What a very, very strange experience it is to see an excerpt of my own book on a famous website.
Salon.com has just posted exactly that.
Thank you, Salon!
And so I discover my designer
Do you remember our little debate seven months ago (that long!), about the design on my book’s jacket cover?
As usual, you didn’t hold back. (And may that never change!) Thus dafna, for example:
… it has the right parts, but they are not in the right place nor in the right proportions for the reasons listed. a few tweaks and you might have had a more memorable cover…
And then, in a follow-up comment:
as a first time author, you were probably assigned to a designer, perhaps “junior designer” who was over-worked and under paid.
Well, as a connoisseur of irony, I can’t help but delight in the one I’ve just discovered. The first hardcover copies of Hannibal and Me are out now, and my agent and I were holding them in our hands for our first look at the real thing (a feeling you e-bookers will never know. 😦 )
And there, on the back flap, we saw it:
Jacket design by Devin Washburn/Rodrigo Corral design
Wow, said my agent, Rodrigo Corral is huge.
I wouldn’t know anything about this, but in the world of book design, that agency might be the Apple, or the Ferrari, or the Le Corbusier, or whatever might be the appropriate analogy. And I actually do see a certain visual DNA inheritance in my cover, compared to some of the others you see here, wouldn’t you say?
So Riverhead actually had shelled out for the best. I wonder how that might have influenced my own reaction, and yours, if we had known. Do weigh in.
The only puzzle remains: why did Riverhead not simply tell us?
The books we (at The Economist) wrote this year
I’m not the only one at The Economist to launch a book “this” year.
(As you know, my launch is technically on January 5th, but Hannibal and Me is already available for pre-order, so that counts as 2011.)
Here is a list of the books my colleagues and I wrote this year. A pretty broad range of genres and topics, wouldn’t you say?
Bill of Rights for Friends of Authors
1) Thesis
I was talking to my boss the other day about my imminent book launch. After a few glasses of wine, and in the company of other writers, he, an accomplished serial author with a very British sense of humor, told me, claiming to speak from experience, that
the only thing you’ll ever regret is that you didn’t prostitute yourself more.
He meant, of course, that I (and all authors) should, at least this once, get over the discretion that is native to people of manners, and just … market (verb). Because if we authors don’t, nobody else will, and we authors will be angry with ourselves later.
2) Antithesis
On the other hand, I have been around some authors who, for a period lasting months, turn into book-marketing robots, to the point where I can no longer have a normal conversation with them.
And so I understand fully the humanitarian need for limits.
3) Synthesis
So, in the spirit of mutual empathy between Authors and Friends of Authors, I (pictured above, seated) hereby promulgate a Bill of Rights — nay, a Magna Carta — to protect … you.
(Whoever you might be. But especially if you happen to be somebody I know, like, owe, am married to, have fathered, have been friends with…..)
Rights:
- There shall continue to be, as there have been since time immemorial, topics of conversation that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Author’s Book, and the Author shall respect said topics as such — ie, as inviolable.
- If the Author happens to moderate a panel about an interesting (or even a boring) topic unrelated to his Book, the Author shall refrain from name-dropping his Book in introducing the Panelists or while moderating their debate. If the Author violates this rule, the Audience shall be within its rights to boo Him off the stage, with the physical assistance of the Panelists.
- If thou had, in thy previous dealings with the Author, the sort of relationship in which thou could call Him a wanker, or to cast other aspersion upon Him with impunity and to humorous effect, thou shalt retain said privileges in perpetuity, whether that friggin’ Book of His is a hit or a flop, because that’s really not thy problem.
- When meeting the Author socially, especially if the meeting involves a Honig Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa, thou mayest, with impunity, assert thy right to have a pleasant evening without being reminded of the darned Book at all.
- Thou shalt not blame, loathe or disdain the Author merely for marketing His Book to Others, being mindful that the Author is a prostitute only temporarily and on good advice, as wouldst thou be in His stead.
- Finally, thou hast the right, should thou find the Author’s presence insufferable nonetheless, physically to evade the Author for a period not exceeding the two months around the launch date, provided thou welcome the Author back into human society after the whole silly spectacle passeth into oblivion (which, remember, is a lot sooner than the Author thinks).
Hannibal and Me: the audiobook
I have a Google Alert set for “Hannibal and Me”, which is how I discovered that you can soon (5 days after publication of the hardcover version on January 5th) buy the audiobook. Here it is.
The company is called Tantor audio. Did you notice its logo, above? How utterly appropriate. Let us decide to call him (the pachyderm) Surus, in honor of Hannibal’s favorite.
FYI, I have not listened to the audiobook and have no idea how it will sound. (Indeed, I have not listened to any audiobook. I do like listening to lectures on my iPhone, but books? I never grokked that one. Why not read them?)
