All Blog Posts from Author Talk

"A Full Cup" by Michael D'Antonio

A Full Cup, Michael D'Antonio (Credit: Penguin Group)

Jeff Glor talks to Michael D'Antonio about "A Full Cup: Sir Thomas Lipton's Extraordinary Life and His Quest for the America's Cup"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Michael D'Antonio: I grew up in a small island village called New Castle, N.H. where I spent a great deal of time on the water, admired sleek sailing yachts, and was awed by the freighters, warships, and tankers that passed on their way to the port of Portsmouth. This experience, it turns out, echoed young Tommy Lipton's childhood on the River Clyde. I was also influenced, early on, by the American tradition of the self-made man, which became a sort of romantic ideal in my mind. Today I understand the nuances of success and failure and the truth that individuals can never make it "on their own" but I am still drawn to stories of remarkable, over-coming-the-odds success.


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

MD: I was most surprised to discover the humor and irony in Lipton's story. He was someone who enjoyed having a good time, made fun of himself, and didn't much mind if he became the object of parody. He was, in fact, a very ironic fellow. He knew that intelligent people saw past his many constructed selves - the Irishman, the Scot, the American, the Yachtsman, the boulevardier - and joined them with a wink and a smile. I was also delighted to discover that he was quietly, and effectively involved in high-level politics and used his fame and wealth for the greater good in ways that weren't publicized.


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

MD: I might be some sort of social scientist, studying the ways people develop and organize themselves to be in the world, or I might own a café, which would involve roughly the same interest. The first would take me out into the environment to meet different people. The second would allow the people to come to me. Either way, I'd be engaged in learning about the variety of human experience.


JG: What else are you reading right now?

MD: I just finished "The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism" by David Harvey and I'm starting Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom." I'm also reading "A Secret World, Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy" by Richard Sipe. The Sipe book is for my current project. With the others I'm hoping to find, somewhere, a better understanding of what people call the New Normal and how it arrived.


JG: What's next for you?

MD: I'm working on a sort of current history of the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church. The first signs of trouble arose about twenty-five years ago and I think the time is right for something that puts it in perspective. It's hard going, but I like the challenge.


For more on "A Full Cup," visit the Penguin Group website.

"Verdi's Shakespeare: Men of the Theater" by Garry Wills

Verdi's Shakespeare, Gary Wills (Credit: Joe Schuyler,Penguin Group)

Jeff Glor talks to Garry Wills about, "Verdi's Shakespeare: Men of the Theater," an exploration of Verdi's three Shakespearian operas: Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff.


Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Garry Wills: Love of the plays and the operas, and of many fine performances I have seen of them.


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

GW:
The many intense hours Verdi spent choosing, coaching, and directing his singers.


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

GW:
Given my fantasy life, I would be an opera tenor.


JG: What else are you reading right now?

GW:
I am reading the twelfth-century abbot, Guibert de Nogent, to review for NY Review of Books.


JG: What's next for you?

GW:
"Font of Life" (Oxford University Press), the story of Saint Ambrose baptizing Saint Augustine in the baptistery of Milan (rediscovered in the twentieth century).


For more on "Verdi's Shakespeare," visit the Penguin Group website.

"Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground" by Jonathan Steele

Jeff Glor talks to Jonathan Steele about, "Ghosts of Afghanistan," a powerful book about Afghanistan's tortured recent history, and what it might take to turn things around.


Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Jonathan Steele:
An extraordinary exhibition on the Afghan war opened in central Moscow in 1991, two years after the Soviet Union withdrew its troops. The exhibition's disparate and rather clumsily assembled images made it obvious that it had put together by a committee rather than a single curator.

One section had been prepared by the Soviet Army High Command and consisted of tanks, guns and other hardware. Another was put together by dead soldiers' families, and showed dog-tags, photos of young men in uniform, the yellowing envelopes of letters sent back from the front-line, and a few vases of flowers.

I was living in Moscow at the time as the Guardian's Moscow Bureau Chief and I was particularly struck by the exhibition's third section. It consisted of paintings and sketches of Afghanistan by war artists who had been sent there by the Soviet authorities.

One picture stood out for me. Painted by an artist called Gennadi Zhivotov, it was like a split screen. The upper two-thirds of the picture showed four wounded Soviet soldiers in a landscape of khaki-colored hillsides with helicopters in the background. The lower third of the picture showed men in suits. They were the top Afghan and Soviet leaders sitting at a table in the Kremlin and signing documents on friendship and cooperation between their countries. The painting was called sarcastically Boys Playing at War.

You could not see the wounded soldiers' feet. The lower part of the picture cut them off so that the four sad-faced young men with blank expressions seemed to be hovering above the men who had sent them into battle like ghosts. I was deeply impressed and persuaded the artists to paint me a copy which now hangs in our home in London, as a permanent reminder of the folly of foreigners intervening in Afghanistan.

Since 1991 there have been more foreign ghosts. In addition to the 15,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the 1980s there have been over 1500 Americans and almost 400 British in the last ten years. And let's not forget the far larger number of Afghan soldiers and civilians who have lost their lives, anywhere between 600,000 and 1,500,000.

I've been reporting from Afghanistan off and on for thirty years and this book is my attempt to sum up what I've witnessed and to draw conclusions.


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

JS:
I was surprised by the similarity of the US intervention to the Soviet one. Both were wars of choice, motivated by anger and a desire for revenge but with very little thought given to the consequences. In both cases the foreigners were aiming for regime change. They expected it would be quick and they could soon withdraw.

In both cases there was mission creep and Soviet as well as American commanders and their political masters started on nation-building. In both cases armed resistance developed and intensified.

What I found especially startling was that the Americans fell into the same trap as the Russians, even though the Americans should have known better. After all, they had armed and supported the insurgency which caused the Russians so much trouble. How could Washington have failed to see that its own intervention would soon provoke jihad and armed resistance from rural Afghans too?

The one difference between the Russians and the Americans is that after a few years the Soviet military realized the war was unwinnable. When Soviet politicians, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, decided to withdraw, they accepted the decision with good grace and in some cases with enthusiasm. They did not succumb to the optimism that still characterizes US military thinking in Afghanistan, in the face of all the evidence that military victory is impossible.


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

JS:
I would be practicing yoga, playing tennis, enjoying strolls round our ancient cottage in the East Anglian countryside, and reading.


JG: What else are you reading right now?

JS:
I've recently completed Sarah Bakewell's marvelous biography of the French philosopher, Montaigne, called "How to Live." As someone who's interested in war, I've also just re-read "Fortunes of War," Olivia Manning's brilliant evocation of the British in Egypt during World War Two. It seemed especially relevant while Britain and France were again fighting in Libya this summer, or at least over Libya with their warplanes.


JG: What's next for you?

JS:
I'm pausing in book-writing for the moment. Not counting three books that I've co-authored with other people, I've written six books over the last forty years. With the exception of "Ghosts of Afghanistan," they were all written in my spare time while holding down a job as a reporter and newspaper columnist. It takes me about three years to get pregnant with a new idea, so at the moment I'm just looking after my latest offspring and hoping it gets noticed and admired.


MORE VIDEO:

Steele believes the war could go on and on, like a war of attrition.
Steele talks about how the book got its name.


For more on "Ghosts of Afghanistan," visit the Counterpoint website.

"Brave Girl Eating: A Family's Struggle with Anorexia" by Harriet Brown

Brave Girl Eating, Harriet Brown (Credit: Harper Collins, Jamie Young)

Jeff Glor talks to Harriet Brown about, "Brave Girl Eating: A Family's Struggle with Anorexia."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Harriet Brown: The book grew out of a piece I wrote for the New York Times Magazine, "One Spoonful at a Time," which encapsulated our family's experience in helping our daughter recover from anorexia. The inspiration for both the magazine story and the book were pretty much the same: I wanted to make sure that families who came after us didn't have to go through what we did. When our daughter was diagnosed with anorexia, my husband and I were told she would likely struggle with the illness for the rest of her life; that she'd probably be in and out of hospitals for 5, 7, 10 years; that 20 percent of those who develop anorexia die from the illness or from suicide. We were told a lot of things that didn't make sense to us: that kids with anorexia were afraid to grow up, or that they starved themselves because it was the only way their parents would pay attention to them.

None of these things seemed to fit our family. Being a journalist, I set out to find some different answers, and I did. We used a treatment that's fairly new here and somewhat controversial, Family-Based Treatment, often called the Maudsley Approach because it was developed by therapists at the Maudsley Hospital in London. I really wanted families to know that FBT is not just an option; it's the only evidence-based treatment for teenagers, and it's vastly superior to more traditional treatments. With psychodynamically based treatment, the recovery rate for anorexia is maybe 40 percent, and that's a generous estimation. Two long-term studies have shown FBT to be the first-line treatment for teens and children, with recovery rates between 80 and 90 percent. That's still not good enough, of course, but it's way better than the more traditional numbers. Yet most families are never told about FBT, because it flies in the face of many of the stereotypes and assumptions around eating disorders, especially anorexia.

