Eula Biss

Eula Biss's new book is On Immunity: An Inoculation.

From her Q & A with Nichole L. Reber at Late Night Library:

NR: You dug up some fantastic research on vaccinating newborns against Hep B, stating, “Like human papillomavirus and a number of other viruses, hep B is a carcinogen, and it is most likely to cause cancer in people who contract it when they are young.” This reminded me of certain Republican politicians on the national stage who disagreed with vaccinating young women against HPV. Did your research lead you to a sense of the general public’s stance on the vaccine against HPV?

EB: I don’t think there is one stance on HPV shared by the general public. That’s part of why the HPV discussion is so difficult and confusing. Many parents have already vaccinated their children against HPV, but there is also fairly widespread reluctance to follow the HPV vaccination recommendations. I can think of at least five different mothers I’ve spoken with who have five different reasons for delaying or refusing the vaccine. Some people don’t like the idea of vaccinating children before they are sexually active, though this is when the vaccine is likely to be most effective. Some people don’t think the vaccine is worthwhile, despite evidence that vaccinating every 12 year-old girl in the United States could prevent about 1,300 deaths every year. Some people are afraid of the potential side effects of the vaccine, and these fears are stoked by unsubstantiated or exaggerated reports of side effects – one of my neighbors, for instance, was reluctant to vaccinate her son because another neighbor of ours had told her that she had heard that it made girls in Australia infertile. That concern was new to me, so I looked into it and found that the origin of that fear was a single individual – a girl with unexplained infertility whose doctor had forwarded her case for further study. For some people, (and this might include the Republicans you mention, as well as some of the Democrats I know), the actual efficacy or side effects of the vaccine are irrelevant because the vaccine has become emblematic of the encroachment of the state on the rights of the individual and refusing the vaccine is a way to...[read on]

Visit Eula Biss' website.

Writers Read: Eula Biss (June 2010).

--Marshal Zeringue

Merritt Tierce

Merritt Tierce's debut novel is Love Me Back.

From her Q & A with Emma Chastain for The Barnes & Noble Book Blog:

EC: I loved your book. I loved it so much. I just want to gush about it for the whole interview. It was one of those books that makes me feel like everything else is so fake and phony and this is one of the only things I’ve read that’s about real life and being a woman. It’s so real that I wonder if you had to put pressure on yourself as you were writing to be honest and not to worry about what readers would think.

MT: Yes. I don’t think I should get any credit for it; that’s just how I write. I don’t think about who’s going to read it. I write to make really, really perfect sentences. That’s what I’m going for. I don’t care about the story that much, so it’s hard to think about. I say that because I think that people who have an imaginary reader or an imaginary critic must think about what that reader would make of a character’s decisions, or the plot turns or something. But those aren’t the things that I care about most, and it’s hard to think, “What would a reader think of this sentence?” The closest I’ve come to that was in grad school, where one of my professors, who’s a famous writer, just kind of loathed my writing and had some pretty negative things to say about it—and even said flat-out that it wasn’t fiction, which I don’t even know what that means. And that was kind of crushing because she was—and still is—an idol of mine as a writer. But it forced me to realize that I wasn’t writing to please anyone else or for anyone else’s approval. And it wasn’t like before that I had been writing for her approval or anyone’s approval and then I changed courses. It was just that I realized, “Well, people will think that. And I don’t really care.”

What did she mean when she said it’s not fiction—did she suspect it was memoir?

No, that’s not what she meant at all. I think she meant...[read on]

Visit Merritt Tierce's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Werner Herzog

From Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, Paul Cronin’s volume of dialogues with the director:

Paul Cronin: During an interview a few years ago someone shot you. You told the world: “It was not a significant bullet.”

Werner Herzog: Winston Churchill said that being shot at unsuccessfully is an exhilarating moment in a man’s life. I was at the top of the Hollywood Hills near my home, recording an interview, when I heard a loud bang. I assumed the camera had exploded because it felt as if I had been hit in the stomach by a chunk of glowing metal, but it was intact. Then, some distance away, I saw a man with a gun, ducking out of sight on a veranda. We had already heard him shouting obscenities about the fact that yet another film star was being interviewed in public. In that respect, it was something on a par with road rage. Although the bullet—small calibre, probably 22mm, or a high-powered airgun—went through my leather jacket and a folded-up catalogue, it didn’t perforate my abdomen, which would have been unpleasant. For this reason, the entire incident is nothing to speak of. I would have continued with the interview, but the cameraman had already hit the dirt. The miserable, cowardly BBC crew were terrified and wanted to call the cops, but I had no interest in spending the next five hours filling out police reports. When you dial 911 because of a burglary, the police take hours to check in on you, but when you report someone shooting, the helicopters start circling within five minutes, and soon after that a SWAT team moves in. The entire incident was more a piece of American folklore than anything else, though I’m glad...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Sandeep Jauhar

