New Books For Your Reading Pleasure

With this newsletter, we offer two new books for your consideration: Elio’s GYPSY HEROINE and Susan’s BONGO.

GYPSY HEROINE

Susan’s paternal grandmother extensively researched genealogy on the English family side all the way back to 1066, date of the historic Norman Conquest. It was all about getting to know who we were and how that knowledge might affect us today..

In Gypsy Heroine, a young American woman travels to Lancaster, England, to meet her gypsy grandmother who, as the girl learns in chats around a campfire, was a heroine during World War 2. Before the war, there were approximately two million gypsies in Europe. Some estimates indicate that a third or more of that population was decimated in the Nazi concentration camps.

BONGO

How does a gifted musician, who might well have earned celebrity status in freedom, survive behind bars? Bongo, who went from doing petty thefts on the street to staging big heists to being sentenced to life for murder, used music to elevate himself above the fray of prison life.

Originally a screenplay written under the tutelage of Detroit’s esteemed screenwriting guru, Harvey Ovshinsky, BONGO offers poignant insights into Bongo’s life and delivers a surprise ending with well-deserved justice.

QUOTES FROM FAMOUS AUTHORS

William Faulkner about Ernest Hemingway: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

Ernest Hemingway’s response to William Faulkner: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

Ray Bradbury: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Henry David Thoreau: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

DO I REALLY NEED AN EDITOR?

Stephen King: “To write is human, to edit is divine.”

Marty Rubin: “Only a blank page needs no editing.”

Ernest Hemingway: “Write while drunk, edit while sober.”

This is what editing is about:

Proofread carefully to see if a is missing.

How many of you figured out that the word “word” is missing in that sentence? Or did you skim over it? What? That’s not editing, you say. That’s proofreading.

There are four levels of editing:

1. Content & Development Editing – flow and structure of the entire work, character development, plot, fact checking

2. Line Editing – sentence structure and wording

3. Copy Editing – mechanics of applying style manual rules for grammar and punctuation

4. Proofreading – final check for misspelled words, extra spaces, missing punctuation

READING RECOMMENDATIONS

Elio Madan, Cuban compatriot of author and Yale professor Carlos Eire, delighted in reading Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana and Learning to Die in Miami, for his in-depth look at Cubans airlifted to the United States along with 14,000 others and scattered about the country, many never to see their homeland or families again, their struggles, and their hard work to succeed against language and racial barriers.

Elio adds, “If you want to understand Cubans as a people struggling between two cultures, you need to read both of these books.”