KING de Jonathan Eig

A new biography of Martin Luther King by award-winning author and journalist Jonathan Eig, including newly-revealed materials.

KING
by Jonathan Eig
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022
(chez David Black Literary Agency)

Credit: Lizz Kannenberg

Martin Luther King Jr. was the courageous and brilliant leader of the American civil rights movement, but today many know nothing about him beyond four syllables: “I have a dream.” When we turn heroes into superheroes, when we simplify the lives of great men and women in order to make their lessons easier to digest, we lose sight of their true greatness. We fail to honor them as real people with real accomplishments. Martin Luther King is fast approaching this predicament. The timing for a fresh look at his life could not be better, and the need for one is urgent: thousands of previously unseen documents have come to light, and many of King’s friends, followers, and confidants are eager to talk. Those who can give firsthand accounts are nearing the point in their lives where, if they aren’t heard soon, their stories will be lost for good. In the thirty-six years since the last full biography of King was published, a plethora of new primary documents have become available, and our understanding of King the man has fundamentally changed. The new materials include the 102 interviews with King contemporaries conducted from 2010-2016 for the National Museum of African American History and Culture; more than 100 interview transcripts from the 1987 documentary Eyes on the Prize; handwritten notes from James Baldwin; a 1964 interview with King himself taken by the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren; as well as tens of thousands of newly released FBI documents. Some of King’s contemporaries, including Harry Belafonte and Andrew Young, have already given interviews for Jonathan Eig’s book, which will also incorporate recent research suggesting that King battled depression, drawing from thousands of newly archived personal correspondence, including letters from King to his first biographer, Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, in 1958.

Jonathan Eig is the author of five critically acclaimed books, two of them New York Times bestsellers. He was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Monsey, New York. Eig is a former staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, and he remains a contributing writer there. He has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, the Washington Post, and other publications. His most recent book, Ali: A Life, was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. It has also been long-listed for the Plutarch Prize for biography and the 2018 PEN/ESPN Award for literary sports writing. It was selected as one of the best books of 2017 by The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, and Sports Illustrated. Eig is currently working as producer on multi-part Muhammad Ali documentary. Eig is also working with Morgan Freeman and CBS Studios to develop an eight-part television series based on the life of Ali. Eig’s birth-control pill book is under option by Nat Geo for a television series, and his Lou Gehrig book is in development as a major motion picture. He lives in Chicago, IL.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT CAMPAIGN de John Klima

The first book to prominently feature captured and declassified Nazi communiqués sent from Washington, D.C., to Berlin that show how the Nazis attempted to contaminate the American political system by meddling in the 1940 election.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT CAMPAIGN:
Fear, Propaganda and the True Story of the Nazi Plot to Steal the American Presidency
by John Klima
Pantheon/PRH, 2022

Credit: Jennifer Marder

The year: 1940. Joseph Goebbels, desperate for a favorable outcome to the US presidential election, deployed every media tool at his disposal. THE ENLIGHTENMENT CAMPAIGN is the first book to prominently feature captured and declassified Nazi communiqués sent from Washington, D.C., to Berlin that show how the Nazis attempted to contaminate the American political system by meddling in the 1940 election. The protagonist: one of the farthest-reaching voices in American media of the time—the largely forgotten dynamo Dorothy Thompson. The first woman journalist to interview Hitler, in 1931, she came back from the experience aghast, and spent the next decade—the period of this book—sounding the alarm of the creeping threat of fascism coming to America. Through her syndicated columns and her regular radio addresses, her audience numbered 13 million. She was the first woman journalist to make the cover of TIME Magazine. Since her interview with Hitler—and drawing on her decades in Europe as a foreign correspondent—she saw the way insidious propaganda and the stoking of xenophobia could drive an economically vulnerable democracy into the arms of an anti-democratic despot. In a fast-paced, informative, and reverberating narrative, John Klima recounts this battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.

John Klima, a former staff writer at The Los Angeles Times, a former National Baseball columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News, and whose work has appeared in the Best American Sports Writing, The New York Times, and elsewhere, is the author of three critically acclaimed narrative baseball histories: The Game Must Go On (Thomas Dunne, 2015) (“Zips along and offers great descriptions,” PW), Bushville Wins! (Thomas Dunne, 2012) (“[Klima] tells a great story well, makes a dead era vivid,” Wall Street Journal), and Willie’s Boys (Wiley, 2009) (“The drama is real, the stakes are high, and Klima captures it with shimmering prose and hard-nosed reporting,” Jonathan Eig).

TIRED AS F*CK de Caroline Dooner

In this funny, sincere, absurd, inspiring memoir, Caroline Dooner will look at years of desperate attempts to heal her health problems, undiagnosed anxiety, an eating disorder and dental trauma through extreme methods and through bargains with God.

TIRED AS F*CK:
My rabid search for a miracle cure,and why I needed two years of rest
by Caroline Dooner
HarperWave, 2021
(chez David Black Literary Agency)

TIRED AS F*CK will examine how our culture exhausts us—looking at the dark side of self-help through Caroline’s own experience—and how she used rest to defy cultural expectations. As she had done with the F*ck It Diet, Caroline felt she needed to apply an extreme approach to all other areas of her life—to her career and social life, to dating and the way she talked to herself. Caroline recognized that she was making choices that were keeping her exhausted and she had to figure them out. She decided for the next two years she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to do. Looking at how she became exhausted, with chapters such as “How to Get Debilitating Performance Anxiety” and “How to Secure a Miracle Tooth,” through the debilitating power of positive thinking in chapters such as “How to Only Think Positive Thoughts, or Else,” and “How to be an Actual Children’s Birthday Clown,” to her rest-seeking sections including “How to Figure out What’s Depleting You” and “How to Be Ok Dying Alone,” TIRED AS F*CK is not a self-help book, it’s a cautionary tale. It’s an honest look at the dogma of wellness and spiritual self-improvement culture. It will revel in the healing power of rest.

