Only Maya Angelou can write about loss and make it uplifting. She proved it with the very first volume of her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1958), and she achieves it again with her sixth and last volume of memoirs, A Song Flung Up to Heaven.

In this new book, Dr. Angelou recalls bidding a painful goodbye to Ghana, the country she loved, and to a man she loved there, returning to a much-changed United States. "The year was 1964," Angelou writes. "The cry of burn, baby, burn' was loud in the land, and black people had gone from the earlier mode of sit-in' to set fire,' and from march-in' to break-in.'" No sooner did she land in San Francisco than her friend Malcolm X was shot and killed. The riots at Watts followed. So did the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Her hopes and idealism shattered, Angelou felt each loss like a blow to the heart. "I was blitheringly innocent until I was about 35," she said in a recent interview. "I seem to have had the scales pulled off my eyes, and I decided I didn't like that. What I have done, what most of us do, is contrive an innocence. I contrived an innocence that kept me and keeps me quite young. However just behind that facade there is a knowing. By the time Dr. King was killed, I came to understand a lot of things. I learned I could handle myself. I learned a lot about my own inner strength. I learned that I was greatly loved."

The love of family and friends like author James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Fire Next Time) sustained her. "Agape love, the power of it really was made clear to me. There's a statement Polonius makes in Hamlet when he's talking to his son, in that 'To thine own self be true' monologue. 'Those friends thou has and their adoption tried/Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.' I didn't know how important that was until those rigorous, vigorous challenging years. I learned, ah, that's what that means."

As she cast about deciding what to do with her life, Angelou put food on the table by singing in a Honolulu night club. Anyone familiar with the voice as warm and welcoming as a hearth fire can well imagine her as a singer, but Angelou decided it was too demanding a profession, requiring too much sacrifice. Why, then, did she decide to write?

"I love it, I love it, I love it," says Angelou, now a professor of American Studies at North Carolina's Wake Forest University. "I believe literature has the power, the ability to move men's and women's souls. The work is so tedious, but I love the feeling of putting together a few nouns, pronouns, adverbs, adjectives and rolling them together; I just do."   A Song Flung Up to Heaven, the author credits James Baldwin and Random House editor Robert Loomis with giving her the courage to write her own story. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings launched Angelou, then 30, as an author and as a role model of strength, courage and dignity. It's been both a reward and a responsibility.

"It has its burden in that I'm careful about what I say. I don't go out a lot. I go to friends' houses and they come to mine, but I'm always a little edgy when people are too adoring," says the author. "I believe that quite often that person who is at your feet will change position. If the winds of fortune change, that person will be at the throat. So when someone says, you're the greatest, I say, ahhh, how kind, there's my taxi."

If Angelou is careful in choosing the words she speaks, she doesn't mince any in her writing. She thought of fictionalizing the part of her life she writes about in the second book of her autobiography, Gather Together in My Name. Ultimately, though, "I couldn't do it," she says. Angelou wasn't eager to let people know she had been a prostitute, but she wanted to tell the truth. "A lot of people say, I've never done anything wrong they have no skeletons in their closets, maybe even no closets. I want people to know me. I'm not going to draw any lines."

By baring all in her autobiographies, Angelou wants people to know, as she says, "You may encounter many defeats, but don't be defeated. It may even be necessary to encounter some defeats it makes you who you are and [helps you] know what you can take." You couldn't exactly call Dr. Angelou defeated. Since 1964, she has been nominated for the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, a Tony and an Emmy. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature, the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album and over 30 honorary degrees. She wrote the poem "On the Pulse of Morning" for the Clinton presidential inauguration in 1993 and "A Brave and Startling Truth" for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in 1995. But she wants A Song Flung Up to Heaven to be the last volume of her autobiography, mostly because what she has done for the past 34 years is write. The book ends in 1968 with Angelou beginning I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

"I refuse to write about writing. I don't even know how to do that. I leave that to Marcel Proust," she says and laughs. "I will continue to write essays and of course poetry, but autobiography? This is a good place to end.

"By the time Dr. King was killed, I came to understand a lot of things. I learned I could handle myself. I learned a lot about my own inner strength."

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.

Among the recurrent refrains that lend power and poignancy to writer Jim Harrison’s magnificent literary memoir, Off to the Side, is the phrase "it could have been otherwise." More a question, really, than an assertion, the phrase is sometimes colored by regret and other times by amazement.

"I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was," Harrison says from his home in Montana, where he has recently moved after living some 60 years in northern Michigan. "I once wrote in a poem about reaching the point in life when I would have the courage to admit my life. There were some rough spots, as you probably sensed reading the memoir, especially in my early married years, when I simply had no idea what I was doing or how to support myself. During that most difficult period of 10 years, our house payment was $99 a month, but quite often that was hard to muster."

Harrison’s financial picture changed dramatically with the publication in 1978 of his brilliant novella Legends of the Fall. David Lean wanted to film the title story and John Huston wanted to film another narrative in the collection. Harrison went from barely supporting his wife Linda and their two daughters to making "well over a million bucks in contemporary terms." He was utterly unprepared. "My life quickly evolved [into] a kind of hysteria that I attempted to pacify with alcohol and cocaine," Harrison writes in the memoir.

Harrison believes it was the devotion to his calling as a poet and fiction writer that kept him from going over the edge. When asked about this, he quotes his long-time friend, writer Thomas McGuane, who told him, "you can’t quit or control anything until it gets in your way. But when it gets in your way, you control it or remove it. You don’t really have the freedom to continue because it is getting in the way of the main trust of your life."

