Editor Bios
Mark L. Levine
Mark’s career has revolved around his interests in law, book publishing, politics and the Bible. A lawyer since 1969, Mark has practiced corporate and transactional banking law with two major law firms and is one of the country’s leading authorities on book publishing contracts. He is also an experienced voter protection lawyer and campaign operative, having worked for progressive political candidates in nearly a dozen states.
His books include The Complete Book of Bible Quotations, a “Bartlett’s of the Bible” still in print after 33 years, and Negotiating a Book Contract: A Guide for Authors, Agents and Lawyers. From 2006-2016, he wrote the Contracts Q&A column for the Authors Guild Bulletin.
Under his Scarf Press imprint, he publishes Picture Stories from the Bible … in Full-Color Comic-Strip Form (Old Testament and New Testament editions), hardcover reprints of paperback books originally published in the 1940s by the father of William M. Gaines, founder of Mad Magazine.
Mark is a former partner in the New York office of Boston’s Sullivan & Worcester and a former vice president and member of the Board of Directors of the American Book Producers Association. He has taught Contracts Drafting at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Business Law at Zicklin School of Business/Baruch College, both in New York City. He has also been a substitute teacher in the Peekskill, NY public school system.
Mark is a graduate of Columbia College, NYU School of Law (where he was a member of Law Review) and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Born in Bath, Maine, he currently lives in Yorktown Heights, New York.
George C. McNamee
George is founder and Chairman of Plug Power Inc., a pioneer in modern hydrogen and fuel cell technology. During the last 25 years, he has pursued his passion for building new companies that create software, clean energy and robots. He served as lead director of iRobot for 17 years and is a director of AmberWave, Inc., an ultra-thin solar cell company.
He is a former chairman of First Albany Corporation, an investment bank that he led for 25 years, and a former member of the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange. After the stock market crash in 1987, he chaired the NYSE’s Committee to Reform the Clearance and Settlement System.
In 2011, George was the first history major awarded the Yale Science and Engineering Association Distinguished Service Award. A Trustee of The American Friends of Eton College, he received his bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1969 and lives in Albany, NY with his wife Kathleen and three children.
Daniel L. Greenberg
Danny is a progressive lawyer who has worked with poor and marginalized people and the organizations that represent them for nearly fifty years. He recently retired as Special Counsel for Pro Bono Initiatives at Schulte Roth and Zabel, a large New York law firm, a position he had held since 2005.
From 1994 to 2004, he was president and attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society, the country’s largest full-service law firm for the indigent, with over a thousand lawyers delivering criminal defense, juvenile representation and civil legal services to hundreds of thousands of clients a year. Before that, from 1987 to 1994, he was Director of Clinical Programs at Harvard Law School.
Danny started as a legal services lawyer on New York’s Lower East Side in 1971, spending 16 years as a staff attorney and managing attorney with MFY Legal Services there.
He is a former president of the New York City Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and has been a consultant on domestic and international legal issues for the American Bar Association, the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations. For the 2004-5 academic year, he was the Distinguished Visitor at NYU Law School.
A graduate of Brooklyn College, Danny received his law degree from Columbia Law School in 1969. Following graduation from Columbia, he taught elementary school in Harlem until he turned 26 in 1971.
He is married with two adult daughters. His daughter Mara Nelson-Greenberg is a playwright whose plays have been produced in New York (at the Vineyard Theatre), Kentucky (at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville) and Chicago. His daughter Ilana Nelson-Greenberg is a doctor in her first year of residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Dr. Karen Nelson.
The Editors In 1969-1970
The Trial of the Chicago 7: The Official Transcript is the updated and expanded 50th anniversary edition of The Tales of Hoffman, first published by Bantam Books in 1970 as a Bantam Extra, its series of “instant books” about important public events and topical issues. The editors edited the 22,000 pages of the transcript during a series of frenetic 24-hour days over a period of three weeks in February with the help of nearly forty friends. They delivered the final manuscript for the book to the publisher three days after the trial ended on February 20th. It was in bookstores by March 3rd.
Levine had just started working in a stodgy, conservative “white shoe” law firm, White & Case. McNamee had just started working on Wall Street and was the youngest independent member of the New York Stock Exchange. Greenberg was teaching in an experimental elementary school in Harlem because elementary school teachers were temporarily exempt from the military draft.
Levine and McNamee were roommates in New York City, having met the previous year in Wisconsin as volunteers for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s primary campaign against President Lyndon Johnson. Levine and Greenberg were best friends from their high school days in Brooklyn.
All three had marched in demonstrations against the Vietnam War. All three were avid readers of The New York Times, which was where they first read about Judge Hoffman’s outrageous actions and his verbal confrontations with the defendants and their lawyers.