Jeff Glor talks to Douglas Smith about, "Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Douglas Smith: While researching my previous book, "The Pearl," the story of the fabulously wealthy aristocrat Count Nicholas Sheremetev who scandalized Russian society by marrying his serf, the great opera star Praskovya Kovalyova, I got to know some of their descendants now living in the US. One evening over dinner, I heard the tales of how the family had narrowly escaped Russia with their lives following the revolution, leaving everything but what they could carry in a few suitcases. Their stories of riches to rags fascinated me from the start, and I immediately knew I had to write this history.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

DS: Many things surprised me, but nothing more than the quiet strength and stoicism with which these people bore their sufferings. Their resolve was utterly remarkable and I still find it incredible to consider how they not only survived, but were able to find happiness amidst such loss and hardship.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

DS: If I weren't a writer my dream job would be to work as an art restorer. I find the whole idea of saving crumbling frescoes or damaged paintings romantic and important.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

DS: I just finished Joseph Roth's "The Confession of a Murderer Told in One Night." My first love, before Russia, was Austria, especially the world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I studied German for a long time and lived and worked in Vienna for two years, where I first learned of Roth. His life and work fascinate me, and reading his writings in the German magically takes me back both to my own days in Vienna and to the lost world of central Europe before the Great War.

JG: What's next for you?

DS: There's perhaps no more amazing character in Russian history than Rasputin. Like so many people, I've long been intrigued by this mysterious figure. While working on "Former People," I've also been hunting down Rasputin, digging up long forgotten documents in archives around the world. My idea is to write a biography of Rasputin that reveals his staggering complexity as a person and his importance for understanding the final years of the Romanov dynasty. It's an amazing tale.

MORE VIDEO:

Historian Douglas Smith talks about how wealthy Russia's aristocracy really was before the Bolshevik Revolution. Author Douglas Smith talks about his next project: A more complete and complex retelling of the legendary, and infamous Rasputin.

For more on "Former People," visit the Macmillan website.

Jeff Glor talks to William Silber about "Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

William Silber: I wish I could say it was a labor of love. It wasn't. I wrote this book because I felt a sense of responsibility. During my classroom teaching to about 300 30-year old MBAs between 2000 and 2005 I gave a lecture on central banking and would ask my students: How many of you have heard of Alan Greenspan? Just about everyone raised their hands. I then asked how many of you know who preceded Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve System? Just about everyone but a few stalwarts put their hands down. I felt a responsibility to my students to explain who Paul Volcker was and why every central banker since is in his debt. It is almost like Mrs. Anna in Rodgers and Hammerstein's the King and I who sang -- "By your pupils you'll be taught - which is true except I'll add -- by what they know and by what they don't know.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

WS: This book began as the story of a determined central banker who confounded the critics while defeating an entrenched inflation in America, but turned out to be much more. As my research for this book unfolded, I realized that Paul Volcker not only restored price stability in the United States, but he also led a battle for fiscal responsibility in America. Volcker never held elective office, but his refusal to accommodate the Reagan- era budget deficits by creating money-- what economists call monetizing the deficit-- forced up real interest rates during the mid-1980s until Congress delivered a plan to balance the budget. His tenure as Chairman of the Federal

Reserve System, America's central bank, began the process of reining in the deficit. Volcker promoted the goal of fiscal integrity that Ronald Reagan had promised to the American people, turning Reagan into Reagan.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

WS: I am, in fact, a teacher who also writes about finance and economics in a conversational style, so that everyone interested in those subjects can understand. I have found that humor helps my teaching and my writing. I would, therefore, like to be a successful stand-up comic to help achieve my goals.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

WS: Ever since "Pillars of the Earth," with its strong female main character, Ken Follett is my favorite author. I am on Book Two of his recent trilogy.

JG: What's next for you?

WS: Another biography -- but of someone less virtuous.

MORE VIDEO:

William L. Silber talks about former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Paul Volcker and where he falls on the spectrum between radical and conservative. William L. Silber, talks about recession, economic recovery, and inflation, and what Ben Bernanke -- the current chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, could learn from Volcker.

