Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [205]
Lastly, I am not sure if this book would have been written (and I’m really not sure how it would have been written) without Michael Kavanagh and Amanda Katz. Some of the best ideas and most heartfelt emotions in these pages come, one way or another, from the two of them. Michael was the first person with whom I shared my interest in writing about wrongness, and he has been at my side for every subsequent moment of the process—both when he has known it, and when he has not. I am unaccountably fortunate, and indescribably happy, to have him in my life. Amanda set out to acquire the book and wound up acquiring the author—without question the tougher project. I don’t know how to sufficiently express my gratitude for her patience, tenderness, humor, acuity, editorial brilliance, and, above all, her tenacious faith. I do know, though, that she has made this book—and my life—vastly better than it would otherwise be.
Often while working on this project I thought about something the author Philip Gourevitch once said. “One doesn’t write what one means to write,” he observed. “One writes what one can write.” This is a variant on the kind of erring I discuss in the final chapter: the gap between the ideal bed (or the ideal book) and the real one—between what we can envision, and what we can pull off. In the end, I finally learned the point of this book by writing it. Aiming and missing, falling short, going astray, getting it wrong: it really did turn out to be both an agonizing lesson and an unparalleled pleasure. I am grateful to have experienced them both.
About the Author
KATHRYN SCHULZ is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, the Nation, Foreign Policy, and the Huffington Post, among other publications. She is the former editor of the online magazine Grist and a former reporter and editor for the Santiago Times, of Santiago, Chile, where she covered environmental, labor, and human rights issues. She was a 2004 recipient of the Pew Fellowship in International Journalism and has reported from throughout Central and South America, Japan, and, most recently, the Middle East. A former Ohioan, Oregonian, and Brooklynite, she currently lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
www.beingwrongbook.com
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Credits
Jacket design by Keenan
Jacket photographs: arrow © Marcus Lund/cultura/Corbis, target © Corbis/SuperStock
Copyright
BEING WRONG. Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn Schulz. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
EPub Edition © May 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-199793-8
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