Andrew Evans wins travel journalism award

Andrew Evans, a former fellow Washington, DC, Gridskipper correspondent, won a silver medal in the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition’s Guidebook category. Drew earned the recognition for his Bradt Travel Guide on Iceland.

Never having been to Iceland, I haven’t had occasion to read Drew’s book yet. But I hope to both travel to Iceland and read his book soon. His contributions at Gridskipper have been great and useful.

Drew also blogs about his travels and writing at Walked & Walked.

My professor the author: Justin Catanoso’s new book on faith, family, and miracles

Justin Catanoso, the executive editor of The Business Journal and a former journalism professor of mine at Wake Forest, recently published a memoir, My Cousin the Saint: A Search for Faith, Family, and Miracles.

After discovering that his grandfather’s cousin was on the fast track to sainthood, Justin reconnected with his large family back in Italy and his long-lost faith. I talked to him for a while at a friend’s wedding a few weeks ago, he’s excited about the book’s reception and his book tour. He also said that writing the book was the hardest project he’s ever undertaken.

Justin’s blogging about subjects related to the book at www.justincatanoso.com.

Here’s a review of the book that I posted on Amazon.com:

My Cousin the Saint is provocative—it’s impossible to read this book and not contemplate your own faith and the meaning of family. I consider myself far too practical and rational to be religious. So it was interesting reading about how someone with the same self-image started believing. Or at least trying to.

Furthermore Catanoso’s vivid descriptions of his family in the United States and in Italy provides an interesting contrast of the social norms in those two countries.

Growing up outside of Boston, I was jealous of my many Italian-American classmates and their large, boisterous families. This book confirms that my envy was well founded.

Reading suggestions for Naval aviation aficionados, college pranksters, and teens—or someone who is all three

With seemingly every website this time of year supplying gift ideas, I figured I’d suggest some books, only with a twist: two of them are by friends of mine, the other features pictures of my brother. (And I reckon there isn’t another site that recommends books about such disparate subjects.)

• Anytime, Baby! Hail and Farewell to the U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcat by Erik Hildebrandt, Dale Snodgrass (foreword), and Dave Parsons (commentary). My younger brother, a former F-14 pilot who now flies the F-18 Super Hornet, is in a few of the photos. Hence I’ve seen a lot of pictures of Navy planes. Hildebrandt’s photography is the best I’ve encountered. He does a great job of capturing the grace and beauty of the Tomcat, while still showing it as an agent of warfare. A review on Amazon mentioned some editing concerns. The critique is accurate, but the great photographs make the text almost extraneous (this review is probably the first time I’ve called the text of a book irrelevant).
• Class Dismissed: 75 Outrageous, Mind-Expanding College Exploits (and Lessons That Won’t Be on the Final) by Ben Applebaum, Derrick Pittman, and Ryan McNally. Ben, Derrick, and Ryan went to Wake Forest when I was there and they run the website CollegeStories.com. This book is the follow-up to Ben and Derrick’s Turd Ferguson & the Sausage Party: An Uncensored Guide to College Slang (they were kind enough to mention me in both books’ acknowledgements). Class Dismissed features the best of the thousands of stories their site has received (my favorite is Canty’s Obituary Revenge).
• Project 20/20: The Experiment by Karen Adler Feeley. I’ve worked with Karen for over a year on the Department of Defense’s National Security Personal System (NSPS) project. Just a few weeks ago she told me that she’d published this book (one of the negatives about freelancing is that it’s harder to know your co-workers’ other interests). It’s about four teenagers who are “offered the chance to journey forward through time in search of their dream lives.”

The worst part about being a writer and editor

One of my favorite pastimes is reading, but after devoting 16 hours a day to writing and editing as I did during the past two weeks, the last activity I want to do in my spare time is stare at more words. As a result I’ve made no progress recently on my list of books I’ve started, but need to finish:

• The New Penguin History of the World: Fourth Edition by J.M. Roberts
• The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber
• The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition by Ernest Hemingway
• Caravaggio by John T. Spike

Books writers and editors need

Freelance writing and editing has low start-up costs. Assuming you have a home and phone, all you need is a computer and these books:

• The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law—even if you’re not writing or editing for the media, many public relations documents use this style
• The Chicago Manual of Style-–the industry Bible
• The Economist Style Guide—less of a necessity than the other books (no client has ever asked me to write in The Economist’s style, but a good resource nevertheless)
• The United States Government Printing Office Style Manual—a must if you edit for the government or government contractors
• Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications—the main style guide for many computer manuals
• The Elements of Style—less of a guide than the others, writers and editors should read this book annually to correct bad habits and reinforce good ones