For more on "Volcker," visit the Bloomsbury Press website.

Jeff Glor talks to Mark Helprin about, "In Sunlight and in Shadow."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Mark Helprin: It's a book about falling in love in a time that has passed, but a time that I knew very well and that seems to me more vivid than the present. I could say that the inspiration, which means literally "breathing in," was memory. Nabokov wrote a book called Speak, Memory, a beautiful title that I would have used had he not gotten there first relatively recently. But what I'm talking about isn't nostalgia, it's more, to my mind at least, about reporting on something that you can see, just out of reach, as if you are looking on as it happens.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

MH: What surprised me most was the irresistible way it tractored me into it every time I sat down to write. I don't expect that everyone will have the same reaction, but I really felt that I had crossed into some other world. This was wonderfully therapeutic, in that it allowed me to forget this world for a while, which made it pleasant and easy to face it upon return.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

MH: Physician or naval officer (surface or air, not submarines: I like a view).

JG: What else are you reading right now?

MH: Very easy to report: "Diplomacy" by Henry Kissinger; "De la Democratie en Amerique" by Alexis de Tocqueville (with French dictionary in tow); "Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute;" and "Smert Dolgushova," "The Death of Dolgushov," a Russian short story by Isaac Babel, with an absolutely essential English pony.

JG: What's next for you?

MH: Just before the publication of "In Sunlight and In Shadow," I finished the first draft of a novel. 11 more polishes to go and it may be ready for publication.

For more on "In Sunlight and in Shadow," visit the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt website.

Jeff Glor talks to A.M. Homes about, "May We Be Forgiven."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

A.M. Homes: It's a long story that begins with Zadie Smith asking me to contribute a piece to The Book of Other People, an anthology she was putting together as a benefit for Dave Eggers 826 Project. The idea was to write about character--so I settled on two angry brothers--the subject of intense sibling relationships was something I'd started to explore--in my novel, This Book Will Save Your Life and also in Brother On Sunday, a short story I wrote for the painter, Eric Fischl. I started writing--and what began as a short story just kept growing and became a novel about family, about Richard Nixon, about the importance of history. For me the seeds of a book are always planted early--I grew up in Washington D.C, during the Nixon Administration and so Watergate was a key part of my teen years--other themes about the role of the internet in our lives, about how we create families of choice that go beyond biology--all come from the culture and of course there are literary influences such as John Cheever's Falconer and Joseph Heller's Catch-22

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

AH: What I love about writing is the sense of discovery as the characters unfold before me. A good day as a writer is like being a time traveler--you go to other places, you live in other time periods, it's kind of amazing. I am happiest when right in the middle of a novel--it's like being in a relationship for a long time--the characters become real, you worry about them when you're not with them, they speak to you as you sleep etc. In this novel, I was surprised to see how the children, Nate and Ashley evolved and it was a treat to I watch Harry, the main character, rise to the occasion as a parent and a man. I describe the book as a mid--life coming of age story. And I just love the rollicking fast pace of all that happens along the way--it's darkly comic, sometimes absurd and in the end quite moving--all the things I like about life all the things that make what's sometimes very painful tolerable.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

AH: What would I be doing--well the truth is I always wanted to be in The Rolling Stones--but as you might have noticed there are no girls. Failing that I'd be a doctor, I think of the practice of medicine as both an art and a craft and I love the moment we're at when technology and hard science have brought wonderful tools for imagining and treating but also know that we need doctors who listen, who talk to their patients.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

AH: Joan Wickersham's News From Spain, short stories and Salman Rushdie's memoir, Joseph Anton. I'm a big consumer of news, I read The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Financial Times, I love reading newspapers from around the country and around the world. People often say things to me about how dark or absurd my imagination is--but the truth is every day life is pretty ironic on a regular basis.

JG: What's next for you?

