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Children's & YAPicture Book

Jon J. Muth

Reading a new book by author and illustrator Jon J. Muth is a bit like pulling open a door and stepping into another world. Since 1999, when Come On, Rain!, his first picture book, was published, readers have eagerly awaited each new title by this talented artist. Muth's latest book, Stone Soup, a beautiful, heartwarming retelling of the traditional tale, is destined to become a classic.

Muth came to children's books through an unusual path: he has been a well-known illustrator of comic books for nearly two decades, and his groundbreaking artwork has been published in both the U.S. and Japan. After his son was born, Muth developed a comic book inspired by his experiences as a new father. One day he brought his illustrations to Scholastic Press, hoping to turn them into a book for children.

"They weren't exactly sure about publishing what I had brought them, but in the meantime, they asked if I might be interested in illustrating a manuscript they had received by Newbery Award winner Karen Hesse," Muth recalls. "The writing in Come On, Rain! was so beautiful, I immediately said yes." Come On, Rain!, the story of a young girl celebrating a summer rainstorm, earned Muth a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators. In 2000, he illustrated Gershon's Monster: A Story for the Jewish New Year by Eric Kimmel, which was an ALA Notable Book, winner of the Sydney Taylor Award and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.

Muth evoked his own childhood memories for the urban setting of Come On, Rain!. "I grew up in Cincinnati and can remember the intense heat of the streets in summer," says the soft-spoken artist, who now lives in upstate New York.

But Muth transports readers to a very different place and time in The Three Questions (2002), a retelling of a story by Leo Tolstoy, which Muth both wrote and illustrated. Here, a young boy named Nikolai roams through an impressionistic, magical landscape evocative of old Chinese brush paintings. Nikolai is searching for answers to the most important questions in life and finds resolution through his adventures with a panda and her child. Along the way, Nikolai gets advice from a wise turtle called Leo, named after Tolstoy himself, one of Muth's favorite writers.

Although the original tale of Stone Soup has roots in Europe, Muth has set his version in China, using Buddhist story traditions. Three Ch'an (Zen) monks named Hok, Lok and Siew, based on characters prominent in Chinese folklore, come upon a village where people are weary, suspicious and unhappy, and work only for themselves.

To help the villagers find happiness, the monks decide to show them how to make stone soup. By the end of the story, the villagers have come together in a feast, celebrating their community, and the things that make us all truly rich. Once again, Muth's graceful, impressionistic watercolors, rich with Chinese symbols, transport readers to another time and place.

Perhaps one reason illustrating children's books comes naturally to him is his ability to see the world from a child's perspective. "I have learned to make myself small and run around inside my stories, to think like a child," says Muth, who sees his role as more than just "decorating" a text. "I am interested in that "”third thing' that happens when you connect words and pictures," he says.

Looking at Muth's books, a very simple word comes to the reader's mind: magic.

Deborah Hopkinson's latest book for young readers is Girl Wonder: A Baseball Story in Nine Innings.

Reading a new book by author and illustrator Jon J. Muth is a bit like pulling open a door and stepping into another world. Since 1999, when Come On, Rain!, his first picture book, was published, readers have eagerly awaited each new title by this…

Children's & YA

Ann Brashares

Ann Brashares has taken the teen world by storm. A former editor, last fall she broke out from behind the scenes with her first novel, the surprise bestseller The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. This year, she returns with another book for savvy young readers, a smart sequel to her first book called The Second Summer of the Sisterhood.

With her newest title, Brashares again takes us into the hearts and minds of four teenage girlfriends, Tibby, Carmen, Lena and Bridget, whose mothers met at a prenatal aerobics class while they were still in the womb. "When I thought about when these girls become friends, it was never early enough," says the author. "I wanted a totally unquestioned relationship to one another, like siblings." And Brashares has indeed created a sisterhood with these girls a set of siblings like no other: one is Greek, one Latino, one blonde and one somewhat nondescript. While the author does hint a little at the ethnicity and background of each of her characters, she leaves much to the imagination.

"I wanted to indicate that there is variety and a general openness among the girls," she explains. "It’s a colorful picture, but not specifically drawn."

More important than their backgrounds, though, are their friendships. Realistically enough, each girl has her own quirks, and she is loved by the others in the group for them. Brashares expertly captures the essence of true girl power through these characters, but she is also able to express the emotions and difficulties that almost every teenager goes through. Brashares’ first book centered on a "magic" pair of jeans (any pair of pants that can fit perfectly on four unique teenage bodies has to have special powers). The girls pass these jeans along to each other throughout the summer and find romance, friendship and strength by wearing them. As each of the "sisters" takes her turn with the pants, she finds that the summer isn’t filled with all the happiness she had hoped it would be: Tibby has to learn the hard way who her real friends and family are; Carmen jealously destroys her mother’s new relationship; Bridget faces the truth about her mother’s death; and Lena deals with an unexpected pregnancy.

Indeed, the first passing of the pants proves to be bad magic rather than the good omen that the girls had envisioned. But as the pants and the summer move on, the girls come to realize that it’s not the pants that help them survive their traumas and see them through their joyous moments, but the closeness and comfort of their strong, lasting friendships. "I think of the pants as pulling them into the plots of their lives," says Brashares, "and there needed to be a challenge, something difficult in their lives." Compared to the first book, the second is a bit more daunting. The challenges the four mates face are somewhat more adult in nature: restoring faith in friends and family, dealing with a single parent’s romantic life, coming face-to-face with death.

"The girls are aging with each book and will continue to do so," says Brashares. "I felt that they were more mature and capable of dealing with some weightier issues." Brashares’ books aren’t just how-to guides to surviving the curve balls of the teenage years. They are a peek into the lives of everyday people who have their own personalities, styles, histories and dreams. Love, friendship, commitment and honesty are important elements here, and Brashares combines them all flawlessly.

So what’s next for the Sisterhood? "I’m not sure where it’s all going," admits Brashares, "but it’s going somewhere." At the very least, we’ll see another summer of trials, tribulations and triumphs from the girls, and we may possibly see a glimpse of their colorful faces on the big screen. But time will tell with all of that. Until then, remember: Pants=love. Love your pals. Love yourself.

Heidi Henneman writes from San Francisco.

Ann Brashares has taken the teen world by storm. A former editor, last fall she broke out from behind the scenes with her first novel, the surprise bestseller The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. This year, she returns with another book for savvy young…

Eric Schlosser

Like a modern-day Dante, self-taught social explorer Eric Schlosser descends into the darker layers of American life in search of the very core of contradictions that defines the nation itself. His 2001 debut, Fast Food Nation, a super-sized stomach-turning expose of the fast food industry and indictment of corporate globalization, heralded the arrival of a social crusader for the new millennium. Schlosser is Michael Moore without the bullhorn, Hunter S. Thompson without the drugs, a cautious optimist who writes and speaks in the measured tones of NPR's All Things Considered. His is a welcome voice of quiet reason and contained outrage in these high-decibel times.

