All Interviews

Chris Gardner

Interview by Ron Wynn

Author, entrepreneur and motivational speaker Chris Gardner became an international symbol of the will to survive in 2006. His incredible journey from homeless single father to fiscal guru was chronicled in both the best-selling memoir The Pursuit of Happyness and the blockbuster film starring Will Smith.

Now, three years later, Gardner is not only a wealthy man, but a passionate social activist determined to help others achieve personal and professional success, no matter their circumstances or background. His new book, Start Where You Are: Life Lessons in Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, represents the next phase in Gardner’s career, offering hope and sound advice in this tough economic climate.

"I remember telling people 18 months ago when everything looked good that tough times were coming," Gardner says by phone from his Chicago office. "I didn’t have access to any information or trends. I just saw some factors in terms of how much credit was out in the marketplace and the speculative buying. Now I’m determined to show people they can be totally broke today, and still, through the lessons in this book, not only recover but eventually thrive if they are willing to do what it takes."

The book’s 44 chapters distill commonsense wisdom, presented with a zeal and enthusiasm that is evident as Gardner responds to questions. "The very first thing I tell college graduates today is that if you want to get an advanced degree, now is a good time to do it, because in many cases the job you thought you earned your [first] degree to get might not exist any longer.
"But more important than that, you should find something you love and are passionate about doing. Then, assess the opportunities out there for you to do it. You might have to take a job doing something else for now, but don’t forget or abandon your long-term goal," Gardner says. "You definitely should have a plan, and you’ve got to know the difference between who you are and what you do. Whatever job you get doesn’t define who you are. That’s defined by your values, your willingness to work hard, your ingenuity and your persistence."

Start Where You Are dispenses many other suggestions and strategies for getting where you want to be. One section is devoted to getting started in whatever field you want to pursue. Others look at avoiding past mistakes, the necessity for learning the ropes of a particular craft and even the boost that can be obtained from a spiritual approach.

"If people are looking for how to get rich quick, I tell them this isn’t the right book for them," Gardner says. "I’m talking about improving your life, and money is really the least effective way of measuring someone’s self-worth. The lessons in this book will not only help you grow and thrive as a person, they’ll help you when the tough times arrive, and enable you to understand the world’s not ending if you get laid off."

Gardner talks as much about joy, love and faith as he does ownership, empowerment and capital. Though the book contains chapters that deal strictly with financial matters, like Lesson #34 (Mo’ Money, Mo’ Options, Mo’ Problems) or Lesson #29 (Share the Wealth), he’s far more concerned with psychological and moral growth than fiscal improvement, and sees the latter as the natural byproduct of the former. "The advice that I provide is universal," he points out. "So much of what happens in life comes as a result of your approach, and when you change that, you can change your life."

Now CEO of the investment firm Gardner Rich LLC, Gardner also tackles causes ranging from homelessness to violence against women to financial illiteracy. He is teaming with actor Will Smith again on a forthcoming project: a network reality show, though Gardner cautions, "It won’t be something sensational or exploitative. We want to do real stories and give people the opportunity for growth, change and empowerment."

Gardner and Smith are joining forces with superstar producer Mark Burnett, creator of "Survivor" and "The Apprentice," among other shows, and he’s hopeful the program might be ready for the fall season, though he adds that details are still "in negotiations." So for now, Gardner will continue his lectures and work, hoping that Start Where You Are will prove as transformative and inspirational as The Pursuit of Happyness.

Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville City Paper and other publications.

YA Fiction YA

Jessica Verday

Interview by Eliza Borné

The story of how Jessica Verday came to write The Hollow, the first in her paranormal teen trilogy—and her publishing debut—sounds like a scene from the novel in itself.

“This is going to sound like it was in a dream, but it wasn’t,” she explains during our interview at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville. “I was waiting to fall asleep in January of 2006, when all of a sudden I heard this girl speak. She said something, and I couldn’t hear her name clearly. All I could hear was the ‘b’ sound in the middle of the name. The line she said was intriguing and it got me very interested in her story.”

When describing the experience to her husband, he guessed that the girl’s name might be “Abbey.” Verday knew that he was right.

“As soon as I knew her name—and this is going to sound very odd, very strange—suddenly this flood of information came. What if this girl liked to make perfumes? Could I set it in Sleepy Hollow? What if she hung out in cemeteries?”

Verday listened to her character. “Most people would think it was weird, but I loved ghost stories growing up, and to me it just seemed very natural,” she says. “I thought, I’m supposed to write this down—I never thought, this is weird, I’m hearing voices in my head. I thought it was very natural. I thought these characters clearly have a story to tell, so I started writing.”

After a bad start on the computer—she re-wrote the first chapter three times—Verday tried writing by hand. “I got out the notebook and the pen, and it just flew from there. Once I started it was clear that this was the way the story was meant to come out.”

Although she loved reading everything from Newbery winners to R.L. Stine when she was growing up, Verday did not anticipate being a professional writer. “I wasn’t the type of person who said in elementary or high school that ‘I’m going to write a book,’” she says, although she did dabble in short stories about haunted houses and girl detectives.

Verday’s mother worked as a church secretary in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “I spent my time in a church cemetery,” Verday says of her childhood. “When I finished the book, I was like: I wrote about this girl who hangs out in a cemetery. That was what I did growing up, and that apparently influenced me more than I knew.”

Verday had a “childhood filled with books.” She also had family problems, and a few weeks before her 16th birthday, she ran away from home. She took a Greyhound bus to Austin, Texas, and married her boyfriend a few weeks later.

“Luckily it’s worked out very well,” she says. “We’ve been happily married for 11 years.”

When Verday was 17, she and her husband took another Greyhound to Nashville. They lived in a hotel for six months and worked long shifts to “pretty much just get on our feet,” she says. They eventually moved into an apartment, and Verday had a string of different jobs—many of which have influenced her writing. Perhaps the most interesting was her stint as a phone psychic, which lasted for a week.

“I know that’s going to come up again,” she says. “I have a story where I know I’m going to write about someone who’s involved in tarot card readings, and that was one of the things they taught me how to do.”

Thirteen notebooks and 15 pens after first hearing Abbey’s voice, Verday finished The Hollow in the summer of 2007. She got positive responses from agents, and in early 2008 she signed a three-book deal with Simon Pulse.

Each chapter of The Hollow begins with an excerpt from Washington Irving’s legend, and a large portion of the novel takes place in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. When she decided on her setting, Verday took a trip to Sleepy Hollow, New York. She toured the real Sleepy Hollow cemetery and took hundreds of pictures. Although there are paranormal elements in her novel, Verday wanted to make her setting “founded in reality as much as possible.”

