All Interviews

Children's & YA

Patricia Reilly Giff

Many a fiction writer will demur when asked if their work is autobiographical. Not so Patricia Reilly Giff, who deliberately and gracefully combines elements of her family history with fictional threads of plot, people and place.

In an interview from her Connecticut home, Giff, who has written more than 60 books for children including the Kids of the Polk Street School series, as well as Newbery Honor winners Lily's Crossing and Pictures of Hollis Woods, says, "My biggest thing is family, and I love to write about family." Thus, her characters are based on everyone from youngsters she encountered during her teaching career (Giff began to write full-time at age 40) to her own family. "I warn my children," she says, laughing, ”'If you do something I don't like, you'll appear as a villain in one of my books.' "

This is apparently an effective disciplinary measure, as Giff's children have grown into well-behaved adults who get along quite nicely. In fact, her son operates a Fairfield, Connecticut, children's bookstore called The Dinosaur's Paw (named after one of Giff's books), and the whole family pitches in on the endeavor. "We all own a piece," Giff says. "It's been there since 1990, and it's a wonderful thing for us."

In keeping with the author's focus on family, the life of Giff's beloved great-grandmother, Dina, was the inspiration for her latest book, A House of Tailors. The central character is a talented young seamstress named Dina. Just as she was in real life, the fictional Dina is a spirited, vibrant girl who emigrates from Germany to 1870s Brooklyn. Although she possesses incredible skill as a seamstress, Dina hates sewing and looks at the move as an opportunity to start a life devoid of needles and thread.

Says Giff, "Dina died a few years before I was born, but everyone would refer to her as the heart of our family. When I knew I wanted to write, I would say, 'Dina, if I get a book published I will write about you someday.' "

Nearly 30 years later, Giff did write about Dina. A House of Tailors is the fascinating result: a story rich with history and family love, with a focus on the ways in which children can be strong and creative in unusual situations. Dina survives a difficult crossing from Germany to America, not to mention incredible homesickness. That fortitude serves her well as she adjusts to life in America and the realization that, rather than escaping the sewing she dreads, she has moved into another house of tailors. Dina's irrepressible character enables her to turn the bad news into a positive situation and she eventually finds her own sewing-centric place in the world via humorous, memorable situations.

Key elements are drawn from Dina's real life and from the history of the era. "I did research about Brooklyn and read what it was like in 1870," says Giff, who has herself lived in Brooklyn. "The story of the smallpox was true . . . plus, Dina really was a beautiful seamstress." In fact, says Giff, "Dina's sampler, which she did at age eight, was the only thing that survived her trip from Germany to Brooklyn. It hung over my bed throughout my childhood, and even now hangs in my bedroom." This notion of family bonds that remain strong through the years and of history's influence on each one of us is a central element in Giff's work. "This book will be great for my grandkids. Dina was born in 1855, and this will be there for them and [will] go into the next century." Inspiring and guiding children is what compels Giff to keep writing.

Says the author, "I have a very strong memory of childhood and a very strong feeling about writing for kids. I think about the kids I worked with [as a teacher] all the time when I'm writing I always say they dance in front of my typewriter." Their arabesques and dips must surely be inspiring – Giff has another book, Willow Run, due out in 2005.

Linda M. Castellitto lives in Rhode Island, where she writes and occasionally sews.

Many a fiction writer will demur when asked if their work is autobiographical. Not so Patricia Reilly Giff, who deliberately and gracefully combines elements of her family history with fictional threads of plot, people and place.

In an interview from her Connecticut home, Giff, who…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Martin Cruz Smith

Russian homicide detective Arkady Renko's cases have mirrored the historic upheavals within the Soviet Union during the past quarter of a century. He has battled his old-guard bosses and the KGB in Gorky Park, been thrown into exile aboard a Soviet trawler in Polar Star, returned to confront the rise of the post-Soviet Mafia in Red Square and, in a busman's holiday, investigated a friend's murder during a tour of Russia's orphan, Cuba, in Havana Bay.

In his latest adventure, Wolves Eat Dogs, the indomitable inspector confronts crimes against man and nature when a murder trail leads into the frightening, fascinating world of modern man's biggest technological blunder, Chernobyl.

When wealthy New Russian Pasha Ivanov falls (or is pushed) 11 stories to his death, Renko's business-as-usual superiors rule it a suicide, case closed. But a saltshaker found beneath the body leads Renko to an eerie discovery: Ivanov's sumptuous digs are white-hot with cesium 137, a deadly radioactive isotope.

Two years ago, popular suspense writer Martin Cruz Smith visited Chernobyl against the advice of almost everyone. Like his fictional alter ego, Smith listened to his instincts instead.

"When I first broached the subject of Chernobyl, everyone said that's the last thing anyone would want to read about, it's so grim," he says by phone from his home in San Rafael, California. "But when I went there, it was so much more interesting than I first thought. It was interesting to see people under such pressure. There was incredible heroism among the so-called liquidators who were cleaning up that mess. Many of them carried radioactive materials in their hands with absolutely no idea how dangerous that was, but some of them did understand and they sacrificed themselves." Many Americans assume Chernobyl was abandoned after the 1986 disaster. Not so. The 135,000 inhabitants of the two closest towns, Pripyat and Chernobyl, were evacuated, but the workers who manned the three functioning reactors and the liquidators who tried to contain the damage within the fourth reactor stayed behind. The last of the active Chernobyl reactors was finally shut down last year.

Smith recalls his first look at the sarcophagus that surrounds, though hardly "contains," the world-famous number four reactor; radioactivity from it continues to seep into the groundwater that feeds the Dnepr River.

"It looks like a monument to a disaster," he says. "It strongly resembles a cage, a cage that looks very impressive at first sight but then the more you study and know about it, the flimsier it becomes." In fact, Chernobyl has become the unofficial sick joke of the once-proud Ukraine. There was the unnecessary low-power test that triggered the chain reaction that caused a deadly fireball to blow the roof off the tower, contaminating the Northern Hemisphere. Then came an unexplainable three-day silence from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during which children played in the green foam, the plant's protection against radioactive release. After the forced evacuation of Pripyat, the government built a new town, Slavutych, on a radioactive site it called its "cesium patch." "Pripyat really lets you know that things have gone very much awry; you walk into a city of 50,000 and you're the only one," Smith recalls. "But then they moved the workers to Slavutych and planted them on radioactive ground. How could they screw up so badly?" Workers clad in camouflage commute daily from Slavutych to the reactors, passing through radiation detectors frequently. A microdot of cesium or plutonium invisible to the naked eye is enough to send a Geiger counter needle off the gage. In his week inside the Zone of Exclusion, Smith carried a dosimeter constantly.

"Some of the veterans get these cavalier attitudes. I had a guide with me in a Pripyat amusement park who called me over and said, Put your dosimeter here.' So I put it down and the needle just flew off, a thousand times normal. I said, why are we standing here?! It was just a random spot in the town that was not marked by a stake and warnings." In Smith's new novel, one of Ivanov's vice presidents is found in Pripyat with his throat slashed. Murder means little in a town that has seen so much death. To solve the case, Renko enlists the help of Eva, a sexy but deeply cynical physician who treats the scavengers and old Ukrainians who have returned to Chernobyl despite its deadly toxicity.