AH: I'm writing a book about hospitals for the Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton. He's commissioned six writers to go into various large-scale institutions and try to make sense of what they mean in our lives and how a human relates to organizations of enormous scale. I've always been very interested in medicine so I chose New York Hospital--the idea being that I wanted to explore a top hospital--one that was succeeding despite the health care crisis, despite the economic uncertainty--it's been incredibly interesting.. Alexander Hemon is at the United Nations, Geoff Dyer went onto an aircraft carrier, and another writer is visiting the international monetary fund. Last week I was spending time with a brilliant neurosurgeon, I was in the Operating Room as he removed a large tumor from a patient--it was mind blowing in the best sense of the word.

For more on "May We Be Forgiven," visit the Penguin Group website.

Jeff Glor talks to Nataly Kelly about "Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Nataly Kelly: This book was inspired by the work that interpreters and translators do every day. Because Jost is a working English-to-German translator and I have a background as a Spanish interpreter, we had plenty of our own stories to draw on. However, we were most inspired by our many colleagues who work in other areas of the field - translating everything from machinery repair manuals to love letters and websites.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

NK: Even though Jost and I were pretty familiar with the diversity of the translation field, we have to admit that even we were surprised at how much translation influences the ways in which we live. Not many people know that even NASA relies on interpreters, that translation helps prevent public health outbreaks, or that the latest fashion trends are heavily influenced by translation. Translation can truly be found in every nook and cranny of our lives.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

NK: I'm reading a great book called "Japanese Death Poems" by Yoel Hoffmann. It's a collection of poems written by Zen monks and haiku poets during their very last moments of life. I know it might sound morbid, but I'm interested in cultural views of various aspects of health, including end-of-life situations, and this is a fascinating glimpse into a culture that is quite distant from my own.

JG: What's next for you?

NK: I'm keeping busy with my research at Common Sense Advisory, but in my spare time, I'll continue writing and translating. I just found out recently that a publisher in Ecuador will be publishing a trilingual book of poetry by an indigenous poet from the Amazonian Shuar community named Mar?a Clara Sharupi Jua. I am her translator, so she has asked me to translate about 80 poems of hers into English. I can't wait for English readers to hear more of her voice.

For more on "Found in Translation," visit the Penguin Group website.

Jeff Glor talks to Chris Berdik about, "Mind Over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Chris Berdik: I had read a lot about the mind's quirks and irrational biases, all the beliefs and assumptions that lead us to make strange choices, cause us to see things that aren't there, or otherwise blind us to the truth. At the same time, I'd been reading about placebo studies by people like Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard and others, investigating the possibility that, under some conditions, truth and reality may actually be shaped by our expectations, rather than hidden and obscured by them.

Our brains are constantly making predictions and jumping to conclusions, and the effects can be surprisingly powerful in some cases, while toothless in others. I started seeing evidence of these effects in research outside of medicine, too - in athletic performance and sensory experience, for example. I was hooked.

JG: What surprised you most during the writing process?

CB: In terms of subject matter, I was amazed by how easily the expectations of self-perception can be hacked to change how we think and behave. These studies include immersive virtual reality research, in which altering somebody's appearance in a realistic computer-generated reality can actually shift who they think they are in subtle but important ways.

As for the writing, I didn't expect this project to be so all-consuming, so difficult and so much fun at the same time. It kind of took over my brain for about two years.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

CB: That's a tough one. I like to think I'd be a scientist. I believe that good journalism and science are both driven by curiosity, and I love asking questions.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

CB: "Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies" by Ben Macintyre. I'm also sampling Charles Bukoswki's poetry in "Love Is A Dog From Hell."

JG: What's next for you?

CB: It's back to the workaday life of a freelance journalist. I'm always on the prowl for my next book project. But, I'm also looking forward to exploring a wide variety of science stories, and dipping my toes in a few pools before I once again take the plunge.

For more on "Mind Over Mind," visit his website.

Jeff Glor talks to Ken Follett about, "Winter of the World: Book Two of the Century Trilogy."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Ken Follett: The 20th century is the most dramatic century in the history of the human race, with terrible wars, mass murder, and nuclear weapons--and it's also the century in which I and most of my readers were born, so it's our story.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

KF: I was shocked to learn that Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union was as brutal and murderous as Hitler's in Germany.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

KF: Tough question, as I've been doing this full time since I was 28. I'd probably be a journalist, interviewing authors.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

KF: "Shakespeare's Language" by Frank Kermode. I'm a Shakespeare nut and I bought this in Stratford two weekends ago.

JG: What's next for you?

KF: Writing Book Three in the Century trilogy, which is called "Edge of Eternity" and is about the Cold War.

For more on "Winter of the World," visit the Penguin Publishing website.

Jeff Glor talks to Anne Hyde about "Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book? 

Anne Hyde: I wanted to figure out a way to retell the story of the 19th century west that could be more complex than great Anglo explorers, hardy pioneers, and disappearing Indians. I knew this story was inaccurate, but it needed something else to replace it. What makes the story exciting is the sense of possibility because no single empire or nation controlled the West. No one knew who would win in the end, which really affected how people lived their lives and did business. Native nations had great power because they controlled economic resources. I started thinking about forts as microcosms of life in the American West in that period. As I tracked down some of these people, and traced their lives across the West in the early 19th century, I began to find family letters, business records, government documents and reports that showed me a web of interconnected families, friendships, and business relationships that made the region operate between 1800 and 1860. Once I understood how it worked, I really wanted people to read about the racially and ethnically complex cast of characters that ran the show in the West.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process? 

AH: Three things really surprised me. First, the significance and sheer number of mixed race families of all kinds throughout the period - because survival and success in the region required inter-ethnic connection and because the best way to build relationships is through family and kinship. Once you start noticing these families who link Native nations with Anglo-American, French, Spanish, and Mexican nations, they are everywhere. All of the leaders in the region, male and female, have intimate family connections across ethnic lines because it makes cultural and economic sense.

Second, the stability and longevity of this system of trade and business run by these complicated, interconnected families is amazing. Telling the story by looking at these networks of people also highlighted Native nations and their power even in a century of demographiccollapse.

Finally, I'm still shocked by how bloody the process of undoing this successful system would be and how personally I took all this. Because I'd organized it by families and made it a very intimate story, it was very hard for me to write about all the terrible things that happened to these families beginning in the 1850s. Warfare, epidemics, reservations, new racial regulations. I had to write an epilog that described what happened to my families in the late19th century to demonstrate that even though the story is hard, children and memories survive.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

AH: Well, even though I spend a lot of time writing and worrying about writing, my primary day job is teaching college students. Looking at the past and thinking about how to make it vibrant and relevant and accurate is really a passion for me. I love the way history allows us to get some distance from an issue and to empathize with other humans at the same time. If I really had to pick another calling in life, maybe I'd be a veterinarian - so that I could get a sense of how animals view the world - but I think that would just be another way of getting perspective about the human condition.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

AH: Well, I seem to be reading a lot biographies and murder mysteries. I just finished reading Robert Caro's fourth volume in his Lyndon Johnson biography, which was just riveting. I'm trying to figure out how he makes the details of passing legislation so exciting. I'm hoping that Dana Stabenow, Margaret Coel, and Louise Penny will all have new mysteries soon since I just inhale those. I'm getting ready to teach an Introduction to Race and Ethnic studies class, so I'm reading Anton Treuer, "The Assassination of Hole in the Day" and Margaret Atwood's "Year of the Flood."

JG: What's next for you?

AH: Now that I've discovered all of these mixed race families, I'm tracing them into the late 19th  century and watching how they deal with new racial ideologies. Big parts of the West - around the Great Lakes and the upper Missouri, in the Southwest, in the Pacific Northwest - have very mixed communities for a very long time. I've been looking at records in the National Archives and local historical societies to get a sense of what happens. What is the range of choices people have and how do they make sense of them? Do young men of mixed race backgrounds have a harder time in the West than young women? Does it matter if they are Native and Anglo, or Anglo and Mexican, or French and Native? The simple answer is that these people don't just disappear, but how they understand themselves and how the West metabolizes them is very interesting.