The intensity of Harrison’s devotion to the main trust of his life—his writing—is evident in both the memoir and in conversation. "It’s a religious calling in a sense," he says. "The trajectory started when I was on the roof of our house looking out at a swamp when I was 19. I had written for several years, starting at about 15, but that day on the roof I took my vows and acknowledged my calling."

For Harrison, part of what his calling demands is an intense curiosity about both the internal and the external lives of people. "I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that," Harrison says, and then adds, "I read a lot of memoirs to see how people did it a couple of years ago. A lot of them are too full of whining and they pretend they didn’t have a philosophical, mental or spiritual life and just describe what happened. I couldn’t do that."

Lucky for us. What emerges in Off to the Side, is about as complete a portrait of the inner and outer Jim Harrison as one could hope for. He writes about the lasting influence of his parents and grandparents and their hard-nosed Scandinavian values (despite some years of hard living, his "essential Calvinism made it unthinkable to be late for work, miss a plane, fail to finish an assignment, fail to pay a debt or be late for an appointment"). He describes losing the vision in his left eye at age 7 when a neighbor girl shoved a broken bottle in his face. He writes about the liberation of striking out on his own during the summer between his sophomore and junior years in high school; about the confusion of a short-lived academic career; about the deaths of his father and sister in a car crash and his mistake of peeking at the coroner’s photos. "When my father and sister died I figured if those you love can die like that, what’s the point of ever holding back anything," he says.

With insight and a dash of humor, Harrison catalogs his seven obsessions: alcohol; stripping; hunting, fishing (and dogs); religion; France; the road; and nature and Native Americans. And he describes his experiences writing for the movies, a sometime profession that supported his fiction and poetry and led to friendships with Jimmy Buffet, Harrison Ford and Jack Nicholson, among others.

Harrison says Jack Nicholson, who remains a friend, "was a good teacher on how to handle that reality. There’s simply no other actor or actress that I know who handled it better and kept control. He would just simply never be on television. He thought of it as the enemy. It uses you up. The sad thing you see over and over again is how people who suddenly become famous’ get used up so fast and discarded."

At this point in his life, Harrison has no fear of being used up himself. "I’ve retreated so far from that kind of life," he says. "And," he adds, referring to a new novel he has begun working on, "I have something to write."

Harrison says he decided to call his memoir Off to the Side "because that is a designated and comfortable position for a writer." Throughout the memoir he mentions his lifelong need to hide out, at least metaphorically, in thickets, to be where he can look out and see but not be seen. He also notes that "nothing is less interesting . . . than the writer in a productive period."

But in conversation Harrison asks, "Do you ever read Rilke? He says only in the rat race can the heart learn to beat. So I guess I just vary between the antipodes of hiding out in my cabin and being anywhere—New York, Paris or Hollywood." He laughs, then adds, "A writer friend who has read the memoir asked, How did you manage to do all that?’ And I told him it was inadvertent. I was just leading with my chin."

Like many of us, historian Joseph Ellis long considered George Washington a distant, almost unapproachable icon, "aloof and silent, like the man in the moon." Then Ellis began research for a chapter about Washington's farewell address in Founding Brothers, his brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller about America's revolutionary generation. And he discovered sides of Washington—the man, not the monument we've made of him—that surprised him.

"There's a fundamentally different sensibility at work here," Ellis says, comparing Washington to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson during a call to his home in Amherst, Massachusetts. "It's harder to write about because Adams and Jefferson give you the words themselves, whereas Washington's basic convictions were shaped by experience and action. He is less introspective. He doesn't give you the same language."

What Washington does pass down to us is voluminous, mostly official correspondence, not especially revealing daily diaries and documents from his life as a self-made member of the Virginia gentry, leader in the fight for American independence and first president of the United States. Alas, Martha Washington ordered their personal correspondence destroyed, closing off the main avenue to a more intimate look at Washington the man. The Washington Papers, as the remaining the assemblage is called, are now nearly completely edited and annotated, and Ellis uses these papers to extraordinarily good effect as the backbone of his highly readable, often provocative, human-scale book that is intended to be, he writes in his preface, "a fresh portrait focused tightly on Washington's character."

Ellis fleshes out His Excellency by dipping judiciously into an ocean of new scholarship on the American Revolution, the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, slavery and colonial and early American history in general. The resulting portrait seems to surprise even Ellis himself.

"I was most surprised with how ambitious Washington was," Ellis says, sounding almost bemused. "I didn't expect him to be as gargantuan an ego. We think of Benjamin Franklin as the ultimate self-made man in early American history, but Washington was equivalently self-made. That gave him incredible drive. He came from virtually nowhere and made himself into something, often on the basis of sheer physical presence and physicality. Adams said later that whenever they met to decide who was going to lead them, they always picked Washington because he was always the tallest man in the room. Well, he was not just the tallest man in the room; he was the most ambitious man in the room. And amongst a crew of people like Jefferson and Adams and Madison and especially Hamilton, to say that Washington was the most ambitious is to say something."

Washington also had his eye on how history would judge him, which helped make him the precedent-setting master of restraint that we hail even today. "Power makes us uncomfortable," Ellis notes. "But in the end, Washington is the one person you can trust with it, and he proves that he is worthy of that trust by surrendering power."

Part of Ellis' art in His Excellency lies in his ability to dramatize for the reader how the outcomes of historical events that now seem fated in fact teetered precariously on the edge of disaster: the Revolutionary War, for example, could easily have been lost had Washington not been able to learn hard lessons from the mistakes of his early, instinctively aggressive strategy; the very idea of an American nation could have vanished with the wind had Washington not thrown his presence and prestige behind the Constitutional Convention. Even the book's title makes a nodding reference to the fact that some revolutionaries expected Washington to be ruler for life. It was all new ground, and Washington's unique character—molded essentially, Ellis argues, by experiences in the Revolutionary War – set the precedents that shape our hopes and expectations for America to this day.