The title of the novel, Wolves Eat Dogs, refers to a leitmotif expertly woven throughout the narrative. Wolves in fact have returned to Chernobyl in great numbers, as have wild boar, deer and other wildlife, all of it radioactive from wandering through the so-called "black villages" and numerous hot zones that will remain for thousands of years. For Chernobyl, and indeed the former Soviet Union, explosive change has brought about a new natural order, a wolf-eat-dog world.

In retrospect, Smith considers Chernobyl one of the first irreparable cracks that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. "The Russian authorities would like to say it was human error, that 15 fools got together and did this thing," he says. "But in fact, the reactor was unstable at low levels of output and this piece of information had not been relayed to the technicians who were running the test." Smith says the catastrophic events at Chernobyl brought to light the secrecy at the heart of the Soviet system. "The Russian people definitely saw it as the worst example of that," he notes, and the three-day delay before the general alarm was issued led to "a real collapse in the credibility and belief in the state." Jay MacDonald happened to be driving through Middletown, Pennsylvania, during the Three Mile Island nuclear incident.

 

Russian homicide detective Arkady Renko's cases have mirrored the historic upheavals within the Soviet Union during the past quarter of a century. He has battled his old-guard bosses and the KGB in Gorky Park, been thrown into exile aboard a Soviet trawler in Polar Star,…

Children's & YA

T.A. Barron

Enter the world of Avalon: a wondrous land where all manner of creatures coexist around a great tree. Grown from a seed planted by none other than Merlin himself, the tree is cultivated and nurtured by T.A. Barron, author of numerous fantasy books and possessor of a fabulously fertile imagination.

Barron, perhaps best known for The Lost Years of Merlin series, continues the magic with The Great Tree of Avalon: Child of the Dark Prophecy, the first book in a trilogy featuring a trio of young would-be heroes who find themselves charged with saving their beloved Avalon. As droughts drain the land of its lushness and stars fall dark in the sky, the three wilderness guide Tamywyn, priestess-in-training Elli and eagle/man Scree realize they must move beyond their uncertainty about the future and work together to protect Avalon.

"My job, as an author, is to raise issues about living sustainably with our fragile and beautiful planet. I try to raise them as passionately and convincingly as I can, yet never lecture and sermonize so the reader can form his or her own conclusions," says Barron, who spoke with BookPage from his home outside Boulder, Colorado, where he lives with his wife and five children. And, he adds, "I truly believe every person can make a difference that's why I'm drawn to heroic quest stories." Barron himself undertook a quest that led to author-dom, one that began when he was a Rhodes Scholar. Between the two years of his scholarship, Barron took a year to travel and, he says, "I got a bad case of dysentery and an enormous number of story ideas." He turned one into a book, "and got rejected by 30-plus publishers." After that less-than-encouraging experience, Barron returned to the United States to work as a venture capitalist. "I was constantly finding myself getting up at 4 a.m. to write for a couple of hours before the phone calls and meetings began," he recalls.

This didn't detract from his business success: he eventually became president of his firm, a turning point that Barron says changed the direction of his life. "It was clear if I didn't leave then [to write full-time], I never would." And so, in a bit of drama befitting one of his characters, on the same day Barron day announced good news about the company's finances, he also broke the news of his resignation. "One investor was so upset," Barron recalls, "he pressed a business card into my hand and said, here's the number for my therapist. You must call him."

"It's all about following your passion," the author says. "If you love something as much as I love stories and books, you absolutely have to follow that passion, to keep traveling." It's this persistence in the face of doubt that informs the quests in Barron's books. In The Great Tree of Avalon, Tamywyn is uncertain about his abilities and his future. Barron says, "I wanted to ground him in the world we all live in, where we often don't understand our full potential, or feel cut off from the future and what might lie ahead."

Barron says a passion for preserving the environment is also an important element of his work and his life: "I've always been grounded in nature and have always found my greatest inspiration in the natural world. To me, nature is not just a backdrop, but a full-blown character." In The Great Tree of Avalon, this is certainly so; the inextricable links between the land, air, water and sky are evident, and the fact that even Avalon a giant, soaring tree that bridges the celestial and the earthly can be weakened draws a strong parallel to the possible consequences of environmental damage in our own world. Although the author won't reveal what lies ahead for Tamywyn, Elli and Scree, readers will soon find out: the second book in the trilogy will be published next year.

Enter the world of Avalon: a wondrous land where all manner of creatures coexist around a great tree. Grown from a seed planted by none other than Merlin himself, the tree is cultivated and nurtured by T.A. Barron, author of numerous fantasy books and…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Mark Winegardner

Literary novelist takes on the Corleone family Mark Winegardner is dead tired. The past two years of his life have been spent holed up in monastic artist colonies like Yaddo for months at a time, writing around the clock. Down the stretch, during the last eight weeks of writing, he literally slept every other night, a man on fire determined to make the most of an opportunity most writers would kill for: to write the sequel to The Godfather.

For years, Random House editor Jonathan Karp had urged Mario Puzo to revisit the Corleone family: What happened to crooner Johnny Fon-tane? Irish consigliere Tom Hagen? Michael and Kay? Puzo wasn’t interested, but he had no objection to his family continuing the saga after his death. Three years ago, Karp, Puzo’s oldest son Anthony and literary agent Neil Olson discretely contacted dozens of writers, some household names, soliciting proposals for the first sequel, The Godfather Returns. Short of cloning, they could not have found a better successor than Winegardner. Like Puzo when he wrote his 1969 runaway bestseller, Winegardner is a highly regarded literary novelist (Crooked River Burning, Veracruz Blues) in his early 40s who hasn’t delved previously into the Sicilian underworld. He is also at the top of his game, eager for a broader audience and fully cognizant of the pressure and perils of following in oversized footsteps.

“When I saw the request for proposals, I asked Jon to level with me. I said, Look, before I invest a lot of time into this, tell me the truth: at the end of the day, you’re just going to pick some super-famous crime novelist, aren’t you?” Winegardner says from his home in Tallahassee, where he heads the creative writing program at Florida State University. “And he said, Nope. I can’t promise you we’ll choose you, but I can promise you we will choose a writer a lot like you.” Many of the proposals played it safe by suggesting prequels about the life of the godfather, Vito Corleone, affording the author a relatively blank canvas. Wine-gardner, however, accepted the greater challenge: to devise a story that accommodates not only the original novel but also the two popular film sequels.

“That was the crazy part. I didn’t have to do that; I just decided to do that,” he says.

