January 2012
67 posts
Meet Us Monday: David Jost
Learn more about the fine, fine people who work here at HMH! Today’s Meet Us Monday comes from David Jost, VP for Digital Content.
What do you do here at HMH?
I’m in charge of making ebooks but also do some work with the American Heritage Dictionary electronic content, which includes pronouncing words for the electronic versions.
What was your first job in publishing and how has it evolved to what you do today?
Assistant Editor of the Middle English Dictionary, which led to the American Heritage Dictionary at Houghton Mifflin and then to electronic dictionary work at Inso, a spin-off from HM, back to HM for electronic licensing, and now ebooks.
What was one thing you did today (or this week) that was part of your job that might surprise people?
Matching art to captions in the electronic version of American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition.
What’s your approach to office/cubicle decoration?
A few good prints and photographs including one of Venice by our own Kate Mills.
If you could choose a mandatory HMH book that all employees must read, what would it be and why?
The Hobbit. I think everyone should be exposed to Tolkien. If they don’t like him (not everyone does) The Hobbit is not a long book.
What are your top three book web sites – either author sites, book news, reviews, or whatever?
Amazon and the library websites at Watertown Library and Harvard’s Widener Library.
What’s your go-to gift book?
The American Heritage Dictionary, 5th Edition.
What’s the one book you’ve never read that you’ve always meant to, or felt that you should?
Remembrance of Things Past.
What movie adaptation of a book has really done the story justice and why?
The Lord of the Rings. Those responsible had to cut the work but they chose the right parts of the books and captured their spirit.
Write a haiku about HMH. (5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables)
Middle English first,
then American Heritage,
and now ebooks reign
Don't Forget! Win a Book Wednesday!
Need some warm, yummy, easy, deliciousness in your life? Enter to win a copy of THE FRENCH SLOW COOKER by Michele Scicolone! (I mean, hello, look at the warm, yummy, easy, deliciousness happening on that jacket. That could be in YOUR kitchen.)
Enter to win here, or by reblogging this post!
With a slow cooker, even novices can turn out dishes that taste as though they came straight out of the kitchen of a French grandmère. Provençal vegetable soup. Red-wine braised beef with mushrooms. Chicken with forty cloves of garlic. Even bouillabaisse. With The French Slow Cooker, all of these are as simple as setting the timer and walking away. Michele Scicolone goes far beyond the usual slow-cooker standbys of soups and stews, with Slow-Cooked Salmon with Lemon and Green Olives, Crispy Duck Confit, and Spinach Soufflé. And for dessert, how about Ginger Crème Brûlée? With The French Slow Cooker, the results are always magnifique.
“I’d bet that if French cooks could get their hands on Michele Scicolone’s French Slow Cooker, which is filled with smart, practical, and convenient recipes, they’d never let it go.” — Dorie Greenspan, author of Around My French Table
Official rules here.
The New Yorker includes a lovely story from one of my very favorites here at HMH, former poet Laureate Donald Hall. It begins:
“Today it is January, midmonth, midday, and mid-New Hamshire. I sit in my blue armchair looking out the window. I am eighty-three, I teeter when I walk, I no longer drive, I look out the window.”
Read the story in this week’s issue, and listen to the audio that was posted along with it. You will fall in love. With Don, with the farmhouse, with New Hampshire, with memories that aren’t yours but feel so familiar they almost could be.
16 Reads for the 84th Annual Oscars
The eighty-fourth annual Academy Awards will take place this year on February 26. There’s still time to catch up on your reading – while everyone else is rushing to theaters to get in every last movie before the big night. What to read before the 2012 Oscars? Here’s a literary look at the nominees.
“If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.”
—Philip K. Dick
“
Think you’re not creative? Think again. The take-home message from this multifaceted inquiry is that creativity is hard-wired in the human brain and that we can enhance that quality in ourselves and in our society.
Wired and Wall Street Journal contributor Lehrer (How We Decide, 2009, etc.) explores creativity from the inside out, looking at the mechanics of the brain and the effects of mental states from sadness to depression to dementia. He takes readers to laboratories where neuroscientists and psychologists are conducting controlled experiments on creativity, and he gets inside the talented minds of songwriter Bob Dylan, graphic artist Milton Glaser, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and engineer/inventor Arthur Fry. Lehrer examines how social interaction and collaboration promote creativity within a company, using Pixar studios as an example, and how these factors operate in communities, citing Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv as places that foster innovation by enabling people to interact, converse with strangers as well as colleagues and encounter new ideas. Shakespeare’s London was just such a place, and the author presents factors that made it so, such as a critical density of population and an explosion of literacy. Lehrer also explores what he calls the outsider factor, showing how newcomers to a field or people working in tangential areas generate new approaches to old problems. America, he writes, can increase its collective creativity if it so chooses. The author points out that our schools already do so with athletes, encouraging and rewarding them from a young age, and the same steps can be taken to nourish our brightest, most imaginative children, as demonstrated by the success of schools like the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts and San Diego’s High Tech High. Further, Lehrer argues for policy changes to enhance our nation’s creativity: immigration reform because immigrants account for a disproportionate number of patent applications in the United States, and patent reform, in order to reward and thereby promote innovation.
