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Read the latest reviews of
Winter Fire
“I
enjoyed every word of Winter Fire and congratulate the author on
brilliantly evoking the image of Jean Sibelius – the master of the
enigma. It is a great thriller, too, and one of those rare books you
just simply can’t put down.”
-- Maestro Lorin Maazel, Music Director, the New York
Philharmonic
“An astonishing performance, full of unparalleled
knowledge of music and war, perfectly interpreted into the story with
characters that are wonderfully vivid.”
--Carolyn Kizer, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
"Mitropoulos may well be the most inappropriately
undervalued conductor of the 20th century . . . . William Trotter
redresses this injustice. In his richly detailed book he tracks each
arena in the great conductor's life from the sexual, social and
spiritual facets through the shenanigans of concert management to the
deleterious effects of the cruelty of critics on anyone who doesn't
have the toughest kind of skin. Mr. Trotter, BRAVO! "
— Joan Peyser, Author of Bernstein: A Biography
"Timely and important. . . . Mr. Trotter has done a
remarkable job of mastering his subject quickly and of presenting
Mitropoulos’s case forcibly and persuasively in the court of history.
Graphic, yet haunting…with a terrifying climax.”
— The New York Times
"A first-rate biographical study of one of the
century’s more important conductors . . . Humanizing, a valuable
panorama of U. S. classical music culture, and an irresistible
inducement too seek out the Mitropoulos performances left to us on
records."
— Kirkus Reviews
"Detailed, absorbing, carefully balanced and
beautifully written."
— John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune
"Trotter’s book presents an engrossing portrait of
a man whose ideals of self-sacrifice and generosity, modeled after St.
Francis of Assisi, rendered him almost pathologically vulnerable . . .
an absorbing book."
— Michael Anthony, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"William Trotter has done more than a merely
conscientious job on the biography of Dimitri Mitropoulos. It’s
spacious, caring, informed and stylish, very touching . . . in its
dealing with one of the most curious and valuable of contemporary
performers."
— Ned Rorem
"Greek-born Mitropoulos . . . was one of the great
American conductors of the mid-century, and it is astonishing how
little his memory is regarded in his adopted land . . . Music critic
and novelist Trotter . . . has presented a compassionate, judicious
and moving portrait."
— Publishers Weekly
"An inspirational portrait of a champion of modern
music."
— Booklist
"An important book for anybody who is interested in
what art and music is about and the people involved—not only
composers, musicians, and conductors but also the entrepreneurs,
executives, and managers behind the scene. A fascinating book."
— Morton Gould
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About Bill Trotter:
 William R. (Bill) Trotter wrote his first novel (not publishable, of
course, but a senior editor at Viking Press liked it well enough to
become a valued mentor over the next ten years) at the age of fourteen
and hasn’t looked back in all the forty-five years since. Out of
hubris (or stupidity, depending on his bank balance from one
month to the next), Trotter eschewed the traditional graduate-school
MFA route to literary respectability (and job security), choosing
instead the goal of actually supporting his family entirely by
writing. For a long time, he was only partially successful at
this, but he finally said farewell to part-time “real jobs” in 1983
and has, in fact, earned his entire living by the sweat of his
keyboard ever since.
 There
are only two ways anyone can do that in contemporary American culture.
1) Write a mega-bestseller that sets you up for life, or, 2) adopt a
blue-collar attitude and write for whatever and whoever will pay you
for your time, sweat, and expertise. Bill has no patience with
literary prima donnas who hide inside the wombs of Academia and
disdain to produce work that is “beneath them”. As he told an
interviewer back in 1994: “I’ve worked in some of the grubbiest
neighborhoods of the scribbler’s trade and deployed all my skills and
obscene amounts of my time in projects that meant nothing at all to me
personally and that most proper Literary Authors would consider
demeaning. But my reasoning was this: I would approach every freelance
job, no matter how unglamorous it was, with the idea that I could
learn something from the work that I could apply, later, to the
projects that were personally important; and that I would never
submit work-for-hire that I would be ashamed to have my by-line
attached to.”
 That’s one reason why Trotter has been able to leap successfully from
one genre to another. (That’s also the reason why his agent once told
him: “You have the most interesting resume in the business, Bill, but
that doesn’t necessarily make you marketable!”) To thousands of
computer game addicts, he is “The Colonel”, the Senior Writer for “PC
Gamer” magazine, whose monthly column about war and strategy games
(“The Desktop General”) has run continuously for fifteen years. To
fans of the horror and fantasy genres, he’s the respected author of
compelling short stories and novellas, whose work has twice been
nominated for the prestigious
Bram Stoker Award. To aficionados of
military history, he’s the author of the best-selling trilogy
The
Civil War in North Carolina and the definitive English-language
history of the Russo-Finnish “Winter War”, A Frozen Hell. To
music lovers, professional orchestra players, record collectors, and
no small number of well-known conductors, he’s the author of a
world-renowned biographer of the great Dimitri Mitropoulos,
Priest
of Music. To readers of mainstream literature, he’s a witty
essayist, a respected book reviewer, and the author of four critically
acclaimed novels, one of which has been optioned for a major motion
picture.
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WRT
inspecting the ruins of a blockhouse on the Mannerheim Line, on
the Karelian Isthmus, April 1965. In this sector of the Finnish
defensive line, the Russians were dropping 400 shells per minute,
for days on end. Just beyond the trees, the landscape looked like
the Somme battlefield: thousands of overlapping craters, all the
vegetation stripped bare, a lunar wasteland, still full of
unexploded ordnance and mines. My guide warned us not to leave the
road – no argument from me! |
While
it is no small achievement to win recognition in four or five
different genres, the sheer breadth and variety of Bill’s published
work has, until recently, made it difficult for him to achieve true
fame and fortune in any genre. Increasingly, however, Trotter
has attracted a growing “cult” following composed of readers who
happily follow his byline from one genre to another, and to a widening
acceptance of his work as a whole. In the opinion of many fans,
wider recognition is long overdue, and when the North Carolina English
Teachers’ Association chose him, in early 2004, to be the first
recipient of a special “Lifetime Achievement Award”, it marked a
watershed event in Trotter’s long, distinguished, but hitherto
under-valued career.
It
also seemed to signal that the time was absolutely right for Bill
Trotter to have a dedicated web site, where interested readers could
obtain a coherent overview of his work, and maybe become motivated to
go out and buy a few more of his books – the ones they didn’t even
know existed! Welcome to TrotterBooks.com!
One particularly astute and sympathetic critic
summarized Trotter’s career very aptly in his review of
Winter Fire:
“For those of us who have followed his work with pleasure and
satisfaction for many years now, there is reason to hope that William
R. Trotter will at last receive the wide recognition he deserves.
This
Greensboro writer is no literary parvenu; in the early days, Trotter’s
work graced the pages of the venerable Red Clay Reader alongside that
of Fred Chappell, Doris Betts, Joyce Carol Oatts, A.R. Ammons, Paul
Green, Allen Ginsberg, Reynolds Price, Leroi Jones, Stanley Kunitz,
Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Feringhetti, Sam Ragan, and Boris Pasternak –
pretty good literary company for an ‘obscure, regional’ writer!
Winter Fire is a passionate tale, reflecting Trotter’s
disparate but intense interests in such diverse subjects as poetry,
music, and military history. Most writers have a limited range of
passionate commitments, and the very breadth of subject matter in
Trotter’s published works has no doubt contributed to his lack of
mainstream recognition – he’s too unclassifiable for comfort! But it
is the very diversity of those passions that lend this book its deeper
value, making it much more than ‘a good read’. This writer is
intoxicated – with Sibelius, with the valor of the Finns, and with the
mystical ambience of the vast northern forests – and he cannot bear
the thought that you and I don’t know as much about these things as he
does.
That makes him a teacher as well as a story-teller. It is
from such writers that we learn. Trotters takes us deep inside the
creative processes that produced Sibelius’s sublime but often elusive
music – an act of interpretive daring made possible only by a
lifetime’s love for the works and the man. What emerges is a
meditation on the wellsprings of art itself; where it comes from, and
the price it can exact from those who make the deepest commitment to
it.
With the welcome release of Winter Fire, Bill Trotter
takes his long-overdue place in the ranks of major North Carolina
literary figures.”
-- Prof. Steve Jarrett, in The Greensboro
Daily News and Record
Send queries and fan
mail to:
TrotterBooks and Records
PO Box 14752
Greensboro, NC, 27401
Landmarks of an Long, Strange Career
August, 2000 – current: Speech writer and cultural
advisor, on retainer, for the United States Ambassador to Finland, the
Honorable Bonnie McElveen Hunter. In this capacity, I have been asked
for autographed copies of my history of the Russo-Finnish War, A
Frozen Hell, by Dr. Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State Colin Powell,
and Senator Jessie Helms; the book is on the State Department’s
“Required Reading” list for senior diplomats posted to Helsinki and
the other Baltic capitols. I have also been a guest lecturer, on
“cold-weather tactics” at Virginia Military Institute and for the
Second Division of the US Marine Corps, at Camp Lejeune.
1988 – current: Senior Writer, Imagine Media, Brisbane,
Ca. Over 1400 reviews, columns, features, interviews and news stories
for PC Gamer Magazine, CD-ROM Today, PC Accelerator, and Boot!
Magazine (Approx. circulation of 1.3 million, in twelve languages,
along with five Web sites);
2000: Workshop Leader (“Creative Non-Fiction”),
Wildacres Writers Retreat;
1996 – 2000: Weekly columnist for Triad Style Magazine;
1999: Contributor, Groves International Encyclopedia of
Music, fifth edition;
1999: Visiting Lecturer, Virginia Military Institute
1995: Contributing Editor, Encyclopedia of Personal
Computing (The PC Press);
1987 – 1991: Contributing Editor, Military History
Magazine;
1988 – 1989: Contributing Editor, Carolina Piedmont
Magazine;
1984 - 1987: Music Critic/Feature Writer, Spectator
Magazine;
1984 – 1988: Contributing Editor, Successful Meetings
Magazine (New York);
1980 – 1983: Associate Editor, The Northstate Reader;
1983 – 1985: Sales Associate, Walden Books, Greensboro,
N.C.;
1975 – 1981: Associate Editor, The Greensboro Sun;
1978 – 1981: Assistant Manager, Peaches Records and
Tapes, Greensboro; responsible for stocking and maintaining the
largest classical section between Washington and Atlanta;
1977 - 1978: Director, “Springfest” Arts Festival,
Greensboro; responsible for planning and administering all aspects of
the event, including: delegation of committee activities, timetable,
acquisition of property and physical renovation of same; liaison with
city/county officials, budgeting, publicity, and on-site security;
1973 – 1977: Writer/Director, World Film Productions,
Greensboro; in charge of films, film strips, and slide programs in the
fields of training, marketing, and education; script writer for
Guilford County Bi-Centennial documentary;
1971- 1973: Technical Publications Editor, First Union
National Bank Corp., Charlotte, N.C.; responsible for developing
policy and procedure manuals for all major departments, including
Personnel, Trust Division, Investments, and Commercial Loans;
1969 – 1971: Editorial Writer, The Charlotte Observer;
1966 – 1969: Archivist/Production Assistant, The
Film-makers’ Cooperative, New York City.
List of Published Works
Journalism
Book Reviws: approximately 160, for The
Charlotte Observer, Greensboro Daily News, Spectator Magazine, etc.,
1965 – present;
Reviws of Concerts, Films, Theater:
approximately 360, for Charlotte Magazine, Opera News, Toccata,
Maestrino, Greensboro Daily News and Record, High Point Enterprise,
etc., 1972 – present.
Essays
“Sibelius and the Tides of Taste”, High
Fidelity Magazine, Dec. 1965;
“The Four-Hour Thunder”, Red Clay Reader
No. 6, 1969 (Honorable Mention, American Literary Anthology, 1970);
“Norman Mailer and the Big Green Cheese”,
The Miscellany Magazine, 1971;
“Furtwangler’s ‘Nazi Ninth’ – The
Phonograph Record as History”, St. Andrews Review, 1972;
“Red Dawn Over Tweetsie”, The Sun Magazine,
1985;
“Give Your Kids the Gift of Music”, Parents
Magazine, Nov., 1991;
“Jean Shepherd: Laughter of the American
Dream”, Play Magazine, June, 1994;
“Bushwhackers and Cold Mountain”, North
Carolina Literary Review, 1999.
Short Stories
“The Running Back from Yuggoth”, Fantasy
Book, June, 1985;
“Bagman”, Twilight Zone’s Night Cry
Magazine, Sept., 1985;
“A Pinch of Snuff”, Deathrealm Magazine,
Oct., 1990;
“The Boss of the Seventh Level”, Deathrealm
Magazine, Feb., 1992;
“The Siren of Swanquarter”, Deathrealm
Magazine, Jan., 1994 (Voted “Best of the Year” by reader poll,
nominated for the Bram Stoker Award);
“Big Game”, Deathrealm Magazine, Sept.
1996;
“The Bleeding of Hauptmann Gehlen”, for
anthology The Darkest Thirst, Design Image Group Publishers, 1999
(Nominated for the Bram Stoker Award);
“Drums”, for anthology The Song of Cthulhu,
Chaosium Press, 2001.
Novels
WINTER FIRE. E.P. Dutton, 1993; mass market edition,
Signet Books, 1994; trade paperback edition, Carroll & Graf, November,
2003 (currently under option for a motion picture by Seville
Productions, Hollywood, Ca. Pre-production work began in Dec., 2002;
noted British director John Irvin will direct; screenplay by Simon
Kelton and Michael Frost Bechtner; negotiations currently underway for
Anthony Hopkins to play the role of Jean Sibelius.)
What the Readers Said:
“I enjoyed every word of Winter Fire and congratulate
the author on brilliantly evoking the image of Jean Sibelius – the
master of the enigma. It is a great thriller, too, and one of those
rare books you just simply can’t put down.”
-- Maestro Lorin Maazel, Music Director,
the New York Philharmonic
“…what we have here is a combined war novel, a piece of
nature mysticism, and a biography. I know nothing about the war in
Finland and maybe even less aboujt nature mysticism, which strikes me
as slightly dotty but not dismissable [but] I do know people who knew
Sibelius, and I think this book is a wonderful portrait of the
composer in those years when he was not offering much music to the
world. How can a present-day writer get so deeply inside the mind of a
composer who died in 1957? Why, through his music, of course!”
Donald Vroon, Editor,
The American Record Guide
“An astonishing performance, full of unparalleled
knowledge of music and war, perfectly interpreted into the story with
characters that are wonderfully vivid.”
Carolyn Kizer, Pulitzer
Prize-winning poet
“In addition to offering love, war, and fabulous
writing, Winter Fire is a musical morality play…It is also a
particularly haunting novel to read at this important moment in world
history, as we consider the ‘human enemy’ among us. It urges readers
to have an overwhelming spiritual experience in contemplating truly
great music…it compares favorably with Yhomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus, and
in its way is even more true to life.”
Russell Peck,
Distinguished American composer
“Graphic, yet haunting…with a terrifying climax.”
The New York Times
“Winter Fire stokes the imagination with lush and
burning images…”
Edwin Black, author
of IBM and the Holocaust
“A stunning evocation of Finnish landscapes, myth, and
music, while the desperate conditions under which war was waged in
northern Europe are brought savagely to life.”
Kirkus Reviews
HONEYSUCKLE, (Short novel, in the anthology Dark
Terrors 5, Victor Gollancz (United Kingdom), 2000.
THE SANDS OF PRIDE, Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York
(Trade paperback edition from Plume, June 2003)
What the Readers Said:
“Monumental…”
The Denver Post
“William R. Trotter has crafted a marvelous Civil War
novel, epic in proportion and sweeping its treatment of the first
three years of that bloody conflict.”
Book Page
“Definitely a page-turner, [with] an abundance of
adventure, romance, and tragedy.”
Booklist
“A grand triumph of the American imagination…”
Fred Chappell,
Poet-Laureate of North Carolina
“…infinitely more readable and exciting than the vastly
over-rated Cold Mountain.”
The Civil War News
“A spellbinding historical novel and a compelling work
of serious literary fiction.”
-- Howard Frank Mosher, author of Stranger
in the Kingdom
THE FIRES OF PRIDE (Vol. II of the Civil War epic begun
in Sands of Pride); Hardback edition from Carroll & Graf, January 2004
What the Readers Are Saying:
“Trotter concludes his epic tale of Civil War North
Carolina with a sequel as splendid as its predecessor…reaches a
thundering climax with the bloody and magnificently described fall of
Fort Fisher. The same combination of superb research, compelling
characters, and dry wit that enthralled readers in [Volume One] will
do so again.”
Publishers Weekly
“Superlative battle action combines with an array of
interconnected personal tales to provide a crackerjack Civil War
adventure…”
Booklist
“Trotter’s writing soars…”
-- Kirkus Reviews
WARRENER’S BEASTIE, Carroll & Graf, hardback scheduled
for 1st Quarter, 2005
Non-Fiction Books
WORD PROCESSING: A HISTORY AND MANUAL OF PRACTICE,
American Management Association, 1977 (Out of Print)
LIFE BEGINS AT FORTE, The Leopold Stokowski Society,
London, 1982. (Out of Print)
DEADLY KIN: A TRUE STORY OF MASS FAMILY MURDER, St.
Martins Press, 1989. (Out of print)
SILK FLAGS AND COLD STEEL, (The Civil War in North
Carolina, Vol. 1), John F. Blair, 1991
BUSHWHACKERS (The Civil War in North Carolina, Vol. 2),
John F. Blair, 1992
What the Readers Said:
“Trotter has a creative non-fiction style that brings
this time and place alive.”
Reader Review,
Amazon.com
“…thoroughly researched and well written history. This
book is especially interesting to readers of…Cold Mountain. Trotter
not only describes the overall setting in which [that] novel takes
place, but Frazier seems to have borrowed scenes directly from
Trotter’s book.”
Reader Review on
Amazon.com
IRONCLADS AND COLUMBIADS, (The Civil War in North
Carolina, Vol. 3), John F. Blair
What the Readers Said:
“Not all the Civil War happened in Virginia (or
Tennessee or Georgia), and this book provides an interesting account
of numerous little-known nor long-remembered campaigns that should get
more attention than they do. It’s readable, it’s interesting, it’s
well-researched – and it’s something more than yet another rehash of
who-lost-Gettysburg. What more could a Civil War buff want?”
-- Reader Review on Amazon.com
A FROZEN HELL: THE RUSSO-FINNISH WAR OF 1939-1940,
Algonquin Books, 1992 (Winner of the Finlandia Foundation Arts and
Letters Award, 1993)
What the Readers Said:
“Mr. Trotter tells brilliantly a piece of history that
needed telling.”
The Washington Times
“Masterfully recreates all the heroism, tragedy and
drama of a campaign who lessons deserves far more attention.”
Gen. James R. Galvin,
former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe
“We will not often find a book written with such
authority as this one…we are fortunate to have it.”
John Eisenhower, The New
York Times Book Review
“A balanced account that accurately describes the
horrifying price both sides were forced to pay.”
Marine Corps Gazette
“Well-researched, eminently readable and valuable to
students of military and political history”
-- The Associated Press
PRIEST OF MUSIC; THE LIFE OF DIMITRI MITROPOULOS,
Amadeus Press, 1995; Chosen one of the year’s “Ten Best Arts Books” by
National Public Radio.
What the Readers Said:
“Trotter demonstrates a keen wit and impeccable
scholarship…a profound and important life story.”
The Greensboro Daily News
and Record
“I cannot remember a more impressive musical biography
than this superbly written one…It has everything: drama, ambition,
greed, glory, downfall, and most of all, love. Was there ever a more
generous or loving musical figure than this visionary Greek?”
The Listener Magazine
“William Trotter has done more than a merely
conscientious job on the biography of Dimitri Mitropoulos. It’s
spacious, caring, informed and stylish, and very odd in its dealing
with one of the most curious and valuable of contemporary performers.”
Ned Rorem
“William Trotter has performed a literary miracle – he
has brought back to life one of the most unique musical personalities,
a man of genius, for sure. [Trotter] has also given us a splendid
overall survey of international musical culture.”
David Diamond
“I could not agree more with the validity and
importance of such a work and I applaud [Mr. Trotter]….”
Isaac Stern
“…an extraordinary chronicle of one of our century’s
musical giants. Author William Trotter captures the essence of a great
man’s lifelong struggle to remain pure and devoted to music and to
people.”
David Amram
CLOSE COMBAT: NORMANDY CAMPAIGN, Microsoft Press, 1999
CLOSE COMBAT: A BRIDGE TOO FAR, Microsoft Press, 1999
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