In his second book, Reefer Madness, Schlosser digs deep into America's black market economy that some economists estimate at $1 trillion untaxed dollars annually nearly 10 percent of our gross domestic product. He focuses on the three most lucrative underground industries marijuana, pornography and cheap migrant labor that have largely contributed to the unprecedented growth of the American black market during the past 30 years.

In three interconnected essays combining history and statistics with insightful reportage and fascinating interviews, Reefer Madness explores the ways in which the American underground has altered our nation's culture. In the title essay, Schlosser shows how America's war on pot has backfired, actually fueling the demand for the weed and artificially buoying its market price. The section on migrant workers, "In the Strawberry Fields," focuses on the faceless laborers forced by poverty to sleep in the fields in which they toil, often within yards of the upper crust communities that buy the fruits of their labor at bargain prices. "An Empire of the Obscene" is a fascinating portrait of Reuben Sturman, a self-made multimillionaire whose rise from staging Midwest stag nights to overseeing a global porn operation reads like the dark side of the American dream. According to Schlosser, the roots of the modern underground can be directly traced back to the late 1960s, when America's youth culture broke free from mainstream values and mores. A decade later, anti-tax and anti-government conservatives helped push the business of sin to unimagined levels.

Schlosser says the '60s marked the birth of our national addiction to consumption, whether of pornography, drugs or Happy Meals. "It's a complex legacy. A lot of what is best in our culture did spring from that time, from the environmental movement to women's rights and civil rights," he says. "But the darker side would be the drug culture and the spread of this culture. Even though I really believe that the marijuana laws are absurd, the culture surrounding drug taking is a very unhealthy one. I think a lot of the social causes of the '60s petered out into drugs and the drug culture." Schlosser's interest in social causes came about by accident. A native of New York City, he graduated from Princeton University with a history degree, then spent years as a struggling playwright and novelist ("I was remarkably unsuccessful at both," he admits). Friends finally convinced him to give journalism a try. His only brush with nonfiction had been as an undergrad in a class taught by the legendary John McPhee. "He had just a huge, huge impact on me," Schlosser says. "He was a phenomenal teacher and an incredible writer. It sounds so corny, but it was this class that I had taken a decade earlier that gave me the chutzpah to try, and also the foundation to build upon." A few story assignments from Atlantic Monthly magazine introduced Schlosser to the vast country west of the Hudson that he's been exploring ever since. He begins each project with extensive library research, burrowing his way down through general reading into academic and specialized publications.

"I don't have any researcher or anyone helping me. I enjoy the process of discovering and all the background reading. It's not miserable work at all. And when you then get out in the field, you know what you're looking for and the conversations are more interesting." One might imagine that pot farmers and pornographers are reluctant to be interviewed.

"They are and they're not," Schlosser says. "It's amazing who you'll meet if you just go to Indiana and sit in a bar. A lot of these people feel cut off from the media, cut off from the mainstream. Once it became clear that I wasn't a narc or wasn't going to rat anybody out, it was hard getting some of them to stop talking." A far bigger challenge is squeezing all the research and interviews between the covers. To help make room, Schlosser keeps his quotes to a miserly minimum and the emotional volume turned down low.

"I'm trying to get people to think, and the writing style is deliberately calm and not full of invective against people who may disagree with me," he says.

Working among America's least fortunate, whether migrant workers who sleep in the field or pot smokers serving life sentences, has had an impact on Schlosser. "The hard part is reconciling their lives with my life. The challenge is not just to have this expanding human experience but then to put into words that convey what I've seen. I've got to tell you the words don't even come close to the reality, no matter how hard I try." That process is not likely to get easier: in his next book, Schlosser will take on America's prison system. Despite the upsetting images that come with this territory, Schlosser remains an optimist.

"People can't believe it, but I am," he chuckles. "And I think it's optimism that allows me to tackle some very dark subjects to begin with. I mean, if I were totally pessimistic, then why even bother? But having been in meatpacking communities which are grim, and these farm worker encampments which are really grim, and the prisons which are the grimmest places I have ever been, it has left me even more optimistic. A lot of the trends I've written about are getting better. I'm not taking credit for it; I think the success of Fast Food Nation is due to the fact that people were starting to wonder about those issues anyway. I really am optimistic, at least in the long term."

Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Florida.

Like a modern-day Dante, self-taught social explorer Eric Schlosser descends into the darker layers of American life in search of the very core of contradictions that defines the nation itself. His 2001 debut, Fast Food Nation, a super-sized stomach-turning expose of the fast food…

Travel

Isabel Allende

Like many writers, novelist Isabel Allende thinks of herself as an outsider. "I have always been by temperament a dissident and a rebel," she says during a call to her home in Marin County, California. "This has been my struggle all my life."

But it’s one thing to be somewhat alienated from family and social class, as Allende was in her youth, and quite another to be sent into exile from your homeland. Allende fled her native Chile shortly after a CIA-assisted coup on Tuesday, September 11, 1973, led to the overthrow and death of her uncle Salvador Allende Gossens, the democratically elected president of Chile. The coup resulted in a brutal military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. From exile in Venezuela, on January 8, 1981, Allende began writing a letter to her grandfather, an old-school Chilean who was nearing his 100th birthday and in failing health. The letter soon developed into Allende’s mesmerizing first novel, The House of the Spirits, which marked the beginning of her extraordinary literary career.

Outsiders almost always have an intense and ambivalent longing for the inside. This is certainly true of Allende. While her marvelous new memoir, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, offers stinging criticism of her native land – its machismo, its religious and political oppression, its shameful treatment of native populations – Allende’s love for Chile is so evident and eloquent that many readers will consider packing their bags and booking the next flight to Santiago.

"When you are born in a place, especially a small place that feels like a village, you put up with the bad things and love the good things," Allende says. "There is a strong sense of community, of family, or extended family that still exists there. People in Chile will tell you, No, that’s over, it’s gone, it’s not like it was before.’ But coming from the United States, it’s the first thing that you see."

Allende has lived in the San Francisco Bay area since she met and married an American attorney, whose life and adventures were the basis for her novel The Infinite Plan. "California resembles Chile more than any other place in the United States," she says. "Not only the landscape and the vegetation and the weather, but the fact that some sense of Hispanic culture is very present here. My husband says that Chile looks like California looked 40 years ago."

Since Pinochet stepped down in 1994 and democratic institutions have slowly returned to Chile, Allende has been making annual visits home to see her mother, stepfather and members of her large extended family. Some of her family members read the manuscript for My Invented Country and, she says, "everyone had a different opinion." "I thought the book was going to be terribly criticized in Chile. But, actually, it was pirated immediately, it was sold in the streets, it became number one on the bestseller list, and the reviews have been great."

This is a surprise, and Allende explains it this way: "Many years ago when I was young, I used to write feminist articles, humorous articles, making fun of men and the things that men do because they are so macho. I would get loads of fan letters from men who enjoyed the articles and said they had a friend just like the man I described. It was always a friend. It was never them. I think that is what happened with this book. Readers think this is how the other Chileans are."