Lehrer writes with verve, creating an informative, readable book that sparkles with ideas.
” —Kirkus Reviews, for IMAGINE: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
“The idea that the Pope would authorize the use of something as heinous as torture by priests or people working for priests is a pretty astonishing development. Ultimately, the justification that it invokes is the same one anyone uses when they’re using torture for reasons that are not sadistic and that is, in essence: ‘The moral cause that we’re engaged in is too important to settle for half-measures.’ … When you read accounts of torture, you get the unmistakable impression that the people doing the torture or conducting the torture — somewhere inside them, they think they are saving souls.”
—Cullen Murphy, on accounts of torturers from the first Inquisition. (via nprfreshair)
Friday Excerpt: God's Jury
Chapter 1
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE: THE PAPER TRAIL
No one goes in and nothing comes out.
—a Vatican archivist, 1877
—-
Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack
in a fortress may be accounted small.
—Reverend Hale, The Crucible, 1953
The Palace
On a hot fall day in Rome not long ago, I crossed the vast expanse of St. Peter’s Square, paused momentarily in the shade beneath a curving flank of Bernini’s colonnade, and continued a little way beyond to a Swiss Guard standing impassively at a wrought-iron gate, the Porta Cavalleggeri. He examined my credentials, handed them back, and saluted smartly. I hadn’t expected the grand gesture, and almost returned the salute instinctively, but then realized it was intended for a cardinal waddling into the Vatican from behind me.
Play
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick Gets Interactive
The definitive presentation of Philip K. Dick’s brilliant, and epic, final work is hitting the social sphere.
With the new Exegesis BookPulse app, THE EXEGESIS has become a whole new experience, interactive and extra-informative. You can:
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• Receive updates on Exegesis and PKD through the dedicated news section
• Share your thoughts and the experts’ comments on Facebook
Learn more here! Or try the Lite version for free now!
Win a Book Wednesday
This week’s giveaway is REVOLUTION 2.0 by Wael Ghonim, one of the most dramatic and galvanizing stories of the Arab Spring, told by the Google executive at the center of it all.
Enter here to win!
The revolutions that swept the Middle East in 2011 surprised and captivated the world. Brutal regimes that had been in power for decades were overturned by an irrepressible mass of freedom seekers. Now, one of the figures who emerged during the Egyptian uprising tells the riveting inside story of what happened and shares the keys to unleashing the power of crowds.
Wael Ghonim was a little-known, thirty-year-old Google executive in the summer of 2010 when he anonymously launched a Facebook page to protest the death of one Egyptian man at the hands of security forces. The page’s following expanded quickly and moved from online protests to a nonconfrontational movement.
The youth of Egypt made history: they used social media to schedule a revolution. The call went out to more than a million Egyptians online, and on January 25, 2011, Cairo’s Tahrir Square resounded with calls for change. Yet just as the revolution began in earnest, Ghonim was captured and held for twelve days of brutal interrogation. After he was released, he gave a tearful speech on national television, and the protests grew more intense. Four days later, the president of Egypt was gone.
The lessons Ghonim draws will inspire each of us. He saw the road to Tahrir Square built not by any one person, but by the people. In Revolution 2.0, we can all be heroes.
Official rules here.
Friday Excerpt: The House at Sea's End
From THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END by Elly Griffiths, available now.
Prologue
November
Two people, a man and a woman, are walking along a hospital corridor. It is obvious that they have been here before. The woman’s face is soft, remembering; the man looks wary, holding back slightly at the entrance to the ward. Indeed, the list of restrictions printed on the door looks enough to frighten anyone. No flowers, no phones, no children under eight, no coughers or sneezers. The woman points at the phone sign (a firmly crossed out silhouette of a rather dated-looking phone) but the man just shrugs. The woman smiles, as if she is used to getting this sort of response from him.
They press a buzzer and are admitted.
