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| Ray Stannard Baker AKA David Grayson |
I am on the verge of finishing three books-in-progress before the year's end: Cross Creek by Majorie Kinnan Rawlings; What's the Worst That Could Happen? (ninth in the Dortmunder series) by Donald Westlake; and The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon by Alexander McCall Smith, the latest in his No. One Ladies' Detective Agency series.
I am hoping to start with a clean slate as I just bought The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin and One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson.
I recently watched an interview with Ms. Goodwin from
C-SPAN's Q & A program archives which introduced me to her
latest book. (You can watch it here.) What caught my attention was the fact that one of the journalists featured in the book is Ray Stannard Baker who wrote for McClure's magazine, the muckraking monthly, along with Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946) is better known to me as David Grayson, the name he used when he wrote a series of books that have found their way onto my bookshelves through discovery at used book stores. These include Adventures in Solitude (1932), Adventures in Friendship (1910), and Adventures in Contentment (1907). I wrote about Mr. Baker/Grayson and these books here.
The Bully Pulpit is a huge, 900-plus page book and Mr. Bryson's One Summer runs over 500 pages. I am making quite a commitment here with these two books and one I hope I can keep. If I read just four pages a day, I will be finished with both by the end of 2014.