For more on "Empires, Nations, and Families" visit the Harper Collins website.

Jeff Glor talks to Timothy O'Brien about, "The Lincoln Conspiracy."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Timothy O'Brien: I've been a longtime Lincoln buff -- since I was 10 years-old or so -- and have always loved strongly plotted and engrossing thrillers and mysteries. So writing The Lincoln Conspiracy was a way to wed both of those interests. This is the first in a series and I hope the entire series can capture the social arc of the early industrial years because so much was set in motion around politics, wealth, women, and African-Americans, all of which we're still living with today. It's a great tableau for storytelling, an opportunity to immerse readers in a pivotal, transformative era, and the setting for a novel that hinges on intrigue, riddles, and murder.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

TO: How long all of the research took! I often spent hours looking into the provenance of guns or early police practices. I also think you have to think hard and work hard to make your characters authentic and three-dimensional. I hope that Temple McFadden, the detective at the center of the plot, feels compelling and authentic to readers.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

TO: Making movies or running a vineyard in Napa.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

TO: "Mission to Paris" by Alan Furst and "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn

JG: What's next for you?

TO: I'm back in the saddle with Temple McFadden again. The saga continues. All six books in the series will revolve around confrontations between Temple and a very wily puppet-master in what amounts to a Holmes-Moriarty face-off that transforms both men.

For more on "The Lincoln Conspiracy," visit the Random House website.

Jeff Glor talks to Richard Horan about "Harvest: An Adventure into the Heart of America's Family Farms."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Richard Horan: I was unemployed and still am. Plus, all of my old heroes were dead (the great writers and boxers and agitators of idolized in my youth). Added to that was the fact that America, just after the devastating Cheney-Bush years, was devolving into irrelevance. Particularly vexing was the fact that Global Warming was being denied not only by the government, but also by the politicians, corporations, next-door neighbors, friends, and family despite the fact that the world around us all was and still is drying up and sinking into the sea. Writing fiction books no longer seemed of any value to me. Nothing but raising kids held any importance in my mind. Even teaching, which I'd proudly done for nearly 20 years, had become nothing but a cesspool of mediocrity; and part of the problem rather than the solution. In sum, I was pretty down on the world. Then I heard that radio interview with the president of the United Farm Workers, Arturo Rodriguez, where he challenged Americans to apply for work as farm hands. Images of my immigrant grandfather's fruits and vegetables warehouse flooded my memory. Those fruits and vegetable lifted me out of my funk, and Rodriguez put the idea into my head to travel around America and join the harvest of the fruits and vegetables that I loved.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

RH: I am very suspicious of that term "writing process" because as a writing teacher for many years I have come to realize that it means different things to different people, teachers and students alike, which is as it should be because a writing process is different for everyone, every time he or she writes. In the case of "Harvest," the writing process was both the actual work of living on the farms and working alongside the farmers and farm hands, as well as the actual writing itself. As a fiction writer, writing about my experiences in the field is a great deal different than sitting at my computer imagining the scenes I produce. But to answer your question, the amazing surprise about the actual writing of "Harvest" was how easily the experiences lent themselves to print; to story. I tell everyone who asks that "Harvest" was as much fun to write as the experiences themselves. I believe this is very unusual for any author and any book, and it makes me quite suspicious that there was perhaps some sort of good karma at work here.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

RH: I walked away from the sport of professional boxing at the age of 22. My last fight was up in Joliette, Canada, against the number one ranked middleweight in the country. I didn't win, but it was touch and go. After that fight I had lots of offers to fight for big money. At that point I realized that my heart was not in boxing; it was in literature, writing. An article I read made me realize that: Marvelous Marvin Hagler was the middleweight champion at the time. He was training for a fight out in Provincetown, Mass., and the article described his monk-like regimen; the eight hours he spent in his room in addition to his daily workout in preparation for fight day. I'll never forget his description of himself when they asked him what he did in his room all day long: "Think about the fight. If I died and they cut my head open, they'd find a boxing glove inside," he told the reporter writing the article. If they cut my head open, they'd find a thousand stories and wondrous characters, too numerous to count. No, like Hagler and boxing, I was born a writer.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

