Authors Electric

A “platform” is the most important attribute a writer can possess. (Having the ability to write could be argued to be more vital, of course, but then us ghostwriters are always available to sort out any lack in that department). Two books have brought this thought to the front of my mind. One of them comes with quite possibly the greatest author platform in the world, while the other has – like most of the rest of us – had to rely more heavily on serendipity.  Barack Obama is arguably the man with the most interesting autobiographical material available at the moment. Not only did he come from virtually nowhere to be the leader of the free world, he also held onto his integrity to a degree that in the current political climate is almost impossible to envisage. On top of that he is a fabulous writer. I admit I am biased and there is a chance that he has faults which I am too starry-eyed to see, but I think almost half the world’s population thinks roughly along the same lines ...

The election debacle has me flashing on 1968 when it seemed to this old lefty - as it does today - that the stars were arrayed against our every hope for that better world we had thought briefly within our grasp. Part of it has to do with my preparing to release a new, print edition of  Our Own Kind , a semiautobiographical novella about black-and-white relationships at a newspaper during the catastrophic three months between the 1968 assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles - a story that I tried to let unfold along nexus of private lives and public calamities while skirting the edges of America's ever-present racial divide. And here we are again. Fast forward 48 years to another American presidential election year ending badly. This one started out almost as a comedy. But the potential for calamity is worse - quite conceivably an end of the republic as we know it. Nearly every measure Trump and his corporate Republican cronies...