The novel begins after Abbey’s best friend, Kristin, has disappeared, presumed dead. After an empty casket is buried, Abbey meets Caspian at Kristin’s grave. The two feel a strong connection to each other, and Abbey and Caspian continue to see each other at the cemetery. He won’t give Abbey his contact information or tell her about his past, however—even as Abbey begins to rely on him while she copes with her friend’s death. Although Verday writes convincingly about real emotions—grief, loneliness, teen love—the novel contains plenty of spooky scenes (one involving the Headless Horseman).

As readers will discover, book one ends with many unanswered questions, especially when it comes to the man in Kristin’s life. “In book two you’ll find out who he is,” says Verday. “He’s a fun character—he had a lot of surprises for me.”

The second and third books in the trilogy will be released in the fall of 2010 and 2011. The tentative title for book two is The Haunted. Verday won’t reveal the title for book three, although she does hope to continue with the “H” theme. She did admit that she has an idea for how the trilogy will be perceived by readers: “Book one is questions, book two is answers and book three is choices.”

After so many ups and downs, Verday is content with her life as a full-time writer in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. “It is so amazing to get to put words on a paper, and then they are put on someone’s shelf and someone will read them. It is fantastic to be able to say that this is my job.”

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The story of how Jessica Verday came to write The Hollow, the first in her paranormal teen trilogy—and her publishing debut—sounds like a scene from the novel in itself.

“This is going to sound like it was in a dream, but it wasn’t,” she explains during…

Children's & YA

Elise Primavera

Interview by Miriam Drennan

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and four years ago, author Elise Primavera was in need of a Christmas book for a very young friend. I wanted something that dealt with the Santa Claus/North Pole aspect that makes the actual theme of the holiday more real. A lot of Christmas books almost try not to be terribly, terribly Christmasy. Primavera is a huge fan of the holiday and decided, after her fruitless search, maybe she should write a Christmas book, something that takes the magical, fun aspect of the holiday and presents it in a way that’s not cliche. Something that you could sit down with a child a couple of weeks before Christmas and the story gets them really excited about the holiday. Something that elaborates on Santa Claus, the elves, the North Pole, and what goes on up there. I went home and decided I would try to do this. The result is Auntie Claus, a book that reveals some of the mysteries behind the daily operations of Santa’s shop. By answering some of those questions, however, a central theme emerges: it is far better to give than receive. This Christmas, Saks will feature Auntie Claus-themed windows; next Christmas, a live-action film adaptation starring Rosie O’Donnell will premiere.

Primavera notes that later that same day, she took a shower. I’m not kidding. I get great ideas in the shower, and I was thinking about what makes a really good Christmas book. A lot of it is found in the title. A play on words, a play on a song, or an expression, so I started fooling around with titles and words and I’m taking a shower, right? Then I thought about Santa Claus. And I played with words that rhymed: Aunta Claus, Santy Claus, Auntie Claus. And as soon as I said it, the whole character came to mind: an eccentric woman who keeps her Christmas lights on all year long. She says that at this point, she jumped out of the shower to write all her ideas down so that she didn’t forget any of it. The whole idea was, Is she real or is she not real? And that’s all I had at that point. Then I thought, maybe she’s the force behind Christmas, the helper or the mastermind. From there I built on that and came to Sophie and the rest of the family. That came a lot slower, but the initial, immediate thunderbolt was definitely the character Auntie Claus. As demonstrated in her shopping and showering experiences, Primavera’s writing process is not necessarily deliberate. Sentences come to me. And never when I want them to. For example, I’ll get the idea and keep it in my head for a while, and sometimes when I’m trying to go to sleep, a paragraph will come to me and I will write it down. Primavera also illustrated Auntie Claus. Using a technique that she learned and developed as an art student, Primavera covers a piece of illustration board with a specific gesso/pumice stone mixture. She lets it dry, then sketches her illustrations in charcoal and quickly blocks in her shapes with gouache. Pastels are light, so it’s hard to get dark, rich colors. Sometimes, Primavera goes back and re-draws, and then layers with chalk and pastels.

Auntie Claus contains several odd elements diamond keys, canine butlers, bratty children, an overbearing elf. Are these setting the stage for future Kringle family adventures? There’s going to be a sequel, which I’m working on now. I think what’s interesting is that you have this family who, even though they’re not living in the North Pole with Santa Claus, all have Christmas-related jobs. Well, are there any other famous relatives in the Kringle family? You’ll have to wait and see. That’s for me to know and you to find out, she smiles.

Clearly, Auntie Claus and Primavera are keeping a few secrets to themselves.

Fiction Women's Fiction

Anita Shreve

Interview by Ellen Kanner

With her new novel Fortune’s Rocks, Anita Shreve, author of the bestseller The Pilot’s Wife, returns to the time she loves, the 19th century. Though she believes that, at their core, people’s lives have not changed in a hundred years, the way we talk about our lives has. She likens modern speech to a corset, finding it "spare, tighter, bereft. It’s much harder to write contemporary language. The language of the 19th century is more forgiving, more luxurious. It’s the difference between using really expensive silk and voile and velvet as opposed to using cotton."

Written in a richly wrought style evocative of the age, Fortune’s Rocks is set a century ago, in an affluent seaside community in upstate New York. It follows the life of self-possessed Olympia Biddeford. Fifteen years old when the book opens, Olympia has reached the moment when, as a character tells her, "a girl becomes a woman. The bud of a woman, perhaps. And she is never so beautiful as in this period of time, however brief."

"It’s an extraordinary age," says Shreve, speaking from her home in Massachusetts. "The maturity may not be there, but the sexuality is so ripe.

It’s an age of great beauty; it’s fascinating. I have a daughter who recently went through that and two stepdaughters who are all stunningly beautiful. It’s been interesting to watch how they dealt with it, but more [interesting] to imagine how one would deal with it then."

At this precarious age, Olympia has an affair with a married man, John Haskell. Their forbidden love echoes other great American novels, including Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which Shreve even refers to in the course of Fortune’s Rocks. "As a reader, as a writer, The Scarlet Letter was one of my earliest influences. Ethan Frome, a simple work of American literature, also had a lasting and profound impression on me. I’m interested in passion, betrayal, great love, how they can twist a character as well as forge a character." As her works have shown, Shreve is fascinated by characters thrust into extreme circumstances. "It’s a perfect scenario for a moral testing ground of character."

Like The Scarlet Letter‘s Hester Prynne, Olympia must endure hardship and humiliation, and though she and Haskell are parted, her feelings for him endure. "To be told not to love is useless, she discovers, for the spirit will rebel. Though she thinks it unlikely she will ever see Haskell again, she cannot stop herself from remembering him," writes Shreve, who both is and isn’t Olympia.

