"Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground" by Jonathan Steele
Jeff Glor talks to Jonathan Steele about, "Ghosts of Afghanistan," a powerful book about Afghanistan's tortured recent history, and what it might take to turn things around.
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Jonathan Steele: An extraordinary exhibition on the Afghan war opened in central Moscow in 1991, two years after the Soviet Union withdrew its troops. The exhibition's disparate and rather clumsily assembled images made it obvious that it had put together by a committee rather than a single curator.
One section had been prepared by the Soviet Army High Command and consisted of tanks, guns and other hardware. Another was put together by dead soldiers' families, and showed dog-tags, photos of young men in uniform, the yellowing envelopes of letters sent back from the front-line, and a few vases of flowers.
I was living in Moscow at the time as the Guardian's Moscow Bureau Chief and I was particularly struck by the exhibition's third section. It consisted of paintings and sketches of Afghanistan by war artists who had been sent there by the Soviet authorities.
One picture stood out for me. Painted by an artist called Gennadi Zhivotov, it was like a split screen. The upper two-thirds of the picture showed four wounded Soviet soldiers in a landscape of khaki-colored hillsides with helicopters in the background. The lower third of the picture showed men in suits. They were the top Afghan and Soviet leaders sitting at a table in the Kremlin and signing documents on friendship and cooperation between their countries. The painting was called sarcastically Boys Playing at War.
You could not see the wounded soldiers' feet. The lower part of the picture cut them off so that the four sad-faced young men with blank expressions seemed to be hovering above the men who had sent them into battle like ghosts. I was deeply impressed and persuaded the artists to paint me a copy which now hangs in our home in London, as a permanent reminder of the folly of foreigners intervening in Afghanistan.
Since 1991 there have been more foreign ghosts. In addition to the 15,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the 1980s there have been over 1500 Americans and almost 400 British in the last ten years. And let's not forget the far larger number of Afghan soldiers and civilians who have lost their lives, anywhere between 600,000 and 1,500,000.
I've been reporting from Afghanistan off and on for thirty years and this book is my attempt to sum up what I've witnessed and to draw conclusions.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
JS: I was surprised by the similarity of the US intervention to the Soviet one. Both were wars of choice, motivated by anger and a desire for revenge but with very little thought given to the consequences. In both cases the foreigners were aiming for regime change. They expected it would be quick and they could soon withdraw.
In both cases there was mission creep and Soviet as well as American commanders and their political masters started on nation-building. In both cases armed resistance developed and intensified. What I found especially startling was that the Americans fell into the same trap as the Russians, even though the Americans should have known better. After all, they had armed and supported the insurgency which caused the Russians so much trouble. How could Washington have failed to see that its own intervention would soon provoke jihad and armed resistance from rural Afghans too?
The one difference between the Russians and the Americans is that after a few years the Soviet military realized the war was unwinnable. When Soviet politicians, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, decided to withdraw, they accepted the decision with good grace and in some cases with enthusiasm. They did not succumb to the optimism that still characterizes US military thinking in Afghanistan, in the face of all the evidence that military victory is impossible.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
JS: I would be practicing yoga, playing tennis, enjoying strolls round our ancient cottage in the East Anglian countryside, and reading.
JG: What else are you reading right now?
JS: I've recently completed Sarah Bakewell's marvelous biography of the French philosopher, Montaigne, called "How to Live." As someone who's interested in war, I've also just re-read "Fortunes of War," Olivia Manning's brilliant evocation of the British in Egypt during World War Two. It seemed especially relevant while Britain and France were again fighting in Libya this summer, or at least over Libya with their warplanes.
JG: What's next for you?
JS: I'm pausing in book-writing for the moment. Not counting three books that I've co-authored with other people, I've written six books over the last forty years. With the exception of "Ghosts of Afghanistan," they were all written in my spare time while holding down a job as a reporter and newspaper columnist. It takes me about three years to get pregnant with a new idea, so at the moment I'm just looking after my latest offspring and hoping it gets noticed and admired.
MORE VIDEO:
Steele believes the war could go on and on, like a war of attrition. Steele talks about how the book got its name.
For more on "Ghosts of Afghanistan," visit the Counterpoint website.
"Brave Girl Eating: A Family's Struggle with Anorexia" by Harriet Brown
Harper Collins, Jamie Young
Jeff Glor talks to Harriet Brown about, "Brave Girl Eating: A Family's Struggle with Anorexia."
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Harriet Brown: The book grew out of a piece I wrote for the New York Times Magazine, "One Spoonful at a Time," which encapsulated our family's experience in helping our daughter recover from anorexia. The inspiration for both the magazine story and the book were pretty much the same: I wanted to make sure that families who came after us didn't have to go through what we did. When our daughter was diagnosed with anorexia, my husband and I were told she would likely struggle with the illness for the rest of her life; that she'd probably be in and out of hospitals for 5, 7, 10 years; that 20 percent of those who develop anorexia die from the illness or from suicide. We were told a lot of things that didn't make sense to us: that kids with anorexia were afraid to grow up, or that they starved themselves because it was the only way their parents would pay attention to them.
