Note: This is an expanded version of my talk to the Washington Biography Group on Monday at Washington International School. By David H. Rothman Founder of TeleRead, Co-Founder of LibraryCity, and author of The Solomon Scandals SEEING the windmill blades turn—in Al Gore’s multimedia book Are we wasting our time talking about books and the […]
Read MoreAided by Kindle Review rec and 99-cent sale, ‘Solomon Scandals’ zoomed to 1K rank at Amazon out of 850K
For years, as founder and editor of TeleRead, I complained of e-book gouges by big publishers eager to protect their trade in paper books. My little publisher, Twilight Times Books, owned by the author-friendly Lida Quillen, listened. Last week with my blessing, Lida dropped the price of The Solomon Scandals on Amazon to 99 cents, […]
Read More‘The Solomon Scandals’ gets a sexy new cover—with a photo from one of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s favorites
What was Sy Solomon—the D.C. real estate tycoon in The Solomon Scandals—-doing on the book’s blue cover shown here? Picking up a refrigerator with one hand? Or a gargantuan keyboard? Or plunking down a high-rise in a favorite location, with a little help from well-bribed zoning officials? The correct answer is the last one. But […]
Read More‘I write like William Shakespeare’: Paste ‘The Solomon Scandals’ into this Web form and see for yourself
Do you have the nerve to think that The Solomon Scandals isn’t Shakespearean in style? Hah! Just paste my foreword and first three chapters into a Web form on the ”I Write Like” site—and see for yourself. Even a blog post from the Scandals site can be Shakespearean. Try How TBD could use hyperlocal journalism […]
Read More‘David Rothman’ namesakes: Egosurfers, here’s what the rest of us are up to
I’ve remarked before on weird coincidences related to my name. Two letters, for example, distinguish me from David Roffman, at least if you don’t include middle names. He’s the veteran journalist associated with the Georgetowner newspaper, shown with a Kitty Kelley feature (temporary link). Much of The Solomon Scandals happens in Georgetown, which, by the […]
Read More‘Romenesko’d’: Dan Bloom’s musical obit for ‘snail’ newspapers—or at least his op-ed about it
For the op-ed page and Web site of the Providence Journal, my friend Dan Bloom wrote partly about his song honoring old-fashioned newspapers, aka ”Snailpapers.” He confessed that not everyone loved this “musical obit,” as ex-Washington Star gossip columnist Diana McLellan dubbed it. Lo and behold, however, Danny’s Journal op-ed drew a link from Jim […]
Read MoreThe Georgetown name game: Roffman, Rothman, Solomon and The Georgetowner
Two kinds of parties show up in The Solomon Scandals, my D.C. media novel: the private variety (“party-parties”) and “name-in-the-paper parties” (where the givers and the guests want publicity). For both, the location is still the Georgetown section of Washington, famous over the years as home to the liberal elite. I’ve never applied for “elite” […]
Read MoreThe Jonathan Stone-David Rothman Q. & A.
Jonathan Stone, the reporter in The Solomon Scandals, grilled me for this Q. & A.—uncut. STONE: Why’s Scandals copyrighted in your name? It’s my newspaper memoir. ROTHMAN: Er, faux memoir. Without me, you wouldn’t even have been born…or have worked for the Washington Telegram…or have struggled to avert an IRS-CIA building collapse…or lived through those […]
Read More‘Solomon Scandals’ goes on sale now as e-book; January delivery in trade paperback
Psst! Advance promo copies of The Solomon Scandals are on sale now in e-book format (retail $5.95 USD). Twilight Times Books is also taking advance orders for First Editions in trade paperback (retail $16.95 USD). The paperbacks will ship in January 2009. These are “pre-release promotional copies.” Twilight’s phone number is 423-323-0183, and other ordering […]
Read MoreDeep Throat is dead—and so are the old rules of investigative journalism
Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat, the whistleblower in the FBI who blew open much of the Watergate scandal for the Washington Post, is dead. Leonard Downie, a Post staffer at the time, writes how much investigative reporting has changed since then—for example, technologically. Imagine staying in touch with a source who totes a prepaid cell […]
Read MoreScandals as a Northern Virginia Jewish novel
Jonathan Stone as an Afro-American? Because Jewish protagonists are such old hat? So suggested a buddy of mine—not an anti-semite or self-hating Jewish, but an intelligent man of the observant, practicing variety. May I respectfully disagree? In fact, The Solomon Scandals in some respects is as much a Northern Virginia Jewish novel as a newspaper […]
Read MoreSen. Ribicoff’s spooky investment
Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, the late Connecticut senator who also served in President John F. Kennedy’s cabinet, secretly held a $20,000 investment in a GSA-leased building that the CIA moved into. My story for States News Service, reproduced below, appeared in the New Haven Register on May 29, 1975, and later made the NBC Nightly News. […]
Read More