revisited
I just finished slow-binging my way through “Mad Men,” the iconic, 92-episode television series that ended its seven-season run on AMC a decade ago.
Yes, a substantial investment of time but worth it since, I discover, I had missed perhaps a quarter of all the episodes. Much of it was new to me, even though Don Draper long ago surrendered his heroic standing on Madison Avenue.
Even if there hadn’t been material fresh to me, the repeat viewing would have been worthwhile.
A few observations in retrospect:
The show remains great, mostly because of its deep character development and close attention to historical detail. The show is more R-rated than I recalled it. Smoking Lucky Strikes (an ad agency client) and adulterous affairs compete for the most screen time. But the characters’ ongoing personal struggles and societal issues involving race, gender and consumerism are fused into what I think is a realistic look at what it was like to work at a major ad agency in the 1960s.
But there’s humor, too—some of it dark, some of it bawdy. Some admittedly adolescent but clever sight-gag stuff in the fifth episode of season two made me laugh out loud and watch it a second and third time. Maybe you recall the zipper (not what you think) and paddle-ball segments.
Mad Men is much better than most TV today, engaging entertainment with meaningful historical context. One visionary moment involves an IBM salesman explaining the agency’s first mainframe computer:
“Yes, this machine is frightening to people but it’s made by people.”
“And people aren’t frightening?”
“It’s not that. It’s more of a cosmic disturbance. This machine is intimidating because it contains infinite quantities of information and that’s threatening because human existence is finite. But isn’t it god-like that we’ve mastered the infinite? The IBM 360 can count more stars in a day than we can in a lifetime.”
“But what man laying on his back counting stars has thought about numbers?”
“He probably thought about going to the moon.”
Mad Men’s writing can be ambitious, often subtle, usually captivating. The acting is powerful and the characters even more so. Even 10 years after the final episode, it’s a richly-layered viewing experience, certainly worth a first-time look, maybe even a re-run.
Choice of weapons
I was both relieved and, oddly enough, a bit disappointed to see the Hendricks family murders are not included in Rachel McCarthy James’s new book, Whack Job: A history of axe murder.
Half of this quick read traces the development of the ax (she insists on an e at the end of the word) as “a tool of construction and progress, an instrument of growth easily turned into a method of death.” She considers the book a “weird niche project” that’s neither true crime nor traditional history.
Some of the grimmer history comes in a non-surprising place: the Tower of London where scribes documented not just the condemned but the the number of ax strokes each required.
But then James, the daughter of heralded baseball writer and statistician Bill James, dips into a half dozen ax murder events, the most recent six years ago.
She, by necessity, I suspect, details the Lizzie Borden case, letting us know the 1892 slaying of Borden’s father and stepmother in Massachusetts is not as open-and-shut as we’ve been led to believe.
The most chilling chapter, however, covers the tragedy at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin estate in southwest Wisconsin. You won’t find many details on the official Taliesin website: “In 1914, arson destroyed the living quarters of Taliesin—one-third of the house—and seven were murdered.”
Yes, seven, including Wright’s mistress. And an ax was involved. Wright wasn’t home at the time. Chapter 10 in Whack Job brings hidden details to light. It’s essential reading for anyone interested in Wright.
James observes pop culture has dulled our sense of the ax’s terror.
“Many of our violent protagonists chose the axe with forethought and care and even symbolic intent,” she writes. “More of them grabbed the axe because it was there to be grabbed and it was heavy and sharp enough to do the damage they wanted.”
That paragraph caused me to pause and again wonder about the choice of instruments in the Hendricks children’s deaths.
The ax’s “powers of construction and destruction are imbued not by the leverage of the handle or the sharp edge of the blade,” James writes, “but by the one who uses it.”
Just askin’
Might a guy who cheats at golf fudge the government’s consumer price index numbers?
A subtle change could reduce next year’s cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security recipients.
A slight modification could lower what the government owes investors in inflation-protected Treasury securities.
A minor revision could improve the public’s view of how tariffs are impacting everyday living expenses.
What’s par for the course these days?
Tee time
We live on a golf course. Next-door neighbors just turned their backyard into a resort-level outdoor living space that’s only a chip shot from the 12th tee. Naturally, they’re out there all the time, enjoying the view and breeze, and providing some needed human surveillance.
The result? An unexpected benefit that’s better than a gimme putt: Male golfers have stopped sneaking over to the tall cottonwoods by the creek for “emergency relief.”
Turns out golfers don’t aim for the trees so much when there’s a gallery checking their swing.
Thanks for reading!
Great group of observations Steve! Two things: I never cheat at golf. My game is so bad that a stolen shot or two would help anything. I re-watch Madmen every year. For me, it’s much like that favorite book you keep on the night stand.
Be well and much success on the release. The book deserves to do well.