All Interviews

Children's & YA

Sid Fleischman

"My greatest fear is to bore a child," says Sid Fleischman, Newbery Medal winner and author of the swashbuckling new novel The Giant Rats of Sumatra: or Pirates Galore. Boredom isn't likely to be a problem for Fleischman's young readers, since he has infused the novel with his trademark blend of humor and derring-do, plus a dash of suspense, a bit of romance and some hard-earned wisdom.

"An adult will read 50 or even 100 pages of a book that's boring them to death," Fleischman says in an interview from his California home. "Kids are far more demanding, and should be. It's my job to hold and entertain and inform them as deftly as I can." Luckily for his readers, this talented author possesses not only a finely honed sense of humor but also a lively life story that often serves as inspiration for his books. He has worked as a magician, vaudeville performer, screenwriter and reporter, served in the Navy and written dozens of children's books during his long career.

"When I was in fifth grade, in San Diego during the Depression, I saw a magician and was absolutely dazzled," Fleischman recalls. How did he learn the smooth sleight of hand, the dramatic emergence of a rabbit from a hat? "I went to the library," he says. His studying paid off; he garnered an audience for his performances, and later invented and wrote about tricks.

"It didn't seem like writing to me," he muses. "I was published at 19. When I saw the book with my name on it, that was my epiphany: I went from wanting to be a magician to wanting to be a writer."

And how did he inform himself about the writer's craft? "Back to the library," he says.

Fleischman put his learning to good use as a writer of novels and screenplays; when a 1960 writers' strike put him out of work, he decided to try children's books. "I had three young children, and they didn't understand what I did except that I typed a lot." Mr. Mysterious and Company, about a traveling magician and his family, was his first; he's been writing books for kids, including 1987 Newbery Medal winner The Whipping Boy, ever since.

His latest is a tale of adventure on land and sea during the 1840s Gold Rush era. The Giant Rat of Sumatra is the third in a trilogy of California novels that explore the state's history during the 1840s, including "the darker side of the Gold Rush, [such as] the way minorities were treated, particularly Mexicans."

The year is 1846 and the story's protagonist, 12-year-old Shipwreck, is an American boy lost at sea who is saved and taken on as cabin-boy by Captain Gallows, a daring Mexican pirate intent on returning to San Diego to establish a rancho and find the girl he last saw when he was 12. Deckhands Sam'l Spoons and One-Eye Ginger do their best to cause all sorts of trouble while the ship's figurehead, the eponymous giant rat, leads the way with bared teeth and empty eyes. The amusing chapter headings and illustrator John Hendrix's line drawings firmly bolster the hilarious goings-on.

Since he finished the novel, he's been working on his upcoming book, a biography called Escape! The Story of the Great Houdini. "It's a labor of love," he says.

That characterization is true, too, of writing for children. "If a book turns a child on to reading . . . that is a very important reward for those of us who write for kids," Fleischman says. "And I absolutely feel a sense of responsibility, too," including that of providing a source of humor and fun for his readers.

Says Fleischman, "Kids love to laugh, and you find [humor] in nursery-rhyme books, but when you get into books for older readers, you're supposed to take life seriously. Books get a bad reputation with kids." But, he says, "If you can't laugh in childhood, you never learn to. Laughter needs practice. I want kids to know that when they open those covers, they'll find laughter inside."

 

Linda M. Castellitto writes from Rhode Island, where she practices laughing every day.

"My greatest fear is to bore a child," says Sid Fleischman, Newbery Medal winner and author of the swashbuckling new novel The Giant Rats of Sumatra: or Pirates Galore. Boredom isn't likely to be a problem for Fleischman's young readers, since he has infused…

Children's & YA

Kathi Appelt

"I think I've been writing this book since I was in the third grade," says Kathi Appelt of her new picture-book biography, Miss Lady Bird's Wildflowers: How a First Lady Changed America.

While growing up in Houston, Appelt often helped her grandmother an ardent Democrat at party headquarters, especially during the Lyndon Johnson presidential campaign. "My grandmother was so fond of Lady Bird," Appelt recalls. "She felt that Lady Bird was the epitome of a Southern woman. She loved her, even though they never met."

Later, as an adult, Appelt realized how influential Lady Bird had been. Speaking to BookPage from her home in College Station, Texas, Appelt noted that "Lady Bird is a tiny woman, very quiet. As diminutive as she is physically, she made a huge difference." An advocate for the environment, Lady Bird had a special love for wildflowers, and she worked to preserve them first in her home state of Texas, and later through the Highway Beautification Act, passed by Congress in 1965 after Lady Bird went head-to-head with the billboard lobby. "If you look at First Ladies," Appelt says, "nobody has impacted legislation the way that Lady Bird did . . . none of them with the exception, perhaps, of Eleanor Roosevelt." Ironically, when Appelt proposed her picture book five years ago, her editor said she was interested, but commented that a college intern in the office didn't know who Lady Bird was.

Even those who are familiar with Lady Bird might be surprised to learn about her dramatic childhood. Born in 1912 in an East Texas mansion, Claudia Taylor earned her unusual nickname from a nanny who called her "purty as a lady bird" (which happens to be a colorful beetle). When the little girl was five, her mother fell down the mansion's grand stairway and subsequently died from blood poisoning. After her mother's death, Claudia's father often took his little girl along to his general store, but when he had to work late, she slept upstairs on a cot beside the coffins he sold. Thankfully, her father soon sent for her Aunt Effie to help.

Appelt discovered so many rich details in Lady Bird's childhood that they threatened to take over the book. "You can't imagine how much I took out," she recalls. "[Her childhood] was so interesting that I just hated to cut." As a result, she admits, "It's my most heavily revised book ever. I think I probably rewrote it 50 times." Appelt was overjoyed to collaborate with her good friend, Joy Fisher Hein, as illustrator. Hein is a certified Texas Master Naturalist, an accomplishment that definitely came in handy for this project. Her lavish illustrations brim not only with wildflowers, but also with the Texas swamps of Lady Bird's childhood, a vibrant Mexican scene from her honeymoon and the cherry blossoms that adorn Washington, D.C., every spring. "Joy's love is wildflowers," Appelt says. "The details and her exquisite attention to small things are what make the book so beautiful."

At the end of the book is a helpful page identifying various wildflowers, as well as a page about the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin. Both author and illustrator visited the center and did extensive research. Although they didn't meet their subject (Lady Bird, now 92, has suffered a stroke and no longer gives interviews), the former first lady sent a letter after she saw a proof of the book. "She very graciously thanked us and said she loved the book," the author notes.

Appelt has written many children's books, several books of poetry and short stories, but now she's trying her hand as something new an animal fantasy for middle-grade readers. She is tentative about the book in these early writing stages, but chuckles when asked about her popular, hilarious Bubba and Beau series, three picture books illustrated by Arthur Howard. The books feature very short chapters guaranteed not only to make preschoolers cry for more, but also to leave adult readers chuckling. Three more Bubba and Beau adventures are under contract, Appelt reports, and the next will likely feature her Down-South duo going trick-or-treating. "I would love to write nothing but Bubba and Beau," Appelt admits, "because I have so much fun writing them."