Sandeep Jauhar was a Ph.D. student in physics at Berkeley when a girlfriend’s incurable illness made him yearn for a profession where he could affect people’s lives directly. Once situated at a New York teaching hospital, Jauhar wrestled with his decision to go into medicine and discovered a gradual but deepening disillusionment with his induction into the profession. Jauhar’s conception of doctoring and medicine changed during those first eighteen months as he asked all the hard questions about medicine today that laypeople are asking—and reached satisfying and often surprising conclusions about the human side of modern medicine. Today he is a thriving cardiologist and the director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He writes regularly for the New York Times. He lives with his wife and their son and daughter on Long Island.

Jauhar's new book is Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician.

From his Q & A with Sarah Kliff at Vox:

SK: One of the parts of your book I found most disturbing is about how referrals work. Your experience seems to suggest that referrals are a lot about money and relationships, and that a lot of follow-up care and tests are unnecessary. Why do doctors accept referrals for procedures that they don't think are necessary?

SJ: There's an etiquette. If someone asks you to see a patient, and you refuse, you're never going to get a referral again. Your business could dry up. I'm not under nearly as much pressure as an interventional cardiologist [who does surgeries]. What are you supposed to do when you feel like the patient doesn't need the care? It's a conflict that has to get resolved, and sometimes the physician who is being referred to just acquiesces.

SK: The case that jumped out at me in your book the most was the old woman who you didn't think should have surgery, but she did anyway, mostly because another cardiologist seemed worried about losing out on the surgeon's business. It's a scary situation to think about as a patient.

SJ: It is scary. That case did have a discretionary element. I wasn't 100 percent sure I was right and that the surgeon was wrong. I, as a cardiologist, was saying, we shouldn't do anything, but we ended up doing it. She did end up...[read on]

Learn more about the author and his work at Sandeep Jauhar's website.

The Page 69 Test: Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation.

The Page 99 Test: Doctored.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason McGraw

Jason McGraw is associate professor of history at Indiana University. His new book is The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Cara Caddoo is author of Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Caddoo interviewed McGraw about The Work of Recognition:

What led you to this topic (Afro-Colombians, Colombia, this era)? I was thinking of a question that gets to your personal story if you are comfortable with that. Did you say you backpacked around South America during college?

That’s right, I traveled across northern South America and Central America in the 1990s, mainly to see places my family had lived. But I was very wary of going through Colombia, since those years were the height of the conflict there, and as a typical person from the States with limited knowledge of the place, all I could think about was drugs, guns, bombings, and kidnappings. But I did go through the country (instead of around it). And it was incredible. I fell for the place.

The Caribbean coast of Colombia was particularly fascinating. It has some of the oldest European and African settlements in the Americas, and it is still home to some of the first peoples to make contact with Europeans after 1492. As I began to do research in Colombia, I found a lot of information about former slaves of African descent. That was a history I knew about from other places, and I was in school to study that subject. Yet despite Afro-Colombians make up about one-quarter of the population, there was little written that described what happened after slavery ended in 1852. So I thought to myself, “Job security!”

What I found in Colombia was a version of what happened in many countries after they freed their slaves. The time after slave emancipation was a crucial period for making sense of what freedom would look like, of who could take part in public life, and of what it meant to have and to practice rights. Colombia (like other places) freed its slaves without agreement on what freedom meant. This lack of agreement created a great deal of conflict between former slaves, free people of color, political bosses, church leaders, lawyers, and merchants.

How can this story help us understand today?

Many of our ideas of freedom come from the period after slavery was abolished, and they are contested today just as they were then. Groups from the NRA and Tea Party to the Occupy Wall St. movement and protest movement around the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, have made political claims based on freedom. Everyone claims to fight for freedom, but no one agrees on what it means. Although I’m not trying to offer lessons for today, perhaps understanding that these ideas have been disputed for a very long time could open up new ways to think about the moment we are living through.

I will admit that the idea of freedom has resonance more in the United States, whereas in Latin America justice or social justice is the more powerful concept. Yet you do see various Latin American social movements embracing the idea of libertad.

I also hope that by contributing to Afro-Colombian history I can offer something constructive to the politics and community building currently taking place in their country. I want readers to know that black people cannot be equated with slaves—which is a common perception in Colombia—that people of African descent have engaged in freedom struggles for a long time, and that this process did not end when slavery was formally abolished in 1852.

Is there anything strange or unexpected you discovered during your research?

The strangest find by far was the story of a man who appeared on the Caribbean coast of Colombia in 1898 calling himself El Enviado de Dios—“The One Sent from God.” He was a messiah figure who carried on his back an invisible cross, and he went around blessing newborns, performing marriages, claiming healing powers, and preaching to the poor about spiritual renewal. He quickly amassed about 10,000 followers. These men and women forced Catholic priests out of their communities, occupied parish churches, and began taking cattle from ranches to feed themselves and other impoverished Colombians. All of this so unnerved the church and state that the government sent a military gunship to take him out—a late nineteenth-century version of a drone strike, if you will. But once the messiah was eliminated, his followers erupted in violence. They armed themselves and began assassinating local government officials and priests. For almost a year they fought the Colombian army to a standstill. In fact, the authorities never were able to wipe out the movement, and some of the descendants of the original followers are, we could surmise, still living in rural communities across the coast.

What are some common misconceptions about “citizenship” that you book addresses?

What a great question! I think there are two main misconceptions. The first is that citizenship has never mattered in Latin America. There is a deep pessimism about legal and political rights in the region, with its history of military dictatorships and widespread government corruption. The second misconception is something of the other side of the coin: that all citizenship rights flowed down from the top. According to this belief, whatever the small cliques who ran governments chose to impart as the rights of the people is what counted as citizenship.

I think both assumptions are wrong for very much the same reasons. I want people to consider citizenship as, yes, existing, and also as the product of people who created it as part of their everyday lives. Recognition is a concept I use to make sense of this citizenship (borrowed from philosopher Charles Taylor), and I see this recognition as a from-the-ground-up dynamic. Ordinary citizens demanded to be recognized as citizens, and they demanded the right to grant recognition to others. They did not wait around for the government or the constitution or small ruling groups to tell them what their rights were. This did not always work out for them, and that is where the struggle of my title comes from. Citizenship, then, was created through struggle—between the powerless and powerful, poor and rich, uneducated and overeducated, people of color and white people. Citizenship is not a fixed set of rights and duties but the outcome of social relationships.

Your next book is about Jamaican music. How did you get from this topic to that one?

So, from nineteenth-century Colombia to ska and reggae seems like a stretch? I guess it is, but I have been a fan of, and doing research on Jamaican music for going on 20 years. In 1996, I went to see the Skatalites, one of the most influential Jamaican bands of the 1960s, and I was blown away by their sound and virtuosity. It was this music that inspired me to study slavery, emancipation, and the African Diaspora in the first place.

Jamaican music is one of the most written-about music cultures in the world. So, why write another book about reggae? I have two things to offer to the story of Jamaican music. The first is to show how ska, rocksteady, and reggae were made by people crossing borders. Music came into and flowed out of Kingston, Jamaica, and it was the constant circulation of people, recordings, and ideas from the Caribbean to Britain to the United States and back that created this music. The transnational nature of Jamaican music is known and often remarked upon, but no one has written a narrative of how fundamental it was to artistic creation. The second thing I have to offer is what I call the social history of the music. The musicians, singers, sound system operators, and producers were central to the music industry. But this was dance music! So, I want to put the dancers, record buyers, and listeners at the center of my story. They were also important to creating the music, and the music existed for them. (Besides, audiences and performers were not so distinct, since they usually hailed from the same Kingston neighborhoods.) It was these audiences, moreover, that carried the music across borders. The outcome of all this was the worldwide reggae explosion from the 1970s until today.

Are you reading anything right now that is influencing your writing?

