Karl Fleming, former L.A. bureau chief for Newsweek, has sold Nothing to be Ashamed Of: The Memoir Of A Civil Rights Reporter, “depicting how a Southern boy from a rough background, whose background should have made him into a bigot worse than any other, became a witness to and friend of the civil rights movement.” Public Affairs will publish the book in spring 2005, according to the latest Publisher’s Lunch deal roundup.

Fleming is the father of Los Angeles novelist Charles Fleming, who recently shared his Cuba adventures with CaliforniaAuthors.com, and husband of Anne Taylor Fleming, the author and essayist for the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”

Other California book deals in the Lunch report include:

• Peter DeLeo’s Survive! My Fight for Life In the High Sierras, “the saga of one’s man thirteen day fight for survival after his plane crashes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California,” to Simon & Schuster.

• Daughter of Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman Michelle Feynman’s collection of her father’s previously unpublished letters, Infinite Variety: The Collected Letters of Richard P. Feynman, to Basic for publication in April 2005.

• Brooke Shields’ Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Post Partum Depression to Hyperion for publication in spring 2005.