RH: I write book reviews, so in a sense I get paid to read. But it is one of my favorite things in the whole world to do. It's a great intellectual activity. I just finished writing a book review by Daniel Wolff, "The Fight For Home: How (parts of) New Orleans Came Back." It is a historical document, a transcription, about the folks in the lower Ninth Ward and what they've suffered and how they've managed to overcome incredible obstacles to rebuild their lives after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Loved that book like I love New Orleans. Right now I am reading a book and getting ready to write a review of Jeff Speck's "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America. One Step at a Time." It's great reading about how wrong city planners, community developers, transportation engineers and architects have been about how to build cities so that they will attract and keep people, especially young people. (Hint: Make 'em walkable!) Hopefully the right people will read this one. We have lots to do and lots to reconfigure in our cities. Oh, and I just read for the third time ?lvar N??ez Cabeza de Vaca's "Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America." What a magnificent description of the wildly diverse peoples who lived along the Gulf of Mexico and the interior lands north of the Rio Grande in the early part of the 16th century. There is great examples and discussions about their customs, rituals, personalities, and economies. Fascinating reading. There's a lot of history and information there that has been ignored and/or glossed over for some reason. Read it and see what I mean.

JG: What's next for you?

RH: That's the $64,000 question. I can't predict the future, so I don't know for sure. However, I have a children's book that is ready to be submitted to anyone who is interested. It's about a singing vole (Microtus gregalis) that is inadvertently transplanted from the sub-arctic region of Alaska to the Big Woods region of the Mississippi Delta in Arkansas. It is in the vein of Joel Chandler Harris' "Brer Rabbit," or Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book." Kind of an amalgam of the two authors. I have a novel/screenplay that is also ready to go called "The Authentics" about reality television making war on history, literally. I also have a long list of great ideas for another travelogue/nature book. My favorite idea is this one: "Fishing: " People talk about why they fish and how they feel when they fish (fashioned after Studs Terkel's magnum opus Working.) And this one: "On Parade:" A Plimptonesque account of America's great parade bands as we follow our hero down Main Street and at the front of the line, blowing "The Old Grey Mare" on his cornet. But all writers are full of stories and ideas. Meanwhile.... I'm still looking for a regular job. I've got two girls, one in college and one threatening to go. These are tough times. If nothing comes through, I'll be a harvesting for real next year.

For more on "Harvest," visit the Harper Collins website.

Jeff Glor talks to Sasha Issenberg about "The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Sasha Issenberg: I have covered political campaigns, in some form or another, for fifteen years, and only recently discovered how little I knew about what they were really up to. I spent 2008 flying around with John McCain and Barack Obama as a correspondent for The Boston Globe, writing about their rallies, speeches and campaign ads. After the election, I learned that if I had wanted to understand how campaigns were seeking votes-as opposed to just airtime-I should have skipped the rallies and press conferences. Instead I should have been talking to the geeks back at headquarters, and their unlikely collaborators in commercial data warehouses and university behavorial-psych labs.

The speeches and ads hadn't changed much at all during the time I had been covering politics, but out of public view the prior decade had been a transformative one in the way people went about winning votes.

I wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine about one major change-the introduction of field experiments, basically randomized drug trials for politics, with voters as the guinea pigs-and knew I had just begun to crack the geeks' insular world. There was a much bigger story to tell about how data and analytics had changed politics much as the Moneyball revolution had upended sports. That narrative, I thought, would amount to a kind of secret history of politics at the outset of the twenty-first century.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

SI: I had a sense of how much data campaigns had about individual voters; there had been plenty of awestruck (and, I now know from my reporting, almost entirely fanciful) stories after the 2004 election about how George W. Bush's team had figured out how to identify Republican voters by knowing that they were more likely to drink bourbon and Coors. What I didn't appreciate until well into my reporting was how much about an individual's political attitudes and behaviors campaign analysts thought they could predict from that data. In 2008, the Obama campaign generated individual statistical probabilities for every voter in America - predicting the likelihood that he or she would turn out to vote, would support Obama, would be open to voting for a black candidate for president - and updated them weekly.