“I could have theoretically ignored everything in the movies that didn’t come from the book. Instead, I kind of maneuver around them. I decided early on that I would neither mention the stuff that happens in the movies but not the book, nor would I contradict it. It took me a long time to work out.” Winegardner found his setting and main inspiration in the late 1950s, when Don Michael Corleone is struggling for a way out of organized crime. “I knew for sure that I could do this when I realized that Michael Corleone’s greatest yearning, to be legitimate, was an aspect of the story that had never been resolved. It is somehow resolved by the time Godfather III starts; he’s succeeded in a mixed way that he’s resigned to, but it is absolutely unresolved in Godfather II. I thought, holy cow, we need to see how he succeeds or fails. When did he get to the half-baked success that, at the beginning of Godfather III, it seems he has had for decades?” Winegardner picks up numerous secondary characters from the cutting room floor, including Michael Corleone’s contentious brother Fredo, Sonny’s widow and family (Sonny’s son Frankie here becomes a Notre Dame star linebacker nicknamed “The Hit-man”) and yes, the lovable Johnny Fontane. (For readers who feel a bit lost, The Godfather Returns includes a chronology of the two novels and the films, as well as an extensive list of characters.) Puzo would have approved of the way Winegardner seamlessly weaves his plot into the Godfather story to produce a singularly enjoyable mid-quel that’s lighter on its feet than the original. Winegardner freely acknowledges that the hundreds of post-Godfather novels, films and TV shows, from Donnie Brasco and Goodfellas to “The Sopranos,” enabled him to infuse The Godfather Returns with both humor and realistic sex that weren’t possible in 1969.

“The Godfather is a masterpiece of storytelling, but it is a little bit of a humorless book,” he says. “I know about the Mafia, both from talking with some minor guys and reading more than a hundred books about it, and these are not humorless men. I had the benefit of all the Mafia lore and was better able to go for a certain realism. Puzo just didn’t have access to that at the New York Public Library.” Winegardner isn’t concerned that he’ll lose his own fans by continuing Puzo’s tale. “This is my own work,” he insists. “I was circling around this subject matter my entire career. If they had hired a novelist who had written a lot about the Mafia already, they would have somebody who had already spent some of his capital on this. I had a clean plate. Heap it on, I’m ready to go.” He certainly wouldn’t refuse an offer to write another sequel. “I think people thought it was easier to not have to weave in around the movies, but I feel like hey, wait a minute, I just did the hardest part I weaved around one of the greatest movies of all time and came out the other side,” he says. “If anyone is going to advance the ball down the field from here, it’s going to be me.”

Literary novelist takes on the Corleone family Mark Winegardner is dead tired. The past two years of his life have been spent holed up in monastic artist colonies like Yaddo for months at a time, writing around the clock. Down the stretch, during the last…
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Tony Hillerman

There is a sense of symmetry as I sit in a cozy cabin overlooking the Grand Canyon's Bright Angel Trail and begin collating the notes of my interview with Southwestern mystery author Tony Hillerman. Hillerman's latest novel, Skeleton Man, takes place in the Grand Canyon, reuniting veteran Native American policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee for an investigation into the aftermath of a plane crash, the worst airline disaster of its day, which took place more than 40 years before. Among the victims was a diamond dealer carrying a briefcase full of diamonds, one of which has recently surfaced in a local crime.

It's another fascinating scenario from Hillerman, an Oklahoma native and longtime journalist who launched his Native American mystery series in 1970 with the publication of The Blessing Way. Since then, he has turned out 15 more Navajo mysteries, as well as several other novels, nonfiction books about the West, essay collections and a memoir. From his home in Albuquerque, Hillerman talked to BookPage about his long career and his new book. What was intended as a short interview turned into an hour-long conversation on a variety of topics, ranging from Grand Canyon history to homeland security, only a small portion of which are covered here.

BookPage: Can you tell us a bit about the 1956 airline crash over the Grand Canyon that plays a pivotal role in Skeleton Man?
Tony Hillerman: Sure. The crash took place on June 30, 1956. Two planes were involved, a United Airlines DC-7 and a TWA Constellation. There has been speculation that one of the passengers requested that the pilot turn the plane a bit to afford a better view of the canyon, but I think that is largely speculation. In any event, there was a midair crash, and 128 passengers and crew were killed. It actually caused the FAA to revamp their regulations regarding airspace usage, regulations that remain in place to this day.

BP : You've summoned Joe Leaphorn out of retirement to take part in Skeleton Man. Are there any parallels between Leaphorn and yourself in this regard?
TH: [laughs] I am 82 years old. I imagine that I will keep on writing as long as anyone wants to keep reading. In fact, Leaphorn figures quite prominently in my upcoming novel [a follow-up to Skeleton Man], which will tie up some loose ends such as the ongoing romance between Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito.

BP: Jim Chee is, as you say, something of a romantic, while Joe Leaphorn is a bit of a pragmatist by comparison. Do you identify more with one than the other?
TH: I would say that Leaphorn is more an extension of my personality than Chee. He is closer to me in age and attitude, and he can be a bit grouchy from time to time.

BP: Your books are icons of mystery fiction; you have virtually invented the subgenre of Native American mysteries. How do you account for their ongoing popularity?
TH: You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart. But an author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place. You try to create characters who invite a strong reaction from readers, whether pity, contempt, empathy, whatever.

BP: A number of television adaptations of your Leaphorn/Chee novels have been aired over the past few years. What is your reaction to seeing your characters on the big (or small) screen?
TH: Well, Wes Studi [who plays Joe Leaphorn in PBS adaptations] is perfect. In fact, when an image of Joe Leaphorn crosses my mind, it is Wes Studi's face I see. Adam Beach [who plays Jim Chee] is an excellent actor as well, but much too handsome.

BP: This has nothing whatsoever to do with the current book, but Finding Moon, the tale of an average fellow who goes to Vietnam to discover what has happened to his missing brother, has always been a particular favorite of mine. Can you give us some insight into how that book came about?
TH: [laughs again] Well, you certainly know the right questions to ask! Finding Moon is a favorite of mine as well. It would have been my first book. It was originally set in the Belgian Congo during their civil war in the aftermath of the Belgian armed forces' pullout. What with work and family obligations, I wasn't able to get it finished quickly, and then the situation changed in the Belgian Congo, rendering some of my plot ideas unworkable. I kept it on a shelf for all those years, and was able to rework the bones of the story using Vietnam as the geographic focal point. Although I wasn't able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans and others to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.

BP: Now that I've posed a number of questions that either I or our readers were curious about, is there anything that you would like to add?
TH: Well, I have another new book called Kilroy Was There. It was published by Kent State University as a World War II memorial. I was asked to write the text for the book, but I replied that I was "much too busy." Then I saw some of the photographs by Frank Kessler and I knew I had to do it. The photos depict down-and-dirty street fighting, the realities of war with no sugarcoating or romanticizing.

 

There is a sense of symmetry as I sit in a cozy cabin overlooking the Grand Canyon's Bright Angel Trail and begin collating the notes of my interview with Southwestern mystery author Tony Hillerman. Hillerman's latest novel, Skeleton Man, takes place in the Grand Canyon,…

HistoryBlack History

Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild has the rare ability to take seemingly dull, dry or depressing events of history and turn them into a riveting narrative that both deepens a reader's understanding of the past and directly connects that past to the present. Hochschild did this in his critically acclaimed 1998 bestseller, King Leopold's Ghost, an astonishing account of King Leopold II of the Belgians' reign of terror in Africa at the beginning of the 20th century and the efforts to stop it. He does so again in his absorbing chronicle of the 50-year campaign to end the British slave trade, Bury the Chains.

