The Terrence Crimmins Newsletter
Once a Month
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Reviews
Reviews of Who was Joseph Pulitzer? are still coming in, but the pace of them has slowed a bit. More reviews, of course, would be greatly appreciated, and
can be done at this link, by pushing the bar that says Write a Customer Review.
Excerpt from Chapter Two
Click here to get an excerpt from the beginning of my next novel, entitled
The Riddle of Alexander Hamilton, The excerpt is from Chapter Two, which describes the remarkable transformation of Hamilton to far more prominent opportunities than his humble origins may have permitted.
One reader on the Linkedin site was very enthusiastic about the first excerpt, and wrote an enthusiastic comment.
As always, I welcome your feedback. Please fell free to write with praise or criticism, or your input on what you are curious about that you would like me to write about. I will continue to post excerpts from successive chapters in upcoming news letters.
Video Promotion
Who was Joseph Pulitzer? is promoted in this
dynamic video that gives potential readers a hint of the informative drama of the novel.
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Adolph Hitler's Luck of the Devil |
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Hitler’s first lucky break came 13 years before he was born. His father changed his name from Shicklegruber to Hitler, and thus gave the future dictator a name that was far more slogan-ready. It is hard to imagine nearly all of Germany rising to salute a leader in unison chanting “Heil Shicklegruber!” This was one of many lucky breaks for Adolph Hitler, enabling a sociopathic individual with very dark personality traits to become the leader of a great nation and propel a world war that resulted in the death of between fifty and eighty million people. His main talent was in public speaking, but his message was, in the 1920s, only for a small far right audience. He would speak to crowds of beer drinking German nationalists who responded well to his sarcasm laced rants about the necessity of a new Germany rising up to cleanse the world of its problems. It was the Great Depression that was a very lucky break for Adolph, causing millions of unemployed Germans to be much more receptive to his message. Without the stock market crash of 1929, Hitler would have been just another beer hall rabble rouser. In power, however, he also had lucky breaks, including the survival of two assassination attempts. The first was by a carpenter who built a bomb into a podium from which Hitler was to speak. Hitler, however, paranoid man that he was, felt with good reason that people were trying to kill him, and changed his speaking time so that the bomb went off thirteen minutes too late to kill the genocidal dictator. This occurred in 1939, so the bomber failed in his wish to stop the Second World War. The second attempt to kill Hitler was in 1944, when many officers were well aware that Germany was going to lose the war, and that the military must get rid of Hitler before their beloved Armed Services were destroyed by the Allied Powers if the war continued onward. In this case Hitler’s luck was quite amazing. In an underground bunker the briefcase holding the bomb was inadvertently moved away from Hitler by an officer giving a presentation. When it went off, the table Hitler was sitting at shielded him from the major force of the impact, although four others near him were killed. Thus Hitler, a rampant extremist, was able to continue to go forward with his all or nothing strategy, and Germany ended up with hundreds of thousands more dead than if he had done the responsible thing and surrendered earlier. But, then again, Hitler was not a responsible man, and unfortunately, he had the luck of the Devil.
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Get a free copy of a fascingting article entltled
Solzhenitsyn's Return to Russia. This piece entails an contrast of Solzhenitsyn's writings versus his public perception, as well as a ring side seat to his return to his homeland, including his political feud with Boris Yeltsin.
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Reviews of
Who was Joseph Pulitzer? |
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Joseph Pulitzer was quite a man, arriving in American as a 17 year old immigrant, growing to be a successful pioneer in the newspaper industry. This account is fictionalized, but the events and the historical placement of political crises are spot on. Take Pulitzer, introduce the feuds with W. R. Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt, circulation wars between giant New York newspapers and there is drama enough. Mix in the Spanish-American War, Teddy’s Rough Riders and gun boat diplomacy associated with the threat of a revolution in Columbia (owner of the under developed area now known as Panama) and there’s as much excitement here as in many novels. If I was still teaching, I would put this on a required reading list for my journalism students.
-Hank Lajoie
From time to time a book comes along that may cause you to re-assess your thinking on a particular subject – or at least send you back to the library for more research. For me this is one of those!
The book “Who Was Joseph Pulitzer” (A Novel) was written by Terrence Crimmins, a man I had not heard of before one day last week.
To begin with I was not overly enthusiastic about reading it because I was never that impressed with Pulitzer as a person.
As I learned more about this skinny, outrageously impulsive Hungarian immigrant I began to be more interested.
But – to the book itself. Crimmins has written a book that takes “dry as stale bread history” and transforms it into a “page turner” that is eminently readable! The book would sit comfortably on a shelf with the historical fiction of Lloyd Douglas, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos and others of their ilk.
If you are at all interested in the History of our country – or, indeed, of the world -- I strongly recommend that you get this one and read it! You will be glad you did!
-Doug Todd – Author of “AFTERMATH: A Song For Tyrone…”
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