Ashley Jardina

Ashley Jardina is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. Her new book is White Identity Politics.

From her interview with The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner:

How has white identity changed over the past several decades?

One thing that’s different is how salient and politically relevant it is. We don’t have good public-opinion data going back in time to indicate that levels of white identity in the population have changed, or that now more people are identifying with their racial group than in the past. But what’s certainly clear is the extent to which white identity, or racial identity for some whites in the United States, matters for how they view the political and social world.

Think about white identity as being episodic and contextual. It’s politically relevant when something happens in the environment that makes it relevant, or when élites try to activate it, but it’s not always a force in politics in the way that we’re observing it to be today. If we could go back to the nineteen-twenties, in the wake of massive immigration to the United States, or if we could go back to the civil-rights movement, there are periods when there was a challenge to the dominant status of whites. There’s a possibility that the United States was no longer going to be defined by whiteness. These are places in time in which we might have seen white identity matter just as...[read on]

Visit Ashley Jardina's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John A. Farrell

John A. Farrell is the author of Richard Nixon: The Life.

From his Q&A with The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner:

Was there ever a moment in the Watergate scandal akin to this one, in terms of where Democrats were substantively and politically?

Yeah, I would say probably in the fall of 1973, before the Saturday Night Massacre set everything aflame. The Democrat-led Watergate Committee had spent all summer calling all of Nixon’s henchmen up to the Hill, and had unearthed and dug up a lot of stuff, particularly John Dean’s testimony, which said, “Yes, the President obstructed justice.” But the country was waiting for a smoking gun, and they had just reëlected Nixon by a huge landslide, a historic landslide, and they were suspicious, probably rightly so, that Democrats were seeking to settle old grievances, to settle in Congress what they couldn’t settle at the ballot box. And so you had this period in September and October of 1973 when lots of stuff was happening. Spiro Agnew was resigning. The Arabs and Israelis went to war. But the public-opinion polls showed there was still great hesitancy about Watergate and that a vast majority of people were much more concerned about the economy.

Did events then change, or did the Democrats do something that changed things?

No, I think primarily events changed things, primarily the Saturday Night Massacre. People knew there were tapes in 1973, because that had come out during the Watergate Committee hearings. And they were sort of widely saying, “Well, the tapes are going to show who is telling the truth, John Dean or Nixon, and we will wait for them to come out. And when it went to the courts, it was seen as the process working. And then, all of a sudden, Nixon took this radical step of firing [the special prosecutor Archibald] Cox, and forcing [Attorney General] Elliot Richardson and [Deputy Attorney General] William Ruckelshaus to resign, and all of a sudden people said, “Wait a minute, he is not waiting for the courts to act and for the tapes to come out so we know what the truth is; he is covering up.”

That pretty much solidified mainstream liberal Democrats behind impeachment. You had Tip O’Neill going on the House floor and...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Sally Hepworth

Sally Hepworth is the bestselling author of The Secrets of Midwives, The Things We Keep, The Mother's Promise, and The Family Next Door.

Her new novel is The Mother-in-Law.

From Hepworth's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Mother-in-Law, and for your characters Lucy and Diana?

A: The idea came to me while hosting my in-laws, who stayed with us for six weeks following the birth of my third child.

On this particular trip, my (beloved) father-in-law had been pestering me continually about what my next book was about. Now, I didn’t know what my next book was going to be about, given the fact that I had just given birth! But he wouldn’t let it go.

Finally I told him, in jest: “I’m going to write about a woman who murders her father-in-law.” We laughed about it, but the more I thought about it, I decided it wasn’t a bad idea.

Still, I thought it would be an even better idea if I substituted Mother-in-Law for Father-in-Law. My father-in-law was bummed, because he was looking forward to his 15 minutes of fame, but...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Anne Harrington

Anne Harrington's new book is Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness.

From the transcript of her Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross:

GROSS: So I think the first drug that was used to treat manic depression was lithium, which you write was previously marketed as a health tonic. That amazed me when I read it.

HARRINGTON: Really? The first thing to know about lithium to understand its strange place in the history of psychiatry is that unlike all the other drugs, it wasn't invented in a laboratory. It's an element. It's found in the natural world. And it's found, for example, in certain kinds of spas in Europe that, in the past, you know, bragged about their high lithium content of their drinking water. And so it had a place in spa culture. It had a place as a feel good tonic. It was, for a period of time, an ingredient in a new lemon-lime soft drink that became quite popular in - up through the 1950s that gets renamed 7UP. And there's a...

