I have an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today about the demise of the 118-year old law firm, Heller Ehrman. The firm was started by Isaias Hellman’s son-in-law and was inexorably linked to Hellman and Wells Fargo Bank.
If you want to hear more on why history is better than fiction, come to the Litquake panel Scandal, Intrigue and Drama in California History, on Monday Oct. 6 at the Commonwealth Club. I will be on a panel talking about writing history with authors Julia Flynn Siler, Ethan Rarick, and Rick Wartzman.
Michael Chabon reports on the Democratic Convention in
Caitlin Flanagan has an interesting piece (and video) on the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. It’s partially a review of a new book, Patty’s Got A Gun, by William Graebner.
I have always been fascinated by Patty Hearst. When I was 16, I scored a press pass to her trial, even though my school didn’t have a newspaper. On the day I was set to go to the trial, I was walking to school when my father drove by. My parents were divorced and I didn’t live with my father. He picked my up and took me to school and I told him how I snared a press pass to the Patty Hearst trial. He was so impressed by my ingenuity because seats were in high demand at the trial. We had a nice interaction. Two days later he died of a heart attack while skiing. He was 45. So you see, Patty Hearst resonates in many ways for me.
Bay Area author, Meg Waite Clayton, the bestselling author of The Wednesday Sisters, has sold her next book to Ballantine. It’s called The Ms. Bradwells and it is about “four law school friends whose reunion at a Chesapeake Bay island family home leads them to face the truth about an unexplained death years earlier, their very different career paths, and the redemptive power of friendship,” according to Publishers Marketplace.
Meg’s new blog on how authors came to be writers is really interesting.
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