Allende’s sense of humor in conversation and on the page is enthralling. And as readers of her novels and previous memoir, Paula, know, she is a gifted storyteller who forges an enchanting amalgam of memory and imagination. "Memory and imagination are so closely intertwined that I can hardly separate them," Allende says. "If you and I see the same event, we will perceive it differently and we will remember it differently. When I wrote my very first memoir, which was Paula, I was in an altered state. My daughter Paula was dying. But even so, in the process of writing the book, I was perfectly conscious of the fact that I would choose what I was going to write and what I was going to omit, what adjectives I was selecting to describe a situation. That is an exercise in imagination; that’s a choice. Because if we were to remember without imagination, we would use no adjectives. It would be just nouns. But in life we remember the color, the flavor, the emotion. Not the facts."

According to Allende, the facts of life are mixed. "The world is a horrible place but also a wonderful place. For every horrible person out there doing evil, a thousand people are doing good. But good is silent, discrete, unassuming, whereas evil is so noisy. We only hear about the evil in the world."

In the Chile of Allende’s youth and, in a more menacing way under the dictatorship, "life was supposed to be uncomfortable and unsafe. . . . Even if you broke your neck tripping on the sidewalk there was no one to blame. It was your own fate."

This perspective made it very difficult for Allende to feel at home in the United States. "When I came here I had the feeling that this country was invulnerable, invincible, that the people had the arrogance of the winners, and that I could never belong here. The idea that you could go through life without fear, that you could go through life always feeling safe, that you are insured against every hazard of life, was just so foreign to me."

Exactly 28 years after her uncle’s violent demise led to her exile from Chile, on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Allende discovered a suddenly vulnerable America and felt she "had gained a country." In conversation, Allende says My Invented Country "was born out of a crazy idea when my grandson Alejandro said ‘I think you are going to live at least three more years,’ and I wondered, well, where do I want to live them." That is no doubt true. But it is also true that the two September 11s mark the metaphorical beginning and end of Allende’s nostalgic journey. The path she follows between these two points vividly illustrates the good humor, humane spirit, tough mind and open heart we will all require to create a viable home in our new world.

 

Like many writers, novelist Isabel Allende thinks of herself as an outsider. "I have always been by temperament a dissident and a rebel," she says during a call to her home in Marin County, California. "This has been my struggle all my life."

But…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Carolyn Parkhurst

Linguistics professor Paul Iverson’s life is turned upside-down when the body of his young wife Lexy is found beneath their backyard apple tree. Did she fall or did she jump? Only Lorelei, family dog and sole witness to the tragedy, knows for sure. And she’s not talking. Yet.

Carolyn Parkhurst’s inventive debut novel, The Dogs of Babel, traces the bereaved widower’s sometimes bizarre, sometimes touching efforts to teach the King’s English to his baffled canine in a desperate attempt to solve the mystery of his wife’s death.

In its theme, plot and occasional, uncomfortably gruesome detail, The Dogs of Babel bears some similarity to last year’s most audacious exploration of grief, The Lovely Bones. One might even call this The Lovely Dog Bones.

"There’s a real issue of getting readers to suspend their belief when your premise is a man who is trying to teach his dog to talk. That might be a hard thing for readers to buy," Parkhurst admits by phone from her home in Washington, D.C. "My hope is that, as you learn more about Paul and what he’s like, it’s believable that he might follow this unlikely course."

Paul has reason to suspect suicide: Lexy apparently cooked a steak for the dog not long before inexplicably climbing the tree. Later, Paul’s bookshelf is rearranged in an apparent rebus from beyond the pale, and Lexy’s voice turns up on a television ad for a psychic hotline, desperately seeking succor.

"The book is narrated by Paul, so everything we learn about Lexy is filtered through his perception of her," Parkhurst explains. "In the beginning, he’s in this state of fresh grief and he so idealizes her that we don’t really get an accurate picture until a little later in the book when we start to see some of the more troubling aspects of her personality and both the good and bad parts of their relationship. It begs the question: How well do we ever know another person, and when that person is gone, how do we piece together what they were really like?"

Paul’s journey is a perilous one. As an academic, he seeks scientific answers, even as his research with Lorelei makes him the biggest joke on campus. More troubling, his quest leads him to a group of nutcases called the Cerberus Society who attempt to make dogs talk by altering their anatomy through grisly amateur surgery.

That grim detour was particularly difficult for Parkhurst, who lost her own dog Chelsea midway through the two-year process of writing of the book.

"The only reason I put it in there is it’s almost the logical extreme of what might happen if you took Paul’s ideas all the way, if you put them in the hands of someone who was truly crazy instead of just off-balance with grief. I hope people don’t get too upset by that," she says.

Lexy’s avocation as a mask maker serves as a leitmotif throughout the tale. On their first date, Lexy drags Paul to a masquerade wedding; later, she develops a morbid fascination with death when she is hired to make masks of the recently deceased. "I collect masks and find them very interesting," Parkhurst admits. "It works well with Paul thinking about Lexy after she’s gone and wondering how much of the time she was wearing a mask and how much of the time she was revealing her true self."

Parkhurst, who holds a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from American University, had written only short stories prior to jumping into the novel. Her own fear of losing loved ones, which sparked the central story, was heightened when she became pregnant with her first child midway into the manuscript.

"I had a lot of fears about becoming a parent, which I think is normal," she recalls. "You start to say, am I really allowed to do this? Am I going to screw up this kid in some way I can’t even imagine yet? I took those feelings and amplified them in Lexy. " Some of the book’s more fruitful ideas came to the author while she was goofing off.

"I actually find procrastination to be a fairly useful tool for me," she chuckles. "For instance, the phone psychic. I was supposed to be writing one day and I wasn’t, I was watching the Game Show Network or something, and there was this ad for a telephone psychic with all these voices on the commercial telling the psychic their problems. And I thought, what if Paul was watching this and out came Lexy’s voice?"

The idea of teaching dogs to talk came from a tongue-in-cheek fictional account of such "pioneering research" that Parkhurst had written years earlier.

"I think every dog owner has wondered, what is my dog thinking? What do they make of what they observe about my life? I wish it were true that we could talk and find out what they’re thinking, but I don’t think it’s ever going to happen," Parkhurst says.

By book’s end, Paul does establish a communication of sorts with Lorelei that allows him to get on with his life. It’s an uplifting ending that draws unmistakable parallels between his feelings for Lexy and the unconditional love of man’s best friend.

"I think Paul’s love for Lexy is a little bit less complicated than Lexy’s love for Paul, in the same way that you feel like a dog’s love for you is uncomplicated; they will love you no matter what. There certainly is an element of that in Paul’s feelings for Lexy, but part of his struggle is coming to terms with all of the parts of her personality. There is great richness that she brought to his life, but there were also some very difficult times that he had with her. He’s trying to figure out how to put it all together."

Jay MacDonald lives and writes in Oxford, Mississippi.

