Thomas Powers

From a Q & A with Thomas Powers about his new book, The Killing of Crazy Horse:

Q: What is the most important difference between The Killing of Crazy Horse and previous accounts that have been written about his life?

A: The Killing of Crazy Horse differs from previous books in its focus on the event—the killing itself—not a formal biography of the chief. Many different people played a role on the fatal day—the brooding General George Crook who was determined to get Crazy Horse out of the way; the great Oglala Sioux chief Red Cloud, who was the only American Indian ever to win a war against the government of the United States; the young West Point graduate, Lieutenant William Philo Clark, who thought he could “work” Indians to do the bidding of the Army; the mixed-blood scouts William Garnett (half Oglala) and Frank Grouard (half South Sea Islander); the war comrades of Crazy Horse, He Dog and Little Big Man. Crazy Horse stirred all these men to action, some to defend him, some to get him out of the way. The question at the heart of the book is why was he killed? I found the answer in what a dozen different men thought, felt, intended and did. Seeing the event whole, from all sides, is a good way—in my view, perhaps the best way—to understand what the Sioux and other Plains tribes suffered when they were confined to reservations.

Q: You are perhaps best known for your work on the CIA (although you have written about a wide variety of topics). What made you want to tell the story of Crazy Horse?

A: My writing life has been spent largely trying to uncover things that were hidden, not writing about the CIA as a professional intelligence service. What the CIA was like—its operational style, the tensions between analysts and case officers, the personal histories of the agency’s early leaders—wasn’t classified and it wasn’t even secret in the usual sense when I began, but it was hidden, and it required a lot of patient asking of questions to coax up to the surface.

The first thing that caught my attention about Crazy Horse was the sorrow of his killing. Everybody involved understood almost immediately that it had been a tragic blunder. That sorrow made me wonder why historians had mainly treated the killing as a kind of afterthought. It made a deep and abiding impression on the Sioux, and over time it came to haunt the country as a whole—a painful but perfect example of the way the United States treated its native population. I wanted to know what happened and why it happened. Bringing the whole episode back to life after more than a century seemed almost...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Bill Wasik

Bill Wasik is an editor at WIRED and the author of And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture.

From a Q & A at his publisher's website:

And Then There's This takes a look at "viral culture." What exactly is "viral culture"?

It's the new way we find out about things, the new means by which we understand our society and our world. Instead of a small number of large media outlets and corporations telling us what the culture is about—what new music to listen to, or shows to watch, or books to read; which news stories are important and which aren't—we now have an explosion of sources, all vying to show us new things, to tell us new stories. The result is that we're bombarded by new stories, every day, all the time. Although it's the Internet that has made this change possible, I see "viral culture" as being bigger than just the Internet. The whole way we understand our world is being reinvented on the Internet model.

How did this book come about?

In 2003, I put together a social experiment in New York that used viral emails to create what I called "inexplicable mobs" of people for ten minutes or less. Within weeks, it spread around the world and became the fad called "flash mobs." I had meant the project as a joke, even as a sort of prank, but after it spread so widely I realized I needed to take my joke more seriously. I became really interested in the way that ideas spread through the Internet—not just silly trends like mine, but more serious ones too, in music, politics, business, and more. I decided that I wanted to write a book where I did more experiments of my own, but also...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Miles Corwin

From a Q & A with Miles Corwin, author of Kind of Blue:

What inspired you to write your novel?

I was sitting inside the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division squad room – while I was researching my book Homicide Special – waiting for the next case to emerge. The detectives I was shadowing were between homicides. While I was waiting, I started sketching some fictional ideas in my notebook, loosely based on some of the cases I’d followed.

How did you use your life experience or professional background to enrich your story?

I’ve spent many years writing about cops, criminals, prisons and courts as a crime reporter for the L.A. Times. During the research of my first book, The Killing Season, I followed two homicide detectives in South-Central Los Angeles for about six months. My third book – Homicide Special – chronicled a year inside an elite homicide division that investigates only the most difficult, sensitive, and high profile cases in Los Angeles. Any murder case that involves celebrities, organized crime, requires sophisticated technology, or is considered a high priority of the chief of police is transferred to Homicide Special.

In both books I was given complete access, and I followed the detectives from the time they picked up their cases, to crime scenes, death notifications, autopsies, witness interviews and, finally, to arrests.