None of these things seemed to fit our family. Being a journalist, I set out to find some different answers, and I did. We used a treatment that's fairly new here and somewhat controversial, Family-Based Treatment, often called the Maudsley Approach because it was developed by therapists at the Maudsley Hospital in London. I really wanted families to know that FBT is not just an option; it's the only evidence-based treatment for teenagers, and it's vastly superior to more traditional treatments. With psychodynamically based treatment, the recovery rate for anorexia is maybe 40 percent, and that's a generous estimation. Two long-term studies have shown FBT to be the first-line treatment for teens and children, with recovery rates between 80 and 90 percent. That's still not good enough, of course, but it's way better than the more traditional numbers. Yet most families are never told about FBT, because it flies in the face of many of the stereotypes and assumptions around eating disorders, especially anorexia.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
HB: This book is part memoir and part work of science journalism, and a lot of the science really did surprise me. For a long time, the assumption has been that eating disorders are largely psychological. What I learned during my research is that there's a clear and compelling biological underpinning for these diseases. The two biggest risk factors for developing an eating disorder are having a family history of eating disorders and having a family history of anxiety disorders. Like with depression, we now understand that neurobiology plays a key role in eating disorders. And that's good news because it may help us develop more effective treatments.
The other thing that surprised me was to learn how woefully under-funded research into eating disorders is, especially compared with research dollars spent on other far less common illnesses. For instance, Alzheimer's disease affects roughly 5.1 million people, and the National institutes of Health funded $450 million in research in 2011. Eating disorders affect about 30 million people, yet ED research got only $28 million from the NIH this year -- less than 10 percent of the funding for Alzheimer's, for an illness that affects six times as many people. I think this discrepancy comes from the fact that eating disorders are still seen as disorders of choice in a way. The textbook definition of anorexia is that it's a "refusal" to eat. As I watched my daughter go through this, I quickly came to understand that she wasn't refusing to eat; she was unable to eat. There's a big difference.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
HB: This question makes me laugh, because at various points in my career I considered giving up writing and becoming a therapist of some sort. I'm really grateful that I didn't go that route. I think I'm a much better writer than I would be a therapist.
JG: What else are you reading right now?
HB: At the moment I'm reading some of Hippocrates' writings, "The Emperor of All Maladies," and an Agatha Christie novel. I like to read three or four books at once.
JG: What's next for you?
HB: I'm working on a proposal for my next book. The tentative title is "Perfect Health: An Irreverent Look at Our Obsession with Health." What do you think of that? Plus I've got ideas for a couple of other magazine features I want to research. I'm happiest when I'm writing.
For more on "Brave Girl Eating," visit the Harper Collins website.
"The Oracle of Stamboul" by Michael David Lukas
Harper Collins, Jeffrey Cross
Jeff Glor talks to Michael Lukas about, "The Oracle of Stamboul," a historical novel about a girl who changes the course of the Ottoman Empire.
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?Michael Lukas: I started writing "The Oracle of Stamboul" in early 2004. At the time I was living in Tunisia, studying Arabic, applying to MFA programs, and generally trying to figure out what to do with my life. A few days after I handed in my MFA applications, the protagonist of the novel, Eleonora Cohen, came to me on a run through the outskirts of Tunis. She was hazy in that first glimpse, a slight, precocious child playing backgammon with two older men. I didn't know anything about her--where she lived or when, who these men were, why she was playing backgammon with them--but I knew as soon as she came to me that I had found the protagonist of my novel.
At first, I thought of her as a mix between Alice from "Alice in Wonderland" and Roald Dahl's Matilda. A few months later, rummaging through an antique store in Istanbul, I came across a picture of a young girl from the 1880s. When I saw this picture, everything clicked. Here was Eleonora, staring out across history with a laconic, penetrating gaze. Over the next seven years, she took on a life and character of her own. Eleonora still has elements of Alice, Matilda, and the girl in the picture, but she has since become her own person.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
ML: What surprised me most was how much of myself is in the characters, even though they live such different lives than my own. Sometimes writing can feel like that scene in "Being John Malkovich," when John Malkovich enters his own mind and finds himself in a restaurant filled with John Malkovichs saying "Malkovich, Malkovich." I guess what I am trying to say is that we can't help but imbue our characters with our own thoughts, feelings, and characteristics, whether the character is a preternaturally intelligent orphan or the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. And that, in itself, is pretty surprising.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
ML: I think I would probably be a fourth-grade English teacher. I've always enjoyed teaching and I'm lucky enough to be able to teach a few days a week in addition to writing. When I first started teaching writing to children -- through an afterschool program called Take My Word For It! -- I was going through a bit of a quarter-life crisis. My students' wide-eyed enthusiasm and seemingly infinite imaginations helped me to regain my sense of wonder and possibility in the world. I also love that children don't second guess their own ideas. Last semester I had students writing novels about ghost dog tooth fairies and moldy pickles trying to escape the refrigerator. And they all worked!
JG: What else are you reading right now?
ML:I'm in the midst of reading three wonderful and very different books: "The Hummingbird's Daughter" by Luis Alberto Urrea; "The Buddha in the Attic" by Julie Otsuka; and "The Line of Beauty" by Alan Hollinghurst.
JG: What's next for you?
ML: I am currently working on a novel about the Jews of Cairo. The book, which is tentatively titled "The Forty-Third Name of God," tells the story of an Egyptian Muslim family charged with guarding the Ben Ezra Synagogue and its famous Genizah (a treasure trove of medieval Jewish manuscripts found in the 19th century by Solomon Schechter). A multigenerational chronicle, this novel will tell the story of the Genizah, its discovery, and the cosmopolitan Mediterranean world it sheds light on. It is a novel about Muslim-Jewish relations, Cairo, the hidden secrets of the Kaballah, and the sometimes conflicting ties of family and religion.
For more on "The Oracle of Stamboul," visit the Harper Collins website.
"The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Steven Pinker
Penguin Group, Rebecca Goldstein
Jeff Glor talks to Steven Pinker about, "The Better Angels of our Nature," a book that shows, if you think the world is violent today, it's nothing compared to what it used to be like.
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Steven Pinker: I believe there is such a thing as human nature--that the mind is not a blank slate, and that we don't get all our emotions and drives from culture, parents, and socialization. But the very idea of human nature raises a fear in many people: if we're "killer apes" with "genes for aggression" and a "violent brain," would that mean that we are doomed to perpetual war and mayhem, and shouldn't even bother trying to make the world a better place? But I knew that this fear made no sense for two reasons. One is that human nature is a complex system with many parts: some of them lead us to commit violence; others--what Lincoln called "The better angels of our nature"--inhibit us from violence. Whether violence actually breaks out depends on which features of human nature are triggered by the environment.
Also, I knew that violence in fact has gone down over the course of history--the death rates in war and homicide today are a fraction of what they were in previous decades and centuries. But I know that many people find this hard to believe--they read the news and see bombings and shootings and war, and think we're living in violent times.
I wrote the book, then, to persuade people of two things: that violence has, contrary to appearances, come down, and that this can be explained by the struggle among our inner demons and our better angels.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
SP: Two things. One was how brutal our ancestors were. The Old Testament is filled with genocides commanded by God; the lives of the saints are filled with scenes of gory torture; the medieval knights were bloodthirsty warlords; and until recently people brought the whole family out to see heretics burned, broken on the wheel, or disemboweled. The other surprise was how many kinds of violence have decreased in frequency. I wasn't surprised that we no longer keep slaves or disembowel heretics--I already knew that. But I never expected to learn that homicide in the US, war in Africa, rape, spousal abuse, child abuse, spanking, hate crimes--you name it--have all been in decline since records were first kept.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
SP: Unfortunately, I'm already doing it--in my day job as a professor; I teach classes in psychology, and conduct research on language and the human mind.
JG: What else are you reading right now?
SP: John Mueller's "Terror, Security, and Money"--an expose of all the money and lives we waste combating an exaggerated terrorist threat. Joshua Goldstein's Winning the War on War: believe it or not, war is in decline all over the world. Matthew White's "Great Big Book of Horrible Things"--he calls himself an "atrocitologist," someone who tries to estimate how many people were killed in wars and genocides.
JG: What's next for you?
SP: A style manual for the 21st century: how cognitive science and modern linguistics can help us write clearer and more graceful prose.
For more on "The Better Angels of Our Nature," visit the Penguin Press website.
"Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion" by Janet Reitman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Jeff Glor talks to Janet Reitman about "Inside Scientology."
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Janet Reitman: The book grew out of a very long magazine story that I wrote for Rolling Stone, also called "Inside Scientology," which took about nine months to produce, largely because the learning curve was so steep. Scientology has its own language, its own codes, its own justice system, its own worldview - and none of these things had ever been well explained in any sort of mainstream, accessible way. That shocked me a little bit, I have to say, and it also offered a challenge, which was to write that sort of book, a really objective, thoroughly researched and documented history and narrative exploration of this subject that so many people have heard of, yet know almost nothing about.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
JM: How hard writing a book can be! I have been a magazine writer for a long time, but I had never written a book before, and I think I entered into it thinking, well, this will be like writing a whole lot of really long magazine pieces -- uh, wrong. Totally wrong. The reporting and research I had to do for the book was extremely challenging and daunting at times, and there were lots of surprises along the way just substantively, but I honestly think the most surprising element of actually writing the book was how difficult, and time-consuming, and frustrating writing a book can be. It takes a certain type of discipline and concentration that I never had to exercise before, and I had to learn it. As a result, I had to go through something like five drafts before I had a real "book." And in the meantime, it drove my boyfriend and all of my friends and family kind of crazy, not to mention my editors at Rolling Stone who called me regularly to ask "are you done yet? when are you coming back to work?..."
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
JM: Probably having a tough time finding a job, to be honest... I've been a journalist since the 1990s and it's the only "job" I've ever had. I'd love to live overseas, maybe in Africa, where I know a lot of people and have worked before, but I have a feeling I'd wind up writing from there just as easily...
JG: What else are you reading right now?
JM: I just finished Robert Stone's "Dog Soldiers," which is a really wonderful, but extremely dark book about the 1970s, and may start another one of his books fairly soon. But in the meantime, I'm reading Joe McGinniss's new book about Sarah Palin, "The Rogue," which I need to read for a story that I am working on....
JG: What's next for you?
JM: I'm working on something about the resurgence of the Religious Right at the moment, and then we'll have to see... there are a few ideas I have, but right now they're still in the incubation stage.
For more on "Inside Scientology," visit the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt website.
"1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" by Charles Mann
Random House, J.D Sloan
Jeff Glor talks to Charles Mann about "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created."
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Charles Mann: One beginning point was the home of our friends Laura and Bob, who own a tree farm near our home. I can't remember how this came up, but suddenly Laura was talking about how tree farms all over New England were being invaded by earthworms. Until the English came, Laura said, there were no earthworms in the northern U.S. or Canada. The worms were all carpetbaggers, and they were doing terrible things to northern forest ecosystems.
Laura and Bob are good friends, but I thought they must be nuts. When I had some time, I went to the library and discovered a) they were 100% right about the worms; and b) the worm invasion was only a small part of a giant ecological explosion that was set off by Columbus.
I knew a bit about this explosion, because I'd read Alfred W. Crosby's wonderful books, "The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism." Al had been the first one to notice that Columbus had set off an exchange of species between Eurasia and the Americas, and that this Columbian Exchange had played a big role in human history. Now I learned that, inspired by him, historians and ecologists and geographers had learned a vast amount of new material about the processes he had identified.
Over the years, I had got to know Al Crosby a little. I began to bug him about updating his stuff. He didn't want to--he was on to new things. Finally he said, "Well, if you think it's such a good idea, why don't you do it?" I took his offhand quip as license. "1493" is the result.
I like to think that I added something, but at bottom the book was inspired by dinner conversations with interesting friends and reading interesting books.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
CM: I'm not sure, but I was certainly surprised, riding in a small boat between islands in the Philippines, to see that the engine was literally held together with vice-grips. Another big surprise occurred when I was in a two-seater plane over eastern Bolivia, and the pilot asked me to take over while he crawled out of his seat and rummaged around in the back luggage compartment.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
CM: As a kid I wanted to be an astronaut or a cartoonist or a particle physicist. I don't know which I would be worst at.
JG: What else are you reading right now?
CM: Right now? I just finished writing a long non-fiction book, so I've been reading fiction. I'm mostway through J.G. Farrell's "Siege of Krishnapur" (really good) and partly through some other books. An hour ago I came back from my local book store, where I somehow acquired more books: Octavia Butler's "Kindred," Bruce Duffy's "The World as I Found It," and John Crowley's "Four Freedoms." I don't know whether I'll start those or wait till I finish the others.
JG: What's next for you?
CM: My daughter wants me to write a children's book that she can illustrate. The book would be based on a series of bedtime stories that I told the kids about two Japanese beetles, Bill and Fred. They eat roses and live in the world's biggest greenhouse and have misadventures. I haven't got around to proposing this to my publisher, though.
For more on "1493: : Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" visit the Random House website.
"On Canaan's Side" by Sebastian Barry
Penguin Group
Jeff Glor talks to Sebastian Barry about "On Canaan's Side," a first-person novel told through the eyes of an aging Irish Cook named Lilly. The story spans seven decades, all the way back to the end of the first world war.
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Sebastian Barry: I had a great aunt Lilly who went to America in the twenties. I used to think it was because she couldn't bear the fall in grace of her father, who was chief-superintendent of the old imperial police force in Dublin before independence. But I was shocked to discover that she left under threat of death from the old Irish Republican Army. I wanted to follow her there as it were, if only to offer the strange comfort of a made-up book... Also, my great friend Margaret Synge, who died recently, inspired the novel. Her grandson came back from the war in Afghanistan and tragically took his own life. Margaret, already in her eighties and very unwell, said to me, in her little bedroom, 'Why did He not take me? I was ready to go.' The saddest and most courageous thing I ever heard.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
SB: That America, where I have worked briefly and visited many times over the last 35 years, seemed in the upshot like a 'home place'. Although my grandfather held an American passport, I have no right to call myself a citizen. Nevertheless there is a secret citizenship maybe of the heart. The depth of attachment to the places and people I was writing about really surprised me. I had feared going so far, as an 'Irish' writer -- and it felt like a long journey, but homeward.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
SB: My grandfather, who was in bomb disposal in the Royal Engineers during WWII, wanted me to join the army, so I might have been a rather neurotic, nervous soldier! I left Trinity College Dublin in the 1970s and all job applications from me were rejected, so maybe I wouldn't have been good for much else besides writing. I remember a bank wrote back to me saying, 'Your application charmed us, but you are the least qualified person ever to apply to us...' My first longing was to carry on where Bob Dylan left off, but he never did leave off exactly...
JG: What else are you reading right now?
SB: I am re-reading the entirely marvelous book, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," published in 1970, and rightly never out of print since. A great masterwork of its subject.
JG: What's next for you?
SB: I have just finished all the publicity for "On Canaan's Side" in Britain and Ireland, and am walking and running the Wicklow mountains every day to get fit for a two-week book tour in the US in the second half of September. This is where writing seems sometimes very like boxing! Luckily there is never anyone in the mountains, so no one can see the uninspiring sight of me running along -- or stumbling as I should call it more accurately.
For more on On Canaan's Side, visit the Penguin Press website.
"Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It" by Don Peck
Random House, Dupont Photographers
Jeff Glor talks to Don Peck about "Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It"
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Don Peck: In 2009, as I was talking to labor economists, economic historians, and students of major financial crises about what had just happened, almost all of them were saying that recovery was likely to be very, very slow. And when I started reading histories of extended hard times -- the Depression, but also the 1970s and the 1890s -- I began to see the many, many ways (some of them quite surprising) in which society can change as tough times linger beyond a few years. It also struck me how periods like this one leave legacies that often last for decades -- changing the character of generations, the size and structure of families, the paths of different cities and communities, and so on.
So I thought it would be interesting and valuable to try and write about how this period is changing -- and will continue to change -- our society, based on a combination of history, direct reporting, and analysis. I also thought that there might be value in underlining just how deep and long-lasting the damage from periods like this one can be, and suggesting some public actions that can help us recover faster.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
DP: When I started my reporting for this book (and the Atlantic article that preceded it), I thought young people would bear the lightest scars from the Great Recession -- twenty-something's have fewer responsibilities, and are in and out of the job market anyway, so I figured they'd be able to cope more easily with a bad job environment. But in fact, both history and economic research show that today's young adults are likely to bear some of the deepest and most enduring scars from this period. The first few years on the job market are incredibly important to setting one's career trajectory, and a lot of research shows that people who first come into the job market during a recession not only start out behind, they never catch up to where they would have been had they graduated into better times. The Millennial Generation, on the eve of the recession, was as audacious a generation as this country has ever known. But the character of the Millennials, as well as their financial futures, are changing in this period, in complicated ways. Most of those changes are unfortunate, but some are positive -- and all of these changes are likely to endure well beyond recovery.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
DP: My first (short!) career was in management consulting, and the one thing I miss about that occupation is the problem-solving element. If I weren't a writer today, I'd probably be doing some form of policy analysis -- some of my interests are a bit wonkish, and that sort of work would combine writing, research, and analysis, all of which I enjoy.
JG: What else are you reading right now?
DP: Coming off a year of reading and writing almost exclusively about the recession, I've been binging on the "Game of Thrones" series, which I think is a terrific imagination of medieval statecraft, among its other attractions. In between, I'm reading David Kennedy's upcoming book, "Don't Shoot," a fascinating examination of strategies to reduce crime in America's most violent places, and also the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant (don't ask).
JG: What's next for you?
DP: I want to continue writing about the economy, with more focus on how we can recover and build a more resilient society. I'm very interested in Sun Belt cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix, places that were middle-class meccas and are now struggling -- so I'd like to write about how these places can recover, what they're doing to replace housing construction as big industries, and what looks promising in general.
For more on "Pinched," visit the Random House website.
"Death in the City of Light" by David King
Random House
Jeff Glor talks to David King about, "Death in the City of Light," the true story of a brutal serial killer who terrorized Nazi-Occupied Paris during World War II.
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
David King: I was intrigued by the many unanswered questions. Who were the victims and how many were there? How exactly did they die, and what, really, were the murderer's motives? I was also fascinated by the main suspect himself, Dr. Petiot. Could such an obviously brilliant and charming man, known for giving discounted and free medical care to the poor, really kill so many people, chop them up, and do the horrible things he was accused of doing? All of this, along with my interest in Paris and World War II, made it irresistible.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
DK: First of all, that I gained access to the French police file, which has been classified since the crimes and is still classified today. I'm very grateful for that extraordinary opportunity. Once I started studying the police reports, the interrogations, and the crime scene photographs, I was surprised by just how much of the traditional story was incorrect, sometimes even basic facts about the victims and the investigation. Above all, I was struck by how devious the murder plot was and how close he came to getting away with it.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
DK: I would probably be teaching history or writing at the university. I had a blast at the University of Kentucky. I enjoyed getting to know the students and spending the day reading and talking about things I am so passionate about. It was a privilege to help students see just how important a sense of the past is, and the many ways this knowledge can enrich our lives. I could also imagine working at a radio station. I was a disc jockey in college, and never lost the excitement for good indie music.
JG: What else are you reading right now?
DK: I am always reading a book, or two, or three or more at any given time. At the moment, I'm reading Hunter S. Thompson's "Hell's Angels," re-reading Ed McClanahan's "Famous People I Have Known" (I like to re-read my favorite books), and I've just started Erik Larson's "In the Garden of Beasts." There is also a little French novel I bought at the book shop on Boulevard Saint-Michel [in Paris] where Dr. Petiot was once arrested for shoplifting.
JG: What's next for you?
DK: I am exploring something, though I have to admit I am not sure it will work. If it does, it will be one wild ride; if not, well, it was worth trying. All I can say right now is that it's another true story, and like "Death in the City of Light," it is something you simply could not write as fiction because no one would ever believe it could have possibly happened.
For more on "Death in the City of Life," visit the Random House website.
"The Forgotten Waltz" by Anne Enright
W.W. Norton Publishing, Joe O'Shaughnessy
Jeff Glor talks to Anne Enright about her fifth novel, "The Forgotten Waltz."
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Anne Enright: I took a journey through Ireland on Feb 6th 2009, some months after the economic bubble had burst. It was a day of snow, and the country was very beautiful. I thought about new beginnings; how love comes in the silence after everything is finished. And, with that emotion, I had my book.
Adultery is a great boom-time subject. With all the excitement of new money, old certainties fall away and people have to make their own personal morality. The characters in the Forgotten Waltz are not noble, or perfect, or even very good, but they do want to live properly, they are learning as they go.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
AE: I was surprised by how much I loved Evie who is a child in the book. Gina, the narrator, has an affair with Sean, and Evie is his daughter. The people in the book find Evie a little unsettling, but I know that children are often a canvas we project ourselves on to, and I know Evie - much better than my characters do - and I believe in her ability to make it through. I am not a sentimental writer, but I really do love this child.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
AE: I would be in a secure institution. Or, I don't know - landscape gardening?
JG: What else are you reading right now?
AE: I have been catching up on books I missed from the last ten years: "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson, who is always wonderful, "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell which is a complete pleasure, and "Eucalyptus", a lovely poetic tale by the Australian writer Murray Bail.
JG: What's next for you?
AE: I think I'll write another book.
For more on "The Forgotten Waltz," visit the W.W. Norton website.
"The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel" by Daniel Sinker
Simon & Schuster, Daniel X. O'Neill
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Daniel Sinker: It's interesting, because I think I was the last person to realize that I was actually even writing a book. I'd been at the @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed for months, and as the storylines became more fantastical and more involved, I began to see backchannel discussion in the @ reply stream about turning the feed into a book. People wanted to be able to sit down with the entire story, not just have it appear in bits and pieces in their feed, or have to scroll back reverse-chronologically. They wanted the narrative. From there it was just a matter of figuring out what a book would be like. With so much of the story unfolding in real-time, it was clear that a simple dump of the account onto print wasn't going to work. Arriving at the idea of extensive annotations was the key to understanding how the book would work.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
DS: Hands-down, it was how much fun the annotations were to write. They follow the fictional narrative of the feed and fold in the non-fiction world that was influencing it and, as a result end up telling a nonfiction narrative of the actual mayoral campaign of Chicago, plus an extensive guide to the eccentricities of the city itself. A day when you get to sit down and write entries about the Jessie White Tumblers, Jim's Original Maxwell St. Polish Sausage, and analyze poll numbers for a political race is a pretty good day in my book.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
DS: A writer is just one of the many things I am, so that's an easy question to answer. I'm a coder, I build things on the web (including the @MayorEmanuel website, quaxelrod.com); I'm a journalism advocate, I currently head up a project called the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership that does work in the open-source software and journalism space; I'm a father of a six-year-old. I'm a lot of different people and enjoy being each.
JG: What else are you reading right now?
DS: As nerdy as it sounds, I've been enjoying DC Comic's reboot of their entire universe. Sure, it's not Shakespeare, but it's been great to really watch this massive creative direction unfold, to revisit old characters and to be able to discover a lot of new ones as well.
Comics are one of the few forms of great, serialized storytelling left. It's still such a great way to have a story unfold--piece by piece, month by month--it's nice to really immerse in it again.
JG: What's next for you?
DS: Immediately next for me is to work this incredible job that I have. But in terms of this book, it's about engaging in the very vocal and very excited fan base that has emerged around the characters in the @MayorEmanuel universe. Whether it's signing books or selling T-shirts (a portion of which goes to an amazing youth writing program in Chicago), it's been great to be able to meet the folks for whom these characters resonate.
For more on "The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel," visit the Simon and Schuster website.
"Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness" by Alexandra Fuller
Penguin Group
Jeff Glor talks to Alexandra Fuller about her new memoir, "Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness."
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Alexandra Fuller: Inspiration crept up on me in surges and waves and finally on a crest of illness. To begin with, mum was furious about the first memoir I had written, "Don't Let's Go To the Dogs Tonight" (a work about my childhood that she calls "the Awful Book"). She said I had not seen her as she saw herself at all and that I had missed the "point" of her, so as part of an effort to reconcile, I asked to interview her at length. To my great surprise, she agreed. So we met in Scotland at her sister's house and talked for hours with a tape recorder in front of us. It turned out that her childhood, her sense of herself and her heritage, were so rich (she is such a vivid storyteller) that I started to make pilgrimages into her geography to better understand her past--the Isle of Skye and Kenya. That initial interview and the travel that resulted from it led to more questions and interviews over several years. Still, I wasn't sure I had the material for a book until a couple of years ago when I found myself sick in bed with whooping cough for 100 days. Too ill to wade through my pile of magazines and periodicals, and too depressed to listen to the radio, I dug out my tapes and notes from all those trips and conversations and lay in a dark room listening to mum's voice. The experience lifted me out of my mildly fevered state and directly into her world. I was mesmerized by her story and started to write the book right then, propped up in bed. In retrospect, I think a temperature of about 101 was just about the perfect level of remove I needed from my own world to begin to really hear mum. The quality of my listening shifted from judgment to compassion.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
AF: I was shocked to learn that a single decision--answering an advertisement in a Kenya newspaper--led to my parents moving to Rhodesia in 1967 and that that single decision had such huge, tragic, long-term consequences. Mum doesn't believe in questions that begin with, "What if?" but I can circle that eddy for months.... What if my parents had never left Kenya? What if they had never gone to Rhodesia? What if they had gone to England instead? Moving to Rhodesia seemed like such a lamentable decision--it was a rogue, racist country on the brink of war--but I was also surprised (a little shocked even) that my parents truly have no regrets for their choices. They live very much in the present.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
AF: I can't even imagine that world. I suppose I'd grow my own food to keep my body and my children's bodies alive and keep writing for myself so that my soul didn't untether. In ways I don't entirely have the words for an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down.
JG: What else are you reading right now?
AF:I am reading--and love--Binyavanga Wainaina's memoir "One Day I Will Write About This Place." I think his use of language is utterly distinct and groundbreaking. Also, lately I have been spending a lot of time on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for an assignment so I've been getting deeply into the stories of historic and continuing injustices meted out against the Lakota people by the U.S. federal government. It's disturbing and thought-provoking material made most accessible I think via Ian Frazier's "On the Rez."
JG: What's next for you?
AF: I thought that was an illegal question to ask a writer. If it isn't, it should be.
For more on "Cocktail Hour Underneath The Tree of Forgetfulness," visit the Penguin Group website.
"The Night Train" by Clyde Edgerton
Little, Brown & Company, Kristina Edgerton
Jeff Glor talks to Clyde Edgerton about "The Night Train," a novel about friendship, and the power of music, in one small North Carolina community.
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Clyde Edgerton: I was in a rock and roll band in 1963. Seven white boys. Playing James Brown's "Live at the Apollo" album (it's about 35 minutes with no breaks) word for word and note for note as best we could was part of our show. A friend named Dennis Hobby was James Brown (as best he could be)--the cape, falling down, the microphone tricks, an almost split, etc. He'd be on the floor, in the cape, singing "Please, please, please," right after the band had gone silent. Then we'd come back in (dum, dum, dum, dum-dunka-dum) playing the music and he'd stand slowly, singing. One night we conspired NOT to come back in . . . just to see what would happen. The memory of that night has been with me for over forty years and inspired me to write the book. Also inspiring was an almost-friendship with an African-American teenager, Larry Lime Holeman, from my neighborhood in rural Durham County, NC. I was also inspired by my love for rhythm and blues music and my appreciation of the music of Thelonious Monk. (A bit of inspiration for the book might be felt in the book trailer at http://vimeo.com/25265338.)
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
CE: My realization of the similarity of the little details and nuances of racial segregation in Durham County, North Carolina, in 1963 and in Wilmington, North Carolina in 2011. Also I was surprised (through memory) of the potential power of music in the life of a teenager--music, that abstract thing that is so human, that lively something with energy that may be freely taken and freely given among musician friends.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
CE: Playing piano in a rhythm and blues band and teaching English in a public high school and being very poor.
JG: What else are you reading right now?
CE: A book on illegal liquor sales during the depression in Franklin County, Virginia, written by Charles D. Thompson, and "The Host," an amazing non-fiction piece by David Foster Wallace.
JG: What's next for you?
CE: A buddy of mine recently told me about going to a cousin's funeral where a volunteer funeral militia had made the funeral a military one. A member of the militia group asked my friend's wife if she wanted a shell casing from a round fired during the funeral (a blank, I'd guess) (well, maybe not). When she said "Yes," the militia guy went to his car trunk and brought back a cardboard box of casings. My friend told me the men in the militia group weren't dressed exactly alike and that he'd been was afraid a gun might go off accidentally. He started in on something else about them and I said, "Stop right there. This is turning into the best story I NEVER heard and I want make up the rest for a novel. So I'm working on that novel and I'm also writing a funny (I hope) book about fatherhood in which I have a section about getting fixed.
For more on "The Night Train," visit the Little, Brown website.
"The Cradle in the Grave" by Sophie Hannah
Penguin Group, Mark Mather
Jeff Glor talks with Sophie Hannah for her latest book, "The Cradle in the Grave," a psychological thriller about a TV producer unwittingly caught up in a murder scandal.
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Sophie Hannah: Unusually for me, I was inspired by news events: three mothers accused of murdering their own children. Normally the origins of my novels are much more personal than that, but I would never have written "The Cradle in the Grave" if I hadn't been fascinated by the real-life cases of three British women - Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel - who were tried for the murders of their own babies. Clark lost two infant sons to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), or crib-death. Cannings and Patel each lost three babies, and doctors couldn't find any explanation for the deaths. All three women were accused of murder. Testifying against them was eminent child protection expert Professor Sir Roy Meadow, who coined what came to be known as Meadow's Law: 'One crib death within a family is a tragedy, two is suspicious, three is murder'. Meadow also testified at Sally Clark's trial that the odds of more than one baby in the same nuclear family dying unexpectedly of natural causes were 73 million to 1. On the basis of his testimony along these lines, both Sally Clark and Angela Cannings were found guilty of murder. By the time Trupti Patel came to stand trial, however, the public mood had changed. Many respected statisticians had come forward to say that Meadow's 73 million to 1 statistic was utter nonsense. Campaigners for the exoneration and release of Clark and Cannings pointed out that if a particular family had an undiagnosed genetic condition, the likelihood of more than one baby from that family falling victim to SIDS might actually be very high.
When Trupti Patel stood trial for the murders of her three babies, there were pro-Clark-and-Cannings, anti-Meadow protesters demonstrating outside the court. One medical expert witness who testified for the prosecution told me, 'I knew as soon as I arrived at court and saw the crowd of protesters with their placards and banners, as soon as I was told that I had to be taken in round the back entrance in an armored van - I knew then that, whatever happened inside that courtroom, Trupti Patel would be acquitted. There was a lot of well-publicized anger about so-called evil doctors persecuting innocent crib-death mothers; politically, it would have been impossible to send yet another mother to prison for the murders of her three babies.'
I found this compelling, and chilling. There was no more or less conclusive evidence of either guilt or innocence in the Patel case than in Clark or Cannings. If Angela Cannings had been the third of the three women to stand trial rather than the second, she would almost definitely have been acquitted. If Sally Clark had been third instead of first, she would have secured not-guilty verdicts too. Trupti Patel was fortunate to have been tried at a time when public opinion was heavily weighted in favour of 'the crib-death mothers' rather than 'the child protection hawk doctors'. This was another aspect of the whole affair that I became obsessed with: the way everybody I spoke to about this issue seemed to view it in 'team' terms - the mothers versus the doctors. In the course of my research for "The Cradle in the Grave," I asked many people - almost everyone I met - for their views on these newsworthy cases. Some people were on the doctors' side, and others supported the mothers; it was either 'Those doctors are evil - they demonize innocent women' or 'Those women murdered their babies - it's just that no one can prove it'. Not one single person said, 'Since Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel are completely distinct individuals, I think it's possible that Roy Meadow was right about one or two of them and wrong about one or two of them. Some of them might be guilty and some innocent'. Everyone in the country seemed to have decided what story they wanted to tell themselves, and was cherry-picking the facts that would make that story work, while disregarding anything that didn't quite fit.
So - very long-winded answer! - I wanted to write a novel about several woman accused of murdering their babies, and to tell the stories of those women as individuals. How do three completely different women who have never met, and who have nothing but motherhood in common, end up in horrific predicaments that are sinisterly similar? And are they really similar, or do they only appear to be? That's where the mystery element comes in!
JG: What else are you reading right now?
SH: I am reading "Shit My Dad Says" by Justin Halpern, a brilliant, baffling, painful book that details a childhood full of what can only be described as psychological abuse in a way that makes the reader suspect the author has no idea quite how dysfunctionly damaging his hilariously sarcastic father is. The book is both laugh-out-loud funny and slightly chilling; its every page demonstrates the difficulty of recognizing abuse when it arrives in the form of extremely witty one-liners from an allegedly loving parent.
JG: What's next for you?
SH: I am putting the finishing touches to my next psychological thriller, "Kind of Cruel," and working on an outline for a TV series. In my head, I am also working on ideas for a self-help/popular psychology book for embarrassed British people, called 'How to protect your physical and psychological boundaries without looking like an idiot in public'.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
SH: Two things really surprised me while I was writing "The Cradle in the Grave." After all the research I did into the real-life cases of Clark, Cannings and Patel, I ended up none the wiser as to their respective guilt or innocence. I wasn't even able to make a guess, in any of the three cases. There was plenty of evidence to support whatever story a person might want to tell. That was a little scary. Also, I found that I had sympathy for everyone involved. Doctors who send innocent women to prison for the murders of their babies don't do it because they're evil. They do it mistakenly, because they genuinely want to protect and defend children. And women who smother their babies don't do it because they're wicked, but rather because they're desperate and ill. If society was more compassionate and less harshly judgmental, more people could admit to the mistakes they'd made and there would be fewer unsolved mysteries.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
SH: I would either be a country singer in the style of Emmylou Harris or Nanci Griffith, or else I would be a psychotherapist - a bossy one, who would get cross if patients didn't promise to leave their unsuitable partners and tell their controlling parents to get stuffed immediately.
For more on "The Cradle in the Grave," visit the Penguin Press website.
"Birds of Paradise" by Diana Abu-Jaber
W.W. Norton Publishing
Jeff Glor talks to Diana Abu-Jaber about "Birds of Paradise," a "multilayered novel about a family that comes apart at the seams -- and finds its way together again."
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?
Diana Abu-Jaber: I started writing it, in part, because my husband and I were debating starting a family. But we were really scared--ever since we'd moved to Miami, the news was filled with stories about runaway girls and kidnapped children. And I was thinking a lot about how I'd gone off to college at 16, and what a crazy, overwhelming thing that was, to leave home at such a young age. "Birds of Paradise" became a way for me to think about the things that frightened me the most as a parent, to imagine a family, like the one in the book, who live through the scariest things and those deepest fears. I wanted to know what might happen to the family of a runaway, if they'd endure or be blown apart.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
DAJ: When I first started writing, I thought I knew the reason why the daughter runs away and I wrote a first draft that way. Once I finished that draft, though, I realized that wasn't it at all--it was just what I'd assumed it would be. When I went back in to write a second draft, the real reason turned out to be much darker and more disturbing than I'd expected.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
DAJ: I'm very much drawn to visual media -- I love painting and drawing and I'm obsessed with film. I hope I'd become a filmmaker ... Then again, I might've focused more on my food passion and become a pastry chef -- which I think is another visual medium.
JG: What else are you reading right now?
DAJ: "A Gate At the Stairs" and a big stack of student papers!
JG: What's next for you?
DAJ: I'm writing a follow up to my cooking memoir, "The Language of Baklava." I think the new one will be called "Grace At the Table" -- it's about being a girl with a traditional immigrant parent, struggling to become a writer and then also a mother -- and all the people who said I should choose one or the other!
For more on "Birds of Paradise," visit the W.W. Norton website.