The narrator is one Sean Runnette. Has anybody heard him reading anything?
Sean Runnette
The third review (in Booklist)
The third review is now out, and also very good. The previous two (the one in Publishers Weekly and the one in Kirkus Reviews) were perhaps a bit more gushy.
It appears in Booklist, which, as my publisher tells me, is a publication for the American Library Association — in other words, something that influences what librarians buy and stock. That makes it, like the other two, a “pre-pub” review. (I am learning a lot of jargon in this process. Pre-pub reviews when I lived in London meant checking your breath and hair before heading out to the … pub.)
Unfortunately, you need a subscription, and I don’t have one, to get the link. But I was sent a transcript, and here are excerpts (emphasis mine):
Here’s an intriguing premise: show, through the life and career of the Carthaginian military genius Hannibal (and other history-makers), how the line between success and failure can sometimes be blurry, not to mention how success can turn into failure when least expected, and vice versa. … Kluth’s main thesis seems to be that triumph and tragedy, success and failure, are merely points on a line, and that we make our way in life by cultivating the ability to turn failure into success and recognizing that success can breed failure, if we’re not careful. This isn’t the first book to tackle this subject, but its historical perspective, drawing on the life of a warrior who lived more than two millennia ago, gives it fresh appeal.
“Points on a line”. I don’t believe I used that metaphor anywhere in the book. I like it!
See? I’m already learning from my reviewers.
Hannibal and Me: contents & dramatis personae
Here is my table of contents, which gives you a sense of the structure of the book: For the most part we “age with” Hannibal, and also with Scipio, in the main storyline, so that we face the issues that arise at each stage of life.
In bullet points, I’ve put some of the people that come up in each chapter. You can try to figure out the context in which they appear, and why.
One. HANNIBAL AND ME
- Hannibal
- Me
- (A bit of Carl Jung, tiny bit of Scipio and Fabius)
Two. THE INFLUENCE OF PARENTS
- Hamilcar, Hannibal, Hasdrubal, Mago
- Theseus
- Barack Obama
- Eleanor Roosevelt
- Amy Tan
- (Gerhard Kluth)
Three. DO YOU NEED A GOAL?
- Hannibal
- Meriwether Lewis (and Thomas Jefferson, William Clark)
- Harry Truman
- Ludwig Erhard
Four. TOWERING PEAKS
- Hannibal
- Pablo Picasso
- Paul Cézanne
- Meriwether Lewis
Five. THE ART OF WINNING
- Hannibal
- Morihei Ueshiba
- Cleopatra (and Julius Caesar
)
Six. TACTICS AND STRATEGY IN LIFE
- Hannibal (and Sosylus)
- Carl von Clausewitz
- Steve Miller and Tiger Woods
- Cleopatra
- Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman
- Pyrrhus and Cineas
Seven. DEALING WITH DISASTER
- Quintus Fabius Maximus
- Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
- Lance Armstrong
- Lao Tzu and Sun Tzu
- Eleanor Roosevelt
- Ernest Shackleton
Eight. THE PRISON OF SUCCESS
- Hannibal
- Tennessee Williams
- Amy Tan
- Eliot Spitzer
- Albert Einstein
Nine. THE LIBERATION OF FAILURE
- Publius Cornelius Scipio
- Steve Jobs
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Ten. THE THRESHOLD OF MIDDLE AGE
- Hannibal and Scipio
- Carl Jung (and Sigmund Freud)
- Ernest Shackleton
Eleven. POLITICAL DEATH
- Scipio and Marcus Porcius Cato
- Ludwig Erhard (and Konrad Adenauer)
- Liu Shaoqi (and Mao Zedong)
Twelve. AGING AND TRANSCENDING
- Hannibal and Scipio
- Abraham Maslow
- Ludwig Erhard
- Eleanor Roosevelt
- Albert Einstein
Thirteen. THE LESSONS OF HANNIBAL
- All of the above
- (plus Arjuna)
Audacity, Freedom, Captivity
Thank you to Jim M., a regular reader here, who emailed me a link to something that I had written but completely forgotten. It is this, which is itself part of this.
Here is how that came about: About a year ago, my publisher asked me to meditate, in less than 500 words total, on people in the news at that time, in the style of Hannibal and Me. The idea was not to regurgitate anything from the book, but to extend the approach as one might in casual conversation. The exercise was meant as a teaser for book professionals.
So I banged out three haikus, each with a theme, a person in the news, and a person from the book:
- Audacity – Sarah Palin – Sempronius/Flaminius/Varro
- Freedom – Hillary Clinton – Eleanor Roosevelt
- Captivity – Larry Page – Albert Einstein
(Just to be completely clear: Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton and Larry Page are not in the book. My publisher and I were just having a bit of fun.)
Here goes:
Audacity
The best defense is a good offense, and Sarah Palin has adopted this principle as her own. Wherever she appears, she attacks. When she feels cornered, she attacks harder. Palin might want to study the Roman generals Sempronius, Flaminius, and Varro. Each was ruined by this strategy when he met a shrewder opponent, the Carthaginian Hannibal. All three had only one approach: audacious attack. All had a history of success. But this made them inflexible. Hannibal turned this inflexibility against them. In three separate battles, Hannibal goaded them into attacking, then waited until their forces, through their own momentum, lost their balance. When they did, Hannibal fell upon them.
Freedom
In one of her debates with then-candidate Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton said, “Everyone here knows I’ve lived through some crises.” She could only have been referring to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. That humiliation could have shattered her marriage to Bill Clinton, his presidency, and her own life. That it didn’t and instead helped launch her onto a new path suggests that Clinton’s psychological journey paralleled that of another former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1918, Mrs. Roosevelt discovered love letters between her husband, Franklin, and her secretary, Lucy Mercer. She plunged into a deep depression. But in her rage and sorrow, she discovered a feeling of liberation. The Mercer affair freed her to redefine her life’s meaning and her options. It also freed her to view her husband honestly, and the two formed a new, very different but ultimately stable bond.
(Click for credits)
Captivity
At age thirty-eight, Larry Page takes over as chief executive of Google. He cofounded it with Sergey Brin when they were both twenty-five and students at Stanford, after Page invented his revolutionary PageRank search algorithm. In 2001 they hired an older man to be CEO, but ten years later the apprenticeship is over: It is Page’s turn to run the company. He might want to review what happened to Albert Einstein at the equivalent juncture in life: At twenty-six, Einstein had produced four short but revolutionary papers that transformed physics. Einstein then kept refining his insights until he was thirty-eight, when he discovered general relativity. Although he did not know it then, this was a turning point. His imagination became a prisoner of its very success. A perplexing conservatism seized Einstein’s mind and never let go. Page must make sure that this does not happen to him—or to Google.
Hannibal and Me: The press release
Ahem. How many press releases have I, as a journalist, been subjected to? It must be millions. In my circles, we use that term as a pejorative, as in: ‘Tell me what happened, don’t give me the press release.‘
But now there is one about my book. It might be the first press release I read all the way through. And I discovered that it is … well written.
The author is Jynne Martin, a great publishing talent recently arrived at Riverhead/Penguin.
One new twist for regular readers of this blog may be the list of six lessons in my final chapter which she paraphrased and included at the bottom.
___________
FOR INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Jynne Dilling Martin, Director of Publicity
212-366-2947 / Jynne.Martin@us.penguingroup.com
“Kluth, the West Coast correspondent for the Economist, brings a contemporary slant to Hannibal’s military successes…Kluth does superior work in spelling out the elusive values of success and failure… Realistic and timely, Kluth’s book uses historic truths to move us past the frequent traps of success and failure to mold practical, productive lives.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Hannibal and Me is a rare blend of military strategy and emotional intelligence that offers a more mature solution for winning life’s battles.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Andreas Kluth’s absorbing exploration of the life of the great military commander Hannibal will inspire you to look beyond simplistic notions of success toward a deeper understanding of what it is to live the good life. This is a book full of lessons both profound and practical.” —DANIEL H. PINK, AUTHOR OF DRIVE
HANNIBAL AND ME
What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure
________
ANDREAS KLUTH
Andreas Kluth, a correspondent for The Economist, presents a fascinating new way to think about winning and losing, and draws powerful life lessons from the story of one of the ancient world’s most famous and enduring figures in HANNIBAL AND ME: What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure (Riverhead Books; On sale January 5, 2012; ISBN: 978-1-59448-812-2).
Hannibal’s story is one of action, suspense, and romance. After crossing the ice-bound Alps with 50,000 men and 30 elephants, Hannibal decimated Rome’s armies in a series of brilliant battles and seemed poised to dethrone the world’s leading power. Yet at the heart of Hannibal’s tale lies a great mystery. How was it possible, Kluth asks, that this apparently invincible hero ultimately lost everything and, trapped by his enemies, committed suicide?
Kluth plumbs the mystery of this tragic reversal of fortune, providing readers with thought-provoking and useful insights about the seeds of success and failure from the lives of Hannibal and other notable people from the past and present.
A key part of Kluth’s explanation comes from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, which says to “meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” Using Hannibal as his central example, Kluth shines a light on each aspect of the lifelong journey that we take with these “impostors,” which we often mistake for one another. He explores youth, when parents influence how we view success and failure; young adulthood, when we pursue our dreams, when we dare, win, or lose; middle age, when we need to reexamine our dreams and identities and our successes and failures; and old age, when success and failure take on altogether different meanings.
