By: E&P Staff The long-awaited memoir by Howell Raines, the former New York Times executive editor, will be published on May 9, according to an e-mail to E&P today by its publisher, Scribner's.
It is called "The One That Got Away," which may be taken as a reference to Raines exiting the Times after the Jayson Blair scandal, but which actually (or also) concerns fishing. The cover, in fact, shows Raines in the water holding a whopper. His previous memoir was "Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis."
Scribner's said review copies would be arriving in early April. It describes the book's content this way: "fishing, change, renewal, and life upstream after the New York Times."
An early review in Booklist gave it a thumb's up, saying in part:
"Skillfully drawing parallels between the deceptions practiced by fishermen, journalists, and politicians, Raines describes his love of the unpredictability of fishing and of life. ... Memories of Captain Beddingood, owner of a fish camp, segue into a painful account of how management at the Times was lulled into believing in the capabilities of Blair, later spectacularly disclosed as a plagiarist.
"Though Raines' tenure as executive editor started after Blair began his reporting career with the paper, Raines was toppled in the housecleaning that followed Blair's firing and left to examine his own shortcomings. Long before his ouster, Raines had been coming to grips with his disappointment with his beloved Times, a paper some of the staff thought was not as good as it could be, hidebound by tradition and by defenders who took refuge in the truism that it's hard to turn a battleship.
"With extraordinary grace, Raines explores some missteps that have haunted him so long 'as to become icons of instruction about the importance of avoiding avoidable mistakes.' Although he directly addresses 'brothers and sisters of the angle,' Raines' writing is poetry to all of us."
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