Holt Signs Boo, McKibben
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 7/9/2001
Two new editors at Henry Holt were out in the fray last week, and both brought home prizes. George Hodgeman, a new arrival from the magazine world (Vanity Fair and Details) made his first major acquisition by winning a heated auction among seven publishers for a book by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kate Boo. It's a book called The Shrimp Boat, based on an earlier New Yorker article by the author, in which she describes a single mother on welfare in Washington, D.C., who becomes a police officer, and how she manages to raise three kids in a changing neighborhood as she does so. Hodgeman paid ICM's Amanda Urban a "very substantial sum" for U.S. and Canada, plus audio.
David Sobel, who now heads the Times Books imprint at the house, also paid good money for a new book by Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, this time taking an alarmed look at the implications of biotechnology and genetic engineering. It's called Enough, and was bought, North American only, from Gloria Loomis at Watkins Loomis, for publication in fall 2003.