At that age, Shreve lacked Olympia’s emotional certainty, but shared with her protagonist the ability to enjoy solitude, nothing most teenagers admit to. Her voice dreamy, Shreve recalls, "I valued quiet and liked nothing better than to take a walk and be left alone and be able to observe." The author, who says she would hate to write a memoir but loves to write fiction "because it gives me a mask to hide behind," admits that like Olympia, she has "a willingness to take incredible risks for something as strong as love."

In that way, she says, people have not changed from the last century. Cell phones have replaced letters and bathing costumes have given way to bikinis, but in the end, people are always kindled by their passions and constrained by circumstances. These things are as constant as the sea, a force and presence in five of Shreve’s six novels. "The sea," she says, "is an inexhaustible metaphor. I think every single one of my books takes place on the coast of New England, with the exception of Eden Close."

Fortune’s Rocks not only returns to Shreve’s favorite time and landscape, it takes place in the very house where The Pilot’s Wife is set. "The house . . . was once a convent, the home of the Order of Saint Jean Baptiste de Bienfaisance . . ." writes Shreve in Fortune’s Rocks, and in both books, the house itself is a character, stately yet haunting, evocative of the past.

"This is an idea that’s been with me some time," explains the author. "Any old house has a history. Other women lived there, every person who lived there had a story."

Setting and the epic forces of passion and betrayal link The Pilot’s Wife and Fortune’s Rocks, yet Shreve says, "A lot of readers may be shocked by Fortune’s Rocks. Every one of my books is very different. I have no desire to recreate. In the past, it’s been a commercial liability." She no longer has to fret about marketability, not since Oprah Winfrey chose The Pilot’s Wife to be part of Oprah’s Book Club.

"What a fantastic thing that was," says Shreve, still amazed. "Now I have many, many more readers." After being in Oprah’s spotlight, the author found herself inundated with requests for interviews and readings. It is fun, she admits, to be on the bestseller list, but otherwise, "my life is exactly the same." She knows, though, that the interest in The Pilot’s Wife will draw readers to Fortune’s Rocks, where Shreve will usher them into an earlier time, whether they’re ready or not.

If she could turn back the clock for herself, Shreve wouldn’t mind in the least. "I would have been just so happy to be writing then. I love the language. I don’t know how long I can get away with writing 19th-century language, but I just enjoy it so much." She first experimented with 19th-century language in The Weight of Water "and loved it so much, I was determined to find my way back. I’m interested in the marriage of story and language."

Fortune’s Rocks is where it all comes together, a compelling tale knit with elegant prose. Though how Shreve tells Olympia’s story sets her new novel apart, Olympia’s struggles are not all that different from the experiences of women throughout history and on into the present. "It’s an intimate look at a woman’s life, her grappling with a biblical sense of obsessive love and betrayal and moral decisions and loss, terrible loss. It’s about how to continue with life."

Ellen Kanner writes from her home in Miami, Florida.

Author photo by Norman Jean Roy.

With her new novel Fortune's Rocks, Anita Shreve, author of the bestseller The Pilot's Wife, returns to the time she loves, the 19th century. Though she believes that, at their core, people's lives have not changed in a hundred years, the way we talk about…

Thomas Cahill

Interview by Alden Mudge

"Orgies in a world ruled by fate are not as much fun as you might think they would be," Thomas Cahill says during a call to his residence in Rome, where he and his wife now live for about a third of the year.

Cahill is being deliberately provocative, of course. And playful. But he is also pointing toward the origin of the questions he’s been wrestling with for almost 30 years now.

"In 1970," he says, "I went to what turned out to be a prehistoric fertility festival called Puck Fair in the west of Ireland. It was pretty wild and raunchy and quite unlike anything I ever expected. Except that I found myself connecting it to classical literature, to what you might call pre-Biblical literature. The world I found at Puck Fair and also, I believe, in Greek and Roman literature was a sort of cyclical world, ruled by fate. There was a kind of doom over everything, a fatalism, an inevitability. The experience made me start asking questions about the whole of Western history. I began to think about where my own values, so different from the values of that ambiance, came from."

If all goes as planned, the results of Cahill’s quest will body forth in a seven-volume series called the Hinges of History, through which the author means "to retell the story of the Western world as the story of great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West." Cahill refuses to talk about upcoming volumes because, he says, he has worked very hard to ensure that each book can be read independently. He does not want a reader to feel that buying one book "suddenly puts one under an obligation to read seven. This is not a series of textbooks!"

Most definitely not. The first two books in the series, How the Irish Saved Civilization and The Gifts of the Jews, have been published to popular and critical success, hailed both for their bold historical synthesis and for their engaging and entertaining style. Brisk sales of the books have enabled Cahill to buy his apartment in Rome (he and his wife live the rest of the year in New York, where they both grew up), to retire from his post as director of religious publishing at Doubleday, and "to get on a book-every-two-years schedule, which means, if my nerve holds, I can get the whole series done within one lifetime."

Cahill’s third offering, published this month, is, if anything, bolder and more engaging than his previous books.

At its most basic, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus is a book about the New Testament, "an historical work that inevitably touches on theology," he says. But Cahill’s larger ambition is nothing less than to attempt to answer the questions that are the on the minds of most people—what was Jesus like, what would it have been like to have been in the crowd that listened to Jesus, what would it have been like to have been one of the apostles, and how can we find the answers to these questions in these materials?"

It helps if you read the New Testament in the original Greek, as Cahill did while working on Desire of the Everlasting Hills. And it helps if you familiarize yourself with the major biblical scholarship on any given point, figure, or period you are concerned with, as he has done. "But all that scholarship taken together doesn’t add up to the story as I want to tell it," Cahill cautions. "You need to project yourself—or retroject yourself—back into the whole cultural ambiance of first century Palestine . . . You need to scrape off two millennia of bad sermons and wretched Sunday schools and, in many cases, the hypocrisy that goes with it, as if they were barnacles on a ship."

The impact of such an approach can be profound. For example, it is terrifying to see the crucifixion in the context of the times. Stripped of its rosy iconic glow, it is a horribly brutal act, so traumatizing to Jesus’ followers, Cahill writes, that for almost 400 years, they could not "depict the stark reality of his suffering except in the accounts of four gospels, which are as clipped and precise as the four authors knew how to make them."

And it’s somehow liberating to grapple with the implications of Cahill’s assertion that "Paul wrote all these letters for specific occasions that are long gone," which in Cahill’s book means that Paul has been seriously, if piously, misread for nearly 2000 years. It’s just plain startling to fully comprehend that "to appreciate the atmosphere of first-century Judea we must understand that the ‘religion’ that Jesus preached was, in its time, one of many alternative Judaisms."

