Book Review
A Handbook of Conflict Resolution: The Analytical, Problem Solving Approach
Mitchell, Christopher & Banks, Michael, A Handbook of Conflict Resolution: The Analytical, Problem Solving Approach, London & New York: Cassells, 1996, pp. 187. $26.00
Publishing a book is a very odd business. I don't mean writing a book that can be one of the hardest things anyone can ever attempt and imposes a strain on one's sanity that should be avoided unless one is absolutely sure that what one wants to say is so important it literally must go between covers. No, I mean actually publishing a book with a publisher.
Take my very first book. I went about it all wrong. First, I should have sounded out a publisher before even starting chapter one, simply to find out whether anyone would publish a book about the then virtually unknown field of conflict research, tentatively entitled "Parties in Conflict"- a title I still regard as far more accurate and euphonious than the one the publisher finally inflicted on me "for marketing reasons." Then I should have obtained a contract and as large an advance as I could screw out of a publisher. (My record to date is 165 pounds-about $200-for a book I still haven't delivered!) Then I should have dealt with the difficult part and written the book.
Instead of this, I wrote the book first, feeling that conflict research needed a text that tried to summarize the then state of knowledge in the field and presented the manuscript to a somewhat bemused social sciences editor at a well-known London publisher who said (he or she) would "look at it." Two and a half years passed during which I did other things like getting married and starting to raise a daughter. Occasional letters to the publisher disappeared, apparently into some publishing black hole. One was answered by the social sciences editor to the effect that the book was still "under consideration," but after two and a half years of "consideration," I decided enough was enough. We Mitchells are capable of drastic action when aroused. So I marched down to the publisher and asked to see the social sciences editor. A totally different individual appeared, wearing what I was now beginning to recognize as the traditional bemused look, and said he was the "new" social sciences editor, that the previous one had been fired (they didn't use the euphemism of "downsized" in those more honest days) but unfortunately-and I think he had the grace to blush-his predecessor had also lost my manuscript. Did I have another copy?
I was too modest to inquire whether his predecessor had been fired because he had lost my manuscript (I later found that several other people had seen their work vanish in this way), so I said that I found this unconscionable in a respectable publishing house and thereafter used this blackmailing argument every time they suggested anything untoward like reducing the length of the book or cutting out one of my diagrams. Eventually six years after the first manuscript was delivered and in the same year my second book was published, the book finally came out and is still-just about-in print, making a modest amount (about 75 pounds a year) for its author, which is more than I can say for my second book which made the worst-seller list for 1981.
The Handbook that came out this year has had a somewhat similar checkered history. In the early 1980s, a group of conflict researchers and international relations specialists in London, envious of the success of Roger Fisher and Bill Ury, decided to write up their experiences of using problem-solving approaches in tackling protracted and violent conflict. The result was intended to be a kind of British reply to Getting to "Yes"-how it should really be done when focusing on the problem not the people or when investigating both sides' BATNA's or WATNA's proved ineffective, as it frequently had been in our experience! Punchy, based on real-world examples, but with some real theoretical depth, we thought, and of course sales of more than 200,000 in the first year.
The actuality proved more difficult than we had imagined. If it is difficult to write a book oneself, it is exponentially more difficult to write one with eight authors. In the end, we divided up the various chapters and sections among the eight of us, produced and discussed our various manuscripts, then handed the whole lot over to one of our number to write up the final version, and arrange details with our publisher--this time one had been approached well in advance of writing the actual book.
Advertisements duly appeared in the publishers catalog under "Forthcoming." Several years passed but no final version. The eight authors scattered to various points of the compass, some even to a new center for conflict analysis at an obscure university in Virginia. I started to teach CONF 633 at ICAR and began looking around for a suitable text. Nothing. So I started to use versions of the draft manuscript, adding ideas and (now) training exercises so that gradually, my version of the work turned into a teaching manual rather than a version of Getting to (or Somewhere Near) Resolution.
...conflict research needed a text that tried to summarize the then state of knowledge in the field...
Finally after four years of using and changing the manuscript, I contacted Michael Banks, another of the original eight authors, at the London School of Economics and suggested that we forget about supplanting the Fisher-Ury partnership (who had produced several more Getting books in the meantime anyway) and go for a useful teaching aid. Michael agreed, so we went back to our original publisher (who was initially not all that glad to hear from us) and suggested that she think about bringing out a slightly different version of our original work. After some persuasion and several sessions of breaking saucers and swearing on the Bible that we would this time produce a book, the publisher agreed to let us go ahead, and the story might have ended there but for the vagaries of publishing (as opposed to writing). For of course the firm got taken over by a larger publisher just after I delivered the final manuscript to their offices in London.
A long silence ensued. Then totally different people from Cassells, the new publisher, began to write and fax to the two authors. They were going to publish the work (a lot of other pending authors were not as lucky, I understand). They would put in the maps (if we paid to have them reproduced as camera ready copy). They would put in the cartoons from The New Yorker, but we finally decided that they had to be left out--at $200 dollars each we figured we could afford two but couldn't choose between the one showing a young man asking a florist for "A Perfect Olive Branch" and the one showing the indignant drunk telling two bouncers from the gutter into which he has just been hurled that he "was just about to sound a note of conciliation." Damn this intellectual property fraud!
So, the book is finally out and I have been asked to review it for the Newsletter. I really can't do this, so I have told the story of how it came to be written in the first place and then how it came to be published beginning in 1981-which makes about 15 years, start to finish. One of these days, I really must try to get out a book in less than a decade.
So, as I say, it's a funny business, publishing a book. But do buy it. After all, we are aiming for sales of 200,000 in the first year. CRM