Basically Obama's targeters thought these predictive-modeling tools had turned them into fortune-tellers. "We knew who these people were going to vote for before they decided," the campaign's microtargeting consultant Ken Strasma told me.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

SI: This is boring, but I'd probably be an editor. I've worked only in journalism, because I was lucky to learn as a teenager that it offered a venue for me to pursue my natural curiosities about the world. I'm really interested in taking apart complex systems and telling stories about how they work-whether the modern political campaign or the global sushi trade, the subject of my first book-and love the fact that I can approach them as an outsider.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

SI: I've begun Neill Lochery's Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939-45, which seems to combine two of my interests: urban history and Europe during the war. And I just got a copy of Obama Face au Pouvoir by my friend Guillaume Debr?, a Washington-based correspondent for the French television network TV1. Usually foreign coverage American politics is cursory and uninformative, but I am optimistic about this one - particularly for what I expect will be a satisfying account of Obama's decision-making about Libya as it was viewed by policymakers in Paris.

JG: What's next for you?

SI: I am covering the elections for Slate: my Victory Lab blog (and longer stories) there takes the curiosities I developed in working on this book-about political data, analytics, and tactics-and applies them to day-to-day reporting. After November I will focus wholeheartedly on my next book project, a political, legal and social history of the gay-marriage debate. I've now written a bit about how political mechanics have changed in the last decade. Marriage is the topic on which political opinions have changed the most during that same time-and I'm setting out to try to understand how and why. 

For more on "The Victory Lab," visit the Random House publishing website.

Jeff Glor talks to Tom Reiss about "The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo.

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Tom Reiss: I was a huge Alexandre Dumas fan growing up, and one day I came across the novelist's memoir. He spent the first 200 pages telling the story of his father, Gen. Alex Dumas, and it read like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo combined - only more outlandish. General Dumas was like some superhero living in one of history's most exciting eras: he sword fought his way across the French Revolution, then he rose from the rank of corporal to four-star general in the space of a year and half on his outsized talents and courage. Here was a guy from the tropics who scaled ice cliffs in the Alps and fought his way across Egypt as Napoleon's cavalry commander. Then, there's the shipwreck and the dungeon.

As an equal fan of history, superheroes, and adventure stories, I was enthralled - and amazed that I couldn't find this incredible man in the history books. I was even more amazed when I learned from a bit of further research that he'd been a black man who did all these incredible things at the height of slavery. Could it be true? And if so, how could such a man be forgotten by history?? I needed to find out.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

TR: Probably to learn how far the French went on the road to creating a post-racial society before crushing it. The French Revolution was a kind of 21st century moment in the heart of the 18th century - and Alex Dumas, outstanding though he was, could never have risen the way he did if not for that. The French Revolution was the American Revolution on steroids.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

TR: I've considered myself a writer since I was 7 years old, but I've done a lot of jobs along the way. I enjoyed waiting tables and tending bar during college, especially when it got busy, so I might like managing a big restaurant. In fact, I might like managing many kinds of businesses or organizations. I once started a small business when I got out of college and enjoyed the stress of making it work. High-stress situations clear my head, and I love the challenge of getting along with many different kinds of people. I'm scared of routine. When I was a teenager, I worked summers as a hospital orderly and loved that, and I sometimes wish I could become a doctor, like my father, but I'm not suited to the dispassionate, scientific part.

