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Here’s an excellent analysis of what’s needed to make non-fiction work at book length.

http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2011/12/15/peter-ginna-bloomsbury-journalists-book-length-narrative/

Back in the day, Publisher’s Weekly reviewed books BEFORE publication, not two months after the fact. But for some reason I need to figure out, they didn’t get around to Top Secret America until this week, exactly two months after it came out. Here’s the review, but the key phrase is: “This is an important book that should receive greater attention. ”

Gee, you think?

The latest Editors’ Roundtable is up on the Nieman Storyboard website, and here it is.

Dana Priest and Bill Arkin’s Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, edited by moi, hit the New York Times bestseller list this week at #14 (and made #6 on the Washington Post bestseller list).

Next week it will be a year since the Macondo well was finally killed and sealed safely in it’s tomb of concrete. The media attention paid to all the books about the disastrous blowout last April 20th in the Gulf of Mexico shut down a lot faster than Macondo did. We were quickly on to other disasters, other obsessions, other anniversaries. But out of the blue (so to speak), in the new New York Review of Books dated Sept. 29, comes this retrospective of oil spill/blowout books by Peter Maass.  He says some very gratifying things about Fire on the Horizon. He calls it “a rough gem” and “an excellent book that wraps concise explanations of technology into a fascinating story of danger and tragedy on the rig.”

That last phrase is the most concise possible formulation of exactly what Fire on the Horizon was trying to accomplish.

Top Secret America, the Rise of the New American Security State – the expansion and elaboration of the Washington Post series by Dana Priest and Bill Arkin – a project that took up most of my winter and spring, has gotten off to a blazing start days before it’s official publication date.  It’s already at 120 on Amazon, and a major Frontline special on it won’t air until Sept. 6. The challenge for this was always to take a groundbreaking and informative newspaper series and make it into something more. A book has to engage and involve a reader in a way a newspaper project never can. The strategy was to back out from the investigative conclusions summarized in the series and approach it the way Priest and Arkin did themselves in two years of reporting; to make it a journey of discovery where the readers reach the disquieting conclusions bit by bit as they feel the massive haunches, the rope-like trunk, the solid mass of the belly of the beast and only slowly realize they are dealing with a mastodon — the uncontrolled, even metastatic growth of invasive, redundant and ruinously expensive security measures, the very overreaction that terrorists count on.

The skeptical take on this book project, which I heard a lot as we labored on it, was that, after the massive three part series in the Post, nothing was left to be said. The very first reader review was very reassuring on that point:

I generally take a very jaundiced view of books that emerge from Washington Post columns I have already read, but this book surprised, engages, and out-performs the columns by such a leap that I have to rate it at six stars (10% of what I read and review), and call it a nation-changing book.

Here’s the early review from Kirkus.

It will be interesting to see where it goes from here.

Hunt fans won’t have to wait until next June for a fix. The Herald has committed to the first Miami Hunt since 2009 for Sunday Nov. 13. This will be a Dave-Tom production, as opposed to the Dave-Tom-Gene Washington Hunts. Though we DO let Gene have the opportunity to trash all our ideas along the way. It should be a very novel Hunt, in that the venue is the public space surrounding the brand new, perhaps not even 100% completed, Florida Marlins stadium, where the Orange Bowl used to be. It’s very dramatic architecturally, and dramatic architecture is always a good inspiration for Hunt puzzles. Plus, as I remember fondly from attending Orange Bowl events, the surrounding neighborhood has EXCELLENT cafe Cubano and mango batidos.

The August Nieman Editors’ Roundtable is up discussing a terrific story about a 20-something man masquerading as a teenage high school hoops star. Go to: http://bit.ly/qLBbx4