Hello, all. Thanks for the renewed interest embodied in this thread. It has been a long and fascinating eight-year project, and I find it near-impossible that the book will be out in just a week or two. Kudos all around, of course (please see the acknowledgments page on my site for nearly 2,200 names), but I want to salute here the efforts of Art Thieme and others to provide not just the memories and materials but also the moral support so crucial to the completion of the task. It's one thing to say "I want to write a book" and quite another to do it, and I couldn't have done it without the kindness of so many.

You will see more of this sentiment on the acknowledgment page at my site, but I want to showcase here the amazing role of my publisher, ECW Press, and its owner, Jack David, who allowed me to produce the book that I wanted to produce. That sounds so simple, and yet it is so rare. In the hands of most any other publisher, a book on Goodman -- who is far from a household word -- would have been a formulized and quick once-over. Instead, the result is a tome of 800 pages, 400,000 words, 540 photos, 4,700 index entries, plus a CD. I know, size isn't everything, but you can be sure that this book takes a comprehensive approach to Goodman and the era, and you would not be seeing it soon if not for Jack David and the rest of his staff at ECW. My hat is off to them.

As for the "only Canadian" comment above, I acknowledge the ambiguous meaning, but I assume that most readers will understand that I was referring to current residence, not birth home or previous residence. Regardless, one of the nice things about the CD page of my site (and the CD annotation in the book) is that links are provided for the Internet sites of all the musicians who have them, and those sites can give readers far more information about each contributing musician than I was able to provide in the book.

Finally, if you're looking up my book by Googling it or otherwise searching for my name, please know that my last name ends with an "s" not found in the subject line of this thread.

My fundamental goal with this project is to get it into as many hands as possible, so please feel free to spread the word about it in any way that you can. Also, I will be eager to hear what any of you have to say about this journalistic account of Goodman's life. All comments are welcome -- good, bad, ugly. They'll be part of the adventure!

Clay Eals
1728 California Ave. S.W. #301
Seattle, WA 98116-1958

(206) 935-7515
ceals@comcast.net
http://www.clayeals.com