"This story is really a writer's dream," Hochschild says during a call to his home in San Francisco. Hochshild was cofounder of the progressive Mother Jones magazine and now teaches writing in the journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives with his wife of many years, the sociologist and writer Arlie Russell Hochschild. "It actually surprises me that there have not been more books for a popular audience on what is such an extraordinary drama."

Bury the Chains begins on May 22, 1787, when a group of men gathered in a London printing shop and launched "the first grassroots human rights campaign," which had the then-impossible goal of eliminating slavery. Why impossible? As Hochschild points out, "at the end of the eighteenth century, well over three quarters of the people alive were in bondage of one kind or another." Not only that, slave labor was absolutely essential to the global trade in sugar, and sugar was to the British Empire then what oil is to the American economic empire now. A world without slavery was unthinkable to almost everyone. And yet on March 27, 1807, King George III signed a bill banning the entire British slave trade. And on August 1, 1838, "nearly 800,000 black men, women and children throughout the British Empire officially became free."

The long effort to ban slavery was not one steady upward climb to victory. There were frustrating periods of stasis or backsliding, when the movement seemed derailed, if not dead. The war with Napolean's France entirely stalled efforts year after year as the two global superpowers of the day battled for economic advantage ("war fever is always the enemy of social reform," Hochschild notes).

Hochschild uses these pauses in the course of events to great dramatic effect. He draws on the "fine, fine scholarly writing" of historians like David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher and biographer Ellen Gibson Wilson to move his narrative along the slave trade circuit – to Sierra Leone, for example, which was a central shipping point of the slave trade, and, strangely enough, the site of a visionary attempt to build a homeland for escaped American slaves promised their freedom by the British during the American Revolution (included among their numbers was one of George Washington's former slaves). Or to Haiti, site of a brutal, successful slave rebellion that helped loosen the grip of slavery in the British Empire and has had repercussions that resound to this day. All of this makes for fascinating, provocative reading.

But it is Hochschild's portraits of the persistent, sometimes eccentric, and no doubt frequently annoying activists who led this movement – or were arrayed against it – that makes Bury the Chains such a fascinating read. Hochschild says he originally intended to write a biography of John Newton, author of the song, "Amazing Grace," a former slave-ship captain turned preacher who, legend says, had a change of heart and became a champion of the antislavery movement. "I'm always intrigued by people who change sides," Hochschild says, "in either direction."

The problem was, the legend was not quite true. It wasn't until Newton was approached by a man named Thomas Clarkson that he lent his considerable prestige to the antislavery movement. The little-known Clarkson is in fact the singular hero of this account, and one of the great contributions of Bury the Chains is that it brings the achievements of the courageous, indefatigable and remarkably media-savvy Clarkson to a popular audience.

Other central figures were Olaudah Equiano, a former slave whose influential memoir was a bestseller of the day; the eccentric gadfly Granville Sharp, who invented a harp with a double row of strings, played in a family orchestra that sailed around England on a barge and brought a host of not-so-frivolous lawsuits against miscreant slave owners and slave-ship captains; and William Wilberforce, the era's most famous orator, a conservative member of Parliament who was persuaded to adopt the progressive antislavery cause, and through the purposeful re-editing of history by his two powerful sons was for years considered the most important personality in the movement. But perhaps the most fascinating portrait of all is of the profligate Duke of Clarence, an intemperate, boorish womanizer and a foe of the antislavery movement, who to the movement's consternation, became King William IV in 1830.

Throughout Bury the Chains, Hochschild maintains an awareness of how history is written and rewritten. " All countries have their comforting national myths," he says. That Wilberforce rather than Clarkson was for so long thought to be the central figure of the movement "fitted what most people in England wanted to think: that ending slavery was the work of noble, very religious and respectable people."

Hochschild, himself a veteran of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, strongly believes there are lessons to be learned from reading history. For today's activists, he points to three particular lessons from the experiences of the British antislavery movement: first is the importance of coalitions; the antislavery movement ultimately succeeded because it built an effective religious coalition of Quakers and Anglicans, he says. Second is the need to "ceaselessly search for different kinds of media to get a message across." Clarkson and others "placed a diagram of the close quarters of a slave ship in pubs all over England, and people were shocked and moved by this." And "the third, and most important thing I learned is to never give up. They were always facing very discouraging moments. But they never gave up."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Adam Hochschild has the rare ability to take seemingly dull, dry or depressing events of history and turn them into a riveting narrative that both deepens a reader's understanding of the past and directly connects that past to the present. Hochschild did this in his…

Pop CultureArts & Culture

Malcolm Gladwell

Let others probe the grand sweeps of human history—Malcolm Gladwell is resolved to study moments. At least the significant ones. In his 2000 bestseller, The Tipping Point, he examined conditions that sparked trends. In his new book, Blink, which he subtitles "The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking," the New Yorker staff writer focuses on the astounding reliability and occasional blind spots of snap judgments. It turns out that we know more than we think we know, even if we don't know why.

Blink has three aims, says Gladwell: "to demonstrate that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately; to help decide when we should and shouldn't trust our instincts; and to show that snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled."

It was his own unsettling encounters with snap judgments that led him to write Blink, Gladwell tells BookPage by phone from his office. "I had grown my hair longer," he begins, "and as soon as I [did that], my life began to change. I started getting speeding tickets and harassed at the airports. Then one day, I was walking down 14th Street, and these police in a big van cut me off and jumped out and surrounded me because they were convinced that I was this rapist who'd been in the area. It's an old story, of course. Many African-Americans have it much tougher than I do. It was just a sort of reminder that there was an awful lot going on in the first couple of seconds. People were seizing on things about me and drawing very, very substantial, non-trivial conclusions. That's what got me thinking that this was interesting."

Exactly how much is going on in that first little moment? This ability to make rapid and accurate assessment flourishes everywhere, as Gladwell's book illustrates. In one instance, art experts were able to instantly recognize a phony ancient statue even though scientists who had studied it for months were sure it was authentic. In another, a general acting on battlefield instincts during a war game ran circles around his opponents who had tons of pertinent data and fast computers to analyze it. Gladwell introduces a researcher who can predict the likelihood of a married couple divorcing by eavesdropping on a few seconds of their conversation and noting their facial expressions.

"The thing that really struck me the most from my book," Gladwell says, "was this idea that more information does not necessarily yield a better decision. I've come to take that very seriously. I now no longer feel the need to exhaustively mine every available source of information before making a decision. I now believe that I have to spend more time analyzing what I know rather than going out and adding to what I know."

