As I stated in the Acknowledgements chapter of my book, book-writing can take on a “complexity of its own.”
There were two factual changes that I needed to make to the book and several grammatical improvements that make it better. Our editor, Ruth Fairbank Chiama, helped me in getting this done. She also sent me a copy of some comments made by Charles Krauthammer in his book Things That Matter. Many of his chapters were adaptations of prior newspaper articles. When he put them into book form he made some changes, minor in nature but focused on “allowing me to exercise my petty punctuational prejudices, most importantly, my war on commas. They are a pestilence and must be stopped.” But, he assured the reader that “they change no meaning…. It stands on the day it was first published: imperfect, unimproved and unapologetically mine.”
That, in essence, describes these most recent changes to Backtracking in Brown Water. If you have already read the book, you need not purchase another copy. But, for those first-time readers or potential readers, I think this “tweaking” makes the book better and, at least, puts the author’s mind at ease that it better passes muster from a grammatical and punctuational point-of-view. If you haven’t yet read the book, now would be a good time to purchase it!
Rolland Kidder
