Welcome Friends,
NEW
The Secrets of North Brother Island
An illustrated novel of the greatest American
disaster before September 11, 2001
by John Kenny Crane
Available at Amazon
Hardback $27.95
Paperback $20.95
The Secrets of North Brother Island is about the unsolved disaster in 1904 of the
burning and sinking of the pleasure boat General Slocum, the worst nonmilitary disaster
in American history before September 11, 2001.It is often called "the forgotten disaster"
because of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
However, nearly 1,100 perished on the Slocum, half of them children, in what was to have
been a church picnic. The captain ran it aground on North Brother Island despite the fact
that the fire broke out beside Rikers Island, equipped with a full fire-fighting brigade.
Crane finds the seeds of the disaster in the Civil War forty years earlier in disillusioned
veterans who wind up at North Brother Island hospital long before the General Slocum
disaster because they are considered insane, then considered an incurable disease.
They become pyromaniacs but are not involved in the Slocum fire. They are in fact heroes
in the rescue. In 1998, three scholars investigate all the major fires between 1900 and
1911 to discover who set the Slocum ablaze and come to an astounding conclusion.
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Having been a Professor of English for 22 years and a Dean of the Arts for ten more, I
have been continually amazed by the decay of the English language. Now publishers
want textbooks on English Writing and Grammar “dumbed down”! Dumb down English?
Why don’t they dumb down Math also? Who needs the Pythagorean Theorem anyhow?
Why can’t 2 + 2 = 5?
When I see questions seeking online answers on the Yahoo Web site, and both the
askers and the answerers usually can’t spell, punctuate, put a verb in a sentence, or know
the difference between adverbs and adjectives, I get exasperated. The largest English-
speaking country in the world is now India, and Indians use English more precisely than
we do (with Great Britain, the inventor of English, not far behind us). So, I became a
copywriter, a person who can clean up English for those who mangle or misuse it.
I wish copywriters would go out of business, but I fear they will not. Besides spelling,
grammar, and syntax, there is still that mysterious element called “rhetoric.” Rhetoric is
actually “the art of convincing.” Writers have to consider the audience being addressed,
then use the correct vocabulary, tone, sentence structure, and many other elements of
English to bring the readers and listeners to their way of thinking.
Consider the following two statements, both written and spoken by Nobel Prize
Laureates. They are written for an audience of the most educated people in the world. Yet
they would not “do” in a third-grade classroom.
Faulkner writes freight-train-length sentences that you can hear whistling in the distance,
rumbling as they pass by, and clickety-clacking as they disappear toward some
mysterious destination.
- Excerpt from William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1950:
- “I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work—a life’s work
in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit,
but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist
before.”
Hemingway writes much shorter sentences, almost devoid of adverbs, that depend
almost entirely upon what the reader infers from them. Read his story “Hills Like White
Elephants” to know what I mean.
- Excerpt from Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1954: “Writing,
at its best, is a lonely life.”
Copywriters do not win Nobel Prizes for Literature. They clarify for the intended audience
what the writer actually meant. This is what I will do for you. Just tell me who or what your
audience is and what you are trying to convince your readers and listeners to do.
I want the chance to succeed for you. Please review this Web site for all kinds of writing
with which I can help you. I look forward to working with you.
John K. Crane, Ph.D.
Dean Emeritus of the Arts at San Jose State University
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ELDORADO WRITING
your writing and see others' comments. Growing Up as a Baby Boomer by John Kenny Crane Available at Amazon Hardback $25.99 Paperback $15.49 John Kenny Crane has collected most of his Robert Greenway stories into one volume entitled Growing Up as a Baby Boomer. The short story collection is of Crane's most regular character, Robert Greenway, and his maturation from ages 5-45. He matures from a 5-year-old to a married 45-year-old who owns a British inn in the Dorset village of Abbot's Cernel. In growing up he encounters the same failures we all do. He deems his worst to be a summer job where he totally loses control of a roller coaster he is charged with operating. From this he ultimately moves on to staging a pigeon race for his customers at his British inn. Most of these stories are humorous but a few are poignant. Greenway suffers the failures and successes we all do as he tries to "grow up" into a world he did not expect to encounter: loss of innocence, failure at jobs, disillusionment with his parents. |
| (505) 466-2329 jack@eldoradowriting.com |
