Buena Vista, VA, March 21, 2023—Whaler Books is pleased to announce that Century’s Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll by Mary Llewellyn McNeil has been selected as a finalist in the biography category for the 2022 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.
Century’s Witness tells the story of Wallace Carroll, arguably the most respected and influential journalist of the 20th Century. Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post columnist George Will has called the book a “…well-told story of a gentleman journalist and a trip back to a time when that phrase did not strike most Americans as an oxymoron, and when vibrant local newspapers were both causes and effects of national vigor.” Jon Sawyer, executive director of the Pulitzer Center has called it “the best roadmap I know if we aim to restore journalism’s power to inform and persuade.” “A well-researched and captivating read…” wrote Mark Nelson of the Center for International Media Assistance.
Carroll was a United Press correspondent before and during World War II, deputy director of the Office of War Information, news editor of the Washington Bureau of the New York Times and finally editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel. In a career that spanned 45 years, he covered most of the significant events of the century, from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 to the end of the Vietnam War. With “you are there” stories and interviews with the likes of Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower and Josef Stalin among others, Carroll represented the gold standard of news reporting. His example, captured by Mary Llewellyn McNeil, a former student of Carroll’s, influenced a generation of reporters, editors, and publishers and gives us journalistic principles well-worth revisiting today. “Anyone who cares about the values of daily newspapers should read it,” wrote Donald Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post.
“Each year, we are bowled over by the depth and breadth of the INDIES submissions,” says Foreword Reviews Editor-in-Chief Michelle Anne Schingler. “We are given hundreds of opportunities to engage with the most inventive, surprising, and thrilling independent books of the year. It is our privilege to select the best among them––and an awesome responsibility that we take seriously.”
More than 2,500 entries spread across 55 genres were submitted for consideration in the INDIES best book award competition. The finalists were determined by the Foreword editorial team. Winners are now being decided by teams of librarian and bookseller judges from across the country and will be announced on June 15, 2023.
For additional information, please visit https://www.forewordreviews.com/awards/books/centurys-witness/ and the author’s website, https://www.marylmcneil.com/.
About the author: Mary Llewellyn McNeil is a former editor and writer for Congressional Quarterly and primary author of Environment and Health, Reagan’s First Year, and The Nuclear Age. A graduate of Wake Forest University and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, she resides in Washington, D.C.
Century’s Witness can be ordered from Bookshop.org, Amazon, and bookstores everywhere.
ISBN: 978-1-7378864-4-0 (PB); 978-17378864-9-5 (HC). Price: $22.95 (PB); $32.95 (HC); $14.93 (e-book)