Ethan Casey

Alive and Well in Pakistan by Ethan Casey
Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti by Ethan Casey

Ethan Casey, the publisher of Blue Ear Books and co-editor of the Veterans’ Books Initiative, is a working editor, author and ghostwriter, and a veteran journalist with a background in Southeast and South Asia as well as southern Africa and Haiti. His most recent book projects include Back to the World: A Life after Jonestown by Eugene Smith (TCU Press, April 2021; as collaborator), Voices of America: Veterans and Military Families Tell Their Own Stories (TCU Press, 2020; co-editor with Maj. April E. Brown, USMCR [ret.]), and  A Dirt Road to the Future: Education on the Global Front Lines (2019), an account of one American university’s attempt to reexamine its role in the 21st-century world. His other books include Alive and Well in Pakistan (updated 10th anniversary edition 2014), Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012), and Home Free: An American Road Trip (2013).

Alive and Well in Pakistan has been praised as “compulsory reading for anyone visiting Pakistan” by the Harvard International Review, “magnificent” by Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos, “intelligent and compelling” by Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and “wonderful … a model of travel writing” by Edwidge Danticat. In The Daily Telegraph, reviewer Alex Spillius wrote: “The author’s real journey is a search for common humanity.” Dr. Paul Farmer has called Bearing the Bruise “A heartfelt account [that] gives readers an informed perspective on many of the political and social complexities that vex those who seek to make common cause with Haiti.”Bill Steigerwald, author of Dogging Steinbeck, called Home Free “informed, entertaining, compassionate, yet always trustworthy” and Paul Rogat Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible Will Take a Little While, said: “Ethan Casey listened hard and well in his books about Haiti and Pakistan. Now he’s listening to an America that’s dealing with uncertainty, division, and change.”

Early praise for Back to the World: A Life after Jonestown includes this comment from William L. Andrews, Adams Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:

Back to the World tells a gripping story of survival: how a few residents of Jonestown who, having unwittingly escaped the carnage of Jim Jones’s “revolutionary suicide,” resisted the hatred, persecution, and international ostracism perpetrated by multiple governments to create scapegoats for the tragedy. Eugene Smith’s compelling autobiography testifies to the author’s tenacious, long-term struggle to survive the soul-searing effects of the Jonestown tragedy and to forge a life-affirming prophetic witness in the aftermath.

Ethan Casey has edited many single-author books as well as anthologies, including the study of right-wing movements Homeland: Into a World of Hate (2003) by Nick Ryan and Peace Fire: Fragments from the Israel-Palestine Story (2002; co-editor with Paul Hilder). In ten days in September 2001, under extraordinary deadline pressure and in collaboration with Jay Rosen and New York University’s Department of Journalism, Casey edited 09/11 8:48 a.m.: Documenting America’s Greatest Tragedy, the first book-length collection of writings about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, about which John Sutherland said in The Guardian:

09/11 8.48 a.m. accommodates the ‘shock of the new’ at journalistic speed, and with journalistic fluidity, yet still has the monumental authority of ‘the book’. … [Casey and Rosen] have functioned like conductors of an orchestra, blending others’ talents into unity. One is obliged to think analogically, because there has been nothing quite like this before.

Casey bears editorial and publishing responsibility for all books published by Blue Ear Books, through which he also brought back into print Clyde Edwin Pettit’s classic and distinctive account of the Vietnam War, The Experts. He is currently writing a book on the fight against the poaching of rhino horn in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province and planning a follow-up to In the Before Time.

Ethan Casey previously worked as an international print journalist, based in Bangkok and London between 1993 and 2006 and writing for The Globe and Mail, the Boston Globe, The Guardian, the Observer News Service, the South China Morning Post, and Huffington Post, among other publications. During that period he also co-founded and edited the pioneering online periodical Blue Ear (1999-2005) – praised by James Fallows as “ambitious” and “innovative” – and taught journalism at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore (2003-04). He lives in Seattle and is available to speak to classes or for editing, ghostwriting, and other contracted projects. Email: ecasey@blueearbooks.com Twitter: @ec_blueearbooks