 

Linguistics professor Paul Iverson's life is turned upside-down when the body of his young wife Lexy is found beneath their backyard apple tree. Did she fall or did she jump? Only Lorelei, family dog and sole witness to the tragedy, knows for sure. And…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

For Alafair and James Lee Burke, crime fiction is all in the family

In art as in nature, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Case in point: Alafair Burke. The daughter of acclaimed crime writer James Lee Burke was reading aloud from Cool Hand Luke at age 5 and crafting complete mystery stories with cool Burke titles such as The Case of the Cat Who Lost Its Meow long before her classmates had even mastered their ABCs.

Forget nature vs. nurture—Alafair Burke had both growing up at the foot of one of the hardest working authors in crime fiction.

“When people asked what he did, I would say he was a college professor and a writer,” Alafair recalls from Buffalo, New York, during a conference call that included her famous father. “He wrote every day in the house; that was what I would see him do. His good habits, I think, rubbed off on the kids.” Rubbed off, indeed. All four Burke children have been successful in their careers. Andree is a psychologist, Pamala a television ad producer, and Alafair, the youngest, followed her brother Jim Jr. into law as a prosecuting attorney.

“Alafair was a straight-A student from first grade all the way through Stanford law,” the proud father chimes in from the family’s summer home in Missoula, Montana. “She was Phi Beta Kappa at Reed College and graduated at the top of her class at Stanford law.” To which Alafair commences blushing in Buffalo.

“The downside of the story is she gets it from her mom!” James howls, bursting into his distinctive full-throated belly laugh.

Pearl, his wife of 43 years, is an irrepressible Beijing-born painter and photographer who once served as a flight attendant with Air America. The two met as creative writing graduate students at the University of Missouri.

The occasion of this father-daughter tele-reunion is the publication of Judgment Calls, Alafair’s debut legal thriller and first in a planned series. Samantha Kincaid, deputy district attorney for Multnomah County in Portland, Oregon, is old enough to know the ropes but young enough to care. When a 13-year-old prostitute is brutally attacked on the outskirts of town, Kincaid decides to press for an attempted murder conviction against the advice of her boss, Tim O’Donnell, who would rather accept an assault plea.

Kincaid’s moral compass quickly leads her into Portland’s darker corners, where an underage prostitution ring, a headline-making death penalty case and a serial killer make her question her own judgment calls.

Alafair admits she modeled Sam after her own experiences as an assistant Multnomah County D.A.; she spent five years there and tried more than 30 cases, most of them involving domestic violence, before accepting a teaching position at Hofstra School of Law.

“She’s a bit of a tougher egg than I am; she’s probably more of what I strive to be than what I am,” Alafair admits. “She has kind of a crazy personality where she does everything to extremes. She’s a little obsessive.” The title is a lovely double entendre, invoking both the art of the law and its very real consequences. Judgment Calls reveals what really happens in the sidebars and behind closed doors in the judge’s chambers, where life-or-death decisions are never black or white.

“That is something that I might be able to bring from my background that is unique compared to other writers. The prosecutor really wields an incredible amount of discretion,” she says. “Cases that have the potential to have really serious ramifications will be lost in the shuffle of a busy D.A.’s office where every attorney is literally handling hundreds of files a month. The vast majority of criminal cases get pled out and nobody really looks at them.” Alafair showed a knack for the well-turned book title early on. At age 6, she giggled out the title The Lost Get-Back Boogie after listening with her father to a recording of Woody Guthrie’s “Lost Train Blues.” “I went upstairs and wrote that on the title page” of the novel he was then writing, Jim recalls. “The book became infamous for setting the record at 111 as the most rejected title and book in the history of New York publishing. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize after it was finally published by LSU Press,” in 1986.

A love of law and language runs deep as willow roots in the Burke family. Jim estimates there are five generations of lawyers in his bloodline going back to his great-grandfather, Robert Perry, a Louisiana judge whose Civil War adventures Burke chronicled in last year’s White Doves at Morning. Burke himself studied pre-law before writing took a firm grip on him.

Given the bayou setting of her father’s Dave Robicheaux series, some may be surprised to find Alafair’s work set in the Pacific Northwest. In fact, Alafair was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where her father was teaching at Miami-Dade Community College, grew up from age 8 in Wichita, Kansas, where he taught at Wichita State University, and has spent most of her adult life on the West Coast.

Paternal bragging rights aside, Professor Jim gives his straight-A daughter the highest marks on her first book.

“I think this is an exceptional book. One, it’s very well written. The prose is extremely professional. The dialogue is good. It’s a tight book. Alafair always wrote good prose, regardless of the medium. Her essays are lovely pieces of writing; her legalistic writing is exceptional as well. She writes with the authority of experience, and there’s no surrogate for that.” Might Samantha Kincaid and Dave Robicheaux one day cross paths? In a strange way, they already have.

In 1988’s Heaven’s Prisoners, Robicheaux adopted a 6-year-old named Alafair, whom he saved from drowning when a plane full of illegal immigrants crashed in the bayou. In Burke’s next Robicheaux adventure, Last Car to Elysian Fields (due in September), Alafair is in Portland working on her first novel.

“I never thought about that, Robicheaux and Kincaid meeting up,” the real Alafair admits. “It’s interesting to think whether those characters would like each other based on first appearances; they’re both quick to sum people up. That would be like worlds colliding.”

In art as in nature, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Case in point: Alafair Burke. The daughter of acclaimed crime writer James Lee Burke was reading aloud from Cool Hand Luke at age 5 and crafting complete mystery stories with cool Burke…
YA FictionYA

Ruta Sepetys

At a time when teen fiction is dominated by vampires, werewolves and time travel, first-time author Ruta Sepetys has written a novel whose horrors are all too real.

Exposing the agonies endured by victims of Josef Stalin’s regime, Between Shades of Gray grips readers from the first page with its against-the-odds survival story. Teenager Lina and her family are forced by the Soviet secret police to leave their home in Lithuania in 1941 and travel in a miserable, crammed train car to labor camps in Siberia, on the verge of starvation. They eventually end up north of the Arctic Circle, where they endure hardships so extreme that readers will be shocked to learn this novel is rooted in historical events.

During an interview with BookPage, Sepetys explains that her connection to this atrocity is personal. Her grandfather was an officer in the Lithuanian army. He was on execution lists when the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in 1939, so he and his wife and son fled to Austria, then Germany, and eventually settled in America. The family members they left behind were deported to work camps and imprisoned.

As Sepetys writes in her author’s note, Stalin was responsible for more than 20 million deaths—including more than a third of the population of Lithuania. But the story of the Baltic deportations is not a well-known part of history. During our conversation, Sepetys explains that, after World War II, people living in Soviet-occupied countries could not speak about Soviet crimes for fear of being punished.

“It’s as if the voice of an entire generation was swallowed,” Sepetys says. “The story sort of went dark and now the people that still have ties to it are in their late 80s. A whisper is left and we’re just about to lose it.”

On her first trip to Lithuania, as an adult, Sepetys met family members and asked to see old pictures. They had to tell her that they’d burned the photos when her grandfather fled—they couldn’t let anyone know they were related.

