“Lost Rights” Editor Simon Winder Has New Book Out….

Simon Winder has a new book out – Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History – which is garnering rave reviews in top British papers, including the London Times and the Telegraph. I have not seen the book, but the reviews indicate that the work beautifully captures the breadth and richness of Germany’s history in ways that have been largely ignored for the last half century or so. It is published in the US by Farrar Straus Giroux.

Simon was the editor of two of my first three books – Fair Trade Fraud (1991) and Lost Rights (1994), both published by St. Martin’s Scholarly and Reference division. His encouragement, support, and enthusiasm were invaluable. He saw the merit in a proposal that was turned down by a dozen other publishers. Lost Rights greatly benefitted from having an editor like Simon who was not afraid of exposing government atrocites at their worst. And his razor-sharp sense of humor was also invaluable – he understood my attempts at comic relief far better than did many other editors before or since. (Garrett Kiely, the chief of that division of St. Martin’s, was also a superb editor and courageous about publishing a book that beefed up some Enemies Lists).

Smon returned to his native Britain in the mid-1990s, and he is now a top editor at Penguin UK.