No doubt, Cahill means to be provocative. "If you can’t entertain people, you have no right to ask them to read what you’ve written," he says lightly. But with such bold (and often witty) strokes Cahill strips away the pious accretions of 2000 years so that a picture of Jesus as an actual human being emerges.

"Jesus was a man who sweat and spit and did everything that everybody else in the world does," Cahill says. "You have to imagine that he was an extraordinary individual but that he would have appeared to everyone as a human being who talked the lingo of his time to pretty rough-hewn people, who would not have been impressed by your typical clergyman." Only through such an act of re-imagining, Cahill indicates, can a reader experience the full force of Jesus’ message, which Cahill characterizes as "the revolutionary insistence on kindness."

He adds, "To be a Christian should mean to be in solidarity with the poor and the miserable. Very seldom in history have Christians done that. People who call themselves Christians really haven’t understood what their identity is supposed to be. But every once in a while someone gets it right, and when they do, it makes an enormous difference."

Hence, it seems, the Hinges of History.

"I think Desire of the Everlasting Hills can be appreciated on two different levels," Cahill says at the end of our conversation. "On an intellectual level, I hope readers come away feeling that they have met Jesus, that they know who he is, that they know what his followers were trying to do, and that they understand the effect this had on the culture we live in. But in the end I would like people to close the book having had more than just a titillating intellectual and emotional experience. On a moral level, I would like to move readers in the direction of what Jesus says at the end of the story of the Good Samaritan, ‘Go and do likewise.’ "

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California.

Robert Hicks

Interview by BookPage staff

What marks the start of the holiday season for you?
A briskness in the air, folks seeming to moving a bit faster around me, going out and getting a Christmas tree and all of it wrapped in the same feeling and anticipation that I had as a child of something miraculous about happen. Here I am in my late 50s and all the cynicism that comes with age can not overcome that sense of awe that engulfed the holidays of my childhood.

What are you most looking forward to during the holiday season?
I will be coming off a 35- to 40-event book tour for A Separate Country. I am very grateful to have the opportunity to go out and meet folks and talk about the book. Yet, by then, I think I will be looking forward to staying put, hiking in the woods around my cabin, not venturing far from those home fires burning.

What is your favorite holiday book or song?
When I was a child, my dad would read Dickens' A Christmas Carol over several evenings every year. I think my parents thought it was a lesson we needed to heed. I can still hear my dad doing the different voices. He did a particularly good Mr. Fezzwig.

Why do books make the best gifts?
Books are keys to unlock everything from knowledge to our hearts. They can change us and give us hope. They give us examples of who we can be and who we shouldn't be. They take us places that we will never see or understand otherwise. I remember as a child the story of the Ethiopian Eunuch, whoever he was, saying, "How will I understand lest someone teach me." Books are a gift of understanding.

What books are you planning to give to friends and family?
My top 10 list changes with time. I guess everyone's does. After finishing my new book, I found myself going back to All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren and To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Not enough friends of mine have read Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow or The Awakening by Kate Chopin, so they're on my list as are Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Ironweed by William Kennedy, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and Birds of America (short stories) by Lorrie Moore.

What was the best book you read this year?
Hands down, it was Huckleberry Finn—it was the third time I have read it over the years.)

What is your number one resolution for 2010?
To do right.

Memoir

Mary Gordon

Interview by Alden Mudge

It's a relief, really. Mary Gordon seems no more inclined to answer deeply personal questions than I am to ask them.

Of course, the questions flutter at the periphery of our conversation about her collection of meditative, autobiographical essays, Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity. How can I not wonder about the pain of a child who dreams of fairy princesses and kisses the knee of "Grandpa" Haubrecht in hopes of forming some sentimental connection with the old man, only to recognize in his unbending silence that she is not the magical child of her imagination, and probably not even a child at all? Or the desperation of a 15-year-old living alone with her alcoholic mother in increasing dishevelment, who hears a bird trapped in her closet struggling toward death and reacts by pulling her clothes from the closet, laying them on a chair, and never opening the closet again until it is time to go to college?

But, really, what more could I actually learn by asking Gordon about her implacable grandmother or her cruel aunt? Her mother and the priests who "embodied her idea of the desirable male"? Or the fact that her father, who died when she was seven, was the only person she liked to play with?

In these eight linked essays about the places that have shaped her sensibility—as in her recent memoir about her father, The Shadow Man, and her novels Final Payments and The Company of Women—Gordon writes with such brilliant specificity and with such sensitivity to the fine gradations of human emotion that readers simply infer the answers to such questions. To actually ask them is a betrayal of one of the deepest pleasures of reading writers as good as Gordon: that sense of one mind and spirit connecting with another's. To ask also invites a kind of reductive pop psychologizing. Or worse, the commodification of spirit, which is a sorry hallmark of our era, and an increasing concern for Gordon.

"What makes me nervous," she says midway through our conversation, "is that even people's interest in religion has become a commodity. I mean, the corporate world is now getting spiritual advisors so that their executives can be more productive, because they need to be in touch with their spiritual roots in order that they can make a better Web page . . . There's no other narrative, except commodity and profit. I find myself wondering, is there anything that is not commodifiable?"

Religion has never been a commodity for Gordon. She was raised in a family that "took deep pleasure in the liturgical world of the church" and assembled at her grandmother's on Tuesday nights to watch Bishop Sheen on television. But in the 1960s, in a moment described in the essay "The Architecture of a Life with Priests," a young priest's well-meaning remark "demolished the walls of the confessional," and led her to realize that she "would have to leave the church, because to live with this new sense of lightness and clarity I would need a dwelling that let in the light."

Thirty-some years later, Gordon has returned to the church. "Those sacred spaces were very formative, and irreplaceable," she says. "I began to understand that the habit of mind that was generated by those sacred spaces was very important to who I am, and that if I didn't honor my hunger for that, I would be less than truthful about who I really am. This is another reason why the metaphor of place is so important to me. I needed to be in the psychic space that only church ritual and the ethical framework that is expressed in ritual could give me. Nothing else would substitute for that."

But sacred spaces are not the only places Gordon reflects on in Seeing Through Places. There are also the houses of her grandmother and her babysitter and the neighbors next door, the public places of New York, and a forsaken house on the Cape. Seeing Through Places developed "without an intentional arc," Gordon says. At some point she realized that the essays she was writing were about place and that she wanted to "talk about where I am, I mean literally where I am and metaphorically where I am. So I organized the book around the motif of a journey." That journey spans only a short distance in miles—from Valley Stream, Long Island to Manhattan—but it is an immense psychic journey from a seemingly cloistered life in a working class neighborhood to public life as a best-selling novelist and English professor at Barnard.