Alice Cary's favorite place to see wildflowers is beside mountain trails.

"I think I've been writing this book since I was in the third grade," says Kathi Appelt of her new picture-book biography, Miss Lady Bird's Wildflowers: How a First Lady Changed America.

While growing up in Houston, Appelt often helped her grandmother…

Women's HistoryHistory

Gail Collins

It is hard to disagree with the weight of this statement from New York Times op-ed writer Gail Collins: “The conviction that women’s place was in the home, that they were weaker than men and weren’t really up to life in the public world . . . were beliefs that had existed for thousands of years, and they were shattered in my lifetime. That thought still knocks me out.”

In When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, Collins explores this period of time when “long-held patterns of behavior and beliefs got upended so suddenly.” The book is a follow up to America’s Women, Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, Collins’ acclaimed work from 2003. The subject of American women—specifically, their struggles and broken barriers—is natural for Collins. She became the first female editorial page editor at the New York Times in 2001.

When Everything Changed provides a sweeping, fascinating look at modern women in our country. Filled with facts, court cases and legislation, the book is rich with personal anecdotes. Collins and her researchers interviewed more than 100 women for this history, and for many contemporary readers, their findings will be startling and sometimes heartbreaking.

The book begins with the story of 28-year-old secretary Lois Rabinowitz. In 1960, Lois went to traffic court to pay her boss’ speeding ticket. The judge had a fit when he saw Lois’ outfit: “neatly pressed slacks and a blouse.” In an outburst, he said, “Do you appreciate you’re in a courtroom in slacks?” Lois’ husband had to pay the ticket; the judge had thrown her out of the court for wearing pants. In her interview with BookPage, Collins recounts other outrageous stories she encountered: “the NASA official who said the idea of a woman in space made him sick to his stomach or the public high school in Iowa where the boys’ tennis team practiced on the school courts and the girls had to play on the driveway, jumping out of the way to avoid getting run over.”

Although the women who went through these ordeals could have turned bitter and angry, Collins says a lot of her interview subjects “looked back on these things with amusement . . . they see them as the artifacts of a long-departed world.”

She continues: “Others were sort of bemused that it never occurred to them to object when they were told that—of course—a woman would have to work twice as hard as a man to get ahead in the Justice Department. Or that—of course—Newsweek only hired women to be researchers, not writers. That was fascinating, because some of the people telling me this were among the feistiest and most outspoken women I know.”

For readers enticed by the book’s title, the big question will be when—and why—“everything changed” for American women.

“The law banning discrimination against women in employment was really what triggered everything,” says Collins. “That was added to the Civil Rights Act [in 1964] as a kind of joke/diversionary tactic by a Southern Congressman who would have preferred to kill the whole bill. And then the women were smart enough to jump on the opportunity to get it pushed through.” That Congressman was Howard Smith of Virginia, who at 80 years old hoped the addition of “sex” to Title VII would delay the passage of Civil Rights, rather than advance the position of women.

“Our happiness is all wound up in the happiness of our husbands and sons and brothers,” Collins says. “It’s harder for us to form a united front, and in American history, the points at which women have advanced have been the ones in which other discriminated-against groups were leading the way.”

A young woman during the 1960s, Collins says that even she was “totally fixated on civil rights . . . the women issue really didn’t register for a long time.” By the 1970s—when the National Organization for Women had been around for a few years; when women had gained widespread access to the Pill; when female students began to apply to medical, law, dental and business schools in “large numbers”—the issue had started to register.

“By the 1970s, my friends and I were completely confident that we were going to change the world,” she says. “It actually never occurred to me that by the 21st century there would be any problems left. I would have been shocked if you’d told me in 1979 that 30 years down the line, there wouldn’t be daycare centers in every office building, or that it wouldn’t be totally common for husbands to be the chief caregiver for the children.”

In spite of that disappointment, Collins admits, “I don’t think we had any real conception of what it would be like if young women had the same expectations and ambitions as young men. We thought we did, but it’s way better than we imagined.”

It may be a history book, but When Everything Changed reads like a page-turning saga, a race through the years to learn how we got here today, when “there was no speculation about whether [President Obama’s administration] would include any women in the most powerful posts because it was inconceivable that it would not.”

One of the strongest themes toward the end of When Everything Changed is that of women struggling to achieve a balance in their lives—waking up at 4 a.m. to bake cookies before going to work; doing twice as much housework as their husbands even when both spouses work.

“The ceiling is cracking all the time, but the rate of progress has slowed considerably,” Collins says. “If you ask me for one reason, I’d say it’s the work-family divide. For women to balance their jobs with childrearing is our one big, fat continuing challenge, and it leaches out into so many other things—including why women still make so much less money on average than men do,” she says. “If we only have 17 women in the Senate, it’s partly because women with children normally don’t start political careers until after the kids are in their teens, so they get a much later start climbing the ladder. And if the percentage of women lawyers who make partner in big firms isn’t budging, it’s mainly because those companies demand an extraordinary commitment of time and energy to get to the top.”

Be that as it may, Collins has never seen the history of American women “as malevolent-men-crushing-pathetic-women’s-souls.” She recognizes that women’s struggles were not “just the product of one sex,” and she seems proud and optimistic in the final pages of When Everything Changed. She writes, “American women had shattered the ancient traditions that deprived them of independence and power and the right to have adventures of their own, and done it so thoroughly that few women under 30 had any real concept that things had ever been different.”

And though Collins acknowledges that “there will always be people who look at change and see a problem,” the end of her book will make many readers swell with pride—it features updates on the lives of the interview subjects featured in the book, many of whom went on to break barriers for many years. The story their lives helped write—of American women from the 1960s to today—is inspiring and compelling. Collins explains why in one obvious and poignant sentence: “Our story is particularly compelling because it’s about us.”

It is hard to disagree with the weight of this statement from New York Times op-ed writer Gail Collins: “The conviction that women’s place was in the home, that they were weaker than men and weren’t really up to life in the public world .…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Geraldine Brooks

Like many women, Geraldine Brooks was inspired by Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which she first read as a girl in Australia. Though her mother, whom Brooks calls one of the world’s great cynics, advised her to take it with a grain of salt (“nobody in real life is as goody-goody as that Marmee”), Brooks had a strong reaction to the book and its heroine, the irrepressible Jo March.

“I thought she was fantastic,” Brooks recalls during a call to Australia, where she’d just spent the year with her husband, writer Tony Horwitz, and their eight-year-old son. “This really powerful girl character who’s struggling to find her way creatively and to fit into the social restrictions that were so overwhelming . . . my situation was so different on the other side of the world and a century removed, but it just fired me up.”

The events of Little Women take place while Mr. March is off serving in the Civil War. The original ending of the novel finds him safe at home with his family but says next to nothing about his wartime experiences. “It’s like Jane Austen and the Napoleonic Wars; it’s just not the business of her books, but that was the background of their times,” explains Brooks. While Horwitz was researching Confederates in the Attic (1998), his best-selling book about the Civil War’s legacy in the modern-day South, Brooks found that she had unwittingly become something of an expert on the War Between the States.