Caroline Dooner is a writer, humorist, storyteller, and semi-ex-performer/comedian. She is the creator of The F*ck It Diet website, workshops, and podcast, and the author of the instant favorite The F*ck It Diet, that has consistently continued to grow in readership by word of mouth . Caroline excels at explaining why we have such a dysfunctional relationship with food and weight, and has helped tens of thousands of people heal their relationship with food and body, through a combination of storytelling, scientific studies, and humor.

TALKING TO GOD de Julia Cameron

TALKING TO GOD is another cornerstone Julia Cameron creativity book, focusing on cultivating the art of prayer in one’s life to unblock creatively and live a more authentic, joyful life. It is a perfect follow-up to The Listening Path, which shifted our perspective to the creative art of attention, fostering re-engagement with one’s environments and building deeper connections to gain insight, clarity and deepen our creativity.

TALKING TO GOD:
The Creative Art of Prayer
by Julia Cameron
St. Martin’s Press, Winter 2022
(chez David Black Literary Agency)

In another 6-week creativity program, Julia Cameron focuses on cultivating the art of prayer in one’s life to unblock creatively and live a more authentic, joyful life. TALKING TO GOD is a perfect follow-up to The Listening Path, which shifted our perspective to the creative art of attention, fostering re-engagement with one’s environments and building deeper connections to gain insight, clarity and deepen our creativity. TALKING TO GOD takes us to the next level; through inspiring stories and revealing exercises, Julia will guide her reader to find a way forward as an artist, through prayer. In another 6 week creativity program, Julia’s audience can delve into the inextricable link between spirituality and creativity, and put prayer into their daily practice. The book explores the questioning and seeking of a higher power, and finding solace, answers, gratitude, joy and creative growth through prayer.
From reframing the God concept and “praying on the page” to learning about trusting guidance, readers will see how writing is an act of prayer, that “as we take care to write what is unfolding within us, the flow of words is a flow of grace. The higher power writes through us.” Julia teaches us how life is a prayer, how prayer is woven into the very fabric of life. “For decades, I have shared this connection with my students and as they have worked with this concept, their creativity—and their connection to the divine—have consistently blossomed as well.”

Hailed by the New York Times as “The Queen of Change,” Julia Cameron is credited with starting a movement in 1992 that has brought creativity into the mainstream conversation―in the arts, in business, and in everyday life. She is the best-selling author of more than forty books, fiction and nonfiction; a poet, songwriter, filmmaker and playwright. Commonly referred to as “The Godmother” or “High Priestess” of creativity, her tools are based in practice, not theory, and she considers herself “the floor sample of her own toolkit.” The Artist’s Way has been translated into forty languages and sold over five million copies to date.

THE STRANGER IN THE LIFEBOAT de Mitch Albom

What would happen if we called on God for help and God actually appeared? In Mitch Albom’s profound new novel of hope and faith, a group of shipwrecked passengers pull a strange man from the sea. He claims to be “the Lord.” And he says he can only save them if they all believe in him.

THE STRANGER IN THE LIFEBOAT
by Mitch Albom
HarperCollins, November 2021
(via David BlackLiterary)

Adrift in a raft after a deadly ship explosion, nine people struggle for survival at sea. Three days pass. Short on water, food and hope, they spot a man floating in the waves. They pull him in. “Thank the Lord we found you,” a passenger says. “I am the Lord,” the man whispers.
So begins Mitch Albom’s most beguiling and inspiring novel yet. Albom has written of heaven in the celebrated number one bestsellers The Five People You Meet in Heaven and The First Phone Call from Heaven. Now, for the first time in his fiction, he ponders what we would do if, after crying out for divine help, God actually appeared before us? What might the Lord look, sound and act like? In THE STRANGER IN THE LIFEBOAT, Albom keeps us guessing until the end: Is this strange and quiet man really who he claims to be? What actually happened to cause the explosion? Are the survivors already in heaven, or are they in hell?
The story is narrated by Benji, one of the passengers, who recounts the events in a notebook that is later discovered—a year later—when the empty life raft washes up on the island of Montserrat. It falls to the island’s chief inspector, Jarty LeFleur, a man battling his own demons, to solve the mystery of what really happened.
A fast-paced, compelling novel that makes you ponder your deepest beliefs, The Stranger in the Lifeboat suggests that answers to our prayers may be found where we least expect them.

Mitch Albom is a bestselling author, screenwriter, playwright and nationally syndicated columnist. The author of five consecutive #1 New York Times bestsellers, his books have collectively sold more than thirty-three million copies in forty-two languages worldwide. Tuesdays With Morrie, which spent four straight years atop the New York Times list, is now the bestselling memoir of all time. Four of Albom’s books, including Morrie, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, For One More Day, and Have a Little Faith, have been made into highly acclaimed TV movies for ABC. Oprah Winfrey produced Tuesdays With Morrie, which claimed four Emmy awards including a best actor nod for Jack Lemmon in the lead role. Albom has founded six charities in and around Detroit, including the first-ever twenty-four-hour medical clinic for homeless children in America, and also operates an orphanage in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Albom lives with his wife, Janine, in metropolitan Detroit.