"I really wanted to meditate on a place being at the center of a consciousness," Gordon says. "The accidents of place, the pressure of place that enables certain kinds of behaviors and makes other behaviors impossible. So that place becomes an agent in ways that are practical, in ways that can be tyrannical, and in ways that are very atmospheric and hard to pin down. . . . Often when people write about place it's from a sensibility that believes that place is divorced from people and has a kind of life of its own. I was brought up to think that people were more important than place and more important than things. I was even brought up in a sensibility that said that the invisible is more important than the visible. So the way that I come at place is not the way that Protestant males come at place. If this were an equation, I would be talking about place minus Thoreau."

In the most poignant essay in the book, "Places to Play," Gordon writes that as a child, she was not good at playing and always felt that she "was only masquerading as a child." Desperate to be taken seriously, she couldn't wait for childhood to end. Gordon later writes that she graduated from college younger than when she entered, and credits Barnard and the 1960s for teaching her the value of play.

"Far from being a '60s basher," she says, "I am so grateful for them. Because we were all allowed to play and to be serious. . . . The playful and the serious were able to flow in and out of one another in a way that for me was extremely freeing. And at Barnard, my mind was given play. I was given tremendous attention, a debt I can never repay."

Little wonder, then, that she has returned to Barnard to teach and that she writes of the place in her final essay with such affection. "I'm always afraid that with one false move, which I can't predict or name, I could be back at that old place I was in when I was young," Gordon says near the end of our conversation. "But I also feel a tremendous sense of gratitude and amazement that life has had so much more pleasure and amplitude and graciousness than I ever believed it would have when I was a child."

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California.

It's a relief, really. Mary Gordon seems no more inclined to answer deeply personal questions than I am to ask them.

Of course, the questions flutter at the periphery of our conversation about her collection of meditative, autobiographical essays, Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and…

Mystery & Suspense

Carl Hiaasen

Interview by Jay MacDonald

You would never notice to look at him, but Carl Hiaasen is angry again. The soft-spoken 46-year-old native Floridian still has his easy smile and gentle collegiate manner intact, despite a couple grueling days at the Miami Book Fair. There, fellow Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry enlisted his help to fill in for the sidelined Stephen King in the all-author Rock Bottom Remainders band the previous evening. "I’m just learning the guitar, so it was pretty embarrassing," he admits. "I think they just wanted another target."

If you got hooked on Hiaasen back in 1986 with his debut, Tourist Season, but have sensed a lack of righteous moral outrage at greedy developers and crooked politicians in the last few books, take heart: In Sick Puppy, it’s back with a vengeance.

Twilly Spree, the trust-fund vagabond son of a beachfront developer, has vowed to make reparations for his father by cleaning up Florida one litterbug at a time. When state lobbyist Palmer Stoat leaves a trail of McDonald’s detritus in the wake of his Range Rover, Spree can’t resist teaching him a lesson — several times over. The young eco-avenger soon learns that Stoat is greasing a deal to build a bridge to a Gulf Coast island targeted by an unscrupulous developer with a Barbie fixation. That’s when Spree steals Stoat’s Labrador retriever and his trophy wife and attempts to derail the project.

"Part of this was a generational thing in my own life, because I felt, Look at me, I’m just getting old and cranky, I’m 46 and I feel this way," says Hiaasen. "I don’t see any kids who feel like this. They look around and this is the Florida they grew up in and they don’t give a s_ _ _ about anything. But you know what? Then I would go to colleges and universities and meet kids here at the book fair and they are very interested in what the future holds for their kids, what the Everglades will look like in 20 years or what Biscayne Bay will look like.

"So I thought, what would happen if I had someone in the book who just snapped a little earlier? I had fun with Twilly, reliving some of the same angst and fury I felt as a kid. I think going young with that character helped me keep the fire stoked."

No doubt it was the prospect of once again skewering the developers and crooked politicians that brought another character stumbling forth from the deep swamp: former Governor Clinton Tyree, also known as Skink. The funky elder statesman and the young idealist share this moment on the road:

"[Skink] set his gaze on Twilly Spree and said, ‘Son, I can’t tell you what to do with your life — hell, you’ve seen what I’ve done with mine. But I will tell you there’s probably no peace for people like you and me in this world. Somebody’s got to be angry or nothing gets fixed. That’s what we were put here for, to stay pissed off.’

Twilly said, ‘They made me take a class for it, captain. I was not cured.’

‘A class?’

‘Anger management. I’m perfectly serious.’

Skink hooted. ‘For Christ’s sake, what about greed management? Everybody in this state should take a course in that. You fail, they haul your sorry ass to the border and throw you out of Florida.’"

Hiaasen admits he had to keep the charismatic former governor on a tight leash.

"I knew he was going to be in the novel, but I’d made up my mind he wasn’t going to be in the first part of the novel because he does sort of tend to come on stage and start dominating, and he really is out of my control at that point. He just is what he is. Also, I wanted him older and tired and confronted with a younger version of himself."

The author shrugs off parallels between Twilly and himself. Hiaasen’s father and grandfather were both attorneys in Fort Lauderdale, but he says they were just as surprised and baffled by the rampant growth in south Florida as he was.

"Now you have land use attorneys whose job it is to get around master plans and zoning restrictions, and they make good livings off finding loopholes or making loopholes so people can build something where they weren’t intended to build it," he says. "A good example is Key West. . . . They live off the Hemingway mystique, they trade on the Hemingway mystique, constantly. If Hemingway were alive, he’d take a flame-thrower to Duval Street, and that’s the truth. Fifty T-shirt shops? Give me a break."

Surprisingly, Hiaasen spends considerable pages making the loutish lobbyist Palmer Stoat one of his most fully realized characters.

"The trouble is, he sort of checks his moral compass at the door and that’s what gets him," he says. "In the end, he’ll do anything for a buck for anyone with a buck. He just doesn’t see that he’s doing anything wrong; he doesn’t think about the consequences. That’s what I was trying to get across. It’s different from having a villain who is skinning people and eating their brains."

Having written his eight satirical novels from an omniscient point of view, Hiaasen is toying with a first-person narrative next time out. So far, he has fought the tempting offers from Hollywood to develop a series character along the lines of Travis McGee.

"I said, in the first place, I’m not John D. MacDonald. I’d give anything if I could write that way, out of that guy’s head, again and again, but I can’t. I get bored," he says. "Whatever character I come up with for this novel is going to have to be very, very interesting for me to stay inside his head the whole length of it. I think I’m going to have to do a better job of coming up with someone I can stand."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a writer in Naples, Florida.

