A Ms. magazine article reports that Jack Holland’s final work, his magnum opus, titled Misogyny: the World’s Oldest Prejudice, was nearly not published. His family were forced to give back half the advance when Viking decided not to publish it, without an explanation.
It brought together two of his favorite things in the world: history and women. He loved women. Jack envisioned the book as a tool in advancing understanding between men and women. He’d been, as a journalist, primarily covering Northern Ireland, so he was very familiar with deep-rooted, vicious conflicts… It was a natural progression for him to take those gifts of observation to an even more personal level with bigger implications. This book [is] about women in Ireland, in Papua New Guinea, in Afghanistan, in the United States… It ties together so many different threads. It [helps us remember] that there is no one bad guy, or person, or religion, or philosophy.
I’m pleased to hear that Carroll & Graf (another imprint of my publishers, Avalon) decided to pubish it, instead: a book about misogyny written by a man who’d observed & chronicled the conflict in Northern Ireland and who grew up Catholic is very, very interesting to me.