Before I was a reporter, I spent more than five years as a Los Angeles County beach
lifeguard. I have some surfing scenes in the book that reflect my time on the beach.
I used...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph J. Ellis

From a Q & A with Joseph J. Ellis about his new book, First Family: Abigail and John Adams:

Q: You wrote about John Adams many years ago in Passionate Sage and, of course, he plays a role in Founding Brothers and American Creation as well as in your biographies of Washington and Jefferson. When and why did you decide to turn your attention specifically to John and Abigail?

A: As you say, my scholarly relationship with John Adams is longstanding. And if you hang around the Adams Papers long enough, you eventually realize that the “Family Correspondence” is the crown jewel. In earlier books I kept coming back to it for bits and pieces of evidence, and eventually decided that it was a story in itself that wanted me to tell it.

Q: How do you go about writing a biography of a couple, and their marriage, differently than you do writing a single subject biography?

A: Biographers of both John and Abigail invariably write about the other partner, but the partnership itself is a different kind of animal. I recall being impressed by a book by Phyllis Rose entitled Parallel Lives about five Victorian marriages. Perhaps that book gave me an idea that had been floating about in my subconscious for the last twenty years or so. Writing about them as a team also forces you to link the large political events they were living through with very personal issues like child-rearing, aging together, and health. In my judgment, that’s how most of us actually experience history. I very much wanted to capture that fusion of the public and the personal.

Q: How did they meet and was it love at first sight?

A: They met...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Gregorio

Michael Gregorio is the pen name of Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio. They live in Spoleto, Italy, and were awarded the Umbria del Cuore prize in 2007.

From a Q & A at their website:

---What first got you interested in writing?

Daniela: a passion for reading. I love stories about other people’s lives, other places, experiences which are different from my own. One life just wasn’t enough for me. At a certain point it seemed a natural development to invent my own characters and tell my own stories.

Michael: I recall learning to form letters as a child at school. The wonders of the school library. Various teachers, obviously. University, where I read English, and Dani read Philosophy. We both had ambitions to write. I started writing because I was living in Italy; I was afraid of forgetting my native language. Daniela was a horror fan, and thought she could do as well as many of the writers she was reading. But neither of us found a publisher until we started writing together as Michael Gregorio.

---Who or what particularly influences your work?

Both: Working closely with a partner is an inescapable influence, obviously. Having to justify your ideas to a critical “other” is the greatest test of their validity. When we are both happy with what we have written, we submit the finished piece. At the same time, working within the genre of historical crime investigation, we are challenged by what it is scientifically possible, and what isn’t. We both...[read on]

Visit Michael Gregorio's website and blog.

Read Michael Gregorio's Q & A with R.N. Morris at The Rap Sheet.

The Page 69 Test: A Visible Darkness.

The Page 69 Test: Unholy Awakening.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bernard Cornwell

Bernard Cornwell's latest novel is The Fort.

From his Q & A with Boyd Tonkin for the Independent:

Choose a favourite author and say why you like her/him

CJ Sansom. I absolutely adore his Matthew Shardlake. He's an extraordinarily interesting and engaging character, and very cleverly written.

* * *

Which fictional character most resembles you?

Obadiah Hakeswill [the villain from the 'Sharpe' novels]. No - that's a joke! Otherwise, I'm completely stymied about this.

What are your readers like when you meet them?

* * *
Who is your hero/heroine from outside literature?

It's obvious to say the Duke of Wellington, but that's a bit like falling off a log. My heroine would be Nell Gwyn. She would be fun.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Feldstein

From Randy Dotinga's Q & A with Mark Feldstein, author of Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture:

Q: You write that Richard Nixon was paranoid about the press and had every right to be because it really was out to get him. Which came first, his paranoia or the reason for it?

The paranoia came first. There were people in college who talked about him being paranoid long before the press started attacking him, even before [columnist] Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson started going after him in the early 1950s. He would completely overreact to the very mild criticism at the time he was sending [accused spy] Alger Hiss to prison when he was a congressman.

He was lionized by almost the entire media except for a handful of dissident liberal critics, but he was so sensitive and paranoid that he really overreacted.

He viewed himself as a victim and never seemed to realize that he made himself a target by his own initiating of these slash-and-burn attacks on supposed Communist subversion. By the time he became a national figure, there were critics on the left going after him. Certainly Jack Anderson and his boss, Drew Pearson, were out to get him.

Q: Why did they hate him so much?

Drew Pearson was a liberal, very ideological and, like Nixon, was a Quaker. But he was a pacifist compared to the fundamentalist, almost evangelical strain of Quakerism that Nixon was raised in. He was very much of what we'd call a born-again Christian today.

