Book called one of Amazon’s `Hot new releases’
Loved Field of Dreams Game
The Front Page
Morning Update
Thursday, August 19, 2021
By Ken Tingley
Post-Star reporter Gretta Hochsprung stopped by last week to interview me about my first book.
The book, “The Last American Editor,” is a collection of my columns from my 30 years working at The Post-Star. As I went through the process of choosing the columns and telling the stories of what happened afterward, I learned some important lessons about the work I had been doing my whole life.
Margaret Sullivan, the former Buffalo News editor who is now the media columnist at The Washington Post, wrote the foreward for the book. She pointed out that newspapers write stories “of the moment.” It was something I had not considered before. The work we did at the newspaper is accurate and relevant at that moment, but it rarely has the same context or value years later.
“Newspaper work is, by its nature, ephemeral. It’s of the instant, of the day.,” Sullivan wrote in the foreward. “Readers absorb it, appreciate it or object to it, and then stack the paper for recycling. And we ink-stained journalists recognize we aren’t writing for the ages but for the moment.”
It is something I had not considered before, but then Sullivan wrote this, “But here, once again, Ken Tingley manages something extraordinary. These columns are of their moment, but they also have lasting value.”
As I’ve promoted the book over the past few months, I had a lot of time to think about the work I am publishing. What I conveyed to Gretta during our interview was that this book has value because it chronicles communities at their best, and sometimes at their worst.
The columns have value because they provide a history, not necessarily of the most significant events of the day, but of the character of the people who lived there.
That is important.
The features and columns published in the newspaper were often what was most read.
My columns about those people are worth remembering Bering and revisiting.
These stories are part of the historical record because they are stories of life and death and hardship. They will lift you up and they will bring you down. Some of them still bring tears to my eyes.
So it was encouraging to learn this week that the book may have found an audience with a “#1 New Release” tag on Amazon Kindle as one of “Amazon’s hot new releases.”
Preorders are still available and can be ordered here.
Field of Dreams game
Yeah, it was a bit hokey when actor Kevin Costner led ballplayers from the Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees out of the cornfield at the Field of Dreams site in Iowa Thursday night, but it was still pretty cool.
Field of Dreams isn’t my favorite baseball movie - actually I classify it more as a father-son movie - but it still a pretty darn good.
It shows baseball is thinking out of the box to get more fans interested in the game. They have their work cut out for them. The Yankees blew another ninth inning lead, so this one ended to be a nightmare instead of a dream.
But the Yankees did win two from the Red Sox on Tuesday.