I’ve been reading Kevin Young’s The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. This book is what happens when a poet lets loose on the ostensibly academic topics of history, literature, and culture. It’s a thoughtful and rhetorically powerful take on black American cultural traditions, from the slave narratives through gospel and blues to jazz and hip hop. What has struck me about Young’s book are the connections to my own work. It is helping me see new links between Jamaican music and American soul music of the 1960s—and also to see new dimensions to soul music. But Young also connects music to poetry in ways that remind me of how I used poetry in my book on Colombia. Sometimes it takes another thinker/writer to help you triangulate your ideas and establish the trajectory in your own work. Maybe I should say it always takes another to do that!

Learn more about The Work of Recognition at The University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Work of Recognition.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roxana Robinson

Roxana Robinson's latest novel is Sparta.

From her Q & A at 2paragraphs:

Q: Your novel Sparta won the James Webb Award for Distinguished Fiction given by the Marine Corp Heritage Foundation. The question is often asked the writer: who do you write for? In the special case of Sparta–which considers a soldier’s return from Iraq–is there particular satisfaction in the work being recognized by this audience of veterans? Did you have them in mind as you wrote?

A: When I decided to write a book about a Marine (or rather, when that idea took me over), I began to do research about a culture that is famously insular. I learned very quickly how guarded and protective this culture is – how “tribal,” as one Marine called it–and how deliberately and absolutely they exclude outsiders. At a professional level I was rebuffed, over and over. I realized that it would only be on a personal level, through direct encounters, and through word of mouth, that I would be able to talk to the people who so interested me. They did interest me. I was not just interested but fascinated by every part of the experience of being a soldier. I was deeply sympathetic, but that wasn’t a reason for them to talk to me. I might get it very wrong, regardless of sympathy. No one knows what a novelist is up to, and I couldn’t explain it exactly myself. There was no reason for people to trust me.

Which is why I was humbled by...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Roxana Robinson’s website.

The Page 69 Test: Sparta.

Writers Read: Roxana Robinson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chelsea Cain

Chelsea Cain's new novel is One Kick.

From her Q & A with Rob Hart at LitReactor:

You cover a lot of heavy and complicated subjects in One Kick: guns, self-defense, lock-picking, child abduction and pornography. Clearly a lot of research went in to this—did you ever feel like you were falling too deep down the rabbit hole? And did you find anything down there that surprised you?

My hard drive fried a few months ago and I had to send my laptop to a data recovery company in Northern California. These are the specialists — like calling in the A-Team. If your computer goes down on a sinking ship and is recovered at the bottom of the ocean two years later covered in barnacles these are the people who can recover your data for you. I was on the phone with one of their guys, kind of a crisis counselor/customer rep, and I was about to hang up and suddenly it occurred to me that if they did manage to recover my data they might see my internet search history. "Um, there's something you should know," I said. And I proceeded to explain that I was an author and not actually planning to abduct children or hurt anyone at all despite the fact that I had searches like "how to build a secret room" and "chloroform" and "best ways to kill someone with a knife". My internet searches always lead me to interesting places and if I have learned anything it's that the answers to the mysteries of the universe are all out there somewhere if...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Chelsea Cain’s website, blog, and Facebook page.

Read about Chelsea Cain's 6 favorite detective stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeri Westerson

Jeri Westerson is the author of the Crispin Guest medieval “noir” mysteries.

From her Q & A with Nancy Adams at Saints and Trees:

SAT: Crispin Guest is such a wonderful character! Where did he come from?

JW: I think he probably came from a lot of places, but he mostly formed when I decided what kind of medieval mystery I wanted to write. Once I had come up with the idea of a hardboiled kind of detective on the order of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, he began to form more quickly. Following the tropes of the hardboiled detective, he had to be a loner, down on his luck, hard drinking, hard fighting, tough talking—and a sucker for a dame in trouble. I wanted a knight, because so many medieval mysteries were inhabited (pun intended) by clerical sleuths and I wanted someone completely different, someone who was used to fighting, to being his own man. And I wanted action and a bit of adventure. But I also wanted a sexier sort of detective, so a dark and brooding man, a little Mr. Darcy blended with a bit of Errol Flynn. But I have to say that a great deal of his character stems from his innate sense of honor and justice carved out by his present circumstances, because to make him that loner down on his luck, I had to take away everything that he used to define himself: his knighthood, his title, his lands, his wealth, his very place in such a codified society. And once I did that, he...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Jeri Westerson's website and her "Getting Medieval" blog.

Westerson's first six books featuring Crispin Guest are Veil of Lies, Serpent in the Thorns, The Demon's Parchment, Troubled Bones, Blood Lance, and Shadow of the Alchemist.

The Page 69 Test: Veil of Lies.

The Page 69 Test: Serpent in the Thorns.

The Page 69 Test: The Demon's Parchment.

My Book, The Movie: The Demon's Parchment.

The Page 69 Test: Troubled Bones.

The Page 69 Test: Blood Lance.

The Page 69 Test: Shadow of the Alchemist.

The Page 69 Test: Cup of Blood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Lovesey

Peter Lovesey's new book is The Stone Wife (Soho Crime), the 14th novel featuring Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath, England, police department.

From the author's Q & A with J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet:

JKP: What was your original conception of Inspector Peter Diamond, and how do you think he has measured up to your expectations?

PL: Calling him “The Last Detective,” I made him one of the old-school of police sleuths, resisting the teamwork that characterizes modern investigation. Having a central character who does all the active detective work and deduction is impossible in the real world, but all crime writers have to contrive some way of fixing it if their protagonist is to satisfy the reader. Diamond is difficult to work with, clumsy, accident-prone, but has integrity. This is why he has survived 14 books.

JKP: Diamond faced a variety of difficulties during the first books in this series, not the least of which were that he had to find a way back into law enforcement, after storming out of CID, and later lost his beloved wife, Stephanie, to a sniper. But lately he has had an easier time of it. He has a regular girlfriend and seems to have curbed his temper to some degree. Did you always want the man to find a peaceful groove and settle in?

PL: In the first book, I had the unnerving experience of being sidelined by my own creation. At the point when he resigned, it was borne in on me that this strong personality wouldn’t take a reprimand for an offense he felt was excusable. So he quit. I was left with the difficulty first of solving the mystery in a way that still brought him credit, and later of getting him back into the police. It took two books to do it.

The murder of his wife was devastating for him and many of my readers. I’m often asked how I could have done this. I answer that...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Matt Richtel

Matt Richtel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times technology journalist and novelist. He won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his series on distracted driving. His new book is A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention.

From Richtel's Q & A with Jon Foro for Omnivoracious:

How did you come to the story of Reggie Shaw?

I first met Reggie for a story about distracted driving that I wrote for The New York Times. In more than two decades in journalism, I’ve met hundreds of fascinating people. Few like Reggie. He has a depth of character, a candor, quiet wit, the All-American kid laid bare through tragedy, dark truth and, ultimately, redemption. He became the first person, or one of the first, charged with negligent homicide in a texting and driving death. And he was, in many ways, the last person you’d ever expect that to happen to. Ordinary guy, good guy, turned hunted and haunted criminal, turned hero.

At what point did you realize that this story had potential beyond the tragedy of the accident? What compelled you to write the larger story about technology and society?

Although the Reggie story stuck with me, and he and I stayed in contact, I wasn’t particularly compelled to write a book about it, not at first. Instead, I kept studying and thinking about the science: what was so alluring about technology; what was it doing to our brains? Why would Reggie, a thoughtful, smart 19-year-old kid send a meaningless text while driving at dawn in the rain, while going 55 miles an hour? I realized that I had formulated some ideas about just how magnetic our devices had become, how irresistible, and they were steeped in science that is both decades old and emerging. I’d talk to scientists about my thesis and they’d say: Yes, yes, you have to write about this. Something is happening to our brains and you’ve got to write about it.

But those were just ideas. And, from my standpoint, ideas don’t make good books. Certainly not great books. Great books are stories. They are about people, characters, and passions. That’s my bias, anyway. I want to be swept away by a narrative. Reading, to me, should be fun. Think: Unbroken or Into Thin Air.

In the years I spent learning about the science, I got to know the scientists. You want to talk about characters. These are brilliant, funny, quirky, opinionated people. They laid the groundwork for how we, as a society, understand the brain. They also have their quirks. One of the foremost experts has a license plate that reads “attend.” When I asked him why, he said: “Because turn off your #*^& cell phone is too long.” Another neuroscientist holds crazy Friday Night parties in San Francisco with the most famous technology people, and with musicians and the digerati. One of the great early scholars, whose work after World War II helped shape how we think about the brain and its relationship with technology, told me incredible stories about the early days of neuroscience.

Now I was starting to see story lines; the story of...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Matt Richtel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue