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HistoryAmerican History

Douglas Brinkley

Theodore Roosevelt’s passion for the rugged outdoor life is widely known. But it remained for historian Douglas Brinkley to document—virtually on a week-by-week basis—the extent to which TR transformed his enthusiasm for nature into America’s gain and glory. The results of Brinkley’s exhaustive research reverberate through The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, a whopping (almost 1,000-page) examination of Roosevelt’s fight to save America’s unique natural spaces.

Elevated to the presidency in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley, Roosevelt used the power of his office not simply to advocate the conservation of natural resources but also to impose sweeping environmental measures by fiat. “In seven years and sixty-nine days [as president],” Brinkley writes, “Roosevelt . . . saved more than 240 million acres of American wilderness.”

In one sense, Brinkley has been preparing to write this book for most of his life. “My mother and father were high school teachers” in Perrysburg, Ohio, he tells BookPage from his office in Houston, where he is professor of history at Rice University. “We had a 24-foot Coachman trailer, and we would visit presidential sites and national parks. I had been to Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt’s home, when I was a boy, and I was enamored by the study and the library and the big-game trophies. Then we would visit a lot of these parks—Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, the Petrified Forest and other places—I write about [here].

“But what really galvanized this book for me was in 1992 I brought a lot of students [from Hofstra University] on a program I called The Majic Bus. They earned college credits living on the road, visiting presidential sites and national parks like my family vacation. I came upon the town of Medora, North Dakota, where TR spent his Badlands days, and I was transfixed by this quaint, cowboy-like hamlet. I started at that point micro-looking at TR and conservation as a topic.”
Brinkley says he thinks the subject of land use—the question of what to do with the West—was the “big issue” between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I. He plans to follow The Wilderness Warrior with two more related volumes that will chronicle the American environmental movement through the administration of President Clinton.

“We’ve created this extraordinary system of wildlife refuges, parks and forests,” says Brinkley, “and we’ve pioneered in saving endangered species and rehabilitating lakes and rivers. We’ve done a lot of things right. In many ways, the conservation story is a triumphal American story, but it’s also filled with warnings about the things we’re not doing properly now.”

Roosevelt left a literary trail Brinkley found easy to follow. In addition to his 30 or so books, most of which dealt with nature, TR wrote an estimated 150,000 letters that capsulated his thoughts and travels. His journeys and utterances were also “good copy” at the time for America’s increasingly influential daily newspapers.

“Roosevelt’s great talent was not manipulating Congress, which he looked on with a fair amount of disdain,” Brinkley says. “He was a genius at manipulating the media. He loved reporters. He was a writer himself and a voracious reader. So any new book by a journalist that came out, he read it. He also read all the newspapers and periodicals of his day and knew the reporters by name. He won over a number of [news] people to the conservation movement.”

Politically, Roosevelt was hard to pin down. He was a rabid America-firster, a believer in westward expansion and in the “civilizing” or displacement of Indians. Yet he steadfastly thwarted the capitalists who sought to exploit the nation’s resources for private advantage. He gleefully slaughtered game animals, even as he fought to protect them and their habitats for posterity.

“The truth is that hunters and fishermen were the first environmentalists in the United States,” Brinkley asserts, noting that Roosevelt shipped many of his kills to scientists to study and to taxidermists to mount. “Before DNA testing or banding of animals,” Brinkley continues, “taxidermy was the way we learned about the natural world.”

As Brinkley sees it, Roosevelt “sold environmentalism by being a cowboy/hunter. That was his great contribution. Without the persona of, ‘Look, I’m a cowboy, I ride on a horse, and I’ve hunted grizzly bear and black bear and elk and buffalo’ then he wouldn’t have had the credibility to say, ‘You know what? We should create a buffalo commons to save the buffalo.’ He was able to sell enough people on that because he wasn’t seen as an effete intellectual talking about biology. . . . He was one part Darwin and one part James Fenimore Cooper.”

In the course of his environmental campaigns, Roosevelt crossed paths—and sometimes swords—with such luminaries as novelist Owen Wister (who dedicated The Virginian to him), painter Frederic Remington (then a relative unknown whom TR would tap to illustrate some of his magazine articles), Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington (with whom Roosevelt dined at the White House, much to the chagrin of many prominent Southerners), Mark Twain (who opposed Roosevelt on the Spanish-American War and later derided him in print for his impulsiveness and bloodlust) Jack London (whose fiction Roosevelt attacked for biological inaccuracy) and folklorist John Lomax (for whom Roosevelt personally secured a grant to enable him to continue his seminal study of American cowboy songs).

Apart from its impressive scholarship, The Wilderness Warrior also has an appealing turn-of-the-20th century design. The illustrations are integrated into the text rather than displayed on separate pages, and each chapter is prefaced by a list of phrases that outline the topics covered within.

Brinkley applauds Roosevelt for his “bold, hubristic moves” to preserve the nation’s most arresting landscapes. “He was the only politician we had in the White House in that period who had a biological sense of the world, who understood the need for species survival and did something about it. . . . When you open up a Rand McNally map and look at all the green on the United States, you’re looking at TR’s America.”

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

Theodore Roosevelt’s passion for the rugged outdoor life is widely known. But it remained for historian Douglas Brinkley to document—virtually on a week-by-week basis—the extent to which TR transformed his enthusiasm for nature into America’s gain and glory. The results of Brinkley’s exhaustive research reverberate…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Teri Coyne

People who know Teri Coyne’s work as a stand-up comedian are going to be very, very surprised by her intense, emotionally wrenching first novel, The Last Bridge. There are many good words that could describe Coyne’s story of 28-year-old Alex “Cat” Rucker, an alcoholic waitress who fled her rural childhood home as a teenager then returns to confront her family demons 10 years later, after her mother’s suicide. “Page-turner,” perhaps. Or “psychologically compelling.” But “funny”? Most definitely not.

“People ask, wow, where did that come from?” Coyne says with a characteristic laugh during a call to her home on Long Island’s North Fork. For some years Coyne managed a technical writing and training team at a New York law firm and divided her time between an apartment in Queens and the 110-year-old house she bought and renovated on Long Island, while performing and writing on the side. The favorable early buzz about her first book has not entirely freed her from needing a job, but she now works as a consultant and spends more time at her North Fork home composing an early draft of a second novel. “I am drawn to the darker side of humor,” Coyne says. “I was inspired and influenced by comedians like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks. But when I performed, I certainly wasn’t intense and dark like this book.”

The Last Bridge developed from a kind of vision Coyne had after abandoning standup in order to tell a larger story than she could in her comedy routines. “The book started with an image in my head of a mother taping garbage bags to the wall, a shotgun and the opening line of the book: ‘Two days after my father had a massive stroke, my mother shot herself in the head.’ Once I heard that voice, I couldn’t stop. I wrote the opening line and it just started coming. Looking back, it started at a time in my life when I was exploring this concept of what makes a family, what makes a person a parent. Is it blood or is it choice? Are we the product of our experiences? Or are we the product of our choices? As I started to write this story, it became very clear that that was really what I was trying to explore.”

The exploration did not go entirely smoothly. “Clearly when it takes you 10 years to write a book, you’re not in a big hurry to get something out there,” Coyne says, laughing. “This was my first book. I was learning the process of writing a novel while I was working on it. My goal was not publication but rather to make it the best story I could make it. That meant spending a lot of time writing and rewriting and focusing on getting the tone right.”

Interestingly, Coyne says that she had to leave her house to write the most difficult parts of the book. “When I was working on something that was really, really emotional it was easier for me to just go sit in a public space because for some reason I’m not as distracted in a public space.”

Although she can’t listen to music while she writes, Coyne uses music to get into the writing. She developed playlists for each character she was working on. “Every character has a song and that song just puts me immediately into the head of that person,” she says. Her playlists are on iTunes and her website.

Coyne’s early struggles to learn her craft were not helped by the nature of her central character, Alex, otherwise known as Cat. “It’s very difficult to write a character that you know your reader is not going to like right away. Cat is not a very likeable person in the beginning. But I felt very protective of her. I had to find a way to keep readers with me until I could show who she really is. Anger is not a real emotion and Cat’s anger is a disguise for something deeper. I had to find a way to show what that anger is covering.”

Part of what Alex is covering—or running from—is an abusive relationship with her father. Coyne’s unnerving portrait of that relationship draws on research she did with victims of abuse and from her own family history.

“Cat is not me,” Coyne says, “and none of the characters are reflective of people or characters in my own life, but some of their qualities are composites. That said, I made them all up, so they really are me. I dedicate the book to my father. He had a drinking problem and he had abusive and violent behavior. I struggled with that, as did all the people in our family. There’s this very private thing that happens inside of the family and then there’s this public life you lead in school or outside of the family. You learn very early that your family situation is not something you share outside of your family.”

“I had a lot of friends who had siblings who were kind of the black sheep or developed drug problems or drinking problems,” Coyne recalls. “People thought these people were broken, that something was wrong with them, that they were weak, that they didn’t have any ambition. But the older that I got and the more that I talked to people and saw what really happens to people who come from abusive families, I saw that these are not weak people. These are people that are masquerading a tremendous amount of pain. As I started to learn more and understand more, I started to really see that we have these notions or conceptions about people who are troubled that often aren’t really honest about what that person is really going through. It’s very, very important for me to shed light on that.”

As a result of this passion for bringing light to a difficult subject, Coyne’s empathic and ultimately redemptive first novel has struck a chord with early readers in ways that have completely amazed her. “It has been a lifelong dream of mine to get a book sold and published,” she says. “It’s a phenomenal thing that has happened to me. But I have to say I am in total awe of the reading community. It has just really blown me away how passionate readers are and how they do go out of their way to make contact with me and how dedicated they are to getting the word out about The Last Bridge. It’s really impressive and inspiring.”

The feeling, it seems, is completely mutual.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

People who know Teri Coyne's work as a stand-up comedian are going to be very, very surprised by her intense, emotionally wrenching first novel, The Last Bridge. There are many good words that could describe Coyne’s story of 28-year-old Alex “Cat” Rucker, an alcoholic waitress…

Biography

Tracy Kidder

While working on Strength in What Remains, the excruciating and ultimately uplifting story of a survivor of the genocidal conflict in Burundi and Rwanda, Tracy Kidder violated one of his cardinal writing principles. He wrote on airplanes.

“I really can’t have someone looking over my shoulder when I’m working,” Kidder says during a call to the summer home in Maine that he and his wife, a painter, bought in the 1980s, around the time when The Soul of a New Machine earned him a Pulitzer Prize. “Privacy is a big thing for me.”

Usually Kidder has found privacy in what he describes as his uninsulated, “beautifully built little cottage down by a salt water cove” on the couple’s property in Maine. Or in the quiet office “with plenty of room for pacing” in their house—an old, converted creamery not far from Northampton, Massachusetts. But over the last five or six years, while he was researching and writing Strength in What Remains, Kidder traveled frequently to college campuses all over the country, where his marvelous account of Dr. Paul Farmer’s effort to heal the world, Mountains Beyond Mountains, has inspired enough interest that, as Kidder puts it, “hundreds of schools have inflicted it on their incoming students.”

So out of necessity, Kidder learned to write “a little bit” on airplanes.

“Writing is for me, and I suspect for many other people, a way of thinking,” Kidder says. “It is the only way that I can begin to make sense of things for myself. So I don’t write in a very efficient way. I have to concentrate. The whole idea is to lose myself somewhat, to lose self-consciousness. And when I do that, I feel very vulnerable.”

If Kidder feels vulnerable writing under normal circumstances, imagine how he must have felt writing Strength in What Remains, a stunning account of the harrowing journey of a young medical student, Deogratias (Deo), when the horrific civil war between Hutus and Tutsis broke out in Burundi in 1993. It is an amazing journey. Deo witnessed some of the most unimaginable acts of cruelty human beings can commit against one another. He barely escaped death himself. Through luck and the kindness of a schoolmate, he arrived in New York City with $200 in his pocket, not knowing a soul and not speaking English.

Haunted by his nightmarish memories, Deo slept in Central Park and worked for about a dollar an hour delivering groceries while trying to learn English by reading dictionaries in libraries and bookstores. Helped, eventually, by a number of unlikely New Yorkers, Deo entered Columbia University, studied philosophy, went back to medical school and then began working with Dr. Paul Farmer. Eventually he found a healing path for his return to Burundi.

“My wife heard an outline ofhis story and told me about it. The memory of someone else’s memory stuck with me,” Kidder remembers when asked about the origins of Strength in What Remains. “For me the only hard thing about being a writer is deciding what to do next. My wife said, why don’t you go see Deo? I did. And once I heard the story for myself, I thought I had to tell it. Deo is an enormously charming person. Captivating. One feels that even before one knows his story, but the story only enhances that— that a guy could be so good-hearted and so strong that he could return to Burundi and open a clinic, which is really such an instrument of peace. There’s a radiance about him.”

Kidder spent hours with Deo, dredging up often painful memories, “just talking and talking and talking, and listening really carefully. I’m not a good listener in my regular life, but I’m pretty good when I’m working,” Kidder says. Deo was at first a reluctant subject, Kidder says. “I don’t blame him. I would never let anybody do what I do to other people. And Deo is, of course, completely publicity shy. There were times when I thought I should stop, and I felt like a real creep for doing this to someone. But once he decided to do it, he did it.” In the dramatic finale to the book, Kidder accompanies Deo on a return visit to Burundi and Rwanda.

Kidder lets Deo’s story unfold in an unusually affecting double narrative—first as a sort of page-turner, which Kidder says is meant to present “as accurate an account of Deo’s memories as I can,” and then from a bit of a distance, “to show Deo in the throes of memory.” A postscript adds historical context for the chaos and violence unleashed between Hutus and Tutsis in Burundi and Rwanda. But nothing can answer the question Deo seeks to answer when he enrolls in a philosophy course at Columbia: what kind of human being can take up a machete and slaughter his neighbor?

Ultimately, Kidder says, Strength in What Remains is about memory—and forgetting, and taking action. Visiting a genocide memorial site with Deo in Rwanda, he writes that of course we need such memorials. But “too much remembering can be suffocating.”

Afflicted by “ungovernable, tormenting memories, Deo first sought solace by studying philosophy at Columbia. But it didn’t work.”

“I think Deo’s solution is not to dwell on memories and not to extinguish them either,” Kidder says, “but, rather, to act. The best solution is for him to go back and try to bring public health and medicine to one village. The phrase ‘never again’ has clearly become an empty platitude, because genocide keeps happening everywhere. The real answer is remembering, being guided by those memories, and acting.”

Growing more reflective Kidder says, “Over the last nine years I’ve spent the better part of my time with Paul Farmer and Deogratias. They lead you beyond conventional wisdom. A lot of conventional wisdom represents an attempt to ignore the fact that most of humanity is impoverished and in deep misery. These guys and their colleagues are confronting that misery. Through that, I believe another way of looking at the world is bound to arise.”

Kidder’s Strength in What Remains offers a glimpse of that new world arising.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

While working on Strength in What Remains, the excruciating and ultimately uplifting story of a survivor of the genocidal conflict in Burundi and Rwanda, Tracy Kidder violated one of his cardinal writing principles. He wrote on airplanes.

“I really can’t have someone looking over my shoulder…

Memoir

Sue Monk Kidd

During the summer of 1998, Sue Monk Kidd, whose best-selling books include The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair, found herself in a free fall toward her 50th birthday. As a consolation gift for herself and a college graduation present for her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, she whisked the two of them off to Greece. Thus begins Traveling With Pomegranates, a memoir of their journey together, literal and spiritual, written by both women. It was a journey that allowed them to discover and appreciate each other as adults, as well as mother and daughter.

Kidd and Taylor reconvened recently at Kidd’s home in Charleston, South Carolina, the city where both women live, to reflect on their unique joint project. According to Kidd, the most difficult aspect of the book was figuring out how to structure it.

“There was my story, there was Ann’s story, and then we had this third story which was about the two of us and our relationship. So really, there were three intersecting layers to this book,” Kidd recalls in an interview with BookPage. “It just got more and more complicated. The main thing was, we knew this had to be the narrative of our relationship. But trying to figure out how to make all these different layered stories work together and feel seamless and flow into one another was the biggest challenge.”

The title, Traveling With Pomegranates, resonates on several levels, beginning with the significance of the pomegranate. In Greek mythology, Hades, lord of the dead, kidnaps the young maiden, Persephone, and takes her with him to the underworld.

Persephone’s mother, the Earth goddess Demeter, goes into deep mourning, allowing crops to wither and turning fields and orchards into a wasteland. To save the Earth and its people, Zeus orders Persephone released, but she has eaten four pomegranate seeds while in captivity. Thus, she must return to the underworld four months of the year, while her mother again mourns her absence and the land sleeps in winter. Kidd and Taylor were going through some difficult life experiences of their own at the time of their trip to Greece. Kidd was coming to terms with aging, looking for the courage to try writing a novel (her first, which became The Secret Life of Bees), hoping to reconnect in a meaningful way with her daughter, and realizing that as a person with great drive and ambition, her life lacked the joy of just “being.”

“This reconciliation of the opposites, the reconciliation of these poles of polarity we’ve lived and experienced in life, it seems like they come home to roost as we get older,” Kidd says. “It became something about learning how to both ‘be’ and to accomplish and write andcreate and make a difference. That was a very hard reconciliation for me. It went right to my core.”

Taylor had just broken up with her fiancé and was struggling with the “what do I do with my life” issues young people often face. The shattered romance and lack of direction had put Taylor into a fairly severe depression. As she writes in the book, “Being in Greece did not resolve the big questions for me, but I did discover some things. I learned how easy it is to give up and become draperies while everyone else is dancing. I learned there is a name for how I feel—depression— and I had to face up to that. I learned that Persephone does eventually come back from the underworld and that maybe I would, too. That I could talk to my mother. That while I have no idea what to do with my life, I am not a total loser.”

Speaking from her mother’s home, Taylor says she sees special significance in the story of the pomegranate. “The pomegranate and the swallowing of the seeds, it’s such a perfect example of how a symbol can take on individual connotations. For my mom it was about Demeter’s loss. For me, it was about Persephone’s transformation and the return that she made back to the world from this naïve, untested girl to someone transformed.”

In fact, symbols and talismans form a huge subtext in the memoir. Kidd wears a small silver bee charm around her neck, hoping it will inspire her to write her novel. She buys two glass pomegranates for herself and her daughter while in Greece, to remind them of Demeter and Persephone. She carries a small statue of Mary, Jesus’ mother, on the trip. Kidd believes symbols and talismans can tell individuals a great deal about themselves. “Symbols take us to a world that is deeper than our conscious minds are usually operating with. They open the door to a world that’s often under the surface and that has larger meanings than the ones we are consciously, on the surface, dealing with on a day-today basis. So a pomegranate is not just a piece of nutritious fruit.” Laughing, she continues, “I was compelled by the pomegranate because of the myth, and when I explored that myth, I was amazed to discover a whole story about a mother’s necessary loss and finding reunion. That took me in a very moving and meaningful direction in my life. So I came through being open to symbols. They give me courage.”

It was almost 10 years after that first trip to Greece together (the book also chronicles a return trip to Greece and one to France) that Kidd and Taylor finished their memoir. The two women had kept detailed journals, which proved invaluable when writing their story. But Kidd believes memory is like a muscle—the more you flex it, the stronger it becomes.

“Memory can be very elusive, but I do think it’s almost like a living, breathing thing inside of us. It’s all there, somewhere inside. If we can learn how to tap it, it does come flooding back. ” An afterword to Traveling With Pomegranates closes with one of Kidd’s favorite quotes:

“‘We write to taste life twice,’ Anais Nin wrote, ‘in the moment and in retrospection.’ Living the experiences in this book and then writing them was a privilege and a gift, but what I savored most was doing so with Ann. Tasting life together. Twice.”

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

 

RELATED CONTENT

An excerpt from Traveling with Pomegranates:

Sitting on a bench in the National Archaeological Museum in Greece, I watch my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Ann, angle her camera before a marble bas-relief of Demeter and Persephone unaware of the small ballet she’s performing—her slow, precise steps forward, the tilt of her head, the way she dips to one knee as she turns her torso, leaning into the sharp afternoon light. The scene reminds of something, a memory maybe, but I can’t recall what. I only know she looks beautiful and impossibly grown, and for reasons not clear to me I’m possessed by an acute feeling of loss.

It’s the summer of 1998, a few days before my fiftieth birthday. Ann and I have been in Athens a whole twenty-seven hours, a good portion of which I’ve spent lying awake in a room in the Hotel Grande Bretagne, waiting for blessed daylight. I tell myself the bereft feeling that washed over me means nothing—I’m jet-lagged, that’s all. But that doesn’t feel particularly convincing.

I close my eyes and even in the tumult of the museum, where there seems to be ten tourists per square inch, I know the feeling is actually everything. it is the undisclosed reason I’ve come to the other side of the world with my daughter. Because in a way which makes no sense, she seems lost to me now. Because she is grown and a stranger. And I miss her almost violently.

 
Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from Traveling With Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor. Copyright (c) 2009 by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor.

During the summer of 1998, Sue Monk Kidd, whose best-selling books include The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair, found herself in a free fall toward her 50th birthday. As a consolation gift for herself and a…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Lizzie Skurnick

Last year, blogger and writer Lizzie Skurnick set out to revisit a few of her favorite young adult novels. She chronicled the experience in Fine Lines, a weekly column on Jezebel.com. The series was a hit: hundreds of women (including me) had their memories jogged or saw old favorites get their day in the sun. Now, the columns have been turned  a book, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.

Reading Shelf Discovery feels like attending a high school reunion and reminiscing about the best of your teenage escapades with a particulary entertaining friend. Skurnick's witty, conversational and insightful summaries of novels like Flowers in the Attic, Bridge to Terebithia, The Little Princess and Little Women are supplemented by a sprinkling of guest essays from writers like Jennifer Weiner, Tayari Jones and Cecily Von Ziegesar. The collection reminds women of a certain age how the literature we read back then helped us understand our lives—while at the same time explaining that a pig bladder could be the best toy ever (Little House in the Big Woods), the Met was a really cool place at night (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler) and that you should never, ever trust your long-lost twin (Lois Duncan's Stranger With My Face).

BookPage talked with Skurnick about teen crossovers, desert islands and why she hasn't read Anne of Green Gables in a web exclusive Q&A.

Fine Lines got an amazing response. Were you surprised that so many other women remembered your childhood favorites?
The success of Fine Lines is very much a question of a happy meeting of circumstance. On the one hand, you have the rise of the web, which makes it easy to categorize and find fellow obsessesives in just about anything. On the other, you have this generation of women coming of age who've been busy with college and grad school and jobs and families and are suddenly like, Wait—what happened to that great book by Lois Duncan I loved? Oh, here it is for 2 cents on eBay! I did know that this was more than a moment of kitschy nostalgia. It's more that we're only just now grown up enough to see how important to us these books were, and we have the means to have the conversation.

Teen or young adult books that crossover to find adult audiences are all the rage these days (Twilight, the Hunger Games). Do you think this is a new phenomenon?
I think they're an unsurprising development in a society where everyone young wants to be old and everyone old wants to be young. But I rather like some entries into new genre—when you marry the sophistication of an adult books with the absurd fun of YA, basically you've taken an adult book and given it a plot, something a lot of adult books could use. Putting a sophisticated twist on a children's story is a bit trickier. (Disney has been putting double entendres to good use to make their product palatable to parents for centuries.) But if you simply raise the stakes—no pun intended—on a children's story by adding adult histrionics, the results are a little more uneven.

A related question: what do you think YA books offer adults that their intended audience might miss? And vice versa?
Well, I'm not sure I'd say "miss" as much as I'd say each audience is taking away what they need. I can't speak for any particular reader, but I know, as a child, I was much more interested in the small details that showed what people were thinking and feeling. I still remember so well that, in Nicholas and Alexandra, the Empress yells, "Abdique! Abdique!" when Nicholas abdicates–speaking French, not Russian, even as the autocracy crumbles–though why I remember this, I cannot say. Now, I can barely remember the characters' names—I'm much more interested in what people are doing. Adult readers moving some of their bookshelves over for YA may be impatient with the fact that you often only find a decent story–a real story, with an arc and everything—in adult genre writing, not literary fiction.

If we're talking about what children miss when they read adult books, I can safely say, pretty much everything. (What does it mean, technically, to abdicate, after all? Thank God in those pre-Wikipedia days I had a good dictionary, not that I used it that often.) But when you read an adult book as a child, you're doing the literary equivalent of listening in on your parents' fight–you understand the drama, though you have no idea what they are talking about.

Is there a book you revisited that turned out not to live up to its memory? 
There were two books out of the nearly 100 I read doing this book that I found I couldn't enjoy as much as I had as a child. The first was Constance C. Greene's Beat the Turtle Drum, which was truly one of my favorite books when I was 8—I must have read it 30 times—and which I remembered as this enormous opus. In fact it's a very slim book with only a few scenes. And it's a good book, too—it's just that's it's actually written for a child. That was instructive to me, because it showed how reader age-agnostic so many of these other books really are.

The second was Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I think that book may have actually been too important to me at a certain point in my life to make it decent to return—I wrote a column about how I felt like I was a dotty old aunt spying on a bunch of girls when I tried.

Is there a YA classic that people would be surprised to learn you hadn't read?
There are so many! But I'll give two shockers: Anne of Green Gables (gasp) and most of Nancy Drew. I'll stop there before I alienate anyone else.

Shelf Discovery deals mostly with novels from the 70s and 80s. What do you think is the identifying feature among books published during that time?
I think because they pre-date this idea of teenage girls we have now, the feature they share is that they all resist easy categorization. On the one hand, you have these hilariously inner-directed, wildly curious girls, like Harriet (of Harriet the Spy), of course, but also The Westing Game's Turtle or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler's Claudia. Then you have these historical survivalists, like Island of the Blue Dolphin's Karana or The Witch of Blackbird Pond's Kit. Then you've also got Lois Duncan's cadre of ordinary girls suddenly wrestling with supernatural powers, or Norma Klein's Upper West Side sophisticates, who may or may not have lost their virginity but don't hang the idea of their girlhood on it. Even Beverly Cleary's novels are always questioning what being a girl is for—what's good or bad about it, how we can thrive but also protect ourselves in the world. (Fifteen is really quite a provoking novel about what it's like to like a boy.) Madeleine L'Engle manages to pull all of these factors in and add intergalactic time travel. 

I think that the feminist movement influenced so many of those novels (as it did women's midlist fiction of the period, like that of authors Marge Piercy or Alix Kates Shulman). There's a far more mutable attitude towards sex and sexuality, what growing up really means, what women are supposed to be and what women are becoming. I also think that so many women had the opportunity to write and publish on a large scale for the first time, so you have this flood of stories about girlhood, about family, about divorce, about marriage. Why these books get steered into YA and the stories in Goodbye, Columbus do not, I can only (ungenerously, I'm sure) speculate.

Do you still read fiction aimed at teens, and if so, do you think it has changed?
I actually signed up to judge a YA fiction prize this year to get a closer look at what is happening. From what I have read, it seems sophisticated in different ways and innocent in other ways (for lack of a better comparison, I'll say it's like "One Day at a Time" versus "Gilmore Girls") while so much of what's interesting seems to be taking place in genre works rather than the kind of realist narrative I'm used to, like Katherine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved, for instance. 

I do think what's changed in literature is what's changed in society: now we have this idea of what teenagers are and should be—movies, stores, TV shows, schools of therapy, books are dedicated entirely to the question. When I was growing up it was Meatballs and friendship bracelets and you were pretty much done. I can't help but thinking the books of my era were devoted to releasing teenage-hood from this opaque prison (look at Paul Zindel!) while now they, like so much else in our lives, are about what happens when you live under a microscope with a pre-determined idea of what you should be. Is it better to have someone assume you're a juvenile deliquent or assume you should speak five languages and be interested in the plight of the homeless? I don't know.

It's clear from your essays that these books helped shape the way you think about the world. Do you think kids get the same benefits from books today?
You would have to talk to the kids today 20 years from now and see if Twilight has damaged them as much as 9,000 pundits seem to feel it will! But I think reading at a young age is almost always world-shaping—it's a very intimate experience, after all, one of the only ways to look deeply at another world when you still barely know your own. One practical change is that the books themselves are a quite a bit more expensive—the books I read growing up cost anywhere from 95 cents $1.25, and it was a big difference when they started going up to $4.95. I think it's unlikely that technology will make books cheaper for children—and it shouldn't, because author should be paid for their work–but I do hope it can make books more available and accessible. 

If you had to pick one book featured in Shelf Discovery that everyone should read, what would it be?
I've made it my official campaign position for this book tour that I'd like everyone to buy and read Berthe Amoss' Secret Lives, a wonderful book about a girl growing up in turn-of-the-century New Orleans trying to find out the truth about her mother's death. I forgot the title for years and was only able to actually locate it through the powers of Google four years ago—I don't want that to happen to anyone else.

What's the most surprising thing you have learned from a book?
There's so many: that the Czar and Czarina spoke French at home, of course; that red abalones are the sweetest; that you can nick off enough metal from bullet shavings to make another bullet; that you have not converted a man because just because you have silenced him. (I could keep up with the references, but there are really too many.)

Who would you rather be marooned on a desert island with: Laura Ingalls or Sara Crewe?
Oh, that is so hard! Sara would be fun because she would tell stories, but you get the sense she'd be kind of useless hauling wood and might waste away from a disease if you weren't careful. Laura you'd just fight with, because she'd be as bossy as you are. Can't I just go with Karana?

What's next on your reading list?
I just moved and donated half of my books, a process during which I unearthed a biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett I've been meaning to read for years. Then Wharton, Summer, and then A Summer to Die, which my friend Elizabeth has insisted I write about, and maybe Seventeenth Summer, just to stick with the theme. 

Last year, blogger and writer Lizzie Skurnick set out to revisit a few of her favorite young adult novels. She chronicled the experience in Fine Lines, a weekly column on Jezebel.com. The series was a hit: hundreds of women (including me) had their memories…

Graphic Memoirs

David Small

Reached at his home in Menden, in the southwest corner of the state, David Small says, “It’s a gray day in Michigan.” Gray seems appropriate for the conversation; somehow, discussing Stitches, Small’s grim, deeply affecting graphic memoir, in bright sunshine would feel wrong.

The book describes Small’s gothic-horror childhood, his weird, remote parents and deranged grandmother and the catastrophe that shaped his young life. As a boy, Small had sinus problems; his father, a radiologist, treated him with X-rays, state of the art at the time. When David developed a lump on his neck, no one seemed worried. A doctor friend diagnosed him with a cyst at age 11. At age 14, his parents finally took him to get the cyst removed. He underwent not one but two surgeries and woke up missing half his vocal cords, unable to speak. No one told him he had cancer— no one told him anything.

An acclaimed illustrator of children’s books, Small says his early attempts to write his memoir as prose got him nowhere. He’d been having bad dreams and knew he had to write something, but he couldn’t dredge up the memories.

“When I started making it a graphic [memoir], it started coming back,” he says. He worked “by identifying one object in the room and then, in my mind’s eye, making the camera pan around the room.” The first image that came back to him in this way is also the scariest scene in the book: six-year-old David wanders through hospital corridors at night, waiting for his father to finish work. He stumbles into the pathology department where, on an eye-level shelf, he sees a tiny, shriveled human form preserved in a jar, little hands cradling its enormous head. It looks furious and sad, just like him. Then it looks at him, and he flees, but the creature haunts him. “I think I identified with him somehow,” Small says, “that angry little face.”

Despite the difficulty of the material, he says, the memoir process was rewarding: “I feel like a new man, like a cinderblock’s been lifted off my neck.”

One thing he didn’t have to worry about was how his parents might react. “My mother and father are dead, so I don’t know what they would’ve thought,” he says. “I can only guess. My editor asked me, ‘What would your mother have thought about this book?’ And I said, well, she probably would never have spoken to me again. And there was a pause. And then he and I spoke at the same time and said, oh well, that wouldn’t have been anything new!”

About a year ago, he says, his editor called him in a panic. “Have you seen the New York Times today?” he asked. “Go online and read the front page and then call me back.” Small did, and immediately saw a story about Margaret Seltzer, whose sister had just denounced her gangland memoir as a fabrication. His editor said, “David, I know this has nothing to do with you, but is there anybody left who might remember these events and contradict what you’re saying?”

“I don’t think so,” Small replied. “I do have this brother . . . I don’t talk to him much.”

“You have to send him the book,” said the editor.

“I can’t, it’s not even done!” Small protested, but in the end he sent his brother the book. After a few days, he says, “I called him up with much heart-pounding and said, what did you think of the book?”

There was a long pause. “And then, in his sepulchral tones—he sounds like Richard Nixon—he said, ‘David, your book blew me away. It was like a snapshot of my youth.’ He asked me if he could show it to his therapist. It was just amazing.”

After that, his brother visited. “We laughed and cried and drank and talked and reminisced,” Small said. “After 30 years, I have my brother back. If nothing else happens with this book, it’ll be worth it just for that.”

Small’s drawing in Stitches is both roomy and precise, with lots of open space in and around the panels but an intensity of focus—especially on facial expressions—that feels almost claustrophobic. Often, panels zoom in on an angry frown, a narrowed eye, a kitchen cupboard slammed shut. One two-page spread shows a close-up of David seeing his stitches for the first time, opposite three dizzyingly abstract details of the gash. Turn the page and the cut is even more abstract, just a series of lines over shadow.

It’s also a loud book. David’s brother is constantly banging on drums, his mother bashes around in the kitchen, his father peels out in the car. (Meanwhile, of course, David is silent, first by choice and later against his will.) Small is deft with angle, as in the scenes drawn from a hospital-bed’s-eye-view that force the reader into David’s position, helpless and vulnerable. Small describes his drawing style as cinematic.

“I’m sort of glad I didn’t know anything about comics to begin with,” he says. “I took my own approach, which came straight out of cinema.”

In the acknowledgements, Small thanks “Dr. Harold Davidson for pulling me to my feet and placing me on the road to the examined life.” Davidson appears midway through the book as a therapist who looks like a rabbit with a pocketwatch, part Donnie Darko, part Alice in Wonderland.

“He was an unusual analyst,” Small says. “He let me stay at his family’s house, for example. I’d called him at 2:00 in the morning just terrified that my mother was going to come into my room and shoot my head off. So he let me spend the night on the couch in his home office.”

“I had no conception of how to be in the world,” Small continues. “It was like being raised by alcoholics. He really cared for me and took extra care with me.” Davidson’s philosophy was that “in order to really effect anything close to a cure you have to really love your patients,”

Small says. “If you’ve been raised by an unloving mother it leaves a hole in your heart, and you just learn to live with it. I can’t imagine what would’ve happened to me. . . . I’m so thankful to him. I feel really lucky. I’ve kept in touch with him all these years.”

Small illustrates children’s books written by his wife, Sarah Stewart, but they work in separate phases. “We like each other too much to collaborate,” he says. “We come at the world from two points of view. She’s a much more optimistic person than I am. My poetry is the poetry of slagheaps and ironworks.”

Small says if there are hints of his troubled childhood in the children’s books he has written and illustrated (Imogene’s Antlers, Hoover’s Bride, Paper John), they only appear in subtext. “It’s all very hidden,” he says. “When you’re working for children, you’ve got to put some restraints on. Doing the graphic memoir was a big relief, to just be able to say and draw whatever I wanted.”

Small is currently working on more children’s picture books. “I don’t know what the next graphic will be,” he says. “I hope there will be one. It was such a great experience— I guess it will take another story as compelling to me.”

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

Reached at his home in Menden, in the southwest corner of the state, David Small says, “It’s a gray day in Michigan.” Gray seems appropriate for the conversation; somehow, discussing Stitches, Small’s grim, deeply affecting graphic memoir, in bright sunshine would feel wrong.

The book…

NonfictionHumor

Lewis Grizzard

EDITOR'S NOTE: For the past 10 years, Lewis Grizzard has annually produced a best-selling book. His 10 titles have more than 2 million copies in print, and his latest book, Don't Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, You Know them Taters Got Eyes, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for weeks. In April, the first two in a series of advice books by Grizzard will be published by Longstreet Press. We wanted to talk with Grizzard about his vairous projects, but we could never catch up with him. Therefore, we asked Lewis Grizzard to interview himself.

Q: Well, Lewis, I'm glad I was able to catch you between engagements to ask you a few questions. So how many times have you been engaged?

A: That was a trick question, wasn't it? I can see that I'll have to be careful during this interview. Truth is, I've been engaged only once, but I've been married three times so far. I'd rather play than practice.

Q: Are you presently married?

A: No, but there are several women auditioning for the part.

Q: Is that why you decided to write the advice book, Lews Grizzard's Advice to the Newly Wed…and the Newly Divorced?

A: Yes, it seemed like the perfect marriage of subject and author. and that may be as close as I get to a perfect union.

Q: Could you give us an example of your sage advice to a newly married man?

A: Beware of crying women. Crying is the ultimate weapon they use to get their way. Crying has led me to dine with in-laws I didn't want to dine with, to eat green soup that looked like pond scum, and to answer questions about how much life insurance I had in case both my arms got cut off. Any one of my ex-wives could have cried Jane Fonda onto the Supreme Court. One of them almost got me to vote for George McGovern by crying—I told her I would, but at the last minute I remembered the secret ballot.

Q: What about advice for anyone considering divorce?

A: Be prepared to lose even your most valued personal possessions in divorce court. I have lost, among other things, several sofas and beds, one good dog, a number of television sets, and my priceless Faron Young albums. She didn't even like Faron Young, but she told a friend she really enjoyed watching the records melt in the fire. It could have been worse, I guess.

Another friend was puzzled when the jury came back in to ask the judge for further instructions during his divorce trial. He questioned his attorney and was told, "After what your wife said about you, they're probably asking if they can recommend the death penalty."

Q: You seem to have a real love-hate attitude toward women. Would you agree with that statement?

A: Well, along with Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias, i've loved my share and probably a few of yours. But the only thing I really hate is three-putting from ten feet. I guess my attitude toward women was shaped by my father. In his lifetime, he fought the Germas, the North Koreans, and the Communist Chines, and later he said to me, "Son, there's nothing in this world meaner than a quarrelsome woman."

Q: So what's the title of your other advice book?

A: It's called Lewis Grizzard on Fear of Flying. That's another subject that I know a great deal about.

Q: Yes, I understand that you travel a lot.

A: Travel a lot . . . I've got so many frequent flier miles hat one airline tried to give me my own plane. I told them I didn't want it.

Q: So what is it about flying that bothers you so much?

A: Actually, I like flying. It's the crashing and burning that bothers me. Just think about it: Why is it that the first thing you see approaching an airport is a big sign that says "Terminal?"

Flying is unnatural. If God had intended for man to fly, He never would have given him the rental car with unlimited mileage.

Q: But, in spite of that, you continue to fly hundreds of thousands of miles a year. Why?

A: Have you ever tried driving from Atlanta to Casper, Wyoming? That's just a longer, slower death.

Q: So give me a few tips about flying.

A: First, I recommend a visit to the airport var . . . at least twelve hours before scheduled departure. when boarding the plane, listen closely for any airline personnel using the word "forgot." If they forgot to bring a new deck of playing cards, might they also have forgotten to gas up the plane and check the oil before takeoff?

If the mechanic making last-minute checks underneath the plane is nammed Bubba, I'd take the next flight.

Try to pay attention when they're going over the safety instructions. sometimes I goof up and forget to bring my seat back to its original locked and upright position for takeoff and landing.

Probably the worst thing I do when  I fly, however, is that, in the unlikely event there is a loss of cabin pressure, I don't breathe normally when I place the oxygen mask over my head and face. Instead, I breathe like a Secretariat down the stretch.

And finally, for now, I recommend that you don't eat airline food. That way you never have to loosen your grip on the seat.

Q: That certainly sounds like good advice. I don't suppose you've been asked to do any endorsements for airlines, have you?

A: As a matter of fact, Delta asked me to do one for Eastern. I thought that was a little strange.

Q: Lewis, your humor column is syndicated in more than 350 newspapers nationwide, your books are regular best-sellers, and you are one of the most popular speakers in America. To what do you attribute your success?

A: I'd say the keys to my success are my self-renewing subscription to the Reader's Digest; my collection of old Red Skelton monologues; slow take-away at address and not looping the club a the top of the swing; promising not to do it again while looking hurt; never drawing to fill a straight; and interviewing myself so that I get only positive publicity.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For the past 10 years, Lewis Grizzard has annually produced a best-selling book. His 10 titles have more than 2 million copies in print, and his latest book, Don't Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, You Know them Taters Got Eyes, has been…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Alex Haley

Alex Haley is one of the best-known and most widely read authors in the world. His book Roots, published in 1976, and the television series based on the book, which aired in 1977, were not only critical and commercial successes, they were also unique cultural events. James Baldwin wrote about the book in The New York Times: "Roots is a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one—the action of love, or the effect of the avsence of love, in time. It suggests, with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can't but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us."

Among other honors, Mr. Haley was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for Roots, a work he calls "faction," a combination of fact and fiction. Earlier Mr. Haley had won critical acclaim for his authorship of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

And now Alex Haley has a new book A Different Kind of Christmas, that will appeal to readers of all ages. The novella follows a young Southerner who becomes an agent for the Underground Railroad and helps mastermind the escape of slaves from his father's plantation on Christmas Eve, 1855. Editor Roger Bishop recently interviewed Mr. Haley at the author's farm in Norris, Tennessee. The conversation centered on the new book with occasional discussion of other subjects. What follows are the excerpts from the interview:

RB: Mr. Haley, your new book, A Different Kind of Christmas, is a powerful story that should appeal to the widest possible audience. Without giving too much away, would you describe the story?

AH: Somebody wrote in USA Today that it is a story wherein a white college student had become self-influenced to join the Underground Railroad and organized an escape of slaves. That's in essence what happens.

In a broader sense, I have always been intrigued how we as a culture tend to have tunnel-vision images of things and don't include facets of it. For instance, slavery, which I researched a great deal in the course of Roots. I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true. But it’s always intrigued me that amidst the group called slaves there were individuals who were extremely able, who were extremely colorful, who were powerful personalities, who by no means fit the usual images of slaves. They were people who, through their personalities and abilities, were very respected in the community where they lived by both black and white. Such a person was Chicken George out of Roots. You couldn’t think of Chicken George as some anonymous cipher. He was Chicken George. And so with this in mind, in this book I have created the character Harpin’ John. Harpin’ is because he was a very expert harmonica player together with which he was a very expert barbecue man. Now in the South, today and then, anybody who is really a virtuoso on the harp and at the barbecue pit is somebody to reckon with. He was a major character in his slave community, and he was a slave—but he was also Harpin’ John. Another thing I enjoyed about his name is that it sounds like hoppin’ john, the food.

The principal character is a young, white college student, Fletcher Randall, at The College of New Jersey (what we now know as Princeton University). It’s set in 1855. His father is a senator from North Carolina and a large plantation owner. At that time many young, Southern men were sent to school up North because their parents thought they would get a better education in the Yankee country, although they despised the Yankees. And some of them, like this boy’s father, covered it by saying to know what the Yankees were up to they had to send their boys to Yankee schools. And it is there in college, that Fletcher, a Southerner by birth and trend, begins to question the mores of his heritage and culture.

RB: Although A Different Kind of Christmas is fiction, were there actual incidents that you were aware of when you wrote?

AH: Oh yes. Everything in it is to be found. White converts to the antislave belief made the Underground Railroad work. Only the whites had the power to subvert slavery. The Quakers, as a religious group, were one of the main forces. They forbade any member to own slaves, so many Quaker men who had owned slaves simply released them into freedom. Everything in the book has happened and has happened many times. Many slaves, like Harpin' John, were agents. The most famous being Harriet Tubman, who was called the general, because she went back so many times to get so many people out.

RB: You write of the strong bond between the black slaves in the United States in 1855 (the time of your story) and the American Indians. Would you please speak about that relationship?

AH: By that time the Indian Removal had occurred, and there were not many Indians left, but there were pockets here and there. It was a very close bond and not too much is written about it. Anyway, here you have two groups of people who were disenfranchised. They were both thrust outside of society—both rejected and wanted in that they were both used. The Indians had been used worse than the slaves in that their land —everything—had been taken. But they were still living around in enclaves hither and there. There was a great deal of inbreeding between the Indians and the slaves. Genetically speaking, black people are some part black, some part European, and most of us are some part Indian. In my own family, we are part Cherokee. There was a lot of marriage both directions, but mostly Indian men and slave women.

RB: You have said that you have never lost your love for the South despite the region’s history of slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination. Here is a direct quote from you: “There’s more substance here, so much more to write about. I don’t know anything I treasure more as a writer than being a Southerner. I love to write about the South and try to convey the experience of it, the history of it. It has been pointed at negatively in so many ways, and so few people for a long time appreciated the physical beauty of the South.” Perhaps that says it all.

AH: Well, I would only reiterate most of it to say the thing I find I love so much here is the culture which is comprised of people who tend to have been raised better than people in the North. We all grew up as children who learned how to say yes mam and no sir and mean it with respect for elders. And somehow, it seems to me that in the South, at least as I know it, you could go up in that yard and find you a grasshopper to follow, or you could go and get your grandmother’s spool she’d used all the thread off of, notch the edges, get a rubber band, and make you a little tractor. Everywhere you turn there is something that with a little thought, ingenuity and a whole lot of precedence you could do to entertain yourself. There are so many, many more things that are the South—the music. The South has more detail to write about. We have so much more grass for one thing, and all the things that happen in the grass are denied to those people who, for the most part, live in the Northern cities. Just the grass alone is an arena to deal with. I feel very close to the South. I am of the South. And the racial prejudice that which is so strongly associated with the South is not unique to the South. The North had racial riots—one after another—which were all deflected in the finger pointing at the South. What we are dealing with now is the new South which is a very different place.

RB: In your essay, which serves as the Preface to The Prevailing Past: Life and Politics in a Changing Culture, you write about the black Republicans in Henning, Tennessee, then you say: “It is poignant how little attention history has paid to the fact that from the early years of Reconstruction, in many Southern localities, the Republican Party’s principal custodians were these and similar groups of blacks who voted in each national election as an act of holy ritual, no matter what obstacles were thrust into their paths, including physical threats.” Would you speak about these Republicans?

AH: The fundamental reason for these Republicans was Abraham Lincoln, who was seen as the great emancipator, and because he was a Republican, the black people just flocked to that party and stayed with it very loyally right on up to FDR. He was the man who turned the tide for the Democrats. And the reason was obviously the Depression. People were down to their last whatever, and it wasn’t just the blacks but the whites as well. And when FDR came along with his alphabetical government and all the things it offered—the CCC, the NRA and various other programs—he was a revolutionary for a whole culture, it wasn’t just the blacks. But for black Republicans he was as dramatic as Lincoln had been earlier. Here was a world in which black women, at least in Henning, Tennessee, were all domestics. They found jobs more quickly than black men. Now when that was the way the world was then and along came FDR with these programs which, for the first time, allowed men to get jobs and be paid 7 or 8 dollars a day instead of 1 dollar (which was standard at that time), it just altogether changed their thinking. So, it was these influences, which were very practical influences, which caused the blacks to go Democrat.

RB: In A Different Kind of Christmas your main character has his Christian conscience challenged and comes to the aid of the slaves. Are there any generalizations that you can make about individuals such as Fletcher Randall?

AH: Fletcher manifests my feelings how as Christians we should behave. The only reason the Underground Railroad really existed was because there were a lot of Fletchers. Some who were innately against slavery, and some who, like Fletcher, gradually came to be and who, having come to be, took some activist role. Society ought to be led by its Christian leaders, not by political leaders, at least in the areas of morality. For instance, the drug thing we’ve got today, it’s not just an annoyance, it’s a dire thread to this nation. Years ago, had somebody been positively identified in the community as selling drugs to any of us as children, I think he would have probably been found one morning—well, you know. And I think more probably it would’ve been done by the deacons and the stewards of the churches. And the reason is that they simply would not have allowed that in their community. but now we simply allow it. You know it could be stopped, of course it could be stopped. We just simply permit it to go on. If the public said no, it would really be all over it. And maybe one day we will before it will have done us in.

RB: Before your international recognition with the publication of Roots you had achieved a distinguished career as a journalist and the author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. You conducted the first interview with Miles Davis in the Playboy magazine interviews. You went on in that series of interviews to interview Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X which subsequently led to your authorship of his autobiography. As one who interviewed both Dr. King and Malcolm X, and grew to know the latter so well, could you speak in a general way about those two men—how they were alike and how they were different in your experience with them?

AH: The thing that has always intrigued me about Dr. King and Malcolm was how easily either of them might have been the other. Now if you had taken Malcolm in the eighth grade, precocious youngster, living in Michigan at the time, an outstanding student in his class—sharp, articulate. If that Malcolm could have then gone to the top black high school where Dr. King went in Atlanta, and from high school to the Boston College School of Theology, think of what a minister and leader we would’ve had.

If Dr. King, age eighth grade, entering that high school and had instead been told, like Malcolm, it was ridiculous to think about being a lawyer, so why doesn’t he become a carpenter. He was so popular in school that proves that white people would hire him to do carpentry. That’s what Malcolm’s class advisor told him. Had Martin Luther King, age eighth grade, gone instead to his aunt’s home in Rockville, Massachusetts (suburban Boston) and learned to hustle—and was taught by a guy who called him homeboy because he was from the same area—was taught first how to hustle shinning shoes. (If you’re gonna shine shoes, let the rag hang limp so it would pop louder for a quarter extra tip). Then learned how to sell marijuana and to do the things that’s hustling. And when he had become a pretty able hustler, go for (what Malcolm called) his graduate studies and get on a train and make it to Harlem where he could get into crime and into this and that and the other. Dr. Kin would’ve made a tremendous hustler. And Malcolm would’ve made a tremendous theologian. Both of them were great powers in their own way. And so to me always the intrigue has been the two men are a case of “…but for the grace of God…” And as a matter of fact, not enough recognition is given to the fact that Malcolm was most helpful to Dr. King. The way I mean it is Malcolm scared people. And what it did was shake people enough so that when Dr. King came along, speaking of turning the other cheek and the Ghandi principles, he was a lot less threatening. So preceded by Malcolm, Dr. King went forward.

RB: Are you engaged in any other writing projects at the moment?

AH: My next book will be called Henning, Tennessee. It is a book about the people and events in the little town where I grew up 50 miles north of Memphis. with any kind of luck it will be out next September. And then will come a book about Madame C.J. Walker who was an absolutely fantastic personality.

 

Alex Haley is one of the best-known and most widely read authors in the world. His book Roots, published in 1976, and the television series based on the book, which aired in 1977, were not only critical and commercial successes, they were also unique cultural…

Fiction

Kate Grenville

After years of looking for a place to belong, Daniel Rooke’s keen intellect and interest in astronomy won him a place on the 1788 First Fleet voyage to the British colony of New South Wales, now known as Australia. While his fellow seamen struggled to control their cargo of convicts and seek out the natives, Rooke was permitted to build an observatory that he hoped would lead to fame and fortune back in England.

Kate Grenville’s stunning new novel, The Lieutenant, follows Rooke to his isolated post on a distant shore, where his careful notations of the stars and changing weather are overshadowed by a burgeoning interest in Aboriginal languages. After Rooke meets a young woman whose linguistic gifts parallel his own, their singular friendship inspires him intellectually and empowers him emotionally.

Grenville is one of Australia’s most respected authors and her last novel, The Secret River, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. She recently answered some questions from BookPage about the true stories behind The Lieutenant and how film, nature and Australian history inspire her.

The Lieutenant is based on real events when the First Fleet landed in what was then New South Wales in 1788. A young Lieutenant named William Dawes, who was also a gifted astronomer, left behind written records of his contact with the indigenous people, one young woman in particular. How did you come across his story and what made you decide to transform it into fiction?
While I was researching The Secret River I came across Dawes’ story in a book called The Birth of Sydney. The editor quoted some of Dawes’ language notebooks, particularly a few conversations between Dawes and a young Aboriginal girl called Patyegarang. The intimacy, trust and playfulness of these conversations leapt off the page at me—they were a side of early black/white relations I’d never imagined was possible.

Rooke has some social characteristics that in the 21st century might be labeled as autistic.  Was there something about his real-life counterpart that made those attributes part of his character? If not, what do you think that adds to his character?
Some of the other early settlers were interested in Aboriginal people, in what we’d think of today as an anthropological way. Dawes’ relationship with them—as recorded in the notebooks he left—has quite a different flavour. There’s a kind of artlessness or innocence about the conversations he records, a respect for the people he’s talking with, and a sense of fun, that made me think he must have been an unusual fellow. There was no sense of him patronising the Aboriginal people or thinking of them as lesser—these were just people whose company he really enjoyed.

I saw Rooke, and perhaps Dawes too, as having the kind of cleverness that often makes kids outsiders among their peers, and imagined that his relationship with the Aboriginal girl was a kind of emotional awakening for him—here was a world in which he could enjoy simply being himself. This isn’t a sexual relationship—Rooke and Tagaran are companions, friends, and equals, as I think Dawes and Patyegarang probably were. He’s free of the social straitjacket of his society, in which he’s so uncomfortable, and can discover aspects of his being that he never dreamt were there.  

I understood Rooke’s journey, in part, to be about the growth of empathy, but I know that’s not the only one. How would you compare Rooke’s emotional journey to his physical one?
What those 18th-century travellers did is almost beyond imagining for us, for whom the world is so known, so small. Rooke (like Dawes) plunged off from his narrow world in Portsmouth into a hemisphere where very few Europeans had travelled. In many ways we know more about Mars than they knew about the place they were going. Rooke, with his scientific interest, was more open than most to the wonders of the new place—he set up an observatory to look at the relatively unknown southern stars, kept meticulous records of rainfall and temperature . . . this was a journey of eager adventure for him.

The emotional journey was also one of opening up to the new, and recording an inner climate. But as well, it drew him into a conflict in which his new emotional awareness came head-to-head with his duties as a soldier. In that terrible moment, when he has to make a decision that will affect the rest of his life, he discovers the universe of morality. It’s not enough to be clever; it’s not even enough to discover an emotional life. Somehow, he has to feel his way through an impossible moral and human dilemma and come out the other side.

Years ago when we were looking for a nanny for our son, we hired a Polish woman whose English was still rudimentary but she was able to make a joke (in a mixture of Polish, English, and hand gestures) that both my husband and I understood. We thought this made her a good communicator. I thought of this a lot as I was reading your book, especially as Rooke comes to understand the difference between the precision of grammatical translations and true communication. Is that one of the things you were trying to capture?
Where there’s goodwill, intelligence and mutual respect, truthful communication is possible even without many words. In fact, the more words you have, the better you can lie. Rooke is struck by his friend Silk (based on the real writer about early Sydney, Watkin Tench), writing an account of his time in the colony in a style of great wit, charm and charisma. Silk comes across in his own work as irresistibly attractive (to the point that modern historians are inclined to take everything he says at face value). What Rooke comes to see is that Silk’s version is appealing, but not always quite true.

One of the things I was interested in with this book was the question “how do we know what we know?” The conversations in Dawes’ notebooks are truthful, in the sense that they seem to have been recorded verbatim, as if by a tape-recorder. But their deeper truth—what was going on between the lines, in the silences before and after the verbatim record—is open to interpretation. My version of the context of their conversations is only one of infinite possibilities. Silk’s urbane text is a different kind of challenge to simple ideas of truth and fiction. At what point does a storyteller’s urge to shape his material turn it into invention?

This, of course, is a big issue for writers of historical fiction, so the novel can also be read in terms of the current debates about fiction, history and all the kinds of writing that occupy ground between those positions.

Rooke notices that he and Silke are different in that Silke’s impulse is to transform the strange into the familiar and his is to wallow in that strangeness. As a writer, what do you think your impulses are?
I’m definitely a wallower in strangeness. It’s what I love so much about being a writer of fiction—to explore utterly strange worlds like the one that occurred in 1788 on the shores of Sydney Cove. But I also love to find the strange in what seems to be familiar. In many ways I know Sydney Cove and Dawes Point (where the story takes place) so well that they’re invisible—they were virtually my backyard when I was growing up in Sydney. But by going back two hundred years, looking at the place through the eyes of my characters, I could feel the unknown place beneath the one that was so familiar. Just by standing still, in a place known to me in every cell, I could take a journey into the utterly unknown.

The descriptions of the land and seascapes are so intense in this book—almost like separate characters. Can you talk about the influence of the natural world on your writing?
I seem only to be able to write if I can set it in a specific, concrete place. The reality of a place—of landforms, plants, rocks, even the weather—seems to be necessary, even though I’m writing fiction. It’s as if I need to acknowledge the real before I start to build a superstructure of invention.

I spent the first 12 or so years of my life in a fog in which I only saw the natural world if it was within arm’s length—I was short sighted, but nobody picked that up until I was in high school. When I saw the world for the first time, courtesy of glasses, it was a revelation—everything was so beautiful! I think that sense of wonder has never left me. I can still be stopped in my tracks on the way to post a letter or buy milk by a sky full of clouds. 

I read an interview with you that mentioned your background in film—one of the things that is so remarkable about your writing is the vividness of the imagery. Do you think your experience with a visual medium had an impact on your writing?
The film experience was fundamental to my writing, I believe. I worked mainly in editing, and mainly in documentaries. Working in documentary—without a script—is an exercise in finding the story in the material you’ve got, rather than starting with the story and then making the images fit it. Editing a documentary is an act of faith that a narrative can be found in disconnected bits and pieces. That’s always been the way I write. I start with fragments and live for a long time with uncertainty about how they’ll add up to a story. For me, it’s a way of keeping a sense of discovery in the writing process. Any time I’ve tried the “write-to-a-plan” technique, I’ve ended up with writing that’s cautious, bland and uninventive—low energy. For all the risks involved in writing out of a muddle of bits and pieces, it’s the only way that seems to work for me.

You really found a balance between what we experience as human beings and the way nature exists outside of subjective time. (I love the line "Time had no intention and no judgment.") How do you think Rooke came to understand that that balance, and what do you hope the readers take away from Rooke’s experience?
Dawes was an astronomer, so I looked at the stars a lot when I was writing this book. I was struck by the fact that I was looking at exactly what he’d looked at so long ago. The Southern Cross, with its faint fifth star, is just as he’d have seen it in 1788. So when I set out to invent a fiction from his story, that sense of the stars was a continuous background hum to the book—you could look up every night and there they were, the past and the future calmly crossing the sky in an eternal present. I came to see that I was trying to tell a story that reflected that. It was a story about two individuals in a particular time and place. Their lives were finite, their ends in some ways sad. But they’d made something that transcended their own lives. They were part of that enormous cosmic story, and nothing they created was wasted or lost. A spark of human understanding had leapt between the two of them, and would go on forever, like those stars.

The book has a huge appeal in Australia; after all, it’s about the very beginnings of your country as a colony. What might you say would be the novel’s appeal for a US audience?
It’s a story about how two people managed to make a bridge of understanding between their unimaginably different worlds. The human urge to see the world as “us” and “them” is very deeply rooted. Difference is so often a trigger for obstinate refusal to try to understand, and that leads so easily to a pointless cycle of conflict. The real story of Dawes and Patyegarang, and the fiction inspired by them, is a push in the opposite direction. Here’s one moment when difference didn’t disappear, but was respected and valued and turned into understanding—what people everywhere on the planet are hoping for.

What are your plans for your next novel? Are you going to continue to mine Australia’s history or are you going to focus on something contemporary—or neither one?
I’ve just started working on another work set in the past—so many of Australia’s astonishing stories haven’t been told. There are still a lot of silences in our past, things we’re not quite sure how to look at. For a novelist, those silences-waiting-to-speak are irresistible.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville, Tennessee.

After years of looking for a place to belong, Daniel Rooke’s keen intellect and interest in astronomy won him a place on the 1788 First Fleet voyage to the British colony of New South Wales, now known as Australia. While his fellow seamen struggled to control their cargo of convicts and seek out the natives, Rooke was permitted to build an observatory that he hoped would lead to fame and fortune back in England.
Memoir

William & Barbara Christopher

The overwhelming popular and critical reception for the film Rain Man, which received eight Academy Award nominations, has helped to focus national attention on autism. In psychiatry, autism is defined as a pervasive developmental neurological disorder, characterized by impaired communication, excessive rigidity and emotional detachment.

Although the character Raymond, portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, is autistic, he is also an idiot savant, which most autistic persons are not. But the film, however well done, is a work of fiction. There are many families that must cope with the realities of autism each day. Such is the family of William and Barbara Christopher and their sons John and Ned. Mr. Christopher is perhaps better known to the public as “Father Mulcahy” in the immensely successful television series “M*A*S*H.” In a new book, Mixed Blessings, due for May release, the Christophers have written about the extraordinary challenge of raising their autistic son, Ned. Alan Alda says that theirs is “A book that brings you right into the center of their hopes, confusion, love, exasperation and grit. This book is alive . . . Bill and Barbara’s strength is contagious . . . their humanity is healing.” Mike Farrell comments: “A faithful and heartfelt rendition of their experiences . . . People are in sore need today of (such) examples of the true meaning of parenthood.” And R. Wayne Gilpin, President of the Autism Society of America, writes that Mixed Blessings is “Rich in caring, concern, and grace.”

Editor Roger Bishop interviewed William and Barbara Christopher last December. The edited excerpts from a long conversation about their important new book appear below.

 

RB: For whatever else it may be Mixed Blessings I saw as a story of the parents’ love for their two sons and of the parents’ extraordinary patience, persistence and intelligence in dealing with the physical disability of one child. Are there other things that you would like to say describing this book?

BC: I think you have said it very well. We think of it as a family story too. Only one family member has autism, the rest of us fortunately do not, and the kinds of challenges that we faced as a family are certainly parallel to any challenge that you meet as a family. And almost every family has some challenge.

 

RB: Early in the book you say that Ned’s teachers say that he’s the smartest boy they have had in their class, but then you receive a note from the Christian Nursery School expressing some concern about his behavior. The note in part says, “We would like to have some professional advice so that we can help him . . . we’re worried about Ned and we know you are too.” I think there are other parents that might find themselves in a similar situation. Would you talk a bit about this first visit to the psychologist?

WC: When the Christian Nursery School expressed their concerns to us, we thought it was time maybe to ask some questions, and we felt very good about their raising him.

BC: One of the things that happens, I think, is that you have your doubts, and you’ve talked to the pediatrician and he is very reassuring, and that makes you feel very good and you think, “Well . . . I don’t know a lot about children, I guess he’s O.K. He’s not much like John, but trust the pediatrician, he’s fine.” And then the next thing happens that makes you feel uneasy. So when the teacher finally says, “We know you are worried about him too,” I think I felt very devastated. On the other hand, it was almost a relief.

WC: Yes, we were in a partnership with these people. Neither one of us has the answers quite, but their suggesting get a little help, and then we can proceed. That sounds smart—that sounds like the way to go. We never thought going to get that little help would open up something much bigger.

 

RB: Toward the end of the book, there is a quote from a leading biologist in the study of autism and she says, “Autism is no longer a diagnosis, it is a description.” Would you elaborate on what you learned about autism?

BC: Well it is a pervasive, life long neurological disorder which is incurable. It affects the person afflicted with varying degrees of problems of all kinds—language disability, communication, socialization, and sensory organization. And these basic neurological problems manifest themselves sin different ways in different autistic people—there’s the full range of intelligence, there are retarded autistic people, and there are genius autistic people. I think when Mary Coleman said that about autism no longer being a diagnosis what she meant was after you get this label of autism, there are many subgroups—there are many variations on the theme and there are many approaches. I know that Ned would be called autistic and some kid over here, who’s very different, would also be called autistic. It’s very hard to generalize.

Many autistic people don’t socialize at all. Ned has always had certain people in his life that he really had affection for and an interest in. Some autistic children I’ve met have a real stone wall. Others progress into what is very close to a normal life and normal ability to relate.

RB: It’s understandable certainly, from what you’ve said here and from reading the book, that the general public would be quite confused about what autism is.

WC: We hope we drew a clear picture of what Ned was like because we don’t think of ourselves really as being expert in autism, but we did feel we had an interesting story in Ned. It’s hard I think for us as parents now after having written the book to know whether the book is going to make people say, “Yeah, I know what that kid is like.” I hope people do know what he’s like from reading because I’ve read other books and I sometimes wanted to know clearly just what the boy being described was like.

RB: May I ask where the idea for the book originated?

BC: Abingdon Press came to us and asked if we would be interested. Bill had received an award from an organization called Religion in the Media, and Abingdon was also receiving an award at that same banquet. They heard Bill speak and he mentioned his interest in the handicapped. Shortly thereafter they contacted us to see if we would be interested in writing about our experiences raising an autistic child. Bill’s first reaction was, “No, let’s not. That sounds like a lot of work.”

WC: To write a few sharp anecdotes or to sketch out something—that wouldn’t be so hard, but to sit down and have a book that really we could say, “this is what it was like,” that seemed formidable. But we soon discovered these letters that Barbara had written. They allow things to be in the book that really couldn’t have been written into the book. The letters can say things that we couldn’t even begin to say—not just because of the fact that the letters brought back forgotten things, but they also say things that we might find very awkward to put down, even if we could remember them.

RB: From a reader’s standpoint, I felt that the letters added a lot because you get some sense of your family life—other things that are going on.

WC: That’s the kind of thing we never would’ve been able to write in. Also the interesting thing is that the letters express feelings that we were having at the time, which in retrospect we—it was sometimes hard to believe we had those feelings.

BC: One of those things that struck often when we started working on the book and going through all our diaries (they’re not real diaries, they’re calendars) and going through the letters was the fact that we were so busy. We were constantly doing things, and while Ned was a big focus in our life, he wasn’t the only thing.

 

RB: Although the book should be helpful to so many people—parents certainly—all kinds of parents, it would seem to me the writing of the book and the reliving of these experiences would have been somewhat difficult. Was that true or did you have another reaction to that experience?

BC: I think I was both things, but certainly there were moments when—especially when I would uncover a letter I had completely forgotten about. One that comes to mind is the letter I wrote to the institutes when we were writing to see whether Ned would be a candidate for their program, and I outlined all the things we’d been through, and I remember reading that letter and just falling apart and thinking “how awful.” But at the same timeI think there was a kind of interest in looking at our own life this closely quite apart from problems or dealing with autism or Bill’s career. Just taking your own life, looking at it hard over a 20 year period and trying to organize it to make it intelligible to someone else was a very interesting process. 

WC: There were a few things that we found in the book that were painful to relive. I was thinking of some of the negative experiences like when Ned first went away and he lived in a group home and the experience was not good. We kind of had to hold back—we didn’t want to make a tirade.

BC: We didn’t feel we were out to settle scores.

 

RB: Well, the book certainly reflects, what I think we could generally call—maybe you would choose another term—an emotional roller coaster as you try one approach, then you try another approach, and you talk with professionals in the field who are apparently giving you their very best judgement on these things and often they’re wrong. But it does seem to me that you’re very generous with the way that you do treat the different people regardless of how they work out.

 

BC: Well, you know people don’t go into this field unless they really want to help, and the professionals we encountered weren’t alone in not having the answers. 

WC: I think one thing that is true—some might be critical of professionals in that there is some attitude that they feel they ought to have answers, and if they don’t, sometimes they kind of invent or fake it a little bit to make the parents feel this professional does know what they’re talking about instead of coming out and saying, “I don’t think I know either.”

BC: Of course we didn’t want to hear that. The last thing we wanted to hear was, “Well, I don’t know anymore than you do.”

 

RB: One of the parts that I so much enjoyed was a happy family experience when you went to England and you visited the Jane Austen places. You quote from her: “It is well to have as many holds on happiness as possible.” I was contrasting that with the Washington trip that you described later on which didn’t work out nearly as well.

 BC: No. That really was a very low point. And of course the abuse of medication is a serious problem with children like Ned, and children with various skinds of mental handicaps, because it seems to be such an easy solution, and it’s almost always the double edge. 

WC: What you end up with these kids is the unpredictability. With kids like Ned or kids in special education, the professionals and the parents learn that they have to make allowances for these very big swings. Especially autistic people who have days or cycles almost of months where they operate very well, and then they will operate not nearly so well, and you can’t despair saying, “Oh, what’s happening? Is his brain deteriorating?” In autism you learn to begin to expect these swings and if you’re using medication, it’s just that much more complicated because you don’t know what you’re going to get.

 

RB: We don’t have time of course to go into all the different schools and approaches, but I was particularly fascinated by the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia. This program demanded a lot of Ned, but also required an incredible amount of your time and effort. Would you talk just a little bit about that?

BC: It is hard to talk jut a little bit about the Institutes. It was a very all encompassing program which kept us busy from the early morning until late at night, and to many people it seems overwhelming, but the thing that is really hard to do with a child like that is nothing. Ned doesn’t do “nothing” very well. A normal child finds all kinds of things to get interested in and starts to develop friends an d alife of his own. In the years before we were doing the Institutes’ program, it was driving Ned to school and driving him from therapy to therapy. I was busy all the time and I didn’t have a sense of success. So when we began the Institutes’ program, we were so inspired by these wonderful people in Philadelphia and we saw immediate progress—so we were working terribly hard but it was terribly interesting. It was the most interesting time in my life, and Bill at the same time was working on “M*A*S*H” and coming home and helping with the program. It was very exciting. 

I don’t think we could have done it forever—it was too intense for that. They don’t have the answers necessarily for all the problems, but they have an approach that works for many children to help them—not cure them, but help them. We gained a lot of confidence in ourselves through working in such a direct partnership with professionals.

 

RB: For those who know you, Mr. Christopher, as Father Mulcahy from the “M*A*S*H” program, have enjoyed that through the years. In the book you get some sense of your work on that program, but was the experience with Ned such that it affected your portrayal of Father Mulcahy in the program or not? 

WC: I really felt totally free of anything like my home as I worked. One thing I think an actor does, I’m sure, is if you’re working and your life seems to be making sense around you, it may send you off to the studio in high spirits, and you may attack your work with  vigor and all. I always felt we had a pretty positive way of working with Ned. And if anything, I think the fact that Barbara and I were such a wonderful partnership all through our marriage has sort of reinforced my ability to give myself to my work. We developed a clear path—way of living with Ned and brining him along—if anything it made me clearer in my mind to devote myself to my work. I didn’t feel that I was at the studio sitting there wringing my hands about what was going on and unhappiness at home—that just wasn’t part of it. So I didn’t feel I had to write about that.