An Especially Good View - Watching History Happen

"In more than five decades as a reporter, editor and publisher, Peter Osnos has had an especially good view of momentous events and relationships with some of the most influential personalities of our time. ... In this unusually wide-ranging memoir, Osnos uses a reporter's skills to portray historic events and encounters beginning with his parents' extraordinary World War II experiences escaping Europe to India, where he was born, to the present day. He shares unique portraits of the famous people he worked with and an insider's perspective of the news and publishing businesses. As he charts the evolution of his career and recent history, he also explores the influence and impact of family, character, curiosity, luck, resilience, a well-pressed suit and some unexpected wrinkles"--

About the author

Peter L.W. Osnos was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) India on October 13, 1943. He arrived in Los Angeles by ship with his parents and brother in February 1944. He was raised in New York and attended high school in Connecticut, college at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and graduate school at Columbia University. He worked as an assistant to the journalist I.F. Stone and joined the Washington Post in 1966. At the Post, Osnos served as a correspondent in Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and London. He was also the national and foreign editor. In 1984, Osnos joined Random House as a senior editor and later associate publisher as well as publisher of the Times Books imprint. In 1997, he founded PublicAffairs in partnership with the Perseus Books Group and served as publisher and editor at large until 2020. He was the founder of the Caravan Project on the development of digital and audio publishing, author of a weekly media column called Platform which was hosted by the Century Foundation and appeared on theatlantic.com and in 2020, launched Platform Books LLC with his wife, Susan Sherer Osnos.

The first book will be "An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen" to be released in June, 2021. It is Osnos' memoir to be distributed by Two Rivers/Ingram. He is the father of two children, Evan Osnos and Katherine Sanford, and grandfather of five. He and his wife now live in New York City and Lakeside, Michigan.

Summary

In more than five decades as a reporter, editor and publisher, Peter Osnos has had an especially good view of momentous events and relationships with some of the most influential personalities of our time.

As a young journalist for I.F. Stone's Weekly, one of the leading publications of the turbulent 1960s and in 18 years at The Washington Post , he covered the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, the Soviet Union at the height of Kremlin power, Washington D.C. as National Editor, "Swinging London" in the 60s and Thatcher's Britain in the 1980s.

At Random House and the company he founded, PublicAffairs, he was responsible for books by four presidents -Carter, Clinton, Obama and Trump; celebrated Washington figures including Robert McNamara, House Speaker Tip O'Neill and Vernon Jordan, first ladies Rosalynn Carter and Nancy Reagan, the billionaire George Soros, basketball superstars Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Magic Johnson, legendary spies, political dissidents and the writers, Molly Ivins and Peggy Noonan, among many others.

In this unusually wide-ranging memoir, Osnos uses a reporter's skills to portray historic events and encounters beginning with his parents' extraordinary World War II experiences escaping Europe to India, where he was born, to the present day. He shares unique portraits of the famous people he worked with and an insider's perspective of the news and publishing businesses. As he charts the evolution of his career and recent history, he also explores the influence and impact of family, character, curiosity, luck, resilience, a well-pressed suit and some unexpected wrinkles.

Also featuring a "virtual attic" of photographs, documents and video at anespeciallygoodview.com.

Additional text

"It’s clear the book was a labor of love… Much of the memoir’s charm comes from Osnos’ candor and energy, and he concludes with a deeply personal retrospective of thought, grateful reflection, and pictorial extras that both seasoned and aspiring journalists will appreciate. The meticulously detailed, inspiring journey of an American news reporter and publisher." –Kirkus Reviews

 "Osnos has not written a memoir so much as a report from the front. Make that many fronts – the great news events of the past half-century, including the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and the Cold War. His upper-middle-class Jewish parents and brother escaped Poland as refugees in 1939, and with them as a 4-month-old, he arrived in the U.S. via India in a basket. A Washington Post journalist and founding book publisher of PublicAffairs, Osnos describes his attitude as “aggressive optimism.” That sensibility infuses his book with an irrepressible energy and enthusiasm tinged with enough self-doubt that one marvels at his seemingly dauntless talent for reinvention. “For reasons I cannot explain,” he writes in his book’s final part, “I have avoided wrinkles.” In junior high school and in Vietnam, he always appeared somewhat starched. With self-reflection absent from so many journalistic accounts, late in life he comes to understand his “emotional deflection” and the fact that “every life has its wrinkles, of the kind that can’t be addressed by having them pressed.”  –The National Book Review

"To Peter Osnos: It's all your fault." –Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve Chair, in his memoir Keeping At It

"[It's been a] four-decade criminal conspiracy.... One arrest, one near arrest, stacks of KGB files, and now four books." –Natan Sharansky, acknowledgement to Peter Osnos in Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People

"To Peter Osnos: Our publisher, editor, referee, and friend." –Jimmy Carter, inscription in his book Always a Reckoning and Other Poems

"Never Trust an Editor. Never Trust an Editor. Never Trust an Editor." –Edna Buchanan, author of The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, sign above her typewriter 

 

Product details

• Authors: Peter L W Osnos, Peter L. W. Osnos
• Publisher: Platform Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.06.2021
• EAN: 9781735996806
• ISBN: 978-1-73599-680-6
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 237 mm x 165 mm x 34 mm
• Weight: 778 g
• Illustrations: 11 Illustrations
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Social sciences, law, business > Media, communication > Journalism; POLITICAL SCIENCE / General, HISTORY / Modern / General