GROSS: 7UP had lithium in it?

HARRINGTON: 7UP had lithium in it, and there's - no one quite knows for sure why Griggs (ph), the inventor of this soft drink - it had a very convoluted previous name. But it was renamed 7UP, and some think that this might be a reference to the atomic number of lithium. It's just under seven and the up meaning the suggestion that it lifts the mood. Lithium is no longer in 7UP. Cocaine is no longer in Coca-Cola.

GROSS: (Laughter) Right.

HARRINGTON: But there was this previous history of lithium. And then lithium sort of fortunes as a product, and it's used in all sorts of other things too that have nothing to do with, you know, the health industry. But its fortunes as a product in the health industry take a nosedive when it is used as the basis - or a compound of lithium is used as the basis for a salt substitute that ends up, people believe, causing heart problems and even several deaths. And so there's a warning sent out by the AMA and then eventually FDA that, you know, these salt substitutes - take them off the market. This is a dangerous drug. And so lithium's emergence in psychiatry emerges against the background of two relevant facts. One, it has a reputation now for being dangerous and, two, it's not going to make a pharmaceutical company very much money because they can't patent it.

GROSS: So is lithium still, like, a drug of choice for treating patients with bipolar disorder?

HARRINGTON: I think there are a lot of people who say it's a very...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Renée Rosen

Renée Rosen's new novel is Park Avenue Summer.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to focus on Helen Gurley Brown in your new novel, and how did you come up with the idea for her (fictional) assistant, Alice?

A: I knew I wanted to set a book in New York City in the 1960s and I wanted it to be centered around a glamorous industry. Mad Men already had the corner on advertising, so I went with magazines. Initially I was thinking of a fictional magazine and a full cast of fictional characters. It wasn’t until I had a conversation with my editor that we realized we had to tell Helen Gurley Brown’s story.

That led to the next dilemma--whose point-of-view should the story be told from. There were so many non-fiction books already out there about HGB, even some that Brown wrote herself. I didn’t want to just fictionalize what had already been done and so beautifully before, so, enter Alice Weiss. I wanted to show HGB’s influence on a typical “Cosmo girl.” Using Alice as a vehicle also enabled me to...[read on]

Visit Renée Rosen's website, blog, and Facebook page.

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--Marshal Zeringue

Don Winslow

Don Winslow's The Border is a follow-up to his 2005 novel The Power of the Dog and 2015’s The Cartel. From the author's Southwest Review Q&A with William Boyle:

WB: Michael Connelly wrote this about The Cartel: “[It’s] a first-rate edge-of-your-seat thriller for sure, but it also continues Winslow’s incisive reporting on the dangers and intricacies of the world we live in. There is no higher mark for a storyteller than to both educate and entertain. With Winslow these aspects are entwined like strands of DNA.” I wonder what it’s like to work with that idea in your head, that you’re educating people, that you’re dealing with some people who are crime fiction fans who will be on board and some people who are smart who will know you’re getting it right, but then you’re also dealing with a whole host of people who are buying into falsehoods, maybe even believing that stuff in Sicario: Day of the Soldado is reality.

DW: I have to forget about all of that. I’m aware of all of it: My education is as a historian, and that’s the way I tackle these things. But then I have to remind myself I’m not writing history, I’m writing a novel. I’m writing what better be a good, exciting, interesting story, albeit with a lot of information. The way I view my job is that I’m supposed to bring people into a world they couldn’t otherwise enter. I’m their guide. When I’m writing, even though I’m aware of everything you just mentioned, dead-on, I have to throw all of that away. I’ve gotta be inhabiting the character’s mind, I’ve gotta be seeing the world through the character’s eyes. I won’t consider any of that stuff, period. Because then I’m writing polemics or history. The other thing is you have to avoid the...[read on]

Learn about Winslow's hero from outside literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tim Johnston

Tim Johnston's latest novel is The Current.

From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Current?

A: The idea dates back to a short story I wrote just before I began my previous novel, Descent, back in 2007.

That story, called "Water," is set in small-town Minnesota and concerns the drowning of a young woman in the local river and the search for her killer. The law casts a serious eye on one young man, but charges are never filed, the truth is never known, and everyone in the story is damaged irrevocably, The End.

The inspiration, you might say, came seven years later, in a café in Memphis. I was reading student stories, minding my own business, when two young women pretty much demanded that I stop reading student stories and begin writing theirs. (These were young women in my mind, just to be clear, and not actual young women.)

They intended, they let me know, to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Louis Bayard

Louis Bayard's new novel is Courting Mr. Lincoln.

From his Q&A with Mackenzie Dawson for the New York Post:

Lincoln was open about sharing a bed with [his best friend, Joshua] Speed — was this a common arrangement at the time?

It was a common arrangement among bachelors because beds were expensive. [What was strange] was the length of time [they shared the bed] — three years. And they got married late in life.

What research did you do?

I learned as much as I can about these guys, and the book is a promiscuous mixture of fact and invention. The book that was helpful was “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln” by C.A. Tripp. He was a Kinsey Institute sex researcher and the first to declare that Lincoln was homosexual. The book is a bit over-the-top and was savaged at the time, but it was the first to bring up that possibility. Although [Lincoln biographer] Carl Sandburg brought up in his 1926 biography that the friendship had a...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Louis Bayard's website.

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--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Dugoni

Robert Dugoni is the critically acclaimed New York Times, #1 Wall Street Journal and #1 Amazon best selling author of The Tracy Crosswhite series, My Sister’s Grave, Her Final Breath, In the Clearing, and The Trapped Girl.

Dugoni's new novel is The Eighth Sister.

From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to focus on your character Charles Jenkins, who's appeared before in your work, in this new novel?

A: I had a story fall into my lap. A true story of a CIA agent accused of espionage. Long story short, I wanted to write a novel and Jenkins, a former CIA agent living on Camano Island, was perfect for the novel I was crafting. He’d worked against the KGB in Mexico City. He was now married with kids and therefore vulnerable.

The Eighth Sister isn’t based on a true story, though the trial pretty strongly reflects true events. I also really had a soft spot for Jenkins. I thought he was a character people would...[read on]

Visit Robert Dugoni's website and Facebook page.

My Book, The Movie: The Eighth Sister.

Writers Read: Robert Dugoni.

The Page 69 Test: The Eighth Sister.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert A. Caro

For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, has three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor, including the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best “exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.” In 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal, stating at the time: “I think about Robert Caro and reading The Power Broker back when I was twenty-two years old and just being mesmerized, and I’m sure it helped to shape how I think about politics.” In 2016 he received the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. The London Sunday Times has said that Caro is “The greatest political biographer of our times.”

Caro's new book is Working.

From the transcript of his Fresh Air interview with Dave Davies:

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and biographer Robert Caro. He has a new book about his life working and writing these biographies. It's called "Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing."

After you finished "The Power Broker" - this book about this towering figure who exercised powers in many unseen ways - Robert Moses, you decided you wanted to write about Lyndon Johnson. Why?

CARO: Well, I never was interested in writing a biography of Robert Moses or Lyndon Johnson. I never had the slightest interest in writing a book just to tell the story of a great man. I wanted to use their lives to show how political power worked. That's what I was interested in.

And with Moses, I came to see - I didn't really understand - you know, as you're doing a book, you're finding - you're realizing what you're doing. You don't realize - I've realized, I'm writing a book about urban political power, power in cities. I said, if I ever have - remember; I was broke. My editor had told me no one was going to read this book. I said, if I ever could do another book, I'd like to do national political power, and I'd like to do it through Lyndon Johnson.

Well, as it happens, I say, well, my publisher isn't going to let me do that because I've signed the contract. In order to get enough money to do "The Power Broker," I had to sign a two-book contract, and the second one was to do a biography of Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York. So I was starting on the La Guardia biography. I didn't want to do it.

I figured my publisher was never going to let me out when my editor, Bob Gottlieb - Robert Gottlieb - he calls me up one day. And he says - now, Bob. He says, I know you're a terrible temper. We used to have terrible fights. He said, I want you to come in. I have something I want to talk to you about, and I want you to promise me you won't lose your temper until I finish. And I said, OK.

And he says, I don't think you should do a biography of Fiorello La Guardia, and I have an idea who you should do a biography of. And it should be a biography of Lyndon Johnson. And you should do it in volume so we don't have to cut any of this stuff out. I always felt I increased my advance by some substantial sum by not saying, what a great idea - by saying, oh, I'll think about it (laughter).

DAVIES: (Laughter) OK. When I read the first volume of your series about Lyndon Johnson, which is "Path To Power," I always tell people who are daunted by reading a book as long as you write them - trust me; you will find this fascinating from Page 1.

And what you begin...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue