New Release Books by Scott Donaldson

A collection of five essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald by the biographer and critic Scott Donaldson (1928-2020).

Building an Effective Security Program provides readers with a comprehensive approach to securing the IT systems in use at their organizations. This book provides information on how to structure and operate an effective cybersecurity program that includes people, processes, technologies, security awareness, and training. This program will establish and maintain effective security protections for the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of organization information. In this book, the authors take a pragmatic approach to building organization cyberdefenses that are effective while also remaining affordable. This book is intended for business leaders, IT professionals, cybersecurity personnel, educators, and students interested in deploying real-world cyberdefenses against today’s persistent and sometimes devastating cyberattacks. It includes detailed explanation of the following IT security topics: IT Security Mindset—Think like an IT security professional, and consider how your IT environment can be defended against potential cyberattacks. Risk Management—Identify the assets, vulnerabilities and threats that drive IT risk, along with the controls that can be used to mitigate such risk. Effective Cyberdefense—Consider the components of an effective organization cyberdefense to successfully protect computers, devices, networks, accounts, applications and data. Cyber Operations—Operate cyberdefense capabilities and controls so that assets are protected, and intruders can be detected and repelled before significant damage can be done. IT Security Awareness and Training—Promote effective cybersecurity practices at work, on travel, and at home, among your organization’s business leaders, IT professionals, and staff. Resilient IT Security—Implement, operate, monitor, assess, and improve your cybersecurity program on an ongoing basis to defend against the cyber threats of today and the future.

With the threats that affect every computer, phone or other device connected to the internet, security has become a responsibility not just for law enforcement authorities or business leaders, but for every individual. Your family, information, property, and business must be protected from cybercriminals in the office, at home, on travel, and in the cloud. Understanding Security Issues provides a solid understanding of the threats, and focuses on useful tips and practices for protecting yourself, all the time, everywhere and anywhere you go. This book discusses security awareness issues and how you can take steps to reduce the risk of becoming a victim: The threats that face every individual and business, all the time. Specific indicators of threats so that you understand when you might be attacked and what to do if they occur. The security mindset and good security practices. Assets that need to be protected at work and at home. Protecting yourself and your business at work. Protecting yourself and your family at home. Protecting yourself and your assets on travel.

“A biography of great immediacy. . . . There are many sections of great poignancy, many funny things, many of electric intimacy and candor . . . there is spellbinding power, never more so than in describing Cheever’s death, pages that are both terrible and deeply moving; one is losing an old, beloved friend.” —James Salter, Los Angeles Times Book Review “John Cheever: A Biography is clearly an indispensable book. Donaldson moves gracefully from the personal to the literary. . . . Solidly researched and entirely readable, admiring of the writer and knowing about the man. Stuffed with fascinating anecdotes. It’s a gut-wrenching story. Donaldson tells it straight, without embellishment, and our attention never strays.” —Dan Cryer, Newsday “A coup of investigative reporting.” —Publishers Weekly “Both erudite and earthly. What emerges is a rich tapestry that gives the reader extraordinary insight into the workings of a master storyteller’s mind.” —Jean Graham, New York Daily News “John Cheever: A Biography by Scott Donaldson is as readable and ‘unputdownable’ as any thriller.” —T. Coraghessan Boyle “A revelation. What a triumph.” —Frederick Exley “Donaldson has set a high standard that other biographers will find difficult to equal.” —John Blades, Chicago Tribune

Archibald MacLeish was the winner of the 1993 Ambassador Book Award for biography.

In The Impossible Craft, Scott Donaldson explores the rocky territory of literary biography, the most difficult that biographers try to navigate. Writers are accustomed to controlling the narrative, and notoriously opposed to allowing intruders on their turf. They make bonfires of their papers, encourage others to destroy correspondence, write their own autobiographies, and appoint family or friends to protect their reputations as official biographers. Thomas Hardy went so far as to compose his own life story to be published after his death, while falsely assigning authorship to his widow. After a brief background sketch of the history of biography from Greco-Roman times to the present, Donaldson recounts his experiences in writing biographies of a broad range of twentieth-century American writers: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Winfield Townley Scott, and Charlie Fenton. Donaldson provides readers with a highly readable insiders’ introduction to literary biography. He suggests how to conduct interviews, and what not to do during the process. He offers sound advice about how closely biographers should identify with their subjects. He examines the ethical obligations of the biographer, who must aim for the truth without unduly or unnecessarily causing discomfort or worse to survivors. He shows us why and how misinformation comes into existence and tends to persist over time. He describes “the mythical ideal biographer,” an imaginary creature of universal intelligence and myriad talents beyond the reach of any single human being. And he suggests how its very impossibility makes the goal of writing a biography that captures the personality of an author a challenge well worth pursuing.

"Donaldson's skill is really a rare and fine art everyone who is interested in twentieth-century fiction or in the art of biography or in the mysterious relationship between the temperament of an artist and the work he produces should have By Force of Will within arm's reach. In its way it is a masterpiece." --Walter Sullivan, The Sewanee Review "Not the least of its virtues is the way in which it allows its reader to play along with a masterly scholarly detective." --San Francisco Examiner

The story of Scott Donaldson's relentless journey to be the first person to cross the Tasman sea solo in a kayak Unpredictable and unforgiving, the Tasman Sea is one of the most hostile stretches of water in the world. An Australian adventurer attempted to kayak across in 2007, disappearing without a trace. In 2018 Kiwi adventurer Scott Donaldson spent two months alone at sea to achieve a world first. It was his third attempt, having fallen a heartbreaking 80 kilometres short in 2014. Donaldson's world first is an inspirational story of dogged perseverance, true Kiwi grit and relentless endurance.

Fool for Love is Scott Donaldson’s masterful biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald—written from a fresh and highly intimate perspective. Fool for Love follows Fitzgerald from his birthplace in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Princeton and upward into the highest reaches of literary and public success—and ultimately to Fitzgerald’s untimely death in Hollywood at the age of forty-four, broke and nearly forgotten. This engrossing, definitive study explores two classic Fitzgerald themes throughout—love and class—and the result is a striking portrayal of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, whose legacy and influence only continue to grow.

Death of a Rebel tells the story of Charles Andrews Fenton (1919-1960), a charismatic teacher, scholar, and writer who took his own life by jumping from the top of the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham, North Carolina. At the time he was apparently at the peak of his career. He had written excellent books on Hemingway and Stephen Vincent Benét, had three other books in press, and was working on a new version of his novel about World War II (a 1945 account won the Doubleday Twentieth Century Fox award). He had earned Guggenheim and ACLS grants. Students flocked to his courses. He was widely regarded as the most popular professor at Duke. Charlie Fenton’s story is a compelling one, and takes on further meaning in the context of the times. An individualist during the notoriously conformist 1950s, he swam against the current, defying authority and openly inviting controversy. This jaunty refusal to accept received wisdom made him an appealing figure to many of his students and colleagues. But it was a dangerous stance that did not sit well with his superiors, and it cost him when his fortunes took a turn for the worse in the spring and summer of 1960. Love and war had a lot to do with his suicide as well. Charlie Fenton, who had come down to Duke from Yale two years earlier with a promotion to full professor, fell in love with one of his graduate students. His wife, outraged, left and took their son Andy with her. The scandal left him alone and a social pariah around campus. Then he suffered one of his bouts of depression. Usually these periods were triggered by trauma, most of it derived from his service as a tail gunner with the RAF bomber command in the summer and fall of 1942. In the past he’d always been able to shake free of his despondency. This time he was overcome by psychological pain deriving from loss: of wife and family, of public admiration, of companionship, and worst of all, of self-regard. The book recounts Fenton’s last days in vivid detail. In writing it, Donaldson had the assistance of family members, of his devoted students, and even – at a painful distance – of the woman he fell in love with fifty years ago. They all share an abiding sense of what might have been, and a deep regret that he could not go on to inspire the uncounted students who would never get to know and admire and learn from him.

At the time of his death in 1935, Edwin Arlington Robinson was regarded as the leading American poet-the equal of Frost and Stevens. In this biography, Scott Donaldson tells the intriguing story of this poet's life, based in large part on a previously unavailable trove of more than 3,000 personal letters, and recounts his profoundly important role in the development of modern American literature. Born in 1869, the youngest son of a well-to-do family in Gardiner, Maine, Robinson had two brothers: Dean, a doctor who became a drug addict, and Herman, an alcoholic who squandered the family fortune. Robinson never married, but he fell in love as many as three times, most lastingly with the woman who would become his brother Herman's wife. Despite his shyness, Robinson made many close friends, and he repeatedly went out of his way to give them his support and encouragement. Still, it was always poetry that drove him. He regarded writing poems as nothing less than his calling-what he had been put on earth to do. Struggling through long years of poverty and neglect, he achieved a voice and a subject matter all his own. He was the first to write about ordinary people and events-an honest butcher consumed by grief, a miser with "eyes like little dollars in the dark," ancient clerks in a dry goods store measuring out their days like bolts of cloth. In simple yet powerful rhetoric, he explored the interior worlds of the people around him. Robinson was a major poet and a pivotal figure in the course of modern American literature, yet over the years his reputation has declined. With his biography, Donaldson returns this remarkable talent to the pantheon of great American poets and sheds new light on his enduring legacy.

Pt. 1. The search for home. St. Paul boy -- Fitzgerald's romance with the south -- Pt. 2: Love, money, and class. "This side of paradise": Fitzgerald's coming of age novel -- Possessions in "the Great Gatsby": Reading Gatsby closely -- The trouble with Nick: Reading Gatsby closely -- Money and marriage in Fitzgerald's stories -- A short history of "Tender is the night"--Pt. 3. Fitzgerald and his times. Fitzgerald's nonfiction -- The crisis of "The Crack-up"--Fitzgerald's political development -- Pt. 4. Requiem. A death in Hollywood: Fitzgerald remembered. -- Ernest Hemingway: Pt.5. Getting started. Hemingway of "The star" -- Pt.6. The craftsman at work. "A very short story" as therapy -- Preparing for the end of "A canary for one" -- The averted gaze in Hemingway's fiction -- Pt.7. Hemingway's morality of compensation -- Humor as a measure of character -- "A farewell to arms" as love story -- Frederic's escape and the pose of passivity -- Pt.8. Censorship. Censoring "A farewell to arms" -- Protecting the troops from Hemingway: an episode in censorship -- Pt. 9: Literature and politics. The last great cause: Hemingway's Spanish Civil War writing -- Pt.10: Last things. Hemingway and suicide -- Hemingway and fame.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway might have been contemporaries, but our understanding of their work often rests on simple differences. Hemingway wrestled with war, fraternity, and the violence of nature. Fitzgerald satirized money and class and the never-ending pursuit of a material tomorrow. Through the provocative arguments of Scott Donaldson, however, the affinities between these two authors become brilliantly clear. The result is a reorientation of how we read twentieth-century American literature. Known for his penetrating studies of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Donaldson traces the creative genius of these authors and the surprising overlaps among their works. Fitzgerald and Hemingway both wrote fiction out of their experiences rather than about them. Therefore Donaldson pursues both biography and criticism in these essays, with a deep commitment to close reading. He traces the influence of celebrity culture on the legacies of both writers, matches an analysis of Hemingway's Spanish Civil War writings to a treatment of Fitzgerald's left-leaning tendencies, and contrasts the averted gaze in Hemingway's fiction with the role of possessions in The Great Gatsby. He devotes several essays to four novels, Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, and others to lesser-known short stories. Based on years of research in the Fitzgerald and Hemingway archives and brimming with Donaldson's trademark wit and insight, this irresistible anthology moves the study of American literature in bold new directions.

Judge William Scott Donaldson has designed this notebook to be used in Alabama courtrooms to provide concise, comprehensible ideas to address selected evidence and procedural questions that often arise during a trial. There are several excellent treatises on Alabama evidence law that provide much more detailed analysis of the issues discussed in this notebook along with case citations. In the courtroom, however, we are not concerned with the history of a rule of evidence or the philosophy behind the adoption of the rule. In trial, we usually need a quick answer. If more time is needed, the excellent treatises may be consulted during a recess.