If We Burn One Year Later
Book updates and solicitations
In recent weeks when someone asks me what I am working on, I say “nothing” (celebratory). The more accurate answer is that I continue to promote my second book, as it begins to come out in translation (Italian was first, next comes Brazil), while I finish up some magazine pieces and figure out what I will do next.
If We Burn came out a year ago, and I have been incredibly grateful for the response. It is nice to get praise, and to see sales numbers, but it is truly gratifying to see a work like this generate real discussion. For many people, a year spent discussing a title and participating in these conversations might be enough. But I have a habit of putting a lot into my books, and into their promotion, and working to see if they might stand the test of time. And the next step for If We Burn is the preparation of the paperback edition. So I have a favor to ask.
If you found an error in IF WE BURN, please email me and let me know? The address is listed here. We have already corrected some small mistakes, mostly typos, before the second printing. But the paperback allows for more substantive revisions. We are not going to rewrite the book, but I want to know about anything that is wrong. The manuscript was professionally fact-checked, and reviewed by five scholar experts, but that is no match for the power of thousands of readers around the world. As I did with The Jakarta Method, I will publish a list of all the changes, and I always try to thank everyone that has helped.
Speaking of that, if you are subscribed to this newsletter, or reading this, I probably owe you my thanks too for supporting this work in one way or another. Unfortunately, the paperback won’t come out for a while (not my choice), so I wouldn’t recommend waiting. We will be selling the hardcover (and looking for things to change, including maybe the cover) for several more months, at least.
What else? In early editions of the book, I had it opening with epigraphs. I decided to drop the quotes, because I thought they were simultaneously too cute and too on the nose. But for what it’s worth, this is what I had:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
“No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative! It gets the people going.”
— Line from Blades of Glory, delivered by actor Will Ferrell, sampled in Watch the Throne by musicians Kanye West and Jay Z (2011)