Basically, I'm tempted by too many jobs. The one thing I'm not tempted to ever do is stop working. Retirement would be too tough for me. As a workaholic and an insomniac, I identified with my subject, General Dumas, who, according to field reports, would ride on patrols without sleep sometimes for two nights on end before going into battle, and winning. But I'm not saying I could be a saber-fighting cavalry officer - that's a job I'd be terrible at! Like the general's son, I'll stick to writing the battle scenes.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

TR: I just started Candice Millard's "The River of Doubt." I recently finished her other book, "Destiny of the Republic," which I loved. I'm also reading my younger daughter "The Road to Oz" - I'll take any excuse to reread the Oz books - and am reminded what a sin it is that the series is out of print.

JG: What's next for you?

TR: After I finished my last book, "The Orientalist," I did three long New Yorker articles, each of which took me a few months to research and write. I'd like to do some journalism again now before I dive into another book, but maybe some shorter pieces. I need a change of pace.

For more on "The Black Count," visit the Random House website.

Jeff Glor talks to Kevin Powers about, "The Yellow Birds."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Kevin Powers: When I returned from overseas I was frequently asked what my time in Iraq was like. I realized that I didn't have a simple answer that could communicate the complexity of that experience. The book was my attempt to ask some larger questions about the war: What does it mean to try to be good and fail? How can you find meaning in an experience that seems like an incomprehensible aberration?

Just as no two people are the same, no two experiences of war are the same. I wanted to show the war from one soldier's perspective, to paint a portrait of him from the inside out.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

KP: Being that this was my first novel, I'd say almost everything about the process surprised me. I've always written both poetry and prose, but having this project to return to day after day, month after month, was both daunting and exciting.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

KP: I'm not really sure. It took me a long time to find the courage to give writing my full effort and attention, to stop worrying about failing or succeeding and just write the way I wanted to write. But I could certainly see myself teaching high school English or History. I've had some extraordinary teachers in my life, and I think doing my best to emulate them could have been a challenging and rewarding career.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

KP: I've been spending quite a bit of time with Dean Young's poetry collection "Fall Higher."

JG: What's next for you?

KP: I'm trying to finish up a collection of poems and I've recently started some tentative work in the direction of my second novel.

For more on "The Yellow Birds" please visit the Hachette Book Group website.

Jeff Glor talks to Doug Fine about "Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Doug Fine: I got started on the project because the mayor of a nearby village to my ranch (this a U.S. town) was convicted of being a Cartel member and smuggling weapons. It was just too close to home. I saw how even well-intentioned law enforcement in my border region of New Mexico can't possibly make a dent in supply and demand. I had to see of there was a working alternative to the Drug War which I could examine as a potential model.

Recent polls have 56 percent of Americans ready to end the Drug War, which is one of our nation's worst policies for reasons documented at length in the book and not a surprise to most of us. This book aims to paint the picture of why a Drug Peace that I witnessed would mean a better America, from an economic and patriotic standpoint. I'm trying to let those remaining 44 percent know that this is a top-tier important issue for our economy and our national health. To illustrate that, I relocated to Mendocino County's and for one cannabis growing season (10 months) covered the county's successful efforts to permit sustainable cannabis farmers. I followed one flower, named Lucille for reasons that have to do with the neighbor of a farmer I followed, from farm to liver cancer battler.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

DF: The kind of thing that surprises me is that there was a Big Bang, or that the Earth has an atmosphere at all. Or that "This is Spinal Tap" didn't win an Academy Award. Not much surprised me about the quantitative results of my research into the coming Drug Peace. The old lady rancher across the valley from me knows the Drug War is one of a great nation's worst policies. Pat Robertson knows. Maybe I was a little surprised by just how valuable the cannabis plant can be to the American economy -- $6 billion annually just in the county I researched in the book.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

DF: Does not compute. Not an option. OK, if forced, um, professional river innertuber.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

DF: Re-reading "The River Why" by David James Duncan.

JG: What's next for you?

DF: Goat milking. In about five minutes. Work wise, looking back in 10 years I'd like to have one or two novels, one or two nonfiction books, one or two feature films, one or two documentary films, and a children's book under my belt. Maybe even a small volume of poetry. And I'd like to have a hot tub.

For more on "Too High to Fail," visit the Penguin Group website.