With Anderson, it wasn't so much ideological. He was willing to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Myla Goldberg

Myla Goldberg is the author of the bestselling debut novel, Bee Season.

She was interviewed about her latest novel, The False Friend, by Jill Owens for Powells.com. Part of the dialogue:

Jill Owens: During your reading at Wordstock, you mentioned that The False Friend came from a song that you had written. How did that process happen?

Myla Goldberg: Very mysteriously. [Laughter] In my band I write a lot of songs, and often they are lyrically driven. I'll start with an idea that's in words, and eventually music comes to it. I was writing a song about a girl who falls in a well, and I found myself realizing that there was a lot more going on in my head than I was getting into this song. It tied into my own memories of childhood, and it was much too big for a song.

I realized, "OK. I've got to do something else with this." That's when I started working on the story.

Originally, a memory of my own had come back to me, one that I'd managed to block out for maybe 15 years or longer. My friend Theresa and I had been total best friends in elementary school, but also total competitors. We were very, very fiercely competitive with each other. And I suddenly remembered this one time where I threw a pair of scissors at her, which actually struck her in the leg and made her bleed. We're not talking stitches. I don't think she even needed a Band-Aid. But she didn't tell on me.

I'd managed to forget all of this until I was an adult. The reason it was such a jarring memory is that I'm a very, very nonviolent person. When I took a fencing class, I couldn't even touch the other person with my little lance, even though they were all padded.

So when this memory came back to me, it was this perspective on being a different person than I am now. I used to be a person that actually did something violent once, which is just so completely different. So that got me thinking, "OK. Well, how...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Avi Steinberg

From a Q & A with Avi Steinberg about his memoir, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian:

Your memoir Running the Books is the ultimate fish out of water story. How did you wind up in prison?

I ended up in prison the way most people end up there. By accident. It’s a classic tale, really. An Orthodox Jewish guy leaves the fold, goes to Harvard, gets bad grades, then becomes a freelance obituary writer, then gets punched in the face at an Orthodox wedding which makes him realize that he must get his life in order. That he needs healthcare. And so he sends out his resume to a prison in the hopes of achieving all that. Health care and order. As I said, a classic American tale. Now, why I went to work specifically in a prison and specifically in a prison library, that’s a slightly different story. In many ways it took, I think, working there for more than two years to discover what I was looking for to begin with. And I think that’s really the saga I describe in this book.

Aside from the obvious answer of clientele, how does a prison library differ from a general public library?

One major difference is that the people who visit a prison library also live together, in this estranged sort of way. They’re around each other nonstop, every day, all day. And the action that occurs in a prison library is always an extension of the drama that is happening upstairs in the cells, in the prison blocks, and to some extent from previous dramas on the street. Everybody’s implicated in everybody’s life. The library functions very differently in these dramas. Sometimes it’s a place for people to gain some privacy and to momentarily escape. But more often it’s a place for people to confront their issues head on. So in a funny way the prison library functions as...[read on]

See Avi Steinberg's list of what Lindsay Lohan should read in jail.

--Marshal Zeringue

China Miéville

China Miéville is the author of The City & The City, his sci-fi/fantasy/detective novel which shared the 2010 Hugo Award for best novel.

From his Q & A about the book with Marjorie Kehe for the Christian Science Monitor:

Your work is often described as “weird fiction.” How do you see your genre?

“Weird fiction” is a term that comes from the 1920s and the work of writers like HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. If I and others call my stuff “weird fiction” it’s in homage to and [in recognition of being] inspired by that tradition of that somewhat grotesque, horror-tinged, blurred line between science fiction and the fantastic. But if I’m talking to people that don’t particularly know the field, then I tend to say that it’s science fiction, because that’s simpler. I’m not someone who gets their knickers into a twist about the specificity of these labels.

The premise of the two cities – Beszel and Ul Qoma, physically overlapping and yet legally and culturally divided by some terrible, forgotten act of history – is so intriguing. Where did it come from?

What happened in my head was the literalization of a fantastic idea of cities that overlapped and that became more and more set in the real world. The real-world ramifications and metaphors came after that. But once I had decided that I wanted to set it in the real world you begin thinking about how the real-world logic works and it came to me quite quickly that this was a real-world logic dictated by social filters and borders and [legal codes] and national boundaries – exactly as in the real world but just exaggerated. As is always the case with most of the ideas that you have as a writer of the fantastic, it’s very hard to pin them to an exact spot. It’s only in the second or third phase that...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue