(Fordham University Press, 2021)
Eunice Hunton Carter: A Lifelong Fight for Social Justice
From the streets of Harlem to the courtrooms in Manhattan to the halls of the United Nations, Eunice Hunton Carter achieved a list of groundbreaking firsts for Blacks and women during the first half of the twentieth century, in keeping with a family history of advocacy dating to her once-enslaved grandfather in the Old South.
Eunice Hunton Carter: A Lifelong Fight for Social Justice tells the fascinating life story of Carter, the first Black female attorney in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the lone woman and person of color on the prosecution team that convicted notorious mobster Charles “Lucky” Luciano in what was billed as the trial of the century.
Carter unearthed crucial evidence that enabled lead prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey to send Luciano and his associates to prison for decades. With co-author Yun Li,Greenwald describes Carter’s many courtroom successes as a prosecutor who also built an international reputation as a pioneering social-justice activist and legal advisor to the UN. Greenwald was interviewed or served as a source of information about Carter in media outlets including TheNational Law Journal, Oxygen.com, Ms. magazine, the I-Heart radio series The Godmother, based on Carter’s career, and others. Eunice Hunton Carter received the top prize in the “biography/memoir” category of the Association of American Publishers annual competition and won in the Biography category Foreword magazine’s annual “Indies Award” competition.
Greenwald “has given us a compelling biography of a woman and an era.”
— Author and political analyst Eleanor Clift
(University of Nebraska/Potomac Books, 2014)
Pauline Frederick Reporting: A Pioneering Broadcaster Covers the Cold War
Broadcaster Pauline Frederick defied the conventional wisdom of her era that women were not qualified to report “hard” news. In Pauline Frederick Reporting: A Pioneering Broadcaster Covers the Cold War, Greenwald traces the decades-long career of Frederick, the nation’s first fulltime woman network news correspondent. A longtime NBC news correspondent, Frederick launched her career covering the end of World War II, the founding of the United Nations and the roots of the Cold War.
Read Greenwald’s op-ed about Frederick in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/heat-drama-and-the-miracle-of-video-the-1948-conventions-in-philadelphia/2016/07/24/21d3ce92-4509-11e6-8856-f26de2537a9d_story.html
“A crackling good story, an authentic page turner about a legendary humorist and animal rights advocate.”
–Walter Anderson, chairman and CEO, Parade magazine
(University Press of New England, 2009)
Cleveland Amory: Media Curmudgeon & Animal Rights Activist
Writer and arts critic Cleveland Amory was a well-known man about town and Today Show commentator when he decided to devote most of his life to a cause he had long supported – animal rights. In Cleveland Amory: Media Curmudgeon and Animal Rights Crusader, Greenwald traces the life of Amory, who had written three best-selling books about American society when he launched his activism and offered wry and usually humorous observations about American culture on Today several times a week.
But when Amory abandoned his characteristic humor to talk about the horrific use of animals in research laboratories, NBC fired him; and although he had been a prominent television critic for TV Guide and other national publications, he found that his work as a reviewer dried up.
But Amory’s knack for public relations and for drawing attention to high profile animal-rights events eventually attracted fans and drew millions of dollars to his favorite cause, making him one of the first high-profile animal rights “celebrities” in the country. Greenwald writes about how he all but abandoned a lucrative writing career to focus on his advocacy, paving the way for others to follow in his footsteps in the animal protection movement.
“A labor of thoroughness and love that every American male…needs to read to bring back the truth of youth and Young America.”
–The Journal of Popular Culture
(Ohio University Press, 2004)
Secret Of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane & the Stratemeyer Syndicate
The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate tells the story of journalist Leslie McFarlane, who wrote the first group of Hardy Boys mysteries – the iconic series of juvenile books that have sold more than 50 million copies since the first book was published in 1927. Despite the phenomenal success of the series for more than a century, McFarlane was paid only about $100 per book; but he continued as their author, in part because of his own love of reading and his desire to ensure that young readers establish a connection to well written and compelling literature that would endure their entire lives.
The National Review wrote that the book shows how the series “had the ability to engage the senses, and the quirks that made the characters sympathetic and not wooden.” Publications including the Chicago Tribune and The Atlantic and others published interviews with Greenwald articles about The Secret of the Hardy Boys.
See Greenwald’s essay about the book in the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/dr-seuss-meet-the-sanitized-sleuths-known-as-the-hardy-boys-11615590355
A Woman of the Times “splendidly captures the life and times of a newspaper legend.”
— David Schneiderman, publisher, Village Voice
(Ohio University Press, 1999)
A Woman of the Times: Journalism, Feminism, and the Career of Charlotte Curtis
New York Times reporter and editor Charlotte Curtis challenged many long-standing journalistic and cultural assumptions to change the way story subjects were portrayed in what used to be called newspaper “women’s pages.” In A Woman of the Times: Journalism, Feminism and the Career of Charlotte Curtis, Greenwald shows how, as “women’s-page” and later associate editor of the Times, Curtis injected realism into society pages, altering their content from strictly frothy wedding announcements and recipes to more serious issue-oriented stories. The book was named a Notable Book of the New York Times.