As Kluth investigated the paradox of the great general’s life, he discovered an important, and lesser known, piece of Hannibal’s story: two Roman leaders emerged who were his major opponents. Fabius was the cautious elder statesman who enabled the Romans to accept the disaster that had befallen them, to overcome their paralyzing fear of Hannibal, and to wait him out for fourteen long years until they could determine how to fight him effectively. Scipio was the dashing young military genius who studied Hannibal from afar with the appreciative mind of a disciple, felt strangely liberated by Hannibal’s crushing of the Roman army, and ultimately turned it into a dazzling triumph. Taken together, the stories of these men provide valuable lessons about success and failure.
Throughout Hannibal’s narrative, Kluth interweaves the stories of other famous figures, from Pablo Picasso to Tiger Woods to Carl Jung to Steve Jobs to Cleopatra. To help readers draw lessons from the lives of his historical subjects, Kluth presents nine overarching principles that have served men and women well since ancient times:
- Stay balanced when others lose their balance. Outnumbered by the Romans, Hannibal knew that the most immediate kind of success—winning—is not about being stronger than others but about being more balanced and calm, and then letting opponents defeat themselves.
- Never confuse means with ends, tactics with strategy. Hannibal’s most subtle lessons teach us how to think simultaneously large and small so that we can align life tactics with life strategy.
- Have “young” ideas when you’re young and when you’re old. For many people, freshness wilts with age, as it did for Hannibal, Picasso, and Einstein. But it is possible to stay or become fresh in later years, as Carl Jung did after a major crisis led to his greatest successes.
- Start maintaining an “old” self-discipline even while you’re young. To avoid the loss of self-control that young heroes like Meriwether Lewis and Tiger Woods experienced, seek the company and counsel of older mentors, study those who came before you, and take the long view of your success.
- When disaster strikes, try to do nothing at first until you see that the situation has changed and renewed action makes sense. When that occurs, you may, like Scipio, feel a paradoxical and energizing sense of liberation that leads to new heights of achievement.
- Part of success is adjusting your idea of what it is. Over the course of a life, success and failure will mean different things at different times, and it may become necessary to update, refine, or even scrap old definitions.
- See the best in people but protect yourself against the worst in them. Both Hannibal and Scipio were noble personalities who never felt personal animosity toward one another and generally saw the best in others, but each was harassed and damaged by petty and vindictive personalities, whose threat they did not adequately guard against.
- Success means becoming a mensch—a whole, integrated, self-actualizing human being. People who do so, like Eleanor Roosevelt, are the most likely to transcend conventional success and failure by achieving a separate peace with themselves and their world.
- Do your duty with equanimity—the fear of failure will seem less overwhelming and the yearning for success less consuming. You will know it is your duty not by how large or small it is, but by perceiving it to be bigger than you, and beyond you.
Kluth’s unifying insight in HANNIBAL AND ME is that triumph and disaster, success and failure, are not necessarily what they seem—whether in the lives of the great figures of history or in the lives of ordinary people. Thus they show up in their disguises, the ups and downs of life, the turns of good and bad fortune, the whims of the goddess the Romans called Fortuna. “Perhaps they disguise themselves,” Kluth writes, “to bring something out of us and that something is character, our true self, who we really are. This book is about those moments of impact, when triumph or disaster strikes, and about the aftermath, when the shock fades and lives change forever and character reveals itself.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andreas Kluth has been writing for The Economist since 1997. He is currently the magazine’s U.S. West Coast correspondent, covering politics, society, and the economy in California and the western states. A graduate of Williams College and the London School of Economics, he is a dual citizen of the United States and Germany. He lives in Los Angeles with his family. HANNIBAL AND ME is his first book. His website is http://www.AndreasKluth.org.
HANNIBAL AND ME RIVERHEAD BOOKS ISBN 9781594488122 ON SALE 1/5/12 ISBN: 978-1-59448-812-2 $26.95
Lo, the novel arrived, fully formed, in Sirsasana
How bittersweet. My first book, of narrative nonfiction, is about to be published, and I should be thinking only about that.
And yet, about 2 years ago, I had a great idea for a novel. I ignored it, but the idea kept coming back. (As it happens, that is how I winnow idea wheat from idea chaff: I pay serious attention to ideas only once they reassert themselves.)
So yesterday, I was in Sirsasana (headstand) when the entire novel arrived. In my head, as though shaken down by gravity. All at once, fully formed, with idea, characters, plot and twists. Title. Beginning. End. The whole dang thing.
I like it. Love it, actually. And I reckon, now that it has presented itself, I could write the thing in a few good weekends.
But as I said: I should be talking only about Hannibal and Me. And yet, my imagination really wants to go that new place already….
Hannibal and Me: life lessons from history 