The other part of Ellis' art is, quite simply, that he writes extraordinarily well, and by hand. "I'm an old-fashioned writer in the sense that I'm technologically incompetent," Ellis says. "To me there's a connection between the muscular movement of the hand and the cognitive process itself."

Ellis partly credits teaching history to undergraduates at Mount Holyoke College with helping "purge my writing of scholarly jargon . . . and making me find ways to articulate complicated ideas in accessible language. I think for most historians the research is two-thirds of the work and the writing another third; for me it's the opposite."

Ellis works at home in a large upstairs office, usually surrounded by his Jack Russell terrier, a cat and a golden retriever. Obviously, his office has no computer, and Ellis says he's never figured out how to use research assistants, so he does all his own research. Sometimes his 13-year-old son Alex (Ellis also has two grown sons from a previous marriage) will slip into the quiet of his office to do homework and leave behind notes for his father, reading "Dad, go to it! My college depends on your success."

"In the same way that there's got to be a seamless connection between the way you write and what you're trying to express," Ellis says, "there needs to be an interconnection between the writing, the teaching, the family, the dogs, the kids—the rhythms of life."

Then, reflecting on the book he has so recently completed, Ellis says, "I hope His Excellency gives you a sense of the character of this person both as a public figure and as a human being. Washington's was an elemental personality. It was not Jeffersonian in its intricacies and contradictions, but the judgments he made in several key decisions—about the war, about the Constitution, about the presidency—all ended up being right. That's impressive. And it was not an accident."

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.

It's a story almost too amazing to be true: An Olympic runner serving as an airman in World War II is marooned on a raft after a plane crash. He and his companion are rescued—by the enemy—and held in a POW camp. But even the remarkable bare bones of the story don't convey all of what there is to discover in Unbroken, a true tale of survival, strength and resilience that Laura Hillenbrand's fans have been waiting for ever since they turned the last page of Seabiscuit. Unbroken is our top pick in nonfiction for November, and Hillenbrand answered a few questions about her new book from her home in Washington, D.C.

First, we have to ask: How did your life change after Seabiscuit?
The success of Seabiscuit was a startling experience. Thanks to a chronic illness, I had been largely isolated for many years. I wrote this book without any expectation of great success with it—I was just trying to tell the story as well as I could. The book was published, and suddenly found this huge audience. I went from living in obscurity and isolation to having TV crews in my living room, literally overnight. It was a lot to take in all at once, but it was wonderful. Since then, it has brought me only joy: amazing experiences, so many new friendships. It has enabled me to connect with the world in a way I never imagined. I am still in wonder over what happened, and I am immensely grateful.

"I'm drawn to subjects whose lives are a study in resilience, and I'm fascinated by the attributes that enable men to survive."

Louis Zamperini has already told his story in two autobiographies. How does Unbroken add to or differ from his accounts, and what was his reaction to your interest in writing about his life?
When Louie first told me his story, I was struck by its wealth of narrative possibilities. Autobiography is a wonderful and worthy genre, but it is a narrow one, offering only one perspective on a life. I wanted to open up the narrative to include the perspectives of Louie's fellow Depression-era Olympians and WWII airmen, the men on the raft with him and the airmen searching the ocean for him, his fellow POWs and the family he left behind. I wanted to place Louie in his historical context and present him as a representative of the broader experience of WWII airmen and prisoners of war, and the hardships they faced. Along the way, I learned many things about Louie's life, and the surrounding events and personalities, that he never knew. When I was done, Louie joked, "When I want to know what happened to me in Japan, I call Laura."

When I initially approached Louie, he assumed I wanted to write his autobiography with him, something he had recently done. But I mailed him a copy of Seabiscuit and explained the different direction I wanted to take his story, and he was game.

One thing your books have in common is their focus on resilience—people overcoming the odds, etc. Many of your readers see the echo of that spirit in your struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Do you feel that experience has helped you identify with the people you write about?
Because I've been struggling with a terrible, intractable disease for nearly 24 years, I identify very strongly with people who find a way to endure, and overcome, extreme hardship. Of course I can't compare my experiences to Louie's, but my history has given me an intimate understanding of suffering, and that understanding helped me commune with him as he moved through his most difficult hours. I'm drawn to subjects whose lives are a study in resilience, and I'm fascinated by the attributes that enable men to survive. In that sense, I couldn't have found a richer subject than Louie. As I worked on this book, my health collapsed once again. At times, I couldn't find hope in my life, but I always found it in his. 

With fewer and fewer World War II veterans remaining to tell their stories, did you feel a particular urgency for writing about this topic? What was it like to hear accounts of the events they experienced firsthand?
I caught this story just as the living memory of it was slipping away. A number of my interviewees, including all of Louie's siblings, his lifelong best friend, one of his high school classmates and several men who were airmen or POWs alongside him, died before my book went to press. This broke my heart; I wanted so badly for them to see their stories told. 

I was nervous about asking men to walk me through their memories of being tormented in POW camp, or enduring hellish combat—it felt like a terrible imposition. One or two men whom I approached said they just didn't want to talk about those events, but to my surprise, most were eager to talk. During a few of my interviews, men cried as they spoke.  But even these men wanted to tell me these stories; they wanted this history to be recorded, and they wanted the world to understand the price they had paid to save the world. It was deeply moving, and I feel honored that they shared their memories with me. They had incredible stories to tell, and I took very seriously the responsibility to get those stories right.

Your chronicle of Zamperini's days on the raft is especially harrowing, and his survival seems almost miraculous. What qualities would you say allowed him to survive when others did not?
Physically and mentally, Louie was singularly well prepared to endure 47 days on a life raft. He was in world-class running condition when his plane crashed, and this surely helped.  But his biggest attribute was mental. Louie was a born optimist, and his childhood as an artful dodger, using his clever mind to get himself out of trouble, gave him the conviction that he could think his way out of any problem. He simply refused to believe he was going to die out there. It was a completely unrealistic belief—the odds of being rescued when down at sea were very poor—but it carried him forward and gave him the impulse to keep working for his survival. He was also a tremendously resourceful person. He devised ways to fish using hooks tied to his fingers, and a hook made from his lieutenant's pin. He came up with a way to save rainwater. He even figured out how to wrestle sharks aboard the raft and kill them. And, knowing that it was very common for raftbound men to go insane, he and his raftmates played memory games hour after hour to keep their minds sharp.

On a related note, even before his wartime travails, Zamperini's athletic abilities had already guaranteed him a notable life. Do you think certain people are predisposed to greatness, or do situations bring it out in them?
I think there is greatness in many of us, but we have to be thrown into extreme hardship to discover it. That's the fascinating thing about extremity: It unveils the true character of people, and finds in them attributes, or weaknesses, that they didn't know they had. This book explores that issue.  Louie was an extraordinary athlete, but that didn't necessarily mean that when he got out on a life raft, he would have the character to endure it. Phil, his raftmate, was this quiet, recessive, unassuming man. No one could have guessed that in combat, his veins would run icewater, or that on the raft, he would prove just as resilient and enduring as Louie. And earlier, when Phil, Louie and their crew were caught in ferocious combat with Zeros, no one would have thought that the hero would turn out to be a sweet-tempered kid from Shapleigh, Maine, top turret gunner Stanley Pillsbury, who ignored the horrendous cannon wounds to his leg and shot down a Zero that was an instant from downing their bomber. It took extremity to reveal these things in these men.

You have a talent for describing historical events vividly. Tell us about the research this requires.
Thanks for the compliment! I think the secret to vivid storytelling is detail-oriented research. The more telling detail you can provide, the more vividly the reader can see the story. When I do interviews, I ask a huge number of questions, often going over and over an event to mine my interviewee's memory for every tidbit they can recall. I did this a great deal with Louie, and he was very patient with me. With this story and with Seabiscuit, I tried to get as many perspectives that I could on each event, and when one source yielded a detail, I'd run that detail past the other living sources to see if that would jog their memories. It often would, and new memories would emerge. Eventually you have a mosaic that you can piece together. I was fortunate in that there were many witnesses to Louie's life—some living interviewees, others who had left their accounts in diaries, letters, memoirs, affidavits and military reports—enabling me to put together a remarkably complete picture of many of the events, even though they took place as long as 70 years ago.

If you could go back in time to observe any historical event, what would it be?
That's a tough question!  There are so many things I would like to see. I'd like to see the Colossus at Rhodes. I'd like to walk the deck of the Titanic. I'd like to see Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address. And I would love to see the Seabiscuit-War Admiral match race. But the first thing that comes to mind, in the context of this book, is the end of the war.  I would love to have been there when Louie was finally free. I won't give anything away, but it happened in a manner that was breathtakingly dramatic.

Are there plans to turn Unbroken into a movie?
There has been a lot of talk about that, and we are looking into it. I would love to see Louie's story told on film. So much of his life is spectacular—his races, air combat, a plane crash, his time on the raft—and would translate beautifully to film. 

You've said you didn't intend to write another book after Seabiscuit, so maybe this question can't be answered right now—but do you see a third book in your future?
I always wanted to write another book after Seabiscuit, but didn't know if my health would allow it. I feel so blessed that my body held up enough to get me through Unbroken, and body-willing, I will write another book, if I can find a story that engages me as the first two did.

Author photo by John Huba.

Ron Reagan is no stranger to sharing his father with the world, but in his new memoir, My Father at 100, he delves deep into the past of a man that few truly knew but many claim as their own. The younger son of our 40th president was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule for a spirited chat with BookPage about his father’s roots, the current state of American politics and much more.

So much of My Father At 100 reads as a personal meditation on your relationship with your father. What prompted you to take your investigation into your family and enigmatic father's past and make it public?
I suppose I could have written a journal and kept it all to myself but there was the sense that people would actually find this interesting. Also, everybody else lays claim to him in one way or another as I’ve said in the book, so I suppose in some way I’m staking my own claim here since I actually knew him. I feel like if anyone has a right to say anything about him, it’s someone like me.

Was it hard sharing your father with an entire country?
In a way. I think anyone who has a parent, or perhaps any other family member who is a very well-known public figure—a big celebrity if you will—I think there is going to be an element of some resentment on some level that you have to share them all the time. And so many people seem so attached to my father and claim him. So there was some of that, although I never doubted that I knew him better than 99.99% of those people.

I think what you had when my father was president that you don’t see now is people of good will on both sides recognizing that whatever our differences are, we’ve got to get some things done here.

At one point in My Father at 100, you mention that your father was a very charismatic man with many facets, and yet you had the feeling that when you were out of his sight, it was almost as though you ceased to exist to him.
The thing about “out of sight out of mind” [is that] it didn’t really have so much to do with his relationship to the public versus his relationship to his family. I think he was just often in his own head somewhere. He did have a tendency at times to put people into an abstract category, and he could even do that on occasion with his own family. For example, I mention in the book about when he wrote a letter to me when I got a D in Algebra in high school. This letter had hardly anything to do with me! It could have been a form letter that somebody had asked him to write to any young man. So you kind of got the impression that he was playing a role himself in that instance and had assigned you a role and you were enacting this kind of drama that really had nothing to do with either one of you. But this wasn’t a constant thing, and I suspect that if I had been face-to-face with him for that conversation it would have been an entirely different thing.

I didn’t share this story in the book—though I probably should have—but many people thought that he was callous toward the poor, for instance, and yet that wasn’t true when it was somebody who had a face, when it was an individual. While he was at the White House, he saw on television one night a young woman who was a single mother who was down and out and this moved him. So he sat down and took out his personal checkbook and wrote her a check for $2000 and mailed it to her. And two nights later he’s watching the news again and there she is on the news again with a framed copy of his check, which she is now hanging on the wall of her meager apartment. And he’s thinking, “Well this isn’t what I intended!” so he writes her another check for $2000 and sends it to her along with a little note saying “For God’s sake, cash this!” But she was an individual to him, she had a particular story. She wasn’t just “the poor.” If you wanted to move him on an issue, if you wanted to capture his interest, [you had to] personalize it, put a face on it, make it a human being.

So, given that he was so introverted—or perhaps introspective is a better word for it—was it ever surprising to you how strongly the public responded to him given how wrapped up in his own mind he could be?
No, not really. I’m not sure I would put it as either introverted or introspective; there is probably some other “intro” word that neither one of us are thinking of at the moment! He dwelled inside his own head a lot of the time, but when you say introspective that implies some kind of critical self-examination, and that really wasn’t what was going on, I don’t think. He was building and rehearsing and solidifying his personal narrative in his own head.

On the other hand, he was very charismatic, and in person I defy anybody to have met him and not liked him having spent any time in his company. He was very affable, very warm, he made you feel like you were his good friend even if you had just met him. And it was not because he was cynical and manipulative, but just because that’s the way he acted around people. So no, it wasn’t surprising at all that people responded to him. People got the 90% that everybody got, but it was that 10%, metaphorically speaking, that he kept close and private. Even his own wife, my mother, admitted that she rarely felt that she got to that last, tiny innermost room.

In your mind, did you ever reconcile "Ronald Reagan: president" with "Ronald Reagan: father," or were the two figures very distinct to you?
They were part of unified whole. I know that some people who saw him as president didn’t appreciate his personal qualities because they didn’t know him personally, but I didn’t really see them as being two different people so there wasn’t any urge to reconcile that. He was very consistent as a person. There was the public versus private element to his character, but it was all very consistent. He wasn’t a very changeable or mercurial person.

Much of this book recounts your journey to discover a side to your father that you knew little about. So without giving away too much, what's one thing you uncovered that people would be surprised to learn about your father?
He was a fairly big, athletic guy, but as a little boy growing up, he was actually undersized and very insecure. He was picked on by bullies at school, he was often the new kid because [his family] moved around a lot, he spent a lot of time alone, and he was overshadowed to some extent by his older brother and even by his parents, who were both very charismatic and extroverted people with forceful personalities. I think that this was part of the reason why he retreated into himself as a little boy and spent a lot of time alone, a lot of time daydreaming. . . . He was dreaming often of the West; he was fascinated by the West, dreaming of himself as a kind of hero in a wide-open landscape.

I don’t think I quite appreciated that solitude when he was young boy, and his vulnerability.

At times this exploration into your father’s and your family’s past must have been painful, perhaps even because it just hammered home the fact that he is no longer with you. So what was the most rewarding element to this entire project?
I think just overall the sense that I know not just my father better—I think I knew him pretty well and there weren’t any huge surprises; it’s not like I suddenly discovered he was a cross-dressing serial killer (though perhaps I should have to boost sales!)—but finding out about my family and getting back into that country and getting back into Illinois. Nobody in my family, until I started looking into this, was really aware that my father had an uncle and two aunts on his side of the family. He never mentioned it to my mother or to any of us. He mentions in his autobiography in passing, without ever naming them. So to go back and discover that there was this larger family on both parents’ sides and find out what happened with them was really rewarding and interesting. As far as we know, those two aunts of my father died very young before he was born, and his father’s brother drank himself insane and died in the Dixon Insane Asylum in 1925 when my father was a teenager. Hard to believe he wouldn’t have known about that, but we never heard about it.

So that was tremendously rewarding, to do that and trace back and do what little independent or original research I was able to contribute to this.

What is one of the most important lessons your father taught you?
Kindness. He could be distant and he could be inattentive at times, perhaps from a sort of obliviousness, but he was a tremendously kind person to everybody he met. He treated everybody the same. Now that’s a double-edged sword when you’re his family wondering whether you should be treated extra special nice, but he treated everybody from the guy who shined his shoes to a foreign head of state the same. Also, I never saw him enter a room and give any indication that he thought he was less or lesser than anybody in that room. Not that he was arrogant. He wasn’t one of those people who needed to dominate a room; he’s not a Bill Clinton type where he’s got to be the center of attention all the time, since if you’re president, most of the time you are! He just had this serene confidence about him where you really believed that he wasn’t the type of guy who would kowtow or suck-up. He didn’t do that. He had tremendous dignity and self-respect, and I think that’s a good example to have growing up.

You are a very vocal liberal and atheist whereas your father was very much not, so how did this affect your relationship with your father?
Well, we could disagree about politics and we could even disagree about the existence of a deity and still remain close and friends. I think he was probably a little frustrated with my politics because my father believed that he was right, and was sure that if he could get you alone for five or 10 minutes that he could convince you of his position. So I think it was terribly frustrating to him that he couldn’t convince me and change my mind in many instances.

The atheism was, I think, a deeper worry for him because he was a deeply religious person, though not in a florid or evangelical way. He just thought I was ruining my life by not believing in God. But he was also wise enough to realize that you can’t force that on anyone, people have to come to that or not as they will, so beyond trying to strong-arm me back into church when I was 12 years old, he just let me go my own way. It wasn’t really an issue between us, even if it might have been a sore spot for him.

If your father were alive today, what do you think he would feel is the most pressing issue America faces in 2011?
On domestic issues, I think we have to be very careful going back 20 to 30 years since he was elected; times have changed and as stubborn as he could be, one assumes he would change with them. I can’t say that he would be a carbon copy of himself in 1980 in 2011.

On the foreign front though, I think he would continue to be highly motivated by the idea of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. That was something that animated him for a long, long time, and I see no reason why he would feel any different now. The problem still exists; it’s arguably even more serious now with the threat of loose nukes and terror and all of that. I think he would have been appalled at the Republican intransigence over the START treaty and holding that hostage to parochial political concern. I think that would have disgusted him. I think someone like Jon Kyl, he’d have wanted to pinch his little head off. It would have been unconscionable, unpatriotic and un-American as far as he was concerned.

Beyond that I hesitate to speculate too much. The only other issue I would raise where I absolutely know how he would feel is the torture issue. He would be utterly disgusted and appalled that the United States of America practiced torture under George Bush. That kind of moral turpitude was just not in him. The cowardice that is required to do something like that was just not part of his character.

Your father began his career in the entertainment industry, much like yourself. Yet you have said that you have no intention of running for office because your atheist views would likely prevent you from ever being elected. Is that truly all that is holding you back?
It’s not the only reason why I wouldn’t run for office, I’m just not by nature a politician. But the fact that I am an atheist, that would make it tough if I did choose to run.

Do you think that Americans too often blur the line between church and state?
Well there are certainly people who try very often to do that! There is [a significant percentage] of the country that really does somehow believe that we were founded specifically as a Christian nation and the only way we can be right as a nation is to embrace a particular strain of Christianity. But yes, there is always an attempt to blur that line and we have people on the Supreme Court now who would be happy to blur that line.

I mean, if you want to legislate biblical law, then none of us would be allowed to wear stripes and I would have had to have been stoned to death by my parents as a young man when I announced I was an atheist, and slavery is ok, and child murder is fine and wives should be bought and sold like livestock. People who say that our laws are based on the Ten Commandments, well what’s the first commandment? Our first commandment is that you shall have no other gods before me. And what’s the first amendment? Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion. So you cannot marry the Ten Commandments to the Constitution; they are diametrically opposed.

It’s a little disturbing that anybody gives these [fundamentalists] the time of day. I think in other countries they would be fodder for comedy, briefly, before they disappeared. But not here! Here you’ve got a FOX news network that hires these people and makes money off of them.

We’ve talked about how the world has changed since your father was in office, but do you feel like the world of politics has changed in the 20 years since your father was president?
Yes, I do. When he was president, it’s not that there wasn’t a pretty stark right-left divide. But even with all of that, I think what you had when my father was president that you don’t see now is people of good will on both sides recognizing that whatever our differences are, we’ve got to get some things done here. There are things that need to be done for the country. Certainly in foreign policy you more often saw politics stopping at the water’s edge. I don’t think you would have seen the same kind of kerfuffle over the START Treaty back in the ‘80s that you saw just recently where it really was just being tossed around like a political football; that would have been regarded as really unseemly back then.

So there was more mutual respect, the personal venom wasn’t as noxious and toxic. My mother, for instance, as First Lady caught some grief for using personal, private donations to buy a new set of china for the White House. By the time Bill Clinton was in office, you had the First Lady not only accused of having an affair, but of murdering the person she had an affair with. So we’ve gone from the First Lady puts on airs and buys fancy china to the First Lady has someone whacked . . . that’s a big jump! Can you imagine someone back in the ‘80s accusing my mother of having someone murdered? Can you imagine my father’s reaction? The notion of my father sitting still while somebody accused his wife of murder . . . he would have called Rush Limbaugh and beaten him to a pulp. That just wouldn’t have happened.

The animosity and the invectiveness that has been aimed at this president, much of it racially tinged, particularly coming from the Limbaughs and Glenn Becks, is way beyond anything that existed back in the ‘80s.

This isn’t the first time your writing has been published, although it is your first book. Now that you’ve written this memoir, do you have any immediate plans or inclinations to write any other books?
That’s something I’d definitely like to think about. I’ve done all sorts of things in my life, starting out as a ballet dancer, doing a bit of acting and television and radio, and some writing for magazines along the way. I enjoyed this process, but it’s a little bit difficult to judge because it was such a personal effort. Would it be as enticing if it was something that was farther from me? It’s hard to say. But my guess is that this is something that I’d like to pursue if I could. I’ll grant you of course that I won’t be able to write anything that interests people as much as a book about my father . . .

What about Ronald Reagan: Vampire?
[laughing] That might do it! Or my father at 102. In all seriousness, though, I’m not sure exactly what it would be at this point, but I’d certainly like to explore the opportunity of future books.

You mention near the end of My Father at 100 that you still listen for your father's voice letting you know that he's ok. If in turn you could tell your father one more thing, what would it be?
I suppose I’d just remind him that he’s loved and not just by people who don’t know him! But by the people who do know him and that he left behind. We still think of him and care for him and hold a warm spot for him in our hearts.

The events of September 11, 2001, changed the world—or at least, most Americans' perception of it. In his 2004 bestseller, Ghost Wars, Steve Coll put that event in context by detailing the history of foreign involvement in Afghanistan, explaining why it was the perfect place for Osama Bin Laden to pull together a radical organization like al Qaeda.

Now, Coll puts Osama Bin Laden himself into context with The Bin Ladens, a comprehensive look at a sprawling family tree. Not even Tolstoy had to handle this large of a cast—Osama is one of 54 children sired by Mohamed Bin Laden, though of course not all of them are introduced here—but readers will find their concentration rewarded with a new understanding of a dynasty that has strongly influenced the modern world.

The Bin Ladens is an incredibly dense and information-packed narrative. Did the topic ever overwhelm you with its complexity and depth?
It was very hard work. It was hard to track down the people who could help me understand the family as fully as possible—they were scattered literally all over the world. And it was hard to spread my research over time in a way that would support writing in depth about an entire century. My goal was to try to write something fresh and specific that was located in the history of Saudi Arabia—not just a narrative of the royal family, which has been done before. So that meant digging under a lot of rocks that had not previously been turned over.

If Americans could take away one lesson from your book about the rise of Osama Bin Laden and his influence in the Muslim world, what would it be?
I think it's important to see him as a modern figure, not as a medieval figure in a cave. He represents not only a reaction against the West and against globalization, but also an adaptation of Western ideas and technologies for anti-Western ends. These are the layers of complexity in his identity, his appeal and his actions that I think are too often neglected in analysis of Osama and Al Qaeda.

What would you identify as the key factor that radicalized Osama?
He was initially recruited by a Muslim Brotherhood gym teacher in his elite prep school in Jeddah. But in some way his early beliefs, while puritan and rigid, were rather orthodox in a Saudi context. His violence arose from his experiences in war in Afghanistan, where he met violence-minded volunteers from across the Islamic world.

Do you see Osama as a product of the Bin Laden family as a whole or an extreme departure from it?
Both. He is a Bin Laden in the sense that his talent as a leader and his understanding of border-crossing technologies, among other things, are derived from his membership in his own family, as was his wealth. He is not the only Bin Laden of his generation to have become deeply religious. But his embrace of violence and war against the United States and Saudi Arabia is an extreme departure from his family's interests and values—in the end, he declared war, in a sense, against his own family.

What is the one thing most people should know about the Bin Laden family, but don't?
The diversity of views and lifestyles within it. The Bin Ladens include some brothers and sisters of Osama who were as enthusiastic about America as he was hostile to it.

You note that although Saudi Arabia makes up less than 2 percent of the world's Muslim population, it has had a pervasive influence on Muslim thought. Do you see that trend continuing in the future? Or will another nation usurp Saudi Arabia's role?
Oil wealth, and the centrality of Mecca and Medina to the Islamic world, will ensure that the kingdom will continue to have influence greater than the size or proportion of its population. But I do think that there will be—and may already be—a gathering backlash in the Islamic world itself against the extreme religious and political beliefs that emanate from the kingdom's most conservative clerics.

You write that in the late 1990s, The U.S. intelligence community simply did not know very much about the Bin Laden family, and an important aspect of what it claimed to know was wrong. Without these intelligence failures, do you believe we could have prevented the 9/11 attacks?
If the U.S. intelligence community understood the family and Osama's wealth better than it did, it might have helped shape a more intelligent, more effective campaign to cut off Al Qaeda's resources and restrict its operations, but I don't think it would have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

What ties, if any, currently remain between Osama and the rest of the Bin Ladens?
The main branch of the Bin Laden family says that all ties are completely broken. His mother and one of his stepbrothers visited him in Afghanistan as recently as early 2001. Osama's wives have left him behind since the 9/11 attacks. But he has more than 20 children and some of those seem to still be in exile and perhaps some of them are in contact with him from time to time.

What do you foresee for the third generation of the Bin Laden family?
There are so many of them—hundreds—and it will be a challenge for them to develop the leaders and the cohesions to continue the extraordinary business success of their parents' generation. But I think they are generally a more worldly generation than their parents, more comfortable with the West and all of its pressures, and so many of them may be able to enjoy fully the success and wealth they have inherited.

Do you feel Osama continues to play a crucial role in the world of terrorism? Or is he a figure of the past?
Al Qaeda has revitalized itself along the Afghan border and its leadership plans and supports attacks in Europe and elsewhere from that sanctuary. Osama himself is surely more isolated within Al Qaeda than he used to be, but he remains an important media spokesman and source of visibility and, for some, at least, a source of inspiration. He is not a figure of the past—not yet.

What are you working on next?
I have the kernel of an idea about American foreign policy that I intend to work on, but I'm in the very early stages and it will be another long research road ahead.

Elizabeth Taylor may be best remembered for her physical appearance—her curves, her eyes, her weight gain in later life—but M.G. Lord's new book, The Accidental Feminist, explores how Taylor's films contributed to a sexual and social revolution without anyone taking much notice.

Even as the world was consumed with her private life and sexuality, Elizabeth Taylor's onscreen presence was being used by the writers and directors behind her films to challenge the Production Code's censorship and address subversive issues such as abortion and prostitution, long before she became an activist in her own right. Lord anaylzes Taylor's life through seven of her most memorable film roles to reveal a fresh side to the icon, giving us us a whole new reason to revisit Taylor's classic movies.

The one-year anniversary of Taylor's passing is approaching (March 23). In your opinion, what is her greatest legacy?

Taylor's greatest legacy is unquestionably her leadership at a crucial time in the fight against AIDS. That leadership, however, was made possible by her extraordinary celebrity, a byproduct of her film career.  

Your discovery of Taylor's accidental feminism began during a Taylor marathon with two generations of friends. How did watching with other generations change how you viewed the movies?

I was born at the end of the baby boom, so I had at least a child's vague awareness of Taylor in her heyday. My Gen X friends, however, mostly knew her in a later incarnation, as the butt of Joan Rivers' fat jokes in the 1980s. My Gen Y friends only knew her as a gay icon and AIDS philanthropist.

My friends and I thought that watching the boxed sets of Taylor movies that I had received as a gift would lead to a night of guilty, campy pleasure. Instead we were blown away, by both the quality of Taylor's performances and the feminist messages hammered home in film after film. They enabled me to see the films with fresh eyes and to recognize the feminist content that had been hidden in plain sight.

"Taylor fought consciously—not accidentally—for social justice. Her final role in life, I believe, was influenced by the movies with feminist content that she had starred in as a younger woman."

Many of Taylor's early films, such as National Velvet, contributed to Taylor's "accidental feminism," since her presence in these films was more a reach for stardom than any conscious attempt to present a positive image for women on film. At what point do you believe Taylor transitioned from accidental feminism to intentional feminism?

As columnist Katha Pollitt has observed, feminism "is a social justice movement." As an AIDS activist from 1985 until her death, Taylor fought consciously—not accidentally—for social justice. Her final role in life, I believe, was influenced by the movies with feminist content that she had starred in as a younger woman. Actors both shape and are shaped by their parts. They bring aspects of themselves to their characters and they take aspects of their characters away.

George Stevens, who directed Taylor in A Place in the Sun and Giant, saw qualities in Taylor as a teenager that she had not yet recognized in herself—strength and courage and a willingness to defy social convention that would serve her well when she began raising money to combat AIDS.

This is evident, for example, in Taylor's part in Giant. Taylor's character, Leslie Benedict, makes common cause with the sick. She steps away from her privileged community—the white Texas ranching elite—to serve a community of outsiders, the Mexican workers. Although she is warned not to enter the Mexican homes, she does so anyway. And when she finds an ailing child, she cradles him. She doesn't pull back, fearing contagion, just as Taylor herself did not recoil from people with HIV. She demands medical attention from the privileged community's physician.

Leslie forces the doctor to acknowledge the humanity—and the suffering—of outsiders. She stands up to bigotry. She risks being ostracized. And in that brave moment, she leads the doctor—just as Taylor herself would lead a callous nation—to do the right thing.

If you could recommend just one of Taylor's films, which would it be and why?

I don't think a single movie captures all of Taylor's facets—or all of the aspects of feminism that her projects have addressed. I would narrow her vast filmography to the seven movies I concentrate on in the book. If pressured to narrow to, say, three movies, they would be Giant (in which her character's commitment to social justice anticipates her real-life AIDS activism), Butterfield 8 (in which her character is censured because she controls her sexuality, a core feminist tenet) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (because, among other things, it was the film that put the Production Code Administration censors out of business forever).

Camille Paglia, after Taylor's passing, said in an interview with Salon, "To me, Elizabeth Taylor's importance as an actress was that she represented a kind of womanliness that is now completely impossible to find on the U.S. or U.K. screen." Do you agree? Is there is any actress today who can compare to Taylor?

The movie industry has changed dramatically since Taylor's day. Studio movies are mostly made for teenagers now. Grown-up drama intended for grown-up viewers appears primarily on episodic cable TV. With this has come a thinning of the movie audience and a dilution of the power and influence of big-screen stars. As a consequence, I don't think any contemporary male or female actor can compare with Taylor.

How do you define where feminism is today versus during Taylor's time? How has its depiction in film changed?

I think Taylor's brand of feminism would fit right in with the so-called "third-wave" that evolved in the early 1990s. Third wave feminism emphases cultural diversity and a commitment to social justice. Younger feminists have also made a practice of re-appropriating pioneering cultural icons from the past. I hope they will come to embrace Taylor—or at least explore that possibility by reading my book.

You talked to a lot of interesting people for Accidental Feminist. Do you have a favorite interview, or a most memorable interview moment?

I loved meeting the late actor Kevin McCarthy—not only for his insights about Taylor but also because his sister, the novelist Mary McCarthy, was one of my role models when I was growing up.

My favorite interview, however, was with Gore Vidal. We talked about his adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer. The Production Code, a set of rules that severely restricted the content of American movies between 1934 and 1967, prohibited any representation of homosexuality on screen. Many directors caved to this proscription; the film adaptation of Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for instance, makes absolutely no sense. The play was about a gay man's refusal to sleep with his beautiful wife because he was in love with his dead best friend. The movie is about a man who for no conceivable reason refuses to sleep with Elizabeth Taylor—a situation that Williams, a gay man who said he himself would "bounce the springs" with Taylor, found beyond absurd.

In contrast, Suddenly, Last Summer retains the homosexuality Williams alluded to in his play. This is because Gore Vidal met with a priest every other week while he was working on the adaptation and convinced the priest that the movie could be interpreted as a "moral fable." In the interview, Vidal told me how he achieved this.

What have you learned from studying Taylor's life?

From looking at Taylor's movies, I got a frightening glimpse of a recent past in which rights we take for granted—abortion, interracial marriage and certain sexual acts in private between consenting adults—were against the law. The Production Code also forbade the depiction of such things as interracial marriage on film. I hope my book motivates younger people to watch these harrowing movies—and to help ensure that these hard-won rights are not taken away.

Your books have covered Barbies, life in the 1990s, American masculinity in the space program and now feminism in film. What's next?

For the first 12 years of my career—between my graduation from Yale and the publication of Forever Barbie—I was a syndicated political cartoonist based at Newsday. I fled the job because I grew to dislike working at a newspaper. But recently I've found that I missed drawing. For my next project, I am collaborating with a neuroscientist, Dr. Indre Viskontas, on a graphic novel that deals with the brain. I'm also learning to use drawing software—Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and a Wacom Cintiq tablet. The learning curve is steep. These days to be a cartoonist one also needs to be a software engineer. But I love this difficulty, because an all-consuming challenge can take an author's mind off the vicissitudes of publication. In my view, the best way to survive the publication of one book is to immerse yourself in the making of a fresh one.