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

HB:
This book is part memoir and part work of science journalism, and a lot of the science really did surprise me. For a long time, the assumption has been that eating disorders are largely psychological. What I learned during my research is that there's a clear and compelling biological underpinning for these diseases. The two biggest risk factors for developing an eating disorder are having a family history of eating disorders and having a family history of anxiety disorders. Like with depression, we now understand that neurobiology plays a key role in eating disorders. And that's good news because it may help us develop more effective treatments.

The other thing that surprised me was to learn how woefully under-funded research into eating disorders is, especially compared with research dollars spent on other far less common illnesses. For instance, Alzheimer's disease affects roughly 5.1 million people, and the National institutes of Health funded $450 million in research in 2011. Eating disorders affect about 30 million people, yet ED research got only $28 million from the NIH this year -- less than 10 percent of the funding for Alzheimer's, for an illness that affects six times as many people. I think this discrepancy comes from the fact that eating disorders are still seen as disorders of choice in a way. The textbook definition of anorexia is that it's a "refusal" to eat. As I watched my daughter go through this, I quickly came to understand that she wasn't refusing to eat; she was unable to eat. There's a big difference.


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

HB: This question makes me laugh, because at various points in my career I considered giving up writing and becoming a therapist of some sort. I'm really grateful that I didn't go that route. I think I'm a much better writer than I would be a therapist.


JG: What else are you reading right now?

HB: At the moment I'm reading some of Hippocrates' writings, "The Emperor of All Maladies," and an Agatha Christie novel. I like to read three or four books at once.


JG: What's next for you?

HB: I'm working on a proposal for my next book. The tentative title is "Perfect Health: An Irreverent Look at Our Obsession with Health." What do you think of that? Plus I've got ideas for a couple of other magazine features I want to research. I'm happiest when I'm writing.


For more on "Brave Girl Eating," visit the Harper Collins website.

"The Oracle of Stamboul" by Michael David Lukas

Michael David Lukas, The Orcale of Stamboul (Credit: Harper Collins, Jeffrey Cross)

Jeff Glor talks to Michael Lukas about, "The Oracle of Stamboul," a historical novel about a girl who changes the course of the Ottoman Empire.

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Michael Lukas:
I started writing "The Oracle of Stamboul" in early 2004. At the time I was living in Tunisia, studying Arabic, applying to MFA programs, and generally trying to figure out what to do with my life. A few days after I handed in my MFA applications, the protagonist of the novel, Eleonora Cohen, came to me on a run through the outskirts of Tunis. She was hazy in that first glimpse, a slight, precocious child playing backgammon with two older men. I didn't know anything about her--where she lived or when, who these men were, why she was playing backgammon with them--but I knew as soon as she came to me that I had found the protagonist of my novel.

At first, I thought of her as a mix between Alice from "Alice in Wonderland" and Roald Dahl's Matilda. A few months later, rummaging through an antique store in Istanbul, I came across a picture of a young girl from the 1880s. When I saw this picture, everything clicked. Here was Eleonora, staring out across history with a laconic, penetrating gaze. Over the next seven years, she took on a life and character of her own. Eleonora still has elements of Alice, Matilda, and the girl in the picture, but she has since become her own person.


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

ML: What surprised me most was how much of myself is in the characters, even though they live such different lives than my own. Sometimes writing can feel like that scene in "Being John Malkovich," when John Malkovich enters his own mind and finds himself in a restaurant filled with John Malkovichs saying "Malkovich, Malkovich." I guess what I am trying to say is that we can't help but imbue our characters with our own thoughts, feelings, and characteristics, whether the character is a preternaturally intelligent orphan or the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. And that, in itself, is pretty surprising.


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

ML: I think I would probably be a fourth-grade English teacher. I've always enjoyed teaching and I'm lucky enough to be able to teach a few days a week in addition to writing. When I first started teaching writing to children -- through an afterschool program called Take My Word For It! -- I was going through a bit of a quarter-life crisis. My students' wide-eyed enthusiasm and seemingly infinite imaginations helped me to regain my sense of wonder and possibility in the world. I also love that children don't second guess their own ideas. Last semester I had students writing novels about ghost dog tooth fairies and moldy pickles trying to escape the refrigerator. And they all worked!


