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Archives for May 2017

Whistleblowers Yesterday and Today

May 29, 2017

Edward Snowden - Karen Silkwood - The Whistleblower's Dilemma by Richard RashkeWhen Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the National Security Agency (NSA) in June 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice and the White House branded him a traitor. He became the most wanted man in the world, and members of the military-industrial complex said they would assassinate him if they had to chance. Why?

Late last year, a twenty-two member congressional bi-partisan intelligence committee issued a long-awaited and scathing report on Edward Snowden. Relying exclusively on information supplied by the intelligence community, the report concluded that Snowden was a serial exaggerator and liar. Was he?

The report said he was a disgruntled employee who gave stolen classified documents to the media out of revenge. Did he?

The report said that the majority of the 1.5 million documents he downloaded were defense secrets that had nothing to do with privacy. Did Snowden leak dangerous defense secrets to the media?

Finally, the report said that Snowden is currently sharing classified documents with Russian intelligence officers. Is he working with Putin?

Karen Silkwood died in a car crash in Oklahoma on November 13, 1974. She was on her way to deliver health and safety violation documents to a New York Times reporter. She claimed that the documents proved gross negligence on the part of her employer, the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation, in handling the plutonium it used in making fuel rods for a nuclear reactor. After the accident, the documents disappeared from her car.

Was her death an accident? Who took the documents? Why were they important? And why is the FBI so afraid of Karen Silkwood that it won’t make public its final report on her death forty-three years ago?

 

Richard Rashke answers these questions in Whistleblower’s Dilemma: Snowden, Silkwood and Their Quest for the Truth. While dissecting each important issue, from motive to demonizing, Rashke carefully presents both sides in an unbiased way.

Critics and readers alike call Whistleblower’s Dilemma a “riveting, thought-provoking book.”

All books by Richard Rashke – click here.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Edward Snowden, Karen Silkwood

What Inspired a Prize-Winning International Best-Seller

May 8, 2017

The House on Moon Lake

Francesca Duranti shares, with us, her inspiration for her book – The House on Moon Lake.

I wanted to create a bizarre, paradoxical atmosphere, first by placing a character halfway between a dream and reality.  To achieve this purpose, my protagonist, Fabrizio Garrone had to be born rich but impoverished, born talented but unable to use his talent, to fall in love, but be unable to enjoy his love story, born in sunny Italy, but sunk deeply in German  literature, fascinated with a woman who takes him captive but horrified by her, too. And lastly, Moon Lake, so neat and tidy and pristine, became the setting for something horrible to happen. In short, I wanted to show the dark shadow behind things.

Francesca Duranti

Filed Under: General

Meeting Lee Krasner, the artist who inspired Modern Art

May 4, 2017

Modern Art - A Novel inspired by the life of Lee KrasnerWhen I got an assignment from a newspaper to interview Lee Krasner, the single thought in my head was that I was about to meet the widow of the great Jackson Pollock. Then I was warned that she would be “difficult,” which I took to mean “nasty”. But when I showed up at her house in East Hampton — the same small house she and Pollock had moved to in the 1940s — the woman I encountered there was anything but mean and hard. I had an overwhelming sense of a fiercely strong human being who had suffered a lot and come through: someone whose integrity, raw hunger for life, and blunt honesty were undimmed at age 72. I walked out of that first meeting on a high, thinking how fortunate Pollock was to have had her for his partner.

The last time I saw her, she invited me to look her up when I was in Manhattan, where she lived for much of the year. I never did that, out of a certain diffidence, a feeling that she must have more important people to see. So when I read, four years later, that she had died, I had a great sense of regret and loss. It was probably that which made me write Modern Art, a novel in which the character based on her, rather than the one based on Pollock, is very much the central figure.

Just as some people found Krasner too much of a tough broad to be likable, some readers didn’t care for Belle Prokoff in my book. But others saw her the way I had experienced Krasner: as a woman who had gained a certain hard-won wisdom, even a spiritual dimension, through the things she had suffered. That is exactly how I tried to present her.

Evelyn Toynton

Read more about the book – Modern Art (click here).

Filed Under: Delphinium Authors, General Tagged With: Evelyn Toynton

Do You Use Your Acquired Writing Skills?

May 1, 2017

Helen Yglesias and some thoughts on acquired writing skills.The late Helen Yglesias was 85-years-old when Delphinium published The Girls, her novel about four sisters, all of them over the age of eighty. The presiding theme of her delightful, light-hearted book is that old people don’t necessarily give up their passions and antagonisms. They see themselves as perhaps slowing down but never as old and obsolete.

The author was certainly like this. Although I was not the acquiring editor of her book, I did have the opportunity of meeting with Yglesias several times and was struck by her lively opinions and, to be honest, her irascible nature that had very little patience for what she saw as artificial or watered-down. One striking comment she made was about creative writing programs, which many English departments rely upon to bring in necessary revenue. “You do get a few good writers out of these programs,” Yglesias said, “but they are in the slim minority in compared to how many writers graduate from these programs every year.” Of the rest of the MFA writers Yglesias felt much of the prose she read that came out of creative writing programs was similar, smooth, competent but unremarkable. She went on to say that originality and authenticity are not learned but acquired by living and experience, which no creative writing program can teach.

We lost Yglesias several years after we published her novel but are happy to keep her work alive both in paperback and in an e-book.

Filed Under: General

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