When she learned of this tragic history, Sepetys saw it as her responsibility to share the story with the world, and tell it as accurately as possible.

“My freedom and everything I have has cost me theirs. My freedom, in the U.S., because my father left, had cost them their freedom. And that’s very heavy, but it made me even more determined that I was going to do this.”

Her family warned that “the world just isn’t interested in this story,” but Sepetys refused to accept that advice. As it turns out, she was right. At the time of our interview, there had been 22 foreign sales of Between Shades of Gray, including one in Lithuania. “This is not about me at all; this is about their story and honoring the people and their experience,” she says.

Though she wanted to share Lithuania’s history, it was important that it be wrapped in fiction. When Sepetys talked to people about their experience during the Soviet occupation, many of her interview subjects had a condition.

“So many people told me, I’ll tell you what happened but you have to promise not to use my name. They were so terrified. Fifty years had passed but the pain was still so raw,” she says. “Fifty years had passed but their hands were still shaking when they spoke.”

Sepetys honored their wishes by drawing on their experiences to create memorable characters. The two who will probably stick with teen readers the most are Lina, the 15-year-old main character, and Andrius, a boy she meets on the long, harrowing train ride to Siberia and with whom she shares a budding romance. The plot centers on the remarkable survival story of Lina and her family as they are forced to travel to different labor camps in extreme conditions—including a camp that is literally at the North Pole.

Although Between Shades of Gray is Sepetys’ debut novel, she is no stranger to the creative process. She has worked in the music business for 20 years, currently as the owner of an artist management company based in Nashville. Besides her day job, she is hard at work on her second book—the story of a murder set in 1950s-era New Orleans.

Sepetys feels that she has found a home with historical fiction. “History holds secrets, and around every corner there is some little-known story,” she says. “Through studying mistakes from the past, hopefully we can learn from our mistakes and create hope for a more just future.”

At a time when teen fiction is dominated by vampires, werewolves and time travel, first-time author Ruta Sepetys has written a novel whose horrors are all too real.

Exposing the agonies endured by victims of Josef Stalin’s regime, Between Shades of Gray grips readers from…

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Gary Paulsen

From running dogs in Alaska’s famous Iditarod to sailing around treacherous Cape Horn by himself to writing more than 190 books, author Gary Paulsen seems to have a passion for life like nobody else. In his new book, The Glass Café (or the Stripper and the State; How My Mother Started a War with the System That Made Us Kind of Rich and a Little Bit Famous), he takes his writing to a new extreme by capturing the unique voice of 12-year-old Tony.

A young boy Paulsen met while living in Hollywood, Tony is, of course, no ordinary kid. He is thoughtful, intelligent, incredibly artistic and the son of a stripper named Al (short for Alice). Even though Al dances for a living, she too is an intelligent, thoughtful person, with a sensibility Paulsen brings out in unsurpassed form. Through a series of misunderstandings, prejudices and comedic moments, he creates an entertaining yet true-to-life account of the struggles single parents often go through and the intense love, protectiveness and loyalty they have for their children.

Paulsen has written numerous books for young readers as well as adults. While he admits there is more adult writing he would like to do, he prefers to reach out to the younger crowd. "I think it’s artistically fruitless to write for adults. They’re locked into car payments and divorce, and not open to new ideas," he explains. "If you really want to write artistically, you have to write for the eighth or ninth grade. Adults just don’t have time to appreciate artistic, new things."

Paulsen has won several Newbery Awards (for such books as The Winter Room, Hatchet and Dogsong), and his titles continue to gain critical acclaim. Oddly enough, English was never one of his favorite subjects in school, and his decision to become a writer came about in a surprising way. "I had become an electronics engineer in the Army, and I was tracking satellites one night when I had an epiphany and realized I needed to be a writer," he recalls.

Even though he had never composed a single story, that night Paulsen walked off his engineering job to begin a career in writing. And the rest, as they say, is history. His many titles have ranged from adult westerns and mysteries to children’s picture books. But his favorites of the bunch are books for young readers that center on tales from his childhood, "all true stories," he says. Paulsen’s next grown-up adventure will be sailing his boat, an 1820s-design sailboat with no motor, around Cape Horn.

"Sailing the Cape is the maximum expression of sailing a boat," he says, "the same way the Iditarod is the maximum expression of running sled dogs." And the maximum expression of writing? "I’m going to write until I die," claims the author.

His trick is to approach the craft the same way he did dog running. "When you’re racing dogs you focus for 20 or so hours at a time, so that’s what I do for writing," says Paulsen. But one thing has changed where his working habits are concerned: instead of writing from the frigid north, he now works on his sailboat, which he navigates on his own for months at a time. "I set the steering vane and write for hours," says Paulsen. During one recent trip, he cranked out four books. "I write until I’m finished," he says, "then I fly back to do book tours."

Paulsen loves the inspiration that being on the open water, miles from land, brings him. "When a story works for me, the hair goes up on my neck," he says. "It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it is elegance." Make no mistake about it: although he has run dogs through 1,200 miles of frozen tundra and although he sails through some of the most treacherous waters on earth, Paulsen’s true passion is writing.

"I am a writer who runs dogs and a writer who sails," he says. "To me, writing is everything. Everything else is just a place to write."

Heidi Henneman writes from San Francisco.

 

From running dogs in Alaska's famous Iditarod to sailing around treacherous Cape Horn by himself to writing more than 190 books, author Gary Paulsen seems to have a passion for life like nobody else. In his new book, The Glass Café (or the Stripper…

Memoir

E. Lynn Harris

As preface to his remarkably honest memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, best-selling novelist E. Lynn Harris offers this epigram: "Work like you don’t need the money, dance like nobody is watching and love like you’ve never been hurt."

Similar grand passions sweep across the pages and back through the years as the ebullient Harris recounts his former double life: by day, the quintessential "buppie," pulling down big bucks as an IBM computer salesman; by night, a closeted gay man searching for storybook love in the callous shadows of the urban club scene.

Hard work, a passion for soul music and the staunch resolve to remain a hopeless romantic enabled him to overcome depression, a suicide attempt and the loss of numerous friends to AIDS. His is a cautionary tale about a cautionless time, an era that fortunately allowed gentle souls such as Harris a few bad choices. What Becomes of the Brokenhearted is not a question here, but an affirmation, perhaps even a prayer.

 

Not many new writers would have the audacity to offer up their memoirs at the tender age of 48. Then again, Harris’ life has been far from ordinary and closer in truth to his eight larger-than-life multiracial, multi-sexual romances, including Invisible Life (1991), Abide with Me (1999) and Any Way the Wind Blows (2001). Harris actually embarked upon his memoirs seven years earlier, both to exorcise his demons and to satisfy fans curious to know where his real life ends and his fiction begins.

"Even as I was spending the last seven years going through my past, people kept saying, why now?" he says by phone from his Atlanta home. "It was very difficult because every time I would go back and write it and read what I had written, I had to relive that part of my life, where now life is so good. I guess that makes you stronger in a lot of ways."

