Buena Vista, VA—Whaler Books is pleased to announce that Century’s Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll by Mary Llewellyn McNeil has won the Gold Medal for biography in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, the Gold Medal for biography in the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) Benjamin Franklin Book-of-the-Year Awards, and the Gold Medal for Best Regional Non-Fiction, Southeast, in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY Awards). These awards recognize the best books published in 2022 from independent and university presses and are regarded as among the highest national honors for independent publishers.
Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post columnist George Will has called the book a “well-told story of a gentleman journalist” that is “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, hailed it as “the best roadmap I know of if we aim to restore journalism’s power to inform and persuade.” And Mark Nelson of the Center for International Media Assistance described it as “A well-researched and captivating read.”
Century’s Witness tells the story of Wallace Carroll, one of the most highly respected and influential journalists of the 20th Century. Although largely unknown today, as a United Press correspondent before and during World War II, deputy director of the U.S. 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, Carroll covered most of the significant events of the century, from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 through to the end of the Vietnam War. Filled with “you are there” stories and interviews with the likes of Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, and Josef Stalin, among others, Carroll’s dispatches represented the gold standard of news reporting. His example, as captured by Mary 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.
Over 9,900 books in over 50 categories were entered in these top three award programs. Winning a medal is regarded as one of the highest national honors authors and publishers can receive.
Century’s Witness is published through Whaler Books, an imprint of Mariner Publishing.
Copies of Century’s Witness can be ordered directly from the publisher, from online retailers such as Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, and from independent bookstores.
ISBN 978-1-7378864-4-0 (PB), 978-17378864-9-5 (HC); $22.95 (PB), $32.95 (HC), $14.93 (e-book).