AFT VIEW
Our cruise ‘insider’ Peter Rushton provides the full story of how his new book with Roger Cartwright, Cruise America, came about
The Story Of
oger Cartwright’s career as a speaker on cruise ships began some years ago when I booked him as a Guest Speaker on Fred. Olsen’s Black Prince. He was an immediate
success, took to it like a duck to water, and several other appointments followed in quick succession. On one of these, following a presentation
Cruise America R
“We shared a COMMON LOVE of SHIPS and
entitled ‘Cruise Britannia’, a passenger commented – “Do you know, that would make a great book!” Which set Roger thinking.
Calling on a person he had met on one of these cruises, Clive Harvey – at the time Editor of Ocean Liner Society magazine Sea Lines – they decided to collaborate on a book about British cruise ships, and it quickly became Book of the Month when it was published. Although rather different in format to Cruise
America in that it dealt with ships rather than the industry itself, it nonetheless enabled Roger to establish the requisite avenues for research. Other books followed, among them The Saga Sis-
ters, the story of the two Saga vessels which propelled the company into the cruise business a few years ago, and those avenues became extremely well defined. Over the years, Roger and I had come to know
each other well. Not only did we share a common interest in cruise ship speaking, but we also found that we shared a common love of ships and the sea and everything connected therewith. Talking together one day apropos of nothing in
particular, the basic idea of Cruise America was born, and we agreed to collaborate on this new book. “Don’t worry yourself,” he said. “I’ll do the
research, you double-check it, insert your own material where appropriate, and then re-write it for publication.” A sandwich or two later, and we went our sepa-
Autumn 2010 I WORLD OF CRUISING 87
the SEA and everything CONNECTED THEREWITH”
Or, How We Went From Cruise Speakers to Cruise Authors!
rate ways (the sandwich was necessary for me, for even the changed role left me feeling that I was still, perhaps, one short of a picnic). I didn’t hear from Roger for a couple of months until, one morning, a fairly lengthy attachment arrived in an e-mail. I called him. “That’s the first couple of chapters,” he said. “Read, digest, amend, rewrite, then let’s get together again.” I read, digest- ed, amended and re-wrote, and both of us began to get quite excited about the result. But the American cruise industry is a complex one, and I well remember one occasion when Roger
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