Practically none.

And yet, that’s what happened to a pair of USC history professors on Oct. 19 when glowing reviews of their books appeared back-to-back in the Times’ nonfiction "Books In Brief" section.

“This is remarkable,” said history department chair Patrick J. Maney, who noted that the reviews of author Paul E. Johnson’s Sam Patch, The Famous Jumper (Hill & Wang) and editor Patricia Sullivan’s Freedom Writer, Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years (Routledge) appeared in “the single most prestigious review publication in the country. Practically every writer, whether of non-fiction or fiction, covets a review in the Times.

“That two USC faculty members were reviewed brings great credit to the University,” Maney said. “I doubt it’s happened before.”

Johnson’s book, which is “delightful [and] crisply written,” according to the Times review, documents the life of a 19th-century national celebrity who gained fame by jumping off of waterfalls in Paterson, N.J., Niagara Falls, and Rochester. Sullivan’s work collecting and annotating the letters of prominent Southern white liberal Virginia Durr who was active in the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Ala., was praised by the Times as “an informal autobiography of a remarkable woman, as well as an unusual personal history of the civil rights movement.”

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