Bet You Missed It

Carefully Selected by Your Crack Staff of News Sleuths

Column Editor: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com>

Let’s Read WWII Women

Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance (2019) (Baltimore socialite Virginia Hall lost a leg in a hunting accident, but volunteered for British Spec Ops and was parachuted behind German lines); (2) Katherine Sharp Landdeck, The Woman With Silver Wings (2020) (women ferrying aircraft to release men for combat); (3) Rebecca Donner, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days (2021) (American woman married to a German develops largest underground resistance group); (4) Liza Mundy, Code Girls (2017) (code breakers recruited from the women’s colleges); (5) Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Greenlee, And If I Perish (2003) (accounts from thousands of women who served). See: Catherine Musemech, “On the Unsung Women of World War II,” The Wall Street Journal, July 23-24, 2022, p.C8.

College Mergers

Northeastern was a blue-collar commuter college until they decided to capitalize on the work/study that the students were doing. They developed a network of 3,100 companies for the students to intern and made the faculty alter curriculum to meet the needs of the companies. Suddenly they were in vogue and highly selective. Last year, 95,000 applied for 2,600 spots.

Flush with success, they began adding additional branches around the country and designed them to serve the needs of their areas. They have campuses in Charlotte, San Jose, London, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland. Then a plum fell in their laps.

Mills College, a 170-year-old women’s college in California was going under. But it was near Silicon Valley with a 135-acre campus worth $1 billion.

In an astounding bargain, in exchange for Northeastern assuming $21 million in Mills’ liabilities, it got the land, $30 million endowment, and a valuable art collection. As you can imagine, there’s much criticism of the deal.

Mills was a typical story. Women’s seminary updated to a women’s empowerment mission. Tried to go coed but backed off under strident alum objections. Squandered money on administrators and contractors. And then — incredibly — decided to require not one but two essays for admission.

Applications immediately fell, but Mills wouldn’t back off and dwindled to ruin.

Joseph Aoun, President of Northeastern, is quite the innovator. He earned degrees in Lebanon, Paris, and MIT. He observes that all around the world there is an Education Minister who rigidly runs the universities from the top down. America is not saddled with that, but higher-ed groupthink and accreditation teams homogenize everything.

He thinks education must change with the world, and he’s broken the strait-jacket. Now multiple struggling colleges are begging for a merger.

See: Douglas Belkin, “Broke Colleges Resort to Mergers for Survival,” The Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2022, p.A1.

Book Fraud for Fame and Profit

Go Ask Alice purported to be the diary of a middle class California girl who took LSD and entered a downward spiral to death. It tapped into the 1970s panic over drugs and Satanism.

Beatrice Sparks was a struggling author who milked a connection to Art Linkletter to get published by Prentice-Hall. Linkletter was a star author for Prentice-Hall and blamed LSD for his daughter’s death. The book tapped into the anxieties of the age to produce a best seller.

Sparks, however, was a “walking correction” whose stories of her credentials and how she got the manuscript were constantly changing.

Next, a mother grieving the death of her son by suicide entrusted his diary to Sparks. In 1979, this became The Haunting Diary of a 16-Year-Old in the World of Witchcraft. This tapped into a national obsession with Satanism and secret devilworshipping cults.

Sparks “discovered” and “edited” six more such journals up to her death in 2012. In Unmask Alice, Rick Emerson manages to unravel what was undoubtedly a fraud.

See: William Tipper, “The Tale of a Bad Trip,” (review of Unmask Alice by Rick Emerson), The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 4, 2022, p.A15.

Obit of Note

Son of a NYC hatmaker, Bob Rafelson (1933-2022) was a cinefile from a young age. He rose to TV producer and co-created The Monkees, a sitcom that spawned a band.

Flush with Monkees money, he and Bert Schneider formed their own production company seeking countercultural projects. Head featuring B-list actor Jack Nicholson flopped.

But they made a huge rebound with him in Easy Rider and then with the 1970 classic Five Easy Pieces.

See: “The filmmaker who captured the counterculture,” The Week, Aug. 5, 2022, p.35.

Let’s Read Rise & Fall of Dynasties

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901) (Nobel Prize in lit 1929); (2) Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) (models story after Bon Marché, one of the first department stores); (3) Stefano Massini, The Lehman Trilogy (2016) (700-page novel in verse [!!] about Lehman family); (4) David S. Landes, Dynasties (2006) (examines family dynasties in banking, automobiles & treasures of the earth); (5) Andrea Colli, The History of Family Business, 1850-2000 (2003) (problem of thrusting managerial hierarchies into family biz).

See: Joseph Sassoon, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 6-7, 2022, p.C8. Joseph is the author of the forthcoming “The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire.

Roger Tory Peterson came from humble origins in western NY state and credited bird watching with keeping him from delinquency.

His Field Guide to the Birds: Eastern Land and Water Birds was rejected by four publishers before Houghton Mifflin bought it. The dinky print run of 2,000 copies sold out in a week. The runs increased to 300,000 and by 1980 made the New York Times Top 10 Bestseller List. When he died in 1996 at the age of 88, it had sold 7 million copies.

His genius lay in grouping birds of similar color, size and shape rather than taxonomy. It revolutionized birdwatching. Plus he was a superb artist.

It brought him a wealth of degrees, awards, and medals from the New York Zoological Society to the Explorer’s Club to the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And made him rich.

See: Brooke Chilvers, “Roger Tory Peterson The book, the man and his wives,” Gray’s Sporting Journal, August 2022, p.92.

Literary Rejection As Genre in Itself

Sex Bias: Bentley and Son’s rejection of Moby Dick — “First, does it have to be a whale? For instance, could the captain not be struggling with depravity towards young, perhaps voluptuous maidens?”

A publisher told Nabokov that Lolita was “overwhelmingly nauseating even to an enlightened Freudian.”

Quality of the writing: San Francisco Examiner told Kipling he didn’t “know how to use the English language.”

Faux concern for the author’s welfare: D.H. Lawrence was told of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “For your own sake, do not publish this book.”

William Faulkner’s publisher on Sanctuary, “Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail.”

Political grounds: Orwell’s Animal Farm was rejected due to a need for “more public-spirited pigs.”

See: https://thecritic.co.uk/good-god-i-cant-publish-this/ Alice Oseman flunked her entrance exam to Cambridge but found a far more lucrative path in life. At 17 she signed a twobook deal starting with her novel Solitaire. She wanted to read about female characters who have lifechanging moments that don’t involve a man. Unable to find one, she wrote her own. Except it’s about a shy gay boy with a crush on a rugby player. But no mind. Heartstopper graphic novels broke sales records and got picked up by Netflix. Now she’s selling a million £ worth of books a month in the UK alone. She surpasses J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, and Lee Child. Heartstopper has sold 4 million copies worldwide with rights sold in 33 countries. Netflix is ordering more series.

See: Alison Boshoff, “The British author you’ve probably NEVER heard of who is selling a million pounds worth of books each month,” The Daily Mail, Aug. 5, 2022.

Obit of Note

Marvin Josephson (1927-2022) was a bored young lawyer who decided to become a talent agent. He helped Bob Keeshan style himself as Captain Kangaroo and built on that success to form International Creative Management that took on thousands of actors and writers.

ICM spread from New York to Hollywood with clients like Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, Barbara Walters, Norman Schwarzkopf, and Eddie Murphy. Josephson never sought the limelight like Mike Ovitz of the rival Creative Artists Agency. “I believe the clients deserve the attention,” he said.

See: J. Kim Murphy; https://variety.com; Marvin Josephson, Founder of ICM Partners, Dies at 95.