A good deal of Blink is devoted to what can be gleaned from and induced by facial expressions. "This source often reveals much more than words," the author contends. "I watched one of the [Bush-Kerry presidential] debates with the sound off to try and get a sense of what they were communicating nonverbally. It was quite striking to watch those things because you realize there was so much going on, on that level. . . . They're telling you a lot. I think you learn something profound about people but you only really see it when you remove the distraction of their words. You learn about their self-confidence and level of conviction. I think you learn something about their honesty. All those things are apparent when you cleanse the moment."

Once he had the "blink" concept in mind, Gladwell says, he had no trouble finding examples to support it. "Books like this are kind of organic. You follow certain ideas and see what happens. I could write another book tomorrow on the same topic that would be completely different. There's a kind of freedom in writing this kind of conceptual book [even though] there's not a clear road map."

So how, then, are we to regard our instincts? Well, we ought to take them seriously, Gladwell says. "They can be really good, or they can be terrible and mislead us horribly. But in both cases, we have an obligation to take them seriously and to acknowledge they're playing a role. The mistake is to dismiss them."

Let others probe the grand sweeps of human history—Malcolm Gladwell is resolved to study moments. At least the significant ones. In his 2000 bestseller, The Tipping Point, he examined conditions that sparked trends. In his new book, Blink, which he subtitles "The Power Of Thinking…

Fiction

Ron McLarty

Should Stephen King ever need a place to crash in Manhattan, the welcome sign is permanently affixed to Ron McLarty's door. It was, after all, King's out-of-the-blue September 2003 Entertainment Weekly column that alerted the publishing industry to McLarty's big-hearted American road-trip of a novel, The Memory of Running, an audiobook original that the Master of Horror proclaimed the best book you can't read. No sooner had King made his impassioned plea for somebody to print this book, comparing its 279-pound boy-man hero Smithson Smithy Ide to the likes of Yossarian, Holden and Huck, than the thunderstruck McLarty found himself in a bidding war that would ultimately exceed seven figures. He's still pinching himself.

"During the auction for the book, I asked these editors and publishers that I could never get to, who represented this great iron wall that I could never climb over, you're paying me this money because Stephen King liked the book? And they said, no, but we wouldn't have read it if Stephen King hadn't liked it, especially at your age."

OK, so most first novelists usually make their debut well before their 56th birthday. In McLarty's case, the reward has been well worth the wait: he signed a $2 million, two-book deal for The Memory of Running and Art in America, and Warner Bros. paid $1 million for the film rights to Running, for which McLarty also wrote the screenplay.

It's been a windfall of artistic validation for a guy better known for narrating best-selling novels than writing them. A veteran character actor (Judge Wright on "Law and Order," Dr. Jacob Talley on "Sex and the City" and Frank Belson on "Spenser for Hire"), McLarty broke into Recorded Books narration in the 1990s as the favored voice of Danielle Steel. Over the years, he has recorded more than 100 audio titles for such authors as Richard Russo, Elmore Leonard and Scott Turow.

In his off hours—and they are many, even for a successful actor—McLarty would hole up in his "pit of despair" basement office in Montclair, New Jersey, and write plays, 44 to date, of which 10 have been expanded into novels. It is a way for an insomniac to make purposeful use of enforced wakefulness, and for an actor to weather the relentless rejection that comes with his craft.

"In acting, you have to audition; you're looking for them to give you permission to do what you do. But I didn't need that for writing," he says. "I'm sure it would have been great to have a book contract, but I could take this pen and feel its importance in my hand and observe people and always have these themes in my head and not feel pressured to get permission to do it, I could just do it. It's just been sort of a writer's life for me—without anything like income getting in the way."

The Memory of Running, the third of his 10 novels, tells the story of Smithy Ide, a 43-year-old Vietnam vet and supervisor at a Rhode Island toy factory who spends his days doing quality control on combat action figures and his nights consuming huge quantities of pretzels and Narragansett beer. When his parents die in a car crash just as news arrives that his schizophrenic sister Bethany has passed away on the streets of Los Angeles, Smithy saddles up his childhood Raleigh bicycle and embarks on a cross-country quest to claim his sister's body. Next-door neighbor Norma, an embittered paraplegic who has always carried a torch for Smithy, cheers him on with strained, touching long-distance calls.

"I wrote The Memory of Running as a play when my mother and father were actually killed in a car accident up in Maine. My mother lived six weeks and my father lived 10 days after the accident. And in this odd way that I work, I read the play about three months later and I thought, you know, it's too big for a play, it has so much more in it. But because I wrote it as dialogue, I had the voices of Smithy and Norma and Bethany in my head." Smithy's redemption ride is peopled with realistic characters that surprise, baffle, seduce and repel our wanderer-on-wheels at every turn. McLarty says he had to kill all hopes of ever publishing before he found the part of himself that brought Smithy to life.

"The first two novels I wrote to wow everybody; I thought I would get a million dollars and everyone would think I was great. On this third one, I said, you know, nobody's going to publish my stuff; I'm going to write this for myself, to sort of explain the world to myself. I think when you do that, you get out of your own way; you're not telling a story to try to impress anyone, you're just telling a story."

" Bittersweet" doesn't begin to describe McLarty's last two years. In 2002, he lost Diane, his wife of 32 years, to lung cancer; McLarty and his three grown sons spread her ashes in a Colorado stream. On New Year's Day 2004, he married fellow New York stage actor Kate Skinner, sold his Montclair home and moved into her Manhattan apartment.

When we spoke by phone, McLarty was between sessions, recording yet another audiobook. What's a winner of life's biggest lottery still doing punching a clock? "I just did an episode of 'Law and Order' and my friends all asked me why," he says, chuckling. "I said, you know, if I was 26 or 36, I would have already constructed a life as a writer. But my life has been constructed around finding the time to work and getting around in the world through acting. I'm an actor because I love being an actor. I took this summer off and really thought about whether I wanted to be an actor, and I do. I want to be both. I need it. One feeds the other. It isn't really work." 

Jay MacDonald once repaired and rented bikes in Key West.

 

Should Stephen King ever need a place to crash in Manhattan, the welcome sign is permanently affixed to Ron McLarty's door. It was, after all, King's out-of-the-blue September 2003 Entertainment Weekly column that alerted the publishing industry to McLarty's big-hearted American road-trip of a novel,…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Stella Rimington

Perhaps like me, you've always wondered: do spies read spy novels? The answer in Stella Rimington's case is an enthusiastic yes. "Oh, very much," insists the first female director general of Britain's MI5 intelligence agency. "I am an avid thriller reader and always have been. That is rather odd actually, that somebody relaxes by reading fictional stories about their own profession, but indeed I do and always have."

Rimington was a diplomatic housewife living in India in 1965 when she was offered a part-time clerical position by the MI5 operative in New Delhi. "I was reading Kipling's Kim at the time and I somehow imagined that it was really going to be rather like the 'great game' that Kipling writes about," she says. "But it turned out not to be like that at all."

Upon her return to London, Rimington joined MI5 full time as an intelligence officer and became successively the director of its countersubversion, counter espionage and counterterrorism branches. In 1992, she became the first woman chief of MI5; more significantly for Rimington, she was also the first director general whose identity was announced publicly, effectively blowing her 25-year cover.

"The press, particularly the tabloids, went mad," she says. "I knew beforehand and wondered whether it was the right thing to do at the time because I knew it was going to have a dramatic effect on me, particularly on my family. We had been protected by anonymity until then; the neighbors didn't know what I did and didn't care frankly. The press very easily found out where we lived and all of a sudden there they were, camped outside the house. We had to sell the house and move eventually, and effectively live covertly. That was a pretty upsetting start to my time as director general."

Rimington held that post until 1996, opening opportunities for women in actual intelligence gathering as opposed to the traditional administrative and clerical roles as characterized by Miss Moneypenny in the Ian Fleming novels. Speaking of Bond, James Bond, Rimington was the model for the first female M, played in the movies by Judi Dench. In reality, MI5 counters domestic threats, similar to our FBI without the police powers; Bond and M would have worked with the more swaggering MI6 foreign service, the equivalent of our CIA.

Rimington followed her distinguished 30-year intelligence career with a tell-some memoir, Open Secrets, that raised plenty of eyebrows at Thames House. Her first novel, At Risk, launches a planned series featuring MI5 intelligence officer Liz Carlyle, a thoroughly modern version of Dame Rimington in her salad days.

In At Risk, Carlyle heads up the search for an "invisible," the agency's worst nightmare, a British native whose ability to cross borders without detection is being used to stage an attack by an Afghan terrorist. Bruno Mackay, a swashbuckling MI6 operative, has just returned from Islamabad to help hunt down the terrorist. Charles Wetherby, Liz's taciturn boss, keeps a watchful eye over his talented young fledgling.

The terrorist has his own reasons for the target he has chosen; the author skillfully parses out this backstory to slowly tighten the tension as Liz works against time to figure out who is likely to end up on the receiving end of a backpack filled with C4 explosives. The invisible, too, has her own reasons for converting to Islam and becoming a Child of Heaven; the question is, can ideology alone overcome her upbringing?

We are immediately drawn to Liz, a focused, serious young career woman intent on using her analytical gifts to both further her career and fend off the testosterone-fueled cowboys like Mackay who would lead her astray in true Bond fashion. Deftly plotted, realistic in dialogue and detail, At Risk is a first-rate thriller with plenty to say about the strengths and weaknesses of the men and women on the front lines of the war on terror. It's also the first spy thriller in recent memory in which nobody goes to bed with anybody except the terrorists. Rimington builds a lovely verisimilitude between the two women antagonists, both struggling to fit into very different male-dominated worlds.

"They are two women who are in a sense fighting against themselves really; one has decided to break with her background and gone over to the other side, and the other one, Liz, is part of the established world but she's constantly asking herself if that's what she wants to do. So I think we've got that divine discontent that women often have that comes with trying to do two things at once and be perfect at everything. Working women, and particularly working mothers, find themselves trying to balance and always being dissatisfied that they haven't done it properly."

The days of Moneypenny are well over at MI5, which currently has a female director general. Rimington says queen and crown are better for it.

"I think women go about these sorts of things in a different way. That is why I think it is so important that women are involved in intelligence work. It adds a diversity to the whole. I don't think women are better at intelligence work than men, but they're different, and when you put the two together, you get a good mix."

But Rimington has no immediate plans to put the genders together in quite the James Bond sense.

"I think one of the difficulties with thrillers is, if you get too involved with the sex side of it, then it tends to take away from the excitement of the plot. We'll have to see; that's something I'm thinking about." 

 

Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.

Perhaps like me, you've always wondered: do spies read spy novels? The answer in Stella Rimington's case is an enthusiastic yes. "Oh, very much," insists the first female director general of Britain's MI5 intelligence agency. "I am an avid thriller reader and always have…

Children's & YA

Jeanette Winter

Books. They intrigue us. They teach us. They inspire us. But what if there were no books? What if the centuries-old texts, the contemporary novels, even the modern-day textbooks all the books that teach us about our past, our present and our future what if they were destroyed? Save for one courageous and determined librarian, it almost happened. Not centuries ago, but today, in a place where knowledge is one of the few possessions one can hold dear, and in a time of upheaval, fear and war: modern-day Iraq. Acclaimed author and illustrator Jeanette Winter shares the inspiring true story of an Iraqi librarian who rescued thousands of volumes in The Librarian of Basra, a new picture book for young readers.

Winter stumbled upon the story while reading the New York Times on a Sunday morning ("Books Spirited to Safety Before Iraq Library Fire" by Shaila K. Dewan, July 27, 2003). The article told the story of Alia Muhammad Baker, a librarian whose house was full to the rafters with books she had saved from an Iraqi library. The library had become a military outpost, and the daring librarian had sneaked out nearly 30,000 books right under the noses of the soldiers just days before the building burned in a mysterious fire.

"I knew immediately that I needed to make a book out of this story," Winter tells BookPage. "It was perfect." But as is often the case with authors, she was knee-deep in another book at the time. Winter didn't want to lose the idea, so she clipped the article from the paper and started a file, and as she worked on her other project, she collected bits of information and research and added to the file.

By the time she actually started working on The Librarian of Basra, the pictures almost painted themselves. Winter had collected images of Basra and Baghdad and had gone to a photo exhibition to see war pictures from Iraq. "One was of a man in a boat in a canal," recalls Winter. "It seemed so peaceful and wonderful, a step into heaven compared to what was going on. It is this photo that inspired her to create an image in the book that she calls her peace picture, in which Alia dreams of what life might be like when the war is over."

Winter finished the book in record time. "It went so quickly," she admits. "There was no mistaking what I wanted to do." Winter contacted her editor at Harcourt and was amazed by the swiftness with which the publishing process got moving. "For those at the publisher and for me, [Alia's story] was a catalyst for our awareness of what has been happening in the world, especially in Iraq," says Winter.

In truth, the story does put a face to the war. "We see the shelled buildings and the tanks on television, but we don't see the individual stories," says Winter. "With Alia, we do." And although Winter's audience is mostly children, she believes that the message she is sending is not a negative one about atrocities or fear. "It's not bad to have a war book for children," says Winter, "but I think you have to focus obliquely."

Her belief is that although war can occur as it does throughout the world if you focus on optimism, you can tell a positive story. "It was the optimism of Alia that interested me," says Winter. "She wasn't getting help from her government, but she knew that to save the books she would be saving the past, present and future of her country."

Winter is not a newcomer to the children's literary scene; she has written and illustrated nearly 50 books. "I don't really know the number," she confesses. "I never know what to actually count." For now, though, The Librarian of Basra tops her list of favorites. "I'm thrilled that [Alia's] story is getting out," Winter says. "It's very rewarding to me." In many ways, she thinks, it was a book she would have enjoyed reading when she was young. Winter, who grew up as an only child, explains, "I like writing about individual people what one person does on their own really speaks to me."

Alia's story certainly spoke to Winter, and without a doubt, this book will touch the hearts of children and adults everywhere.