JG: What else are you reading right now?

ML:I'm in the midst of reading three wonderful and very different books: "The Hummingbird's Daughter" by Luis Alberto Urrea; "The Buddha in the Attic" by Julie Otsuka; and "The Line of Beauty" by Alan Hollinghurst.


JG: What's next for you?

ML: I am currently working on a novel about the Jews of Cairo. The book, which is tentatively titled "The Forty-Third Name of God," tells the story of an Egyptian Muslim family charged with guarding the Ben Ezra Synagogue and its famous Genizah (a treasure trove of medieval Jewish manuscripts found in the 19th century by Solomon Schechter). A multigenerational chronicle, this novel will tell the story of the Genizah, its discovery, and the cosmopolitan Mediterranean world it sheds light on. It is a novel about Muslim-Jewish relations, Cairo, the hidden secrets of the Kaballah, and the sometimes conflicting ties of family and religion.


For more on "The Oracle of Stamboul," visit the Harper Collins website.

"The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Steven Pinker

The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker (Credit: Penguin Group, Rebecca Goldstein)

Jeff Glor talks to Steven Pinker about, "The Better Angels of our Nature," a book that shows, if you think the world is violent today, it's nothing compared to what it used to be like.

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Steven Pinker: I believe there is such a thing as human nature--that the mind is not a blank slate, and that we don't get all our emotions and drives from culture, parents, and socialization. But the very idea of human nature raises a fear in many people: if we're "killer apes" with "genes for aggression" and a "violent brain," would that mean that we are doomed to perpetual war and mayhem, and shouldn't even bother trying to make the world a better place? But I knew that this fear made no sense for two reasons. One is that human nature is a complex system with many parts: some of them lead us to commit violence; others--what Lincoln called "The better angels of our nature"--inhibit us from violence. Whether violence actually breaks out depends on which features of human nature are triggered by the environment.

Also, I knew that violence in fact has gone down over the course of history--the death rates in war and homicide today are a fraction of what they were in previous decades and centuries. But I know that many people find this hard to believe--they read the news and see bombings and shootings and war, and think we're living in violent times.

I wrote the book, then, to persuade people of two things: that violence has, contrary to appearances, come down, and that this can be explained by the struggle among our inner demons and our better angels.


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

SP: Two things. One was how brutal our ancestors were. The Old Testament is filled with genocides commanded by God; the lives of the saints are filled with scenes of gory torture; the medieval knights were bloodthirsty warlords; and until recently people brought the whole family out to see heretics burned, broken on the wheel, or disemboweled. The other surprise was how many kinds of violence have decreased in frequency. I wasn't surprised that we no longer keep slaves or disembowel heretics--I already knew that. But I never expected to learn that homicide in the US, war in Africa, rape, spousal abuse, child abuse, spanking, hate crimes--you name it--have all been in decline since records were first kept.


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

SP: Unfortunately, I'm already doing it--in my day job as a professor; I teach classes in psychology, and conduct research on language and the human mind.


JG: What else are you reading right now?

SP: John Mueller's "Terror, Security, and Money"--an expose of all the money and lives we waste combating an exaggerated terrorist threat. Joshua Goldstein's Winning the War on War: believe it or not, war is in decline all over the world. Matthew White's "Great Big Book of Horrible Things"--he calls himself an "atrocitologist," someone who tries to estimate how many people were killed in wars and genocides.


JG: What's next for you?

SP: A style manual for the 21st century: how cognitive science and modern linguistics can help us write clearer and more graceful prose.


For more on "The Better Angels of Our Nature," visit the Penguin Press website.

"Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion" by Janet Reitman

Inside Scientology, Janet Reitman (Credit: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Jeff Glor talks to Janet Reitman about "Inside Scientology."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Janet Reitman: The book grew out of a very long magazine story that I wrote for Rolling Stone, also called "Inside Scientology," which took about nine months to produce, largely because the learning curve was so steep. Scientology has its own language, its own codes, its own justice system, its own worldview - and none of these things had ever been well explained in any sort of mainstream, accessible way. That shocked me a little bit, I have to say, and it also offered a challenge, which was to write that sort of book, a really objective, thoroughly researched and documented history and narrative exploration of this subject that so many people have heard of, yet know almost nothing about.


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

JM: How hard writing a book can be! I have been a magazine writer for a long time, but I had never written a book before, and I think I entered into