Booknotes+

In the beginning of Scott Greenberger's new book, "The Forsaken Founder," Dawn Davis, publisher of the Simon & Schuster imprint 37 Ink, introduces us to this new history of a mostly unfamiliar name. Davis writes: "Hamilton, Franklin, Washington, Madison. These are names we know." However, she writes that "there was another man in the room at the founding, a prodigy whose contributions were just as essential, whose name has largely been forgotten: Gouverneur Morris. Morris, as the penman of the Constitution, wrote the words "We the people," which are his and his alone. The subtitle to Scott Greenberger's book is "Gouverneur Morris, the Unsung Patriot Who Wrote the Constitution, Stood Up to Slavery, and Survived the Reign of Terror."

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Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, has been in prison for 32 years in France. He was captured in Sudan on August 14, 1994. In his book titled "The Jackal," Washington Post correspondent Joby Warrick reports on his 2025 meeting with the jailed terrorist in Paris. Carlos told him: "I killed 83 people with my own hand." Reporter Warrick writes that: "Carlos mattered. He was the human face of a dangerous new form of international terrorism that emerged in the 1970s and the 1980s, which became the template for later groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State." The Jackal will be 77 years old on October 12th.
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Paul Taylor tells his readers: "For the first 25 years, I was a newspaper reporter. For the next 25, a political reformer, a demographer, a pollster, an author, and a public speaker." He's now 77 and has written a memoir titled "This Is Getting Old: Two Boomers and Their Generation at Dusk." Besides Paul Taylor, the other boomer in his book refers to his wife of 57 years, Stefanie. He asked his friend and agent Peter Bernstein (BERN-steen) to find a traditional publisher. His only reward, according to Taylor, "was a collection of lovely rejection notes." Not to be stopped, he would move on to Plan B, self-publishing.
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In the political history of the United States, books have had a big impact on who the public follows in elections. In 1956, John F. Kennedy published "Profiles in Courage," which sold 2.8 million copies by his death in 1963. Jimmy Carter released his title "Why Not the Best?" in 1975, the year before he was elected president. When Barack Obama first released his life story in 1995, he only sold approximately 9,000 copies. When it was re-released in 2004, he sold 4.7 million copies. President Trump's "Art of the Deal," published in 1987, sold at least 1.5 million. JD Vance was unknown in 2016 when he appeared on C-SPAN's Q&A. His book "Hillbilly Elegy" has sold over 3 million copies. Ten years later he's 42 and has been a U.S. Senator for two years and Vice President of the United States since January of 2025. Here he is from 2016.
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This is the second of a two-part interview with journalist John A. Jenkins. His book is "Summer of '71: Five Months That Changed America." Jenkins writes in the introduction: "[I]t is hard to overstate the importance of the events that defined the American experience during the fateful five months of May through September 1971." A good portion of the first part of the interview with John Jenkins focused on Daniel Ellsberg and the publishing of the Pentagon Papers. This discussion opens with the history of Angela Davis and the Soledad Brothers.

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