“When he was writing that, a tremendous amount of our lives was consumed with Civil War trips. And I wasn’t crazy about this for a long time. But suddenly somehow the stories of the individuals started to work on my imagination.” Brooks became fascinated by the moral debate that took place in Waterford, the Virginia town where her family now lives, which was settled by Quakers in 1733. “These pacifists were passionate abolitionists, yet were part of the South. And then one day this light bulb went off in my head, and I was thinking, gee, Alcott’s Little Women was really one of the first Civil War novels, and how would that [conflict] have played out for a man like March?”

March is the incredible result of these two converging trains of thought, though the novel “touches only tangentially on Little Women. I wouldn’t have the hubris to attempt to rewrite Louisa May Alcott, so I’ve just taken the bit of the story she didn’t want to deal with, for whatever complex, psychological or Freudian reasons,” Brooks laughs. Her fascinating and meticulously researched novel imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, whom she based on Alcott’s own father. Brooks’ March is an idealist and a man of faith whose convictions are challenged by the horrors of war.

Faith in crisis is a topic that particularly interests Brooks, who wrote about an English village devastated by the plague in her first novel, Year of Wonders. “It is a theme I keep returning to. I’m intrigued by people who have strong beliefs, because I don’t. I’m a spiritual quester, but I also think that you have to work very hard to make the ethical choice rather than the expedient one.”

Deciding that the cause of abolition is worth the necessary evil of war, March enlists as a chaplain. He expects hardship, but the reality of battle is almost more than he can bear. March struggles to keep the disillusionment he feels from his daily letters home to the girls and Marmee, which are a marked contrast to the honest and, as a consequence, graphic, scenes of wartime life masterfully depicted by Brooks. These experiences are interspersed with March’s recollections of his youth spent as a traveling salesman; his passionate courtship of the intelligent, fiery Margaret May (Marmee); and their married life as prominent citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, who rubbed elbows and exchanged thoughts with Emerson and Thoreau.

March’s character is skillfully drawn through his own thoughts and actions, but Brooks rounds out his portrayal in the few brief chapters told through Marmee’s eyes. Her practical voice is a marked contrast to that of her visionary husband, and she has difficulty accepting that March has concealed much of the truth of his experiences.

Idealistic men and their pragmatic female counterparts have appeared in both of Brooks’ novels: is she making a larger statement about men and women?

“That hadn’t occurred to me, but I also think it’s very true, and something that comes from my experiences of being a foreign correspondent in the Middle East [for the Wall Street Journal]. You’d have these fiery-eyed Islamic preachers like the Ayatollah telling everybody how it had to be, and then you’d have women actually having to feed their families and keep them safe through the consequences of that,” she says. “Even in our comparatively luxurious circumstances, even in my own life as a writer, you might have a male novelist who feels free to go into some kind of, don’t disturb me, I’m in my ivory tower out in the woods thing, but as a mother, the kid has to be dressed. So you’re always tied into the practical world, and I think that’s a good thing.”

Brooks is content with her life in the practical world. Her family spends time each year (“ideally it’d be half-and-half”) in Virginia and Australia, despite the 24-hour journey. “The only good thing about it is after you get used to coming back and forth to Australia, every other plane flight seems short!” She’s working on another historical novel. “It’s sort of insanely ambitious. It’s the story of a [real-life] Hebrew manuscript that was created in 14th-century Spain and still exists today. I’m tracing it through the hands that held it. I love finding these stories in history where you know something, but you can’t know everything, and so you’ve got the license to let your imagination fill in the voids.”

And she’s looking forward to readers’ responses to March. “I hope that people who love Little Women will see it as a respectful homage to Louisa May books find new lives and new readers all the time.”

"I wouldn't have the hubris to attempt to rewrite Louisa May Alcott, so I've just taken the bit of the story she didn't want to deal with, for whatever complex, psychological or Freudian reasons!"
Memoir

Gene Wilder

On the screen, Gene Wilder is known for his comic teamings with Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor. Away from the public glare, the man with the melancholy gaze and trademark frizzy hair paints watercolors and lives in a Colonial-era house in Connecticut with his fourth wife, Karen.

How this came to be is the result of the twists, turns and ironies of his life, as detailed in his new memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art. Unfolding chronologically, in a series of vignettes, it co-stars family members, famous names, women he has loved, including his late wife Gilda Radner, and his therapist. "Writing the book was, in itself, a kind of therapy. Several years ago, a brief trip to California became a months-long visit [when his mother-in-law took ill]. I thought I'd go crazy if I didn't have something artistic to do. . . . I started writing, and whatever had built up, after, oh, Gilda, then finding my wife, Karen, and then memories from childhood . . . it just started pouring out," Wilder recalls.

No, he didn't have a ghostwriter. Speaking by phone from his home in Connecticut, he reminds us, in his soft-spoken, carefully modulated voice, that he has written "more than a half-dozen movies." No fan of tell-alls, the introspective Wilder takes his readers through his life's journey via his work, exploring the notion of fate, and how the choices we make reverberate. Consider this scenario: after auditioning six times for Jerome Robbins, Wilder was cast in the 1962 theatrical production of the Bertolt Brecht play, Mother Courage. Though he went on to realize he'd been terribly miscast, he became friendly with co-star Anne Bancroft, whose boyfriend was Mel Brooks, who told Wilder about a script he was writing which would include a role for him. Three years later, when Wilder was on Broadway, Brooks reappeared in his life to report that the deal for the film, The Producers, was at last cinched.

"Oh, my God. If it hadn't been for Mel!" says Wilder, whose performance of nebbish producer Leo Bloom led to a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. He went on to star in Brooks' nutzoid Western, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. He wouldn't have met Radner had director Sidney Poitier not suggested her as the leading lady in Stir Crazy. Wilder soon discovered that the "Saturday Night Live" star was as troubled as she was talented. "I said, at one point, we can't live together. And that's a fact," he admits. Indeed, he adds and writes, were it not for an episode involving Radner's Yorkshire Terrier, Sparkle, they might not have married at all.

Readers may find it surprising that Wilder doesn't romanticize his marriage to Radner. "Oh, you noticed, did you?" he deadpans. He depicts her as demanding, anxious to be loved, a fount of neuroses. But he also stuck by her during her bout with ovarian cancer. "I always thought she'd pull through," he recalls. After Radner's death in 1989, Wilder became the patient, successfully battling non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

He was halfway through writing his book when he realized "I was really writing a love story." But thinking back, he could never have anticipated this particular romance. It began with the movie, See No Evil, Hear No Evil. To prepare for his role, Wilder met with speech pathologist Karen Webb. Following Radner's death, the two reconnected and married. "But if I'd met Karen 20 years [earlier], it would never have worked. I wasn't ready for her and she wasn't ready for me."

In his book's preface, Wilder refers to the famed fountain outside the Plaza Hotel in New York City. To get past it, do you walk to the left or to the right? "I believe that whichever choice you make could change your life," he writes. In Kiss Me Like a Stranger, Wilder offers an unconventional but honest look back at where his own fateful choices have led.

 

Biographer Pat H. Broeske has covered Hollywood for several newspapers and magazines.

On the screen, Gene Wilder is known for his comic teamings with Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor. Away from the public glare, the man with the melancholy gaze and trademark frizzy hair paints watercolors and lives in a Colonial-era house in Connecticut with his fourth…

FictionDebut Fiction

Joshilyn Jackson

Southern heroines rarely leap off the page as full of life and trouble as Arlene Fleet, the headstrong protagonist and erstwhile alter ego of young Atlanta writer Joshilyn Jackson, whose marvelous debut, gods in Alabama, is fixing to slap some sense into modern Southern fiction. Before we've even finished the first page of this most unladylike romp through the Southern gothic hymnal, we learn that Arlene left podunk Possett, Alabama, a dozen years earlier after secretly murdering the high-school quarterback and kicking his body deep into the kudzu. What's more, we're already inexplicably cheering her on. Shouldn't someone at least ask, Lord, what's gotten into that girl?

Well, the Lord truly works in mysterious ways in Arlene's case. When she headed to Chicago for college, she made a pact with the Man Upstairs: in exchange for keeping Jim Beverly's body from the light of day, she vowed to neither lie, engage in sex outside of marriage, nor return to Possett, which she calls "the fourth rack of hell." But when Jim's old girlfriend Rose Mae Lolly shows up in Chicago looking for answers, Arlene figures all bets are off and reluctantly returns to Possett, where she reunites with her loving, racist Aunt Florence and introduces everyone to her very black, very Yankee boyfriend Burr.

'Sweet Home Alabama' meets 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' as Arlene stumbles toward a redemption that even Rhett and Scarlett would never have imagined.

Sweet Home Alabama meets Guess Who's Coming to Dinner as Arlene stumbles toward a redemption that even Rhett and Scarlett would never have imagined. Foulmouthed and hilariously frank, gods in Alabama is just the shot of sour to counter the diabetic-coma-inducing sweetness that seems to have overtaken Southern literature lately. Seekers of nostalgia should try the next book on the left.

It is both surprising and charming to find that Jackson, a happily married 30-something mother of two, still fumbles the one question she'll face ad nauseum this year.

"The first thing my editor asked was, so, how much of you is in Arlene? REALLY NOT A LOT!" she recalls by phone from Atlanta, with extended laughter. "Sure, OK, for the record, if we're doing bedpost notches, Arlene wins hands-down, she wins on an Olympic level, I'm pleased to say. She lives a lot more intensely than I do, and I hope, Lord, that I make better choices. I love Arlene. I think she has a good heart and she's funny and she's smart. I wouldn't want to be her, but I'd hang out with her."

In fact, Jackson was something of the anti-Arlene in high school, being raised, as she puts it, "by a tribe of wild fundamentalists."

"I was the nicest girl. I was a missionary, I went to Guyana with my church group and I dated nice boys. I was good; I shone with the white light of goodness," she says. "Now college was a different story. If I hit an Arlene phase, it was in college."

Jackson caught the theater bug and pursued it, first at the University of West Florida, then at other Southern campuses. "If there was a college in the Southeast, honey, I stopped there," she says. "It was a checkered career path." She ultimately dropped out to pursue acting. She worked in regional repertory and dinner theater before returning to Georgia State, where she graduated with honors in English.

Jackson fell in love with her best friend Scott, a fellow theater major, and followed him to Chicago, where he worked in trade show production. Six years later, the couple returned to the Atlanta area, where they live now and are raising their seven-year-old son and two-year-old daughter.

According to Jackson, Arlene and Burr first appeared as minor characters in a short story eight years ago. The author loved the dynamic between the two and used it to explore modern relationships in gods in Alabama. Burr's low-key love for his high-strung Southern belle helps endear them both to readers.

"I had a few Jane Austen moments; like Emma, I'm writing a heroine that nobody but me will love. But you know why I think Arlene is eventually a sympathetic character? I think a lot of it is Burr. She's a consummate bull****-er and she chooses to love the one guy who always sees through her. I think that says a lot about her, that she wants to be seen through; she wants honesty, she wants goodness, she's yearning for goodness. I think that ultimately makes her a really likable person, because we all do crappy things. It's the people who keep trying to choose what is right that you like. We all screw up."

The mixed-race couple enabled Jackson to explore racial friction in the New South. Her conclusion: get over it. "When you're dealing with racism in the South, my tolerance policy is, if you're 80 years old and you're a racist, what are you gonna do? OK, I'm sorry. And then the younger you get, the less tolerant I am about it, to where if you're my age or younger, I can't stomach it. It's like, what's wrong with you? I grew up like you grew up. This is not mandatory at this point."

As for the, uh, forthright language in her debut, Jackson credits a novelist friend's outraged voice mail with convincing her to push the envelope and unleash her inner Arlene.

"The biggest problem I had with that book was cowardice. The first draft, I had made some choices, I had backed away from some things that I thought were maybe too graphic or too explicit; 'unladylike' is a good word. And I remember I came home and there was this message on my machine, yelling at me: 'This is almost such a good book! You coward! Get them fornicating! Quit being such a lady! You must not be so afraid!' And I knew she was right. Arlene's looking for redemption, and the farther away you go, the more you have to say about getting back to where you want to be. If you get redeemed for stealing a piece of penny candy, it doesn't really mean very much."

The next time a little sin is required for the sake of literature, rest assured: in the words of the late, great Tammy Wynette, this good girl is gonna go bad.

Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.

 

 

Southern heroines rarely leap off the page as full of life and trouble as Arlene Fleet, the headstrong protagonist and erstwhile alter ego of young Atlanta writer Joshilyn Jackson, whose marvelous debut, gods in Alabama, is fixing to slap some sense into modern Southern fiction.
Fiction

Jonathan Safran Foer

Not long after the publication of his brilliant and widely acclaimed first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer was named one of the 50 most loathsome New Yorkers by a local literary weekly. That's a stunning mound of abuse to be piled on a writer who was barely a whisker past 25. And it leads one to wonder what further such plaudits lie in wait for an older (he's now 28!), wiser and far more accomplished Foer now that he has published an even more beautiful and brilliant second novel called Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Most loathsome man in the nation? In the hemisphere? The universe? The stinging arrow of literary envy will have to arc extremely high and incredibly long to bring to earth the soaring flight of Foer's very sad and very funny story of nine-year-old Oskar Schell and his grief for his father, a victim of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Fortunately for BookPage, if an Ogre Foer exists, he is nowhere in evidence during a call to the author's home in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. Instead there is merely the polite, charmingly elusive Jonathan Safran Foer, a novelist more likely to answer questions with anecdotes about the lives of poets and painters than with bold, self-regarding statements about his own life and work. Foer is married to the writer Nicole Krauss, who will publish her own second novel later in the spring. They have a dog, whose sudden barking a few minutes into the conversation alerts Foer to the arrival of the meter reader.

"A glimpse behind the scenes," Foer gasps as he struggles to cradle the phone, hold the dog and buzz the gas man in.

Ironically, Foer has just been talking about how important random events are to his work. He has invoked the poets Joseph Brodsky and W.H. Auden and confessed that he likes to write on the move. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, he has noted, was mostly composed in the New York Public Library, at coffee shops and in the homes of friends. "There's something about being out in public and open to the accidents of the world that can be very useful in writing," he continues after the gas man leaves. "I like keeping the environments fresh; it somehow keeps the imagination fresh."

"Fresh." It's an excellent word for Foer's new novel. It describes the language he uses. It suggests a reason for the unreasoning elation a reader feels reaching the fulfilling end of young Oskar's great quest and adventure through the streets of New York. It even describes the look and feel of the book itself.

"A book is a little sculpture," Foer says. "The choice of fonts, the size of the margins, the typography all influence the way the book is read. I consciously wanted to think about that, wanted to have the book really be something you hold in your hands, not just a vehicle for words. So I was involved in every step of the design, right down to how the book is stamped underneath the dust jacket."

Foer, the casual browser will quickly notice, also makes unusual use of photographs and graphics in the text of his novel. Why? "One answer is: why not?" Foer says. "Why don't novels have these things? Why is literature less accepting of the full spectrum of the arts than, say, painting or music? It's not at all strange to see writing within a painting? Why is it so strange to see painting within writing?"

Foer quickly adds, "I also think using images makes sense for this particular book. First because the way children see the world is that they sort of take these mental snapshots; they hoard all these images that they remember 20 or 40 years later. And also because September 11 was the most visually documented event in human history. When we think of those events, we remember certain images planes going into the buildings, people falling, the towers collapsing. That's how we experience it; that's how we remember it. And I want to be true to that experience. One of the important things a novelist does is choose what to look at, what to examine, because the more time you spend looking at something the more sensitive you are to it. . . . I think it's very dangerous to avoid looking at war, at violence. So I really wanted to explicitly look at those things in this book, not only through the writing, which I tried to make as visual and direct as I could, but also through these images."

Foer entices a reader to gaze intently at these troubling issues by projecting the story of Oskar's quest to unlock the secret of his father's life and death against the story of Oskar's grandparents' struggles to create their own lives after surviving the horrific Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II. The brilliance of Foer's storytelling lies in its poignant, wide-hearted, utterly seductive humor. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close brings a reader to that high level of seriousness that only the very best comedy can achieve.

Still, the singular thrill of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is, quite frankly, the utterly engaging and utterly vulnerable character of Oskar Schell. "I felt very, very, very strongly sympathetic with Oskar," Foer says. "There's a way in which he has no skin. I don't mean that he's thin-skinned. There are just no boundaries between himself and the world. Everything is personal and everything that is personal is universal. That's how kids experience the world, and that's how this kid in particular experiences the world." Through the force of his own compassion, Oskar eventually grows up.

And beyond that, Foer will not—or cannot—go. "I'm not at all sure I have the most interesting interpretation of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," he says almost shyly. "One of the nice things about sending a book into the world is that there are so many smart readers who see things in the book that maybe I didn't intend but that now become part of its meaning. For me, the shortest description I could possibly give of my book is the book. If I could have thought of another way to say it or to describe it, I would have done that instead of what I wrote. "

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

RELATED CONTENT
Interview with Nicole Krauss (Foer's wife) for The History of Love
 
Eating Animals trailer 

 

Not long after the publication of his brilliant and widely acclaimed first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer was named one of the 50 most loathsome New Yorkers by a local literary weekly. That's a stunning mound of abuse to be piled on a…

Fiction

Nicole Krauss

For her inventive second novel, The History of Love, Nicole Krauss set herself "two small personal rules." The first was that she wouldn't do any research for the book. "I just didn't want to," Krauss says firmly in a soft, lilting voice during a call to her home in Brooklyn's Park Slope, where she lives with her husband, the writer Jonathan Safran Foer. In her well-regarded first novel, Man Walks into a Room, Krauss had written of the experiences of Samson Greene, a man whose memory is erased after removal of a tumor. It was a book that had a whiff of research but nary a hint of autobiography within its pages. "The second time around," Krauss says, "I felt very thoughtful about what kind of writer I want to be. I didn't want to write a novel just to write a novel or just to be a writer. I decided to write something for myself. I wanted to really use the things that I know."

Krauss' second rule was that she would never let herself be bored. "Writing the first novel, I thought it was sometimes necessary to write though a boring moment just to move the characters from point A to B. This time I felt that if I was bored, the reader would be bored. So I decided that as soon as something felt a little dull I would invent a new story, vignette or character."

In the hands of a less skillful writer, Krauss' rules might have blended about as well as oil and water. But in The History of Love, Krauss achieves an uplifting alchemy of surprise and recognition. The result is a haunting novel that has generated considerable excitement even before its publication. The New Yorker ran a much talked-about excerpt in 2004, and movie rights have been sold to Warner Bros., with Alfonso Cuar—n (best known for Y Tu Mamá También) set to direct. Foreign rights have also been sold in nearly 20 countries.

Krauss, 30, a Stanford graduate who also studied at Oxford, achieved acclaim as a poet before turning to fiction in 2002 with the publication of her first novel. Though her marriage to Foer (author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) is the source of considerable curiosity in literary circles, she prefers not to discuss it obviously reluctant to be seen as capitalizing on her husband's renown.

With The History of Love, however, Krauss proves that her literary reputation can stand on its own. The novel focuses mainly on the slowly converging stories of Leo Gursky and Alma Singer. Gursky is an 80-year-old retired locksmith in New York, a lonely survivor of a Nazi massacre in the Polish village where he grew up 60 years before the novel opens. Alma is a 14-year-old girl whose father has recently died, whose mother shields herself from loneliness by working without stop as a literary translator, and whose nine-year-old brother, Bird (over whom she vigilantly watches), thinks he might be the Messiah.

Leo and Alma—and all the many other characters in this slender, densely woven novel—are connected across time and space by the impact on their lives of an almost-forgotten novel called The History of Love.

"In the beginning," Krauss says, "this book was very much about writing. I was thinking, well, how many readers does one really need? If it reaches one person and changes her life, is that enough? Or two people? The idea that there is a book that has a print run of under 2,000 and that nobody reads but in the end a single copy of it connects and changes all these lives was very moving to me," she says. "I write because I want to reach people and have the kind of conversation with them that can happen only through a book. It's one of the most beautiful conversations there is, I think. So as the book progressed, I realized that I was writing as much about reading and being a reader as about writing. And I became unabashed about occasionally putting in lines from all the writers I love."

This undercurrent of reference and allusion, even when unannounced, buoys and intensifies the story Krauss tells. Yes, The History of Love is about writing and reading. But more importantly and more essentially, it is about love and loss. As Krauss says, "It's what we know and have experienced of love that give depth and shape to our solitude. The book is about the necessity of imagining in the space of loss and of filling silence with made-up things: thoughts, feelings, images. Everyone in the book invents things to survive."

Interestingly, Krauss found it easier to invent Leo than Alma, whose life experiences were closer to – but not the same as – her own. "I struggled with Alma's voice, I think, because I remember very well what it was like to be 14 years old and someone not unlike her," Krauss says. "It took me a long time to feel I could abandon the sometimes dull circumstances of my own experiences and freely imagine this character. With Leo, conversely, I felt immediately and totally at home in his voice. There was never a question of wondering what would an old man from Poland do here. I always felt with him that I was writing about myself, as strange as that may seem."

Krauss dedicates her novel to her grandparents, "who taught me the opposite of disappearing," and includes photographs of them in the book. Like her character Leo Gursky, Krauss' grandparents fled Europe before the start of World War II. "I put in the photographs and the dedication line because of the scene in the book where Leo . . . realizes that he has lost the ability to be seen by other people. He is a person who thinks a lot about his invisibility. And for that reason I wanted to use passport photographs of my grandparents," she says.

"In my mind the opposite of disappearing is survival. The book is shot through with odes to survival, to the strength it takes to survive, and to the joy of those who have survived," Krauss says. "My grandparents are people who love life. Every conversation I remember having with them as a child was about life—not about tragedy, not about history, not about what had happened to their families—but simply about living."

At the end of the novel, Leo's and Alma's lives unexpectedly converge. And The History of Love becomes not simply a story of love and loss but also a moving history of survival, visibility and the joy of living.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

For her inventive second novel, The History of Love, Nicole Krauss set herself "two small personal rules." The first was that she wouldn't do any research for the book. "I just didn't want to," Krauss says firmly in a soft, lilting voice during a call…

FictionWorld Fiction

Philip Caputo

The ghosts of literary heavyweights are never far from the page in Philip Caputo’s unflinching, dust-swept African odyssey, Acts of Faith. This cautionary tale about a modern-day group of well-intentioned pilots, missionaries and dreamers who attempt to alleviate the suffering in war-torn Sudan covers all the morally rocky ground we love in Melville and Conrad. Three very different love-in-the-trenches subplots recall the shell-shocked assignations of Hemingway. And the brutally honest, two-fisted prose reminds us yet again why Caputo, along with Jim Harrison and Peter Matthiessen, may be the last of the big cats in our literary jungle.

A decade after his 1965 tour of duty with the first Marine combat unit to fight in Vietnam, a shattered Caputo pieced his life back together by writing A Rumor of War, which became a definitive book of that divisive conflict. As a reporter and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, he covered the Kent State shootings and shared a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on election fraud. His fascination with Africa began in the mid-1970s with a trip by foot and camel across the deserts of Sudan and Eritrea that served as a backdrop for his first novel, Horn of Africa (1980).

Acts of Faith was inspired by Caputo’s return to sub-Saharan Africa in 2000 and 2001 on assignment with National Geographic Adventure magazine. In the course of his reporting, he flew into Somalia with bush pilots whose cargo didn’t strictly comply with the UN manifest.

“Everything is flown around in those places: dope, food, guns,” he says by phone from his winter home in Patagonia, Arizona. “Some of the Russian Antonov pilots would fly UN food drops over Sudan, then on leave they would sometimes drop over to the other side and fly Antonov bombers for the Sudanese air force and drop bombs on the same people they were helping.” Acts of Faith centers on Knight Air, an independent airlift operation that flies UN-sponsored relief missions from the Kenyan border town of Lokichokio into the Nuba Mountains, an oil-rich Sudan region at war with the Muslim-controlled government in Khartoum. Douglas Braithwaite, a dispassionate American, and Wesley Dare, a freewheeling good ol’ Texan, run Knight Air with the help of Fitzhugh Martin, a biracial Kenyan soccer star, and Mary English, their young Canadian co-pilot. In the Nuba Mountains, Michael Goraende commands the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army while American missionary Quinette Hardin immerses herself in tribal customs in order to save souls. The Nuba badly needs the airlifts but not the air raids from Khartoum that its new airstrip might bring.

Romance develops between Wesley and Mary, Fitzhugh and Diana, and Michael and Quinette as Khartoum closes in on the humanitarian groups it suspects are smuggling arms to the rebels. Who will escape the approaching cataclysm, and how, occupies much of the third act. Like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, everyone here is spiritually up a river without a paddle.

Caputo admits that the adventurous spirit that prevents him from plotting his novels beforehand sometimes prolongs the writing process as well. He was forced to scrap early work on Acts of Faith after trying in vain to ignite a love interest between Douglas and Quinette (“I wasn’t very fond of him; he’s just not a warm character.”) Then there was the ending; both his wife and editor counseled him against his admittedly bleak finale. “I had originally had the book ending in an almost Shakespearean bloodbath,” he chuckles. At 63, Caputo has reached an uneasy truce with danger. When Men’s Journal approached him to take an embedded position with the 1st Marine Reconnaissance Battalion to cover the invasion of Iraq, he declined. Nor was he tempted to hunt Osama bin Laden in the Afghan mountains. “I said, I don’t know that a 61-year-old guy should be running around with these 20-year-old recon guys,” he recalls. “I had been in Afghanistan years ago with the mujahideen when they were fighting the Russians and I remembered how awful that country was. If it had kind of taxed me when I was 38, what’s it going to do to me now?” Caputo instead threw himself into 13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings (Chamberlain Brothers) which elicited mixed feelings about the anti-war years.

“I had covered the Days of Rage the year before in Chicago, and I remember the protesters chanting. What do we want? Revolution! When do we want it? Now!’ like a football cheer. And a year later, to be standing at that parking lot in Kent, Ohio, looking down on all of this blood that was still fresh and staining the asphalt, I thought, well, kids, this is what a revolution looks like.” Surprisingly, the terrain that Caputo would most like to be able to tackle in fiction is everyday life.

“I read a lot of fiction that you would think somebody like me would not read, like Alice Munro and John Updike and John Cheever, and I’ve always felt this longing to be able to write about very ordinary situations in this wonderfully extraordinary way, but I can’t do it [laughs]. I suppose it would be as if Alice Munro were to say, I think I’ll write a war novel. Who knows, maybe it would be wonderful, but I doubt it.” While his days on the front lines may be over, Caputo is reconciled to the fact that his work will always arise in some way from life on the edge. “There is something about out-of-the-way places and exotic locales and these kind of extreme, more difficult or dangerous situations that have kind of drawn me. I guess they reveal things about people that are not generally revealed in more ordinary circumstances. At my age, I’ve realized that that’s my fate, my destiny so to speak, as a writer.” Jay MacDonald writes for a living in the wilds of Mississippi.

The ghosts of literary heavyweights are never far from the page in Philip Caputo's unflinching, dust-swept African odyssey, Acts of Faith. This cautionary tale about a modern-day group of well-intentioned pilots, missionaries and dreamers who attempt to alleviate the suffering in war-torn Sudan covers all…
Children's & YA

Jeff Stone

Life often inspires art, but rarely do the two align with such symmetry as they did for debut author Jeff Stone. An adoptee who had conducted a 15-year search for his birth mother, Stone succeeded in his quest just a week after he completed Tiger: The Five Ancestors #1, the first novel in a series about five orphaned brothers. In an uncanny twist of fate, the author's fictional explorations served as a catalyst for resolving an unwritten chapter from his past.

Stone says his journey started with two objectives. "I was going through an early midlife crisis and realized there were two major things I wanted to try to accomplish in life one was to write a book and the other was to find my birth mother," he told BookPage from his Indiana home. Stone eventually came up with an idea that would allow him to work toward both goals: he would write a series of children's books that explored the different sides of adoption, particularly the range of emotions and stages that adoptees go through during searches.

Stone also drew inspiration from his practice of Shaolin kung fu, an ancient discipline based on a rich history of Chinese legends, myths and philosophies. Stone, who has earned a second-degree brown belt, was particularly intrigued by the legend of five warrior monks who miraculously escaped the destruction of China's famed Shaolin Temple in the 17th century. He thought it would be interesting to approach the story from a child's perspective by asking what would happen if the five young monks were forced to deal with this tragic event while simultaneously trying to uncover their own mysterious pasts. This hypothetical scenario plays out in Tiger, which follows the adventures of the orphaned monks as they are raised in a secret temple under the tutelage of an avuncular kung fu Grandmaster.

While there are many reasons children will fall in love with this exciting new series, Stone says, "I just hope kids will be inspired to recognize that everyone has individual strengths and weaknesses. If they can embrace the differences and build on their strengths, it will make the world a better place for them." The author's own lifelong passion for martial arts and Asian culture may seem incongruous in light of his Polish heritage and Midwest upbringing, but Stone says it was a childhood love of '70s kung fu TV shows that ignited his imagination. "It drove my parents nuts," he admits, laughing. But this portrayal of a distant and unfamiliar world appealed to him, he says, "because that foreign feeling was something I felt growing up all the time, looking and feeling a little bit out of place, and [the shows] transported me to another world." Stone realized that "a lot of adoptees, including myself, struggle with nature vs. nurture issues," so he decided to incorporate this conflict into the lives of the young monks in his series.

Stone faced these issues head-on while writing the book and searching for his biological mother, but fate dealt an unexpected blow when he lost his job during the process. Fortunately, his four-year-old daughter provided the encouragement he needed to forge ahead. "I was sitting there one day, kind of down, and she came up and handed me a scrap of paper. I asked her what it was and she said, 'It's your new business card!'" It said simply, 'Daddy, Write Books' and his daughter matter-of-factly informed him, "You love to write books, Daddy, so just do that."

Fortunately, Stone took this youthful advice to heart and finshed Tiger, which was snapped up in a heated publishing auction shortly after he was happily reunited with his birth mother. He has since completed the manuscript for the second book in the series, Monkey, due out this fall, and there are five more books in the works. In a fitting finale, this spring Stone is visiting the Shaolin Temple in China, where he hopes to test for his black belt and bring closure to a journey that has come full circle.

Life often inspires art, but rarely do the two align with such symmetry as they did for debut author Jeff Stone. An adoptee who had conducted a 15-year search for his birth mother, Stone succeeded in his quest just a week after he completed…

History

David McCullough

The reader that David McCullough imagines peering over his shoulder as he crafts his meticulously researched histories and biographies is the person he happens to be writing about at the time, whether it’s John Adams, Harry Truman or some anonymous soldier in a long-forgotten battle. “This has been true of everything I’ve written,” the 71-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner tells BookPage from his home on Martha’s Vineyard. “I try to write a book so that if they could read it, they would say, yes, he got it.”

McCullough’s ghostly audience this time around would include the American rebels, British regulars and their leaders who clashed with each other during the second year of the Revolutionary War. The book is titled simply 1776. It begins with the siege of Boston, an American triumph; continues through the struggles for New York in which the British forces prevailed; and ends with the American resurgence in the wintry frays at Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey.

McCullough chose to focus on 1776 “because that was the low point of our fortunes, not just in the war, but, I think one can say, in the whole history of the country. The prospects of there even being a United States of America were never more bleak. Also, it was the year of the Declaration of Independence. When I was writing the John Adams biography and trying to understand everything that was going on in Philadelphia that summer of 1776, I realized, perhaps more than I had before, that all they were doing there was theoretical and that the Declaration itself would have been nothing but words on paper had it not been for the people out fighting the war. Everything depended on them.”

While much of McCullough’s account is involved in showing how the reluctant George Washington developed into an effective military leader, it is just as attentive to the importance of lower-ranking officers and foot soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

“I think too little has been written about the British in the Revolutionary War,” he says. “A lot of what happened with those in the British army and those who were trying to manage the war in London has not been fairly understood.” To understand it better, McCullough traveled to London and pored through such primary sources of the period as letters, diaries, newspapers and magazines.

“I tried to soak up [the British magazines] if only for the vocabulary,” he says. “I [didn’t] want to be influenced by what other historians are writing now. I respect what they’re doing, and I read much of it. But I’m finding my way into that other time and into the lives of those other people through material that came from that other time and from those other people.”

McCullough was determined to give the much-maligned King George III his due. The monarch’s initial response to the American rebellion, he shows, was measured, cautious and hopeful for a peaceful resolution. Moreover, the king was a man of considerable taste and talent. “I went to see an exhibit of [his] collection of art,” says McCullough, “which included his own paintings, which are wonderful. I had simply read that he was interested in art, but when you see what he actually did himself mostly architectural drawings they’re superb.” The fact that Britain lost the war and that the king went insane many years later, McCullough thinks, helped to make George such an object of derision.

Equally diligent in researching American particulars, McCullough says he followed the path of the rebel army from Boston all the way south. “That’s also the fun of the work,” he observes. “Very often I will write the chapter, at least the first draft, before I go to look at [the actual scene] to see how closely I’ve come to getting it right. And always always there are certain things that are different from what I thought. For example, Fort Washington, which is a big part of the story. When you say it’s up above the Hudson River it is, but when you go there, it is really up above the Hudson River. You understand why [the Americans] thought it was impregnable. I felt it. I don’t think you can know anything unless you feel it. I thought, My god! If I had a fort up here, I would know damn well it could hold out. Nobody could come up those cliffs. Of course, they did.”

Tales of American courage and fortitude abound in 1776, but McCullough also presents the rebel army’s deficiencies. “Obviously, there were a lot of people who just couldn’t take it and [who] thought it was hopeless and more than anybody should be asked to do. And so they deserted by the thousands or, when their enlistment was up, they went home by the thousands. They all weren’t heroes by any means.” In addition, he points out, thousands of colonials remained loyal to the crown: “It wasn’t just a theoretic displeasure with the Revolution. They were really against it and willing to fight against it.”

Calling it the most important war in our history, McCullough says he thinks Americans tend to overlook the Revolution for one simple reason: there are no photographs of it. “We see photographs of the people in the Civil War and photographs of the carnage at Antietam and Gettysburg in Matthew Brady’s photographs. We can identify with that. Those are real people. But the people of the Revolution are so often pictured in our minds because of paintings we’ve seen as characters in a costume pageant. There’s something not quite fully real about them. And the other thing people think is that the loss of life was relatively small. Well, by 20th-century terms, of course, it was very small. But in proportion to the size of population at the time, it was enormous. If we lost a comparable number of Americans in a war today as we lost in the Revolution, we would lose about three million people.”

McCullough says it took him about four years to research and write 1776. At the moment, he has no other books in the works. “I’m trying to calm myself,” he says with a chuckle.

 

Edward Morris is a writer in Nashville.

 

The reader that David McCullough imagines peering over his shoulder as he crafts his meticulously researched histories and biographies is the person he happens to be writing about at the time, whether it's John Adams, Harry Truman or some anonymous soldier in a long-forgotten battle.…
Children's & YA

Jon Scieszka

As a teacher, a parent and a writer, Jon Scieszka has learned that there are big differences between boys and girls when it comes to reading. Of course, he isn’t the first to notice—research consistently shows that girls are more successful in learning to read and far more likely to read for pleasure. Scieszka, an innovative children’s author, decided to tackle the problem head-on by launching a literacy effort to link boys and books. His program started three years ago with a website, GuysRead.com, and continues this spring with the release of a new book, Guys Write for Guys Read.

Edited by Scieszka himself, the collection includes short pieces by 90 male authors "on their memories of what it is to be a boy. I left it pretty wide open, but I told them to keep it very short so boys would actually read it," Scieszka explains. He hopes the book will function as a sampler, helping boys find writers they like so they’ll be motivated to read more. Entries range from Douglas Florian’s succinct Guide for Guys: "Don’t daze/Don’t doze/Don’t pick/Your nose," to Chris Crutcher’s memories of his humiliating (and hilarious) induction into a high school sports club. Other contributors include such popular authors as Neil Gaiman, Eoin Colfer, Dav Pilkey, Avi and Christopher Paolini. All the proceeds from the book will be used to support boys’ literacy efforts.

As the author of The Stinky Cheese Man and The Time Warp Trio series (soon to be a Saturday morning TV show on NBC), Scieszka is well-versed in what it takes to interest boys. Raised in a Flint, Michigan, household with five brothers, he says he was completely immersed in "the boy way of seeing the world." After stints in an all-male military academy, college and a graduate writing program, he became an elementary school teacher in New York. "It was such a dramatic flip because suddenly I was in this world that was almost all women. I felt like I was on another planet," he recalls. As one of the lone men at the school, Scieszka found that he could be a powerful role model for boys. "In my first years, I taught a second-grade homeroom, and some of the boys were described by their previous teachers as the biggest terrors—when I read their first-grade reports you would have thought they were ax murderers! But they came into my class and they were fine. It was almost as if they were relieved to see someone of their gender doing this stuff—reading and writing and being able to relate to them."

Scieszka thinks it’s important that boys have choices about what to read and that parents and teachers expand their ideas about what constitutes good reading. "Don’t think that they have to read Little House on the Prairie for it to be reading. Boys, a lot of them anyway, don’t really care about fiction," he notes. They prefer nonfiction, humor, graphic novels, science fiction and even computer manuals. "If we broaden our definition of what reading is, boys will feel more included."

Scieszka, who lives in Brooklyn, is the father of a son and daughter, ages 19 and 21. "I found with my own kids, when a summer reading list would come home, my daughter would see 20 books she’d like to read, while my son really had to search through the list," he says. Scieszka now speaks to teachers and librarians—groups that are still overwhelmingly female—and tells them "to look at their reading lists as if they were a boy in their own classroom and see what’s on it that might interest them."

Scieszka believes society as a whole has much to gain by helping more boys discover the wonders of reading. "If we can get boys to read, we can get them inside other people’s lives and get them to be more empathetic characters," he argues. "It’s a way for you to see someone else’s point of view, which is a huge thing. If we could do that around the world, I think we’d all be better off."

As a teacher, a parent and a writer, Jon Scieszka has learned that there are big differences between boys and girls when it comes to reading. Of course, he isn't the first to notice—research consistently shows that girls are more successful in learning to read…

Pop CultureArts & Culture

Steven Johnson

Cultural historian Steven Johnson has had it with people who complain that videogames, TV shows, movies and the Internet are dehumanizing and intellectually barren pastimes. In fact, he argues, just the opposite is true. Johnson’s thesis is that each of these newer (and constantly evolving) forms of popular culture gives our brains the kind of workout we could never get, say, simply from reading.

It was his long-running interest in videogames that inspired his new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. "I’ve written about videogames in all four of my books," he tells BookPage from his home in Brooklyn, "[and even] when I was writing in an old web magazine called Feed," which he co-founded and edited. "We tried to do serious commentaries on games and not just treat them like child’s play. All through the late ’90s, I was following this road and watching really interesting games come out. At the same time, the mainstream media was talking mainly about these violent games and [the high school massacre at] Columbine: were the Columbine shooters influenced by playing these violent videogames like Quake and Doom and so on? I just thought there was this basic disconnect. It really seemed like the people who were doing most of the public pontificating about these games hadn’t spent any time with them."

The critics, Johnson says, seemed unaware that the best-selling videogames were generally nonviolent and quite complex to play. "I had thought for a long time," he says, "that there was some kind of argument to be made for appreciating the complexity and problem-solving and pattern-recognition involved in the gaming culture."

To link his ideas about the mental benefits arising from pop-culture activities, Johnson poses a concept he calls "the Sleeper Curve." He names it after a sequence in Woody Allen’s 1973 sci-fi comedy, Sleeper, in which a man awakens from a 200-year sleep to learn that such once-feared delicacies as cream pies and hot fudge were actually good for him—at least when viewed over the long run. It’s the same with current games and media, the author argues. While they may seem alarming up close or in individual instances, their long-range effect is beneficial because they gradually and inexorably teach our brains to adapt to the complexity of the lives we now live. In the process of engaging these and other technologies, he says, the average IQ of Americans has been going up steadily over the past 50 years.

A common denominator in pursuing these pastimes, according to Johnson, is that we have to learn the rules, conventions and situations as we go—in other words, adapt. "Adapting to an ever-accelerating sequence of new technologies also trains the mind to explore and master complex systems," he writes. "When we marvel at the technological savvy of your average 10-year-old, what we should be celebrating is not their mastery of a specific platform—Windows XP, say, or the GameBoy—but rather their seemingly effortless ability to pick up new platforms on the fly, without so much as a glimpse at a manual."

But why do emerging technologies and refinements always spark such virulent resistance? "There are a couple of things at work," Johnson muses. "The first is that we always translate these new forms, technologies and genres and evaluate them using the criteria developed to make sense of older [ones]. So the car is the ‘horseless carriage,’ and the [sound recording] is the ‘compact disc,’ even though the fact that it’s compact and a disc is not what’s interesting about it but the fact that it’s digital. We have this bias—we look at videogames and say, hey, this doesn’t have the psychological depth of a novel or even a movie. So this must be kind of a debased form that’s not worthy of any intellectual scrutiny. There’s also clearly a generational thing of people just not getting what the kids are into and assuming they must be up to no good. It’s an old story."

Johnson’s previous works include the bestseller Mind Wide Open, an examination of brain science that uses his own brain as a guidepost. He says his next project will be a book about the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, which he hopes to develop it into a "history of cities and how they heal themselves."

Cultural historian Steven Johnson has had it with people who complain that videogames, TV shows, movies and the Internet are dehumanizing and intellectually barren pastimes. In fact, he argues, just the opposite is true. Johnson's thesis is that each of these newer (and constantly evolving)…

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