Three beds in, they stop. A brown-haired woman is sitting up in bed holding a baby. She is not feeding it, she is just looking at it, staring, as if she is trying to memorise every feature. The visiting woman, who is blonde and attractive, swoops down and kisses the new mother. Then she bends over the baby, brushing it with her hair. The baby opens opaque dark eyes but doesn’t cry. The man hovers in the background and the blonde woman gestures for him to come closer. He doesn’t kiss mother or baby but he says something which makes both women laugh indulgently.
The baby’s sex is easy to guess: the bed is surrounded by pink cards and rosettes, even a slightly deflated balloon announcing ‘It’s a girl’. The baby herself, though, is dressed in navy blue as if the mother is taking an early stand against such stereotyping. The blonde woman holds the baby, who stares at her with those dark, solemn eyes. The brown-haired woman looks at the man, and looks away again quickly.
When visiting time is over, the blonde woman leaves presents and kisses and one last caress of the baby’s head. The man stands at the foot of the bed, pawing the ground slightly as if impatient to be off. The mother smiles, cradling her baby in an ageless gesture of serene maternity.
At the door, the blonde woman turns and waves. The man has already left.
But five minutes later he is back, alone, walking fast, almost running. He comes to a halt by the bed. Wordlessly, the woman puts the baby into his arms. She is crying, though the baby is still silent.
‘She looks like you,’ she whispers.
Do we need to make a “Sh*t Publishers Say” video?
“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)
“I teach silence in all languages
through intensive examination of:
the starry sky,
the Sinanthrophus’ jaws,
a grasshopper’s hop.
an infant’s fingernails,
plankton,
a snowflake.” —Wisława Szymborska, from “Classifields” (translated by S. Barańczak and C. Cavanagh)
through intensive examination of:
the starry sky,
the Sinanthrophus’ jaws,
a grasshopper’s hop.
an infant’s fingernails,
plankton,
a snowflake.” —Wisława Szymborska, from “Classifields” (translated by S. Barańczak and C. Cavanagh)
Meet Us Monday: Morgan Gould
This week’s “Meet Us Monday” comes from Morgan Gould, maker of the world’s best Muddy Buddies.
What do you do here at HMH?
I’m in the Sales Department, and I work with the National Accounts group, running reports, putting together presentations, etc. I also manage Zest Books, a small press based in San Francisco that specializes in edgy teen non-fiction.
What was your first job in publishing and how has it evolved to what you do today?
My first job in publishing was as Special Markets Associate at Harcourt Trade in San Diego. I was there for a few years prior to the merge, and I am one of very few people who relocated to the East Coast to be part of HMH. That position was a really great launch for me – I worked with literacy groups, authors, and did special custom printings – and was able to learn a lot about both sales, marketing, and production.
What was one thing you did today (or this week) that was part of your job that might surprise people?
Proofread and edited jacket copy for an upcoming Zest book Junk-Box Jewelry. Next step: making a bracelet!
What’s your approach to office/cubicle decoration?
All of my work is organized neatly and color coded – by folders, post-its, and highlighters. Decorations on the other hand, are all of the fun things I love but don’t want cluttering up my house! I have motivational quotes, photos, notes from coworkers, and toys (including Gumby and Pokey, a super-tiny-lucky-cat, and a “Grow Your Own Therapist” doll – a gift from a rep!) Oh, and books. SO MANY BOOKS.
If you could choose a mandatory HMH book that all employees must read, what would it be and why?
I was a huge fan of the now out-of-print Charlie Chick. And a personal favorite is Dean Bakopoulos’ Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon. But as for mandatory, Animal Farm. I can’t believe it took me so long to read it.
What are your top three book web sites – either author sites, book news, reviews, or whatever?
Hmm. I read GalleyCat and Shelf Awareness, but I tend to rely on what people post about to find good, popular book news.
What’s your go-to gift book?
The cupcake books! Any of them. Everyone loves them! And then they make me cupcakes. :)
What’s the one book you’ve never read that you’ve always meant to, or felt that you should?
Bullfinch’s Mythology. I want to read it, and I think at one point I read two pages and somehow convinced myself that I actually did read it. But I haven’t. It’s on the list. And on my nightstand. Along with many, many others.
What movie adaptation of a book has really done the story justice and why?
Probably either Love Story or The World According to Garp. I loved both books, and after seeing the movie, I remembered how much I loved the characters, and wanted to read the book again. I like that feeling.
Write a haiku about HMH. (5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables)
Type, type, type. Click, click.
Why isn’t Bookscan ready?
Time to get coffee.
Play