Author photo by Elena Seibert.

Nonfiction

Jonathan Safran Foer

Interview by Trisha Ping

Since his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, made him a major literary figure at the age of 24, people have been talking about the work of Jonathan Safran Foer. His second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, continued the trend, sparking controversy with its inventive use of images and changing typefaces—a technique that was either a gimmick or genius, depending on your literary leanings. Now, Foer turns to a nonfiction topic, the ethics of eating, with equally provocative results. His new book, Eating Animals, goes beyond recent foodie tomes like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle to explore the effect that our carnivorous tendencies have on society. Begun as a search for answers when explaining to his own young son why they don’t eat meat, the book takes readers along on Foer’s journey of discovery—which has already generated a lively debate and just might change the way you eat. We asked Foer a few questions about the new book, his research and his (meatless) Thanksgiving menu.

Food is a touchy subject for many people, especially where it intersects with questions of morality, as it does in Eating Animals. What kind of reactions have you gotten from people you know, when they find out what your book is about?
The strange thing is how people assume they know what my book is about before I tell them. Almost always, when I told someone I was writing a book about eating animals, they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It’s a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.

What expectations did you have when you started writing this book, and how did they match up with what you found in the course of your research?
I assumed my book would end up being a straightforward case for vegetarianism. It didn’t. Factory farming turned out to be significantly more horrible than I was expecting it to be (if in different ways), but the best family farms exceeded my expectations in the other direction. I wouldn’t eat what they produce, but they made a philosophical case against meat eating impossible for me to make.

How do you think your book fits in with other recent books on the ethics and politics of food, such as Michael Pollan’s books and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle?
It’s quite different. I’m a great admirer of Pollan and Kingsolver, but their books stop short of serious discussions of meat.

Do you see a connection between your novels, which concerned the Holocaust and September 11th, and the topic of Eating Animals?
No.

What are some of the differences you have found between writing nonfiction and writing fiction?
Fiction writing is the most liberating thing I know how to do. The singular constraint is my own imagination. Nonfiction is all constraint. Of course there’s plenty of room for interpretation, and style and so on, but I always felt hemmed in by reality. How much more readable I could have made this book, how much stronger the argument, if I weren’t constrained by how things actually are!

You found yourself in some unusual situations in the course of researching this book, such as sneaking into a turkey farm in the middle of the night with an animal rights activist. Did you ever feel that you were in over your head? What was it like to take those steps?
Over my head would be an understatement. I was scared shitless much of the time, angry at myself for having ended up in such positions. I didn’t want to die at the end of some farmer’s rifle, or worse, because of a case of campylobacter. That having been said, it would have been impossible to write this book without seeing the insides of these farms. And having spent more than a year trying the old-fashioned way (letters and phone calls), at a certain point, I had to get in over my head.

How do you think people will react to this book?
I have no idea. Different people will react differently, of course. That much I know. And I know that not everyone will agree with my conclusions. But I hope that readers will see the importance and urgency of the questions.

How much did you know about the history or philosophy of animal agriculture before you began researching and writing this book?
I knew precious little. And the further I got into my research, the better I understood how little I knew. The history, in particular, is important, because one of the most startling things about our present system of animal agriculture is just how new and radically different it is. Factory farms now produce more than 99% of the animals raised for meat in this country. Eighty years ago, there were no factory farms. The suddenness of the change suggests many things, but at the very least we could say that it holds the promise of a quick reversal.

You talk about how the farming industry has tried, largely successfully, to coopt the language of animal welfare for its own purposes, promising that their chickens are “free-range,” for example, when often that simply means that the chickens can see the outdoors through a small screened window. Do you have any suggestions for how consumers can be certain that the products they buy really do come from farms that treat their animals humanely?
The only way to be sure, for now, is to visit the farms and see for yourself. But then, of course, there’s the problem of knowing how those farms operate over time—what they look like when no one is looking. And how frequent are mistakes? So perhaps it’s good to visit the farm on more than one occasion, and ideally as an unannounced visit. If that sounds hugely inconvenient, or downright impossible (as it does for me), I would suggest you just refrain from eating those products.

How can consumers effectively protest if they decide they don’t want to support factory farms?
There’s no protest more effective than saying no. Just order something else on the menu. From that protest, there are a few ways to go. Some will decide to eat meat from small, family farms that practice sustainable agriculture and treat their animals humanely. Others, like me, will simply say no to all meat.

You began working on this book after your son was born. Is he old enough now to understand why you don’t eat meat? Does he make any of his own food choices yet?
All children understand why people wouldn’t eat meat. The burden of education falls to parents who feed their children meat. Killing animals for food—even when done in the most humane ways—is antithetical to everything else parents teach their children about animals. Animals are the heroes of children’s books, the stuffed toys kids fall asleep with, pets, objects of fascination and wonder. No parent would stand idly by as his or her child abused an animal.

None of this necessarily says anything about the rightness or wrongness of eating animals—we raise our children with all different kinds of over-simplicities, half-truths and make believe. But in the three years I spent researching animal farming, I didn’t meet a single slaughterer who was perfectly comfortable with killing animals. That says something. Our taste for animals can be lost, but our discomfort with what we do to them cannot.

In any case, my son is now old enough to understand that he doesn’t eat animals, and that most of his friends do. We’ve had numerous conversations about it, but he’s never needed a second explanation for why we don’t.

What’s on your family’s Thanksgiving menu this year (and are you doing the cooking again this time)?
I will be cooking Thanksgiving dinner. I haven’t yet planned a menu, but it’s pretty much all that you’d expect—minus the turkey, that is. No tofurkey for us. No faux anything. All real food, as much bought from our local farmers market as possible. A few dishes will be awesome, a few will fall flat, we’ll all talk and laugh and go to bed full.

Author photo by Gian luca Gentilini

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Cookbooks

Anne Byrn

Interview by BookPage staff

Does your family have one very special holiday tradition?
I guess our most favorite is the annual making of chocolate toffee for gifts. This was a recipe my mother prepared only once a year, and I am carrying on that tradition for her.

What are you most looking forward to during the holiday season?
I always say, slowing down, but we never do! So I'll say the sights, smells and sounds of Christmas–the decorated tree, the house perfumed with pine and the voices of family and friends dear to me.

What's your favorite holiday book or song?
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I never tire of the story.

Why do books make the best gifts?
They're timeless, can be shared with others and can be read aloud or to yourself.

What books are you planning to give to friends and family?
Calder Game by Blue Balliett, The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown and The Help by Kathryn Stockett.