Growing up poor in the shadow of his abusive stepfather Ben in Little Rock, Arkansas, Harris developed an early ability to turn adversity into advantage, lemons into lemonade. The temperamental Ben always called him Mike, after a neighborhood tough, preferring it to his "sissy" given name, Everette Lynn. Harris recounts one Easter when Ben went into a rage and ripped the boy’s brand new Sunday suit because he had buttoned the jacket "like a little girl." His mother and three sisters, dressed in their Easter finery, could only look on in horror.

"At some point in each of our lives we realize that life is not necessarily going to be fair," the author says. "That was the day for me that I knew I was going to have to pick up some skills to survive." When life got messy, he would retreat into the refuge of his imagination, a lush, passionate world far removed from Little Rock. One of the first black students to attend the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the gregarious Harris excelled, becoming the first black cheerleader and yearbook editor. After graduation, IBM recruited him for a sales position in Dallas, where he was once again the oddity, a young black liberal arts grad in an office of older white engineers. It was another world, a white heterosexual world, but one he would conquer with his natural salesmanship. He set his sights on a six-figure salary by age 29; he achieved it at 26.

Harris recalls being suddenly assigned to host two corporate CEOs on a high-stakes junket to San Francisco, a mission for which he was woefully unprepared at 23. Halfway through the first-class flight west, he turned to the two industry titans and admitted that he didn’t have a clue about what he was doing.

"It really helped me a lot because they taught me and they had a great time," he says.

By day, Harris was a straight arrow; by night, he was carefully exploring the gay bars wherever he found himself: Dallas, New York, Washington, D.C. It was the height of the disco era. Although Harris loved the nightlife, it didn’t love him back.

"One of the group used to jokingly refer to me as such a Mary Tyler Moore-type of person, and that was from my Southern upbringing," he says. "Everybody wanted me to be their little brother; they wanted me as a friend. I don’t know if it was the angels protecting me but a lot of these men that I would have jumped at the chance to be intimate with later died [of AIDS]."

"I was basically still trying to be Mr. All-American who just happened to be gay; I mean, the things that I was interested in sports, the theater and dating I wanted it to be romantic. And I kept getting messages like, hey, you don’t get to be romantic in this life. I just could not believe it was all about sex."

The high life did offer temporary relief from chronic depression, but at a heavy cost. Shortly after his 1990 suicide attempt, Harris sobered up, moved to Atlanta and began writing a fictionalized account of his life as a gay black man. When his manuscript for Invisible Life elicited no response from New York publishers, he published it himself and shrewdly placed it in beauty parlors and bookstores where he knew he would find an audience for his thoroughly modern romances.

"Some people can’t understand women going crazy over me at my signings, almost like a rock star, knowing my sexuality. I think it’s because they know my heart and we’ve been through a lot of the same things together."

Harris applauds the recent Supreme Court ruling on gay rights and the growing acceptance of gay marriage.

"I think that the move by the Supreme Court is a real relief. I just hope that people will take it slow. Sometimes so much injury can be done when people feel they are being forced to do something or accept something. I think it’s hard for straight people to understand what it’s like to be gay, but I think more of them are willing to open their minds about the individuals."

If he could, would he change his sexual preference? "No. Ask me that three or four years ago, it might have been different. If a genie came and granted me a wish of not being gay, would I take it? Yes, if it was a genie, because that would be fantasy. If God came, I would say no because that is obviously the way he wanted me."

Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Mississippi.

 

As preface to his remarkably honest memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, best-selling novelist E. Lynn Harris offers this epigram: "Work like you don't need the money, dance like nobody is watching and love like you've never been hurt."

Similar grand passions sweep…

Fiction

Sharyn McCrumb

There are stories hidden in the hills and hollers of Appalachia, and you can find them if you do your homework. Sharyn McCrumb is just the author to unearth the facts, sprinkle them with a little mountain magic and bring them to life in her fiction. McCrumb’s latest book, Ghost Riders, continues the immensely popular ballad novel series for which she is best known. Set in the Appalachian Mountain region of North Carolina and Tennessee, the books are inspired, or perhaps more accurately fortified, by musical soundtracks she compiles herself before beginning the writing process.

"When I’m developing a character," she explains in a telephone interview, "one of the things I ask myself is what music does this person listen to? I have a theory that people who listen to Eminem, for example, and people who listen to Bach probably don’t have the same speech patterns, or even the same cadences. So while I’m working on a particular scene, I listen to music that the character would listen to. I use a lot of Irish music: harp, hammered dulcimer, fiddle tunes. I try to get into their heads via the music."

During her tours and readings for the previous ballad books (which include The Songcatcher, The Rosewood Casket, The Ballad of Frankie Silver, and If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O) McCrumb noticed that people outside the Appalachian region, even great fans of her novels, were not familiar with the music that was tied to them. "I realized that some people didn’t even recognize the song reference in some of the titles, so I devised a program with a folk singer, Jack Hinshelwood. He’s an award-winning bluegrass musician, and he often tours with me now. I do readings from a novel and he does the songs and music related to it."

Aside from collecting the "character music" and completing the actual writing, McCrumb also does an abundance of historical and geological research for her books, particularly with a novel like Ghost Riders that takes place largely during the Civil War. "I spent four years doing research for this book," McCrumb points out, "because even though it’s fiction I had to understand politically what was happening."

Since Ghost Riders uses present-day Civil War re-enactment as a vehicle for the historical part of the story, McCrumb had to make the re-enactment scenes authentic, as well. There are many Civil War buffs, historians and re-enactors who would be unforgiving about a slip-up. "You see," she says, "they take it very seriously why, the color of the horse could be a three-day debate so you really have to do your homework." (The mother of teenagers, McCrumb probably gets a lot of mileage out of that advice.)

The two characters who really come alive in the novel are Zebulon Vance, North Carolina’s Civil War governor, and Malinda "Sam" Blaylock, historical figures McCrumb says she chose because she not only "really wanted to tell both sides," but because she wanted to show the difficulties in choosing any side. "Prior to the firing on Fort Sumter, Governor Vance had been going all over the mountains begging people not to leave the Union, but when his state pulled out, he felt he had no choice but to go with her, so he was kind of forced into it. I thought he was perfect to tell the Confederate side."

Malinda is the wife of Keith Blaylock. She cuts her hair, straps down her bosom and takes off to join the Union army after her husband enlists (despite his own misgivings about the side he chooses) to "look after him." With characters as colorful as this, a story as potent as the Civil War and a writer as competent as McCrumb, who would argue with the odd inaccuracy? But as she writes in her Author’s Note at the end of Ghost Riders, the nitpickers are out there. "My personal favorite so far was the Texas gentleman who tried to tell me how they pronounce Arrowood in east Tennessee, unaware that Arrowood was the name of my east Tennessee grandparents." Oops. He should have done his homework.

"I grew up with this whole idea of narrative connected to song," McCrumb says, describing her childhood in the Appalachian region. "We would be making the several hours’ journey to see one set of grandparents or the other and my father would tell me stories. But he would also sing, and the songs that he liked tended to be short stories set to music, like the ballads."

McCrumb now lives on 80 acres in the Virginia Blue Ridge, less than 100 miles from where her great-grandparents settled in 1790. "We have a pen full of ducklings and geese we’ve raised for the last eight weeks that are due to go out on the pond soon," she says enthusiastically. "We get them from a nearby hatchery when they are just three days old. They arrive looking like dandelions. [She pronounces it "dandy-lions."] But I love to sit on the bank and watch them gliding along; it’s my tranquilizer." Of course, McCrumb does a lot more than watch the ducks swim and daydream. "I try to write between 500 and 1,000 words a day," she says of her writing schedule, "depending on how hard it is, and where I am in the book."

As the mother of teenagers, she chooses to work late at night, starting around 11 p.m. "because then it’s dark and quiet, and I can focus more. Then the next night I spend the first half hour reading over the work from the day before and revising. That gets me back in the mood I remember the tone and direction of the narrative and I move on from there."

 

There are stories hidden in the hills and hollers of Appalachia, and you can find them if you do your homework. Sharyn McCrumb is just the author to unearth the facts, sprinkle them with a little mountain magic and bring them to life in…

Fiction

Elinor Lipman

Elinor Lipman proves laughter is the best medicine To hear Elinor Lipman tell it, the colorful characters who populate her novels practically whisper their stories in her ear. She’s just the stenographer who gets it all down on paper. Take Ray Russo, the bad-guy-posing-as-savior in her new novel, The Pursuit of Alice Thrift. Ray meets surgical intern Alice Thrift while she’s working the plastic surgery rotation. He wants a nose job. She tells him he doesn’t need it. A match made in hospital? Hardly. A first-class con man, Ray lies, cheats and generally weasels his way into, well, if not Alice’s heart, then at least her life. He almost managed to worm his way into Lipman’s heart as well. “I grew fond of him,” she said in a recent telephone interview. “But the framework of the book was a cautionary tale. He helped me out by just showing his true colors at an opportune time.” The Pursuit of Alice Thrift is vintage Elinor Lipman a sharply incisive, sparkling tale with a cast of lovable eccentrics. The serious, self-esteem-challenged Alice plans to use her surgical skills to repair birth defects and deformities in Third World countries. But cursed with the bedside manner of an ice cube tray, she is in danger of being dismissed from her internship.

“It would help me in all the arenas of my life if I were a touch more gregarious,” Alice says in typically understated fashion.

Ray is extroverted enough for the both of them and manages to convince Alice that he’s the one for her. The proprietor of First-Prize Fudge, he often hits the road to peddle his candy, proving himself to be a good salesman. Neither handsome nor suave, he convinces Alice to give him a chance in spite of herself. His gratingly talkative, self-help-guru manner (“Hey,” he admonishes Alice when she berates her medical skills, “that’s stinkin’ thinkin’!”) seems to her to be the perfect antidote to her own reticence.

“I don’t have to be charming or interesting around him,” she explains to a friend who doesn’t quite grasp Ray’s appeal. “He seems happy to keep the conversation rolling.” That a Harvard educated, no-nonsense woman like Alice would fall for such an oddball may seem questionable, but it rang true to Lipman. “You see it all the time,” she said. “You meet a wonderful woman and then you meet her husband and think What?'” Besides, she reasons, who wants to read about characters who always make the safe, expected choices? “One doesn’t have to describe in a novel what the collective sensibility of women is,” Lipman said. “I wanted to take one woman and make her experience believable. It’s not what you’d prescribe for the whole world.” In fact, there is nothing much about Alice Thrift that’s expected. For starters, few novels actually give away the ending in the first chapter. Lipman makes it no secret that the union between salesman Ray and plastic surgeon Alice lasts about as long as a shot of Botox. It’s a surprisingly effective choice that will keep readers flipping pages as they try to understand how this painfully odd couple ever came to be.

Also unexpected is Lipman’s effortless depiction of the harrowing, coffee-fueled existence of medical residents. She paints a dead-on portrait of hospital culture and casually tosses around alien terms such as pneumothorax and hepatic artery. One could call it the result of a unique type of painstaking research. Lipman’s husband is a doctor, and she lived through his early years in the medical profession.

“We’ve been dating since his third week of med school,” she said. “I found that part of writing the book was just imagination, and then my husband read every word. I also talked to one of his partners, who had a very miserable surgical internship.” Lipman’s own career path didn’t veer toward fiction until she enrolled in a writing workshop in her late 20s. Since then, she’s written eight novels, numerous short stories and, occasionally, essays. She and her husband live in Northampton, Massachusetts, while their 21-year-old son a good writer in his own right, according to Lipman attends college in New York City.

Quietly thoughtful when discussing her work, Lipman seems to relish talking about her characters and speculating on where they are now. In fact, during a recent trip to Boston, she found herself thinking of Alice as she walked past a Filene’s Basement store. It reminded Lipman of one of her favorite scenes in the book, when Alice tries on wedding dresses. “I actually got a little misty-eyed!” she said. “I thought, What is wrong with me?’ But you’re always living with your characters.” Lipman’s newest novel is just as reliably hilarious as her previous books, including The Dearly Departed, Isabel’s Bed and The Inn at Lake Devine. With these books, Lipman has carved out a distinctive niche in the romantic comedy genre. It’s a term that once made her wince but that she now believes is not necessarily synonymous with trivial. Funny novels can still be substantial and enlightening, as her newest book proves.

While Lipman’s prose shines with wit, she demurs when asked if she’s funny off the page as well. “I think my friends would say yes,” she said. “At the very least, good-natured; at the most, funny on occasion. I try.” Such a modest answer Alice would be proud.

Amy Scribner is a writer in Washington, D.C.

Elinor Lipman proves laughter is the best medicine To hear Elinor Lipman tell it, the colorful characters who populate her novels practically whisper their stories in her ear. She's just the stenographer who gets it all down on paper. Take Ray Russo, the bad-guy-posing-as-savior in…
LifestylesHealth & Fitness

Ann Richards

The former Texas governor fights a crippling disease When Ann Richards fractured her hand in a fall nine years ago, she went to the doctor for a bone density test only to learn that she had osteopenia, an early form of osteoporosis. The diagnosis spurred the former Texas governor, whose mother and grandmother also suffered from the disease, to write I’m Not Slowing Down: Winning My Battle with Osteoporosis, an inspiring little volume filled with the author’s shrewd insights into health care, gender and, yes, politics.

Co-written with Richard U. Levine, M.D., I’m Not Slowing Down is an accessible, informative look at a disease that dogs 28 million people, 80 percent of whom are women. Offering information on diet, medication and bone density, as well as instructional photos and tips on exercise, the book also provides a fascinating peek into Richards’ personal life. Her indomitable spirit and sassy attitude are in evidence throughout. BookPage recently discussed the book with its author, who turned 69 this year.

BookPage: How did being diagnosed with osteopenia change your life? Ann Richards: My mother’s last years and my own diagnosis caused me to become really aggressive about taking care of myself. Although I had always led an active life, I was not diligent about physical exercise. Weight-bearing exercises build bones. I now work out in a gym lifting weights twice a week, and I try to walk six to nine miles each week. For the first time, I am taking responsibility for my own health.

The book is a wonderful blend of autobiography and invaluable health information, as well as a memorial to your mother and a tribute to womanhood. What specific goals did you have in mind when you wrote it? My real goal in writing this book was to get women and men to be aware of osteoporosis and its debilitating affects and to ask their doctors for a bone density test. I wanted the book to be short and simple. I specifically asked for photographs of myself lifting weights because most women foolishly think they are too old to build muscle, or that they will have a male physique as a consequence. The stories and the discussions about women are simply to encourage women to think independently and care for themselves. Dr. Levine made the medical part understandable and helpful. What tips for avoiding osteoporosis can you offer a young woman? Young women should begin to build bone mass early in their lives. The more mass there is, the less they will lose in later life. They should enjoy a diet of calcium-rich foods and avoid food and drink that causes bone loss. This book has easy-to-read charts and assists in choosing those foods. Exercise is important for young women to build bone mass and muscle strength. In the book, you encourage people of all ages to take charge of their health and not be afraid to ask questions of their doctors. Why do you think people have such a hard time doing these things? Most people assume that physician language is akin to technical, non-understandable jargon. It does not have to be that way. Doctors do not perform witchcraft. They simply interpret what they are told and what tests reveal. They diagnose and prescribe treatment. Our responsibility is to help doctors know what is going on in our bodies and to insist on clear, precise, understandable language in response. Doctors are our partners, and they need all the assistance we can give them to be sure we get the right diagnosis. What are your goals at this point in your life? I intend to lead a busy, fulfilling, active life. I want to travel the world and see new places and learn new things. I want to remain interesting to my children and grandchildren, and I want them to hurry to keep up with me and not the other way around. I want to work and I want to play.

The former Texas governor fights a crippling disease When Ann Richards fractured her hand in a fall nine years ago, she went to the doctor for a bone density test only to learn that she had osteopenia, an early form of osteoporosis. The diagnosis…

Michael Sims

Michael Sims promised his friends that writing Adam’s Navel would put an end to his frequent and, shall we say, enthusiastic communications about the latest set of whizzbang facts and oddities he had discovered in his wide and voracious reading.

Unfortunately, the completion of his second book, a fascinating, witty and startlingly original head-to-toe tour of the human body, has not had the desired effect. "No," Sims admits during a phone interview from Nashville, "I haven’t actually stopped." Sims does not sound particularly contrite.

And why should he? Sims is the sort of gifted storyteller who can turn the unexpected arrival of roofers into a mini-adventure (the workmen’s loud hammering sent him scurrying from his own apartment to his girlfriend’s quieter abode for our phone conversation). Surely friends and loved ones would notice the gaping, if silent, hole in their lives were Sims actually to follow through on his promise and confine his considerable talents to the pages of books.

Those talents as writer, observer, reader and interpreter are on full display in Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form. Sims guides the reader on a spellbinding journey through the physical characteristics and evolution of hair, eyes, ears, nose, lips, hands, breasts, navel, "privy members," legs, and toes, while at the same time ranging knowledgeably through thousands of years of cultural beliefs and artifacts that we humans have developed in response to these parts of our bodies.

In the 40-page section on the hand, for example, Sims discusses the evolution of the handshake, Carpal tunnel syndrome, finger gestures as insults, the history of fingerprinting, the mechanics of gripping, bias against left-handers and the importance of handedness in nature. He reports Marcel Proust’s oddly inverted defense of the limp handshake. He explains the importance of Dr. Wilder Penfield’s neurological diagrams, which "portray the body not as it looks to us but with each area in proportion to the amount of the brain’s cerebral cortex devoted to it." These diagrams provide Sims with a subtle organizing principal for his book and lead him to discover how "the brain’s budget is allocated to each part of the body and how culture responds proportionally."

He manages to mention in a single paragraph: a baby’s tenacious grip on its mother’s finger, the dexterity of violinists and magicians, Frisbees, heart surgery and Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons. And this summary doesn’t begin to encompass the range of topics Sims covers or the diverse cast of characters who figure in his relatively brief narrative about the all-important human hand.

This is, frankly, exhilarating stuff, the product of a lively, learned and delightfully idiosyncratic mind. Sims is eloquent in his conviction that "an acquaintance with a wide variety of cultural and scientific topics enriches my experience of walking through the day." Yet for a good many years he worried that his brain was "too cross-indexing and too undisciplined to work as a writer’s brain, and I was going to have to come up with something else to do to support myself."

Such nagging self-doubts aren’t all that surprising in someone who is largely self-taught. Sims grew up outside the small town of Crossville, Tennessee. For a while, his family had no car and no indoor plumbing. At 13 he was stricken by a mysterious illness which he now believes was a combination of rheumatic arthritis, brought on by a bout of rheumatic fever, and tachycardia.

"I was confined to a wheelchair for about five years, but was able to get out now and then with the help of my mother and two brothers. Most days I didn’t leave the yard or, many days, the house itself. I read steadily, of course, first science fiction and mysteries. Then science fiction led me to science-related nonfiction."

Sims had only a passing relationship with college – he didn’t leave home for Nashville and go to work in a bookstore there until about 18 years ago, when he was 27 – but his insatiable appetite for reading, first in science and then more broadly in nonfiction, fiction and poetry, led him into what he calls "the border habitat where science, nature and culture meet." He began exploring that borderland in his first book, Darwin’s Orchestra, which was well received but nevertheless soon went out of print.

Completion of Adam’s Navel has given Sims a new sense of himself as a writer. "I’m beginning to trust myself," he says, "and to trust my instinct for what I think of as resonate juxtaposition. It’s as if I’m making a mosaic out of lots of different facts. Every piece of the mosaic is an aspect of nature or of culture, but it’s how I put them together that will determine if I’ve created an original picture and whether or not that picture will come alive."

Sims’ lively mosaic in Adam’s Navel is also energized by his underlying belief in reason and his comic appreciation for human culture’s often ludicrous betrayals of reason, an interest that is evident in his choice of title for the book. "For me the navel is a very resonate symbol of biology and evolution; it’s the scar that records the single physical links between generations. The cultural response to the navel nowadays is that it’s a fashion accessory. But the age-old theological debate over whether or not Adam and Eve, created in God’s image, had navels is a perfect symbol of how nature and culture interact."

Sims adds: "I get very impatient with the notion that our divine, unlimited consciousness is trapped in this poor limited mortal body, when, really, the body brings everything in the world to the brain. Bodily experience creates consciousness and culture. We perceive everything through the body; we express everything through the body; therefore culture seems to be an emanation from the body."

Readers who take the trip will be captivated by Sims’ tour of their bodies and themselves.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

Michael Sims promised his friends that writing Adam's Navel would put an end to his frequent and, shall we say, enthusiastic communications about the latest set of whizzbang facts and oddities he had discovered in his wide and voracious reading.

Unfortunately, the…

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