FSG Editor Makes a Sale

Executive editor John Glusman has often launched the literary careers of others, and now his own is in the hands of Penguin president and publisher Kathryn Court, who has just bought his proposal for a book, based on the experiences of his own father, about the remarkable and harrowing lives of three American doctors captured by the Japanese in World War II. As you read this, Glusman is in the Philippines with his father, Murray, researching the scenes that will be described in Conduct Under Fire: The Extraordinary Tale of Three American Doctors and Their Fate as POWs. Court bought world English, audio and first serial rights in Glusman's book from agent David Black and aims to publish sometime early in 2004. Glusman has long contemplated a book about his father and his two companions, Ferdinand Berley and John Bookman, who as military medics were captured soon after Pearl Harbor and imprisoned in the Philippines. They survived, always caring for the wounded and suffering, through such major campaigns as Bataan and Corregidor, endured the 1945 firebombing of Kobe back in Japan, and finally, liberated, were among the first Americans into Tokyo after the Japanese surrender. Glusman will combine his father's own reminiscences with research and other interviews to tell the story.