What are…

Women's Fiction Inspirational Fiction

Karen Kingsbury

Interview by BookPage staff

What marks the start of the holiday season for you?
Christmas is the most special time ever at our house. We mark the start of the season by decorating our house, transforming it into a Christmas wonderland the day after Thanksgiving. Pretty soon after that we have a gingerbread house-making competition for our six kids. They form teams of two and spend an afternoon working on their houses and listening to Christmas music. It's always a day we look forward to, and the resulting creations become part of our decorations. We also start on December 1st with our Advent calendars.

Does your family have one very special holiday tradition?
We have so many! One favorite is going Christmas caroling every year. We take a day and bake platefuls of Christmas cookiesóall the old family recipes that have been around for generations. Then we decorate them with festive wrappings and bows and take them to friends and family. We never go in or accept other gifts, but rather we stand on the porch and sing a few songs, then we're on our way. It's always a great time, and part of our what makes Christmas the most special time of year for us.

What are you most looking forward to during the holiday season?
I look forward to the atmosphere of Christmas, and the traditions that make it so memorable. Baking cookies, playing special Christmas music, reading books aloud, doing the Advent calendar, Christmas movies—The Preacher's Wife, It's a Wonderful Life and Scrooge; and spending more time with family. Here in the Northwest, it gets dark before five o'clock during the Christmas season. This is always a wonderful thing, because it invites cozy nights near the fireplace.

What ís your favorite holiday book or song?
Every year we read The Greatest Christmas Pageant Ever. We read it out loud over five or six nights, and the kids hang on every word. We also love reading my Christmas book, Gideon's Gift. The kids love the part where old Earl has a change of heart because of the gift from sick little Gideon.

Why do books make the best gifts?
Books bring people together. They create moments and special family bonding times along with memories of shared togetherness. Also, books give us a way to connect our emotions and feelings through the words of someone else.

What was the best book you read this year?
Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. I love his approach and voiceóvery authentic.

Whatís your number one resolution for 2010?
As always, it'll be to make a plan and stay with it.

Nonfiction Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Kenneth T. Jackson, editor

Interview by Alden Mudge

It’s not often that an encyclopedia is a popular success. “Usually you’ll see encyclopedias in multivolumes and priced for many hundreds of dollars, and clearly the marketing plan is to sell to libraries,” says Kenneth T. Jackson, editor in chief of The Encyclopedia of New York City during a call that catches him in San Francisco as he is heading home from Shanghai, where he has been during sabbatical leave from Columbia University.

But from the day in 1982, when Edward Tripp, the late, great head of Yale University Press, drove down from New Haven to discuss an idea for a book about New York with Jackson, a prominent urban historian with near-encyclopedic knowledge of the history of New York City, the plan was to create a book for the general reader that was both authoritative and quirky. The idea, Jackson recalls, was “to put it all in one volume, make it relatively inexpensive, and see if it would sell.”

The first edition of The Encyclopedia of New York City, published in 1995, has gone through seven printings, sold tens of thousands of copies, and spawned a host of imitators in cities and regions around the country. President Clinton took it along as a gift for his hosts during a trip to China. It was part of the bet between mayors when the New York Giants played the Baltimore Ravens in the Super Bowl. As reference books go, it has been a smash hit.

Another measure of its success are the hundreds and hundreds of letters Jackson has received from readers—New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers alike—offering opinions and suggestions about the book. Some requested factual corrections—“it’s on the northwest corner not the southwest corner.” Some suggested additions. Some excoriated Jackson for omissions. Joe DiMaggio, for instance, is mentioned a number of times in the first edition, but he doesn’t have an entry all his own. What? No entry for the Yankee Clipper? “I was hammered for leaving out Joe D,” says Jackson ruefully.

Well, DiMaggio fans, Yankee fans and New York City fans can rejoice. Joe DiMaggio has his own entry in the extraordinarily appealing new edition of The Encyclopedia of New York City. And so do hundreds of other people, places and events.

“Generally, you had to be dead to be in the first edition,” Jackson says. “Now we have more living people. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and the Subway Hero [Wesley Autrey, a construction worker who leapt onto the tracks in 2007 to save a 19-year-old NY Film Academy student who had fallen after a seizure], for example. We have several entries on the World Trade Center 9/11 attack. There are a lot of things like the E-ZPass and the MetroCard that didn’t exist when the first edition came out and which are huge issues today. Clearly one of the biggest stories, maybe the biggest story in New York in the last 20 years, has been the spectacular decline in crime. I mean 75 percent. It’s not just a few percent; it’s massive. And that has happened mostly since the first edition appeared.”

The new edition is more than 200 pages longer than the first edition, contains over 5,000 entries and more than 700 luminous photos, maps, charts and illustrations. “Amazingly they [Yale University Press] are holding the price at the same place it was 15 years ago,” Jackson says of the $65 book. “I still don’t know how it’s as inexpensive as it is.”

According to Vadim Staklo, Yale University Press’ in-house editor on the project, Jackson himself played a major role in keeping the price of the new edition down. “Ken Jackson raised a significant amount of money, which for the most part went into editorial development. That’s where the huge cost is. He paid for permissions to use photographs. He paid for the hours that his team of editors devoted to this project. He paid for the compensation to the contributors.”

That may be more inside baseball than even the most avid Joe DiMaggio fan might like, but the hard work of putting together a 1560-page encyclopedia lies in ceaseless attention to detail. Working within a editorial framework he established in the first edition, Jackson orchestrated the work of roughly 60 assistant editors and 800 contributors, many of them prominent scholars and writers who, at 10 cents a word, wrote mostly for love of the project. “You’d have to live on a pretty limited budget to make a living writing for an encyclopedia,” Jackson says wryly.

The editorial team reviewed and revamped most of the entries from the first edition, added hundreds and hundreds of new entries, and removed some outdated entries. “We got rid of entries on things like law firms, which we found people didn’t look up. They changed so fast that people were really using the Internet for that.”

And speaking of the Internet, Jackson says, “The difference between an encyclopedia like this and the Internet is that when people go to the Internet to look something up they only get what they’re looking up. But so much of what you find in this book is serendipity. Say you’re looking up Sandy Kofax and near it is an entry on the Ku Klux Klan. Who thinks of the Ku Klux Klan in New York City? But there it is. There are so many things like that throughout the book, where you look up one thing and your eye falls on another.”

Jackson’s own eyes have fallen on every single word of the new edition, a prodigious accomplishment in and of itself. He has also written numerous entries for the book, drawing on his vast knowledge of the city after years of exploring it and teaching its history. For decades, Jackson has taught a course on the history of New York City that includes field trips by bus and subway to the far reaches of the city and an immensely popular all-night bike ride from Morningside Heights to Brooklyn. The class still usually draws more than 300 students. “The university prides itself on small classes, so it doesn’t really like the fact that it’s so large,” Jackson says. “But it’s a very large class. It’s huge.” Big and popular, much like The Encyclopedia of New York City itself.

“So many people have been through the New York City grinder,” Jackson says. “They come as a young person, they leave or retire and now live in Las Vegas or Florida or Vermont or wherever but they retain that feeling of having lived in New York. They know where the D train goes and the Shuttle. They know all these things and they feel a little piece of New York will always be inside them. That’s why I think this sells well even outside the city.”

After living and working for 42 years in New York, Jackson still retains his Tennessee drawl. But when he is enthusiastic, as he is about The Encyclopedia of New York City, he talks a mile a minute, like any good New Yorker. At the end of conversation, however, Jackson slows down to make a point. “Obviously you can say more or write more specialized books about this city. But there is no other book that does what this one does.”

And that, dear reader, is the unvarnished truth.

History

David Halberstam

Interview by Eve Zibart

Almost exactly a century after America’s first civil rights war began with the artillery shelling of Fort Sumter, the nation’s second civil rights revolution was launched with a much quieter, but in some ways far more powerful, bombshell. It was called Big Saturday: Saturday, February 27, 1960.

A group of some 300 well-dressed college students, nearly all of them black, walked quietly from a black Baptist church in North Nashville to the central shopping district downtown, entered a handful of prominent department stores and sat down at the lunch counters, waiting to be served. Although it was not the first time some of them had done so, and although another band of protesters in Greensboro, North Carolina, had also organized what became quickly known as a sit-in, the Big Saturday demonstration proved to be the first action — the first violence, the first bloodletting — in the long and cruel campaign to win equal rights for black Americans. Eighty-one of the protesters, many badly beaten, were taken to jail: none of the white assailants was arrested.

The Big Saturday protesters had formed a group the size of a first-year college lecture course. Five years later, a crowd only twice as large — still barely the size of a small church congregation — walked six blocks from a Selma church to a bridge across the Alabama River. On the other side waited a "sea of Alabama state troopers," as march leader John Lewis later recalled it. Lewis and Hosea Williams moved on quietly until they were within speaking distance of the guard, knelt and began to pray. And as they knelt there, their hands clasped and their heads bent, the state troopers charged, bludgeoning the protesters with clubs and raking them with tear gas. That day, March 7, 1965, became known as Bloody Sunday.

"It was a war," says journalist/author David Halberstam, who covered those early sit-ins as a young reporter for The [Nashville] Tennessean and who shortly after made his reputation covering the war in Vietnam for the New York Times. "Martin Luther King was the general, and these kids were the foot soldiers, the shock troops . . . who deliberately picked out the most dangerous places to put their bodies on the line. They were like the airborne brigades that dropped in on D-Day.

"And the more I looked back at it, the more I found out about the Freedom Rides, the more respect I had for their extraordinary courage," says Halberstam, who had been sent abroad in the early ’60s but returned for a short time toward the end of the period. "Mississippi in 1964 was scarier than Vietnam."

Nearly 40 years after he covered the early sit-ins in Nashville, Halberstam has returned to reread, and to rediscover, his first big story, one that perhaps he is less well-known for but which meant as much to him and his forging of a professional ethic as his Vietnam coverage. The Children, Halberstam’s evocation of the central characters in the Nashville movement, "brings me back to a particular point in my career that I’m extremely proud of — and going back to these stories all those years ago, I was pleasantly surprised" by the maturity of his reporting.

The Children painstakingly recreates the lives of the eight young men and women who became the core committee of the Nashville Movement, layering their memories, their fears, and their victories in overlapping chapters. It was a testament, Halberstam says, "to the nobility of ordinary people, acting upon the democratic ideal."

In 1960, Halberstam writes, "They did not think of themselves in those days as being gifted or talented or marked for success, or for that matter particularly heroic, and yet from that little group would come a senior U.S. Congressman [Georgia’s John Lewis]; the mayor of a major city [Marion Barry of Washington, D.C.]; the first black woman psychiatrist to be tenured at Harvard medical school [Gloria Johnson-Powell]; one of the most distinguished public health doctors in America [Rodney Powell]; and a young man who would eventually come back to be the head of the very college in Nashville he now attended [Bernard Lafayette of American Baptist College]."

"These young people were not ’empowered,’" Halberstam says soberly, "they were scarcely members of the privileged class. In fact, most of them came from dramatically underprivileged circumstances. Yet somehow they found the faith to make this country worthy of its promises in the face of constant physical danger."

Their revolution was greatly assisted by the coincidence of two unrelated historical forces: the growing appeal of moral rather than physical authority, as articulated by Mohandas Gandhi, whose philosophy of passive resistance they adopted; and the emergence of television as a national "eye" (the rise of American media being a subject Halberstam has explored in other books as well). The violence, the immediate enormity of it and the undeniable, almost contagious ugliness of it struck the American public as forcibly as video from Vietnam, the first "armchair war," would only a couple of years later.

In fact, it might well be said that the Civil Rights Movement was the real first armchair war. Because when television showed children being blasted down streets with water guns, or when newspapers all over the country printed the photograph of a state trooper splitting open the head of a praying John Lewis, it made every American citizen a witness to such inhumanity, and forced each to make a moral choice of his or her own. "Their ability to use television in a moral sense, to dramatize on TV what it cost America to be racist and to maintain the system of segregation" was an argument of irrefutable power.

Against what might have seemed overwhelming logistical and political odds, the war was won.

"It was an extraordinary triumph," says Halberstam. "In 1960, Congress was dominated by a decrepit generation of Southern leadership that was dead set against them; the Justice Department grudgingly supported them; JFK thought they were a pain in the ass; and the FBI, or Hoover, was violently opposed to civil rights. Four years later, both houses of Congress were competing to pass legislation, Hoover had gradually come to respect them, and [President] Johnson was their greatest ally.

"And they succeeded in doing it all really on a moral principle. They set out to appeal to the conscience of the federal government, to draw the beast of segregation out from under cover and make the American people see the price the country was paying to remain segregated: Bull Connor and his police dogs and the fire hoses and the cattle prods."

When Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, John Lewis was there.

Eve Zibart is a staff writer with The Washington Post.

Almost exactly a century after America's first civil rights war began with the artillery shelling of Fort Sumter, the nation's second civil rights revolution was launched with a much quieter, but in some ways far more powerful, bombshell. It was called Big Saturday: Saturday, February…

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