Books. They intrigue us. They teach us. They inspire us. But what if there were no books? What if the centuries-old texts, the contemporary novels, even the modern-day textbooks all the books that teach us about our past, our present and our future what if…

History

Maj. Charles R. Bowery

Military historian Maj. Charles R. Bowery Jr. explores the leadership exhibited by two of history’s greatest generals in Lee ∧ Grant: Profiles in Leadership from the Battlefields of Virginia. A former instructor at West Point, Maj. Bowery traces the progress of Lee and Grant from their early days as young officers to the last great campaign of the Civil War, exploring the styles each brought to the task of leading their armies. From both their successes and failures, Bowery gleans significant lessons for leaders in all walks of life.

BookPage interviewed Bowery via e-mail from Tikrit, Iraq, where he serves as the Operations Officer for the Gunfighters, a U.S. Army AH-64A Apache attack helicopter battalion.

BookPage: Your book, Lee ∧ Grant, ties the generals’ experiences into lessons on leadership and business management. What inspired you to pair military history with business advice? Charles Bowery: When I began this project, I viewed it as a challenge to write a book that combined military history, leadership and management topics into one narrative. I have studied the Civil War my entire life, so this was a golden opportunity to share my love of the subject with a wider audience. Plus, my military career has placed me in a variety of leadership positions, giving me an additional insight. I find a great deal to admire in both Lee and Grant, and I think their successes and failures have much to offer a leader in any endeavor.

Military and business activities have very different goals, methods and measures of success. Where do the military and business arenas differ, and where do they align? The greatest difference is the cost of failure. In the military, daily decisions literally have life-and-death consequences. Moreover, the drastic consequences of military failure tend to make military leaders more risk-averse, less willing to take drastic measures. If a business deal falls through, the sun rises the next day and life goes on.

The greatest similarities between the business and military worlds are their results-based philosophies and their hierarchical structures. A CEO or manager commands or leads employees in similar ways to a military officer. A business or military leader must apply the right mix of leadership styles and methods to get the most out of his or her team in any given situation.

How are you applying the leadership lessons from your book in your own experience as a military leader? One of the personal joys I had in writing Lee ∧ Grant was the time I was able to spend reflecting on my own abilities and shortcomings as a leader. From Robert E. Lee, I gained a much greater appreciation for the value of interpersonal skills to leadership. Many situations, especially in the military, require very direct, do this because I say so types of leadership, but Lee’s interaction with his subordinates shows that even in wartime, the Golden Rule can apply both to leaders and led.

Grant has shown me the value of persistence in all things, and the value of a calm, collected leader in desperate situations. The best example of Grant’s calming influence over his subordinates comes from the Battle of the Wilderness. As the battle wore on, some of his generals became increasingly worried that they would soon be on the receiving end of one of Lee’s famous crushing counterattacks. This worry, combined with the raw savagery of the fighting in the Wilderness, left the entire army on edge. Through it all, observers noted that Grant took the time to effect any necessary changes or enact orders, but otherwise sat on a stump near his headquarters and whittled a stick as reports came in. Worry and paranoia can become infectious, but so can rock-steady leadership. You present Lee and Grant as making both positive leadership decisions and equally significant errors. How have you seen similar decisions, both good and bad, emerge in leaders today, or even in your own efforts? The biggest leadership shortcoming I see is micromanagement, especially when time is short or in pressure situations. Even capable leaders often feel that the only way to get something done quickly or well is to do it themselves. Micromanagement stifles initiative, eliminates the possibility of outside the box ideas, and can increase the pressure on a superior to unmanageable levels. Grant encountered this problem in the Overland Campaign, as he exerted growing control over the minute tactical movements of General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. In doing so, Grant created rifts in the Union Army’s high command that never healed. At times, both Lee and Grant demonstrated an overconfidence that left them open to disaster.

Near the end of the book you write, If one could combine the leadership qualities of [Lee and Grant] into one entity, the organization that that person led would simply be unstoppable. Who today combines these leadership qualities, and how? Since the millennium, two figures stand out to me as examples of transformational leadership: Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and Gen. (Ret.) Eric Shinseki. Over the past decade, Jobs has transformed the Apple brand into a trendsetter in every area of personal productivity and information technology. When my wife and I bought our first Apple in 1996, the company was floundering. The introduction of the iMac¨ in the late 1990s started the regeneration of the brand, and Jobs determined to keep Apple in both the hardware and software businesses. From there, Jobs kept improving and innovating, and the iPod¨ became the vehicle that propelled Apple to the top of the technology heap. It would have been easy for Jobs to scale back or get out of the business altogether, but he stuck with his vision and proved that it could work.

As the 34th Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army from 1999 to 2003, General Shinseki overcame decades of institutional inertia and initiated a much-needed transformation of United States Army operations and training. During preparations for Operation Iraqi Freedom, Shinseki spoke with absolute candor about troop requirements and stood by his beliefs in the face of great pressure to renounce them. Subsequent events have shown that his argument had merit.

Military historian Maj. Charles R. Bowery Jr. explores the leadership exhibited by two of history's greatest generals in Lee ∧ Grant: Profiles in Leadership from the Battlefields of Virginia. A former instructor at West Point, Maj. Bowery traces the progress of Lee and Grant…
Memoir

Ernestine Bradley

Ernestine Bradley is the wife of Bill Bradley, the former basketball star, U.S. senator from New Jersey and 2000 presidential aspirant. But she dwells neither on sports nor politics in The Way Home: A German Childhood, An American Life, her engaging account of growing up in wartime Germany and then flowering as an adult in America. Although her marriage to Bradley clearly put her in the company of the glamorous and mighty, she doesn’t gossip or drop names. Her focus, instead, is on coming to terms with her parents particularly her self-involved mother and finding her own way in a culture she first glimpsed through its conquering army.

Bradley came to America in 1957, when she was 21 years old and working as a stewardess for Pan American airlines. The following year, she married an American doctor and moved to Atlanta. There she gave birth to her first child, earned a doctorate in comparative literature and began her long career as a college teacher. After the marriage ended, she moved to New York, leaving her child in the custody of her former husband. In 1974, she married Bradley, who would go on to serve 18 years in the Senate. While he lived in Washington (and eventually took care of their young daughter), she continued to teach in New Jersey. Such an arrangement, she observes, was perfectly congruent with the then-prevailing feminist values to which she enthusiastically subscribed.

Speaking to BookPage from her home in New Jersey, Bradley explains why her book concentrates more on what was going on inside her mind than the minute details of what was happening around her. “I think the world always needs some interpretation,” she says, her German accent still distinct. “Otherwise we face it blindly. Without a structure, you can’t process whatever information there is.” Although she says she made some good friends in Washington during her husband’s tenure in the Senate, Bradley admits she was not drawn to the town’s social scene or political intrigues. “So many of the people you meet in Washington, particularly among the political participants, you don’t really develop friendships with. They are all purpose-based contacts, I would say.” Fully half the book is devoted to the author’s life in Germany. Her descriptions of Passau and Ingolstadt, the towns in which she grew up, are vivid and often warm, despite the deprivations she suffered. Always at the center of her recollections is her domineering mother, who was simultaneously an inspiration and a burden. Ernestine was conceived out of wedlock, but by the time she was born, her mother had made a marriage of convenience. That marriage ended eight years later when Ernestine’s real father, a German soldier, came back into the picture. It was not until her mother’s death in 2001 that Bradley seemed able to resolve their complex relationship.

“When I was a teenager the time that she influenced me most profoundly,” Bradley reflects, “I wasn’t really aware that I was being influenced heavily influenced by her. I could only read my responses . . . . [M]y actions were to get away from Ingolstadt as soon as I could. Today, in this country, [that’s] not a big deal. But at the time, which was in the late ’50s in Germany, it was a major step. I don’t know in retrospect whether it was a step of liberation or just a step to get away from this very powerful influence.” But leaving home didn’t end her mother’s influence, Bradley concedes. “I think after I came to this country, I still enacted the imprints I had received before I left. As she began to fail [physically] and I went to Germany right after the [2000] election frequently to be with her some of my thoughts began to be clearer to me. I began to understand why I had to leave, why I wanted to leave and what the cost would have been if I had stayed. Like any mother, she only wanted the best [for her children] but she always thought her way was the best.” In 1992, Bradley discovered she had breast cancer. In fighting the disease, she lost a breast. But the experience made her more resilient and philosophical. “Losing a breast is not so great an inconvenience as losing an arm or a foot,” she writes. “I am lucky.” Now retired from the faculty of Montclair State College, Bradley teaches one course a semester at the New School in New York and spends a lot more time with her husband, daughters and grandchildren. “My life,” she says with evident satisfaction, “is completely filled.” Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

Ernestine Bradley is the wife of Bill Bradley, the former basketball star, U.S. senator from New Jersey and 2000 presidential aspirant. But she dwells neither on sports nor politics in The Way Home: A German Childhood, An American Life, her engaging account of growing up…
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Daniel Silva

Israeli spy Gabriel Allon returns in Daniel Silva’s latest Daniel Silva watched the televised images of Yasir Arafat’s chaotic funeral last fall from several different viewpoints. As a former Middle East correspondent for United Press International, Silva had covered the bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict firsthand. Later, as a news producer for CNN’s Washington bureau, he had witnessed the false spring of the Oslo peace accords between Arafat and the newly elected Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin. Arafat’s grizzled countenance loomed large over events in the Middle East when Silva met his wife of 17 years, NBC correspondent Jamie Gangel, during a typical liquid press debriefing at the Diplomat Hotel in Bahrain. But what was doubtless foremost in Silva’s mind as the central Palestinian figure of our time was laid to unrest was the fact that he had just completed a thorough and scathing indictment of Arafat in his eighth novel, Prince of Fire.

“I was very much an Oslo person,” Silva admits by phone from his home office in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. “I had placed faith in hindsight, perhaps too much faith in the ability of Yasir Arafat. I believed Yasir Arafat wanted peace at the time of Oslo. I do not believe that now, and that is reflected in the novel.” Prince of Fire once again wrests from retirement Gabriel Allon, world-renowned art restorer and former Israeli spy whose three most recent outings (The English Assassin, The Confessor and A Death in Vienna) form what Silva calls an “accidental trilogy” concerning the unfinished business of the Holocaust. Allon, who turned his back on “the Office” after his son died and his wife was horribly injured, is here drawn back into the game when his dossier is found in the home of a suspect in a series of anti-Semitic terrorist bombings.

Allon’s mission takes him from Cairo to London, the French Riviera to the Jezreel Valley as he races to outwit a master terrorist, raised from childhood by Arafat himself, before he strikes at the heart of a major European city. There was, in fact, such a boy, Black September’s Ali Hassan Salameh, architect of the Munich Olympics massacre, who was killed in Beirut by Israeli intelligence in 1979.

Silva knew exactly where he would set his thrillers: “I’ve always been interested in the birth of Israel and the Arab-Israeli wars and the history of the Holocaust and watching these two peoples in this terrible death struggle. It’s been a lifelong passion of mine,” he admits.

But he never envisioned Allon as a series character when he introduced him in The Kill Artist (2000). In fact, when his publisher (Putnam) suggested the idea, he tried to talk them out of it.

“I said, that’s crazy, I can’t make him into a continuing character, the world is so anti-Israel, no one wants to read about this Israeli continuing character. Come on, it’s just not going to work. And they said, just write it.” Silva prefers the British spy school of Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and John Le CarrŽ. “I don’t really read contemporaries,” he admits. “When I read, I read the great dead.” And Allon reflects this: his character is deeply divided, left-brain, right-brain, passionate about restoring the beauty of art masters, dispassionate about the killing that needs to be done if his young homeland is to survive. Silva prefers the battle of intellects to the spilling of blood. Suffice to say, Allon and George Smiley would have much to chat about.

“Yes, throughout the series, he hasn’t killed a lot of people; a lot of it is more referred to. He doesn’t do a lot of blood work in these novels, by choice. I learned quickly that bang-bang and twisty thriller plots just aren’t enough; I needed to do more in order to keep myself satisfied as a writer.” After four straight Gabriel Allon novels, Silva admits it’s time for a vacation from his art restorer. “I could use a little break from him,” he says. “I would like to explore some other sorts of material. I have a lot of respect for the character and the characters around him, particularly [master spy] Ari Shamron, and I’m reluctant to let it just go on and on and run the risk of the character becoming stale. My intention is to take a break for a book or two and then see what happens.” Working within the context of a young nation like Israel has forced Silva to reach some hard personal conclusions about the ongoing conflict. Did bringing Arafat into his fiction present difficulties? “Yes. Had Yasir Arafat accepted the deal that was offered to him at Camp David, this book would never have been written. I had to look hard at the evidence and spent a lot of time thinking about it, and I came to the conclusion that Yasir Arafat in word and deed and in the way he gave money to families who produced suicide bombers and the way he used the state media of the Palestinian authority had a direct hand in terrorism against Israel during the quote-unquote peace process, and that he viewed the peace process as part of the phased strategy of destroying the state of Israel. That is my personal conclusion, that he was not serious about reaching a peace settlement with the Israelis.” In Silva’s view, the Middle East struggle may be “a problem without a solution.” This melancholy assessment permeates Prince of Fire. But the author has no doubts about the bloody legacy of Yasir Arafat.

“I personally believe that Yasir Arafat and his terrorist organization, Black September, showed the bin Ladens of the world the way. These guys were the ones who perfected the high-profile international spectacular like Munich and the airline hijackings and all the rest. I’m afraid this is Yasir Arafat’s legacy: he and his guys were fantastic terrorists.” Jay MacDonald writes from Mississippi.

Israeli spy Gabriel Allon returns in Daniel Silva's latest Daniel Silva watched the televised images of Yasir Arafat's chaotic funeral last fall from several different viewpoints. As a former Middle East correspondent for United Press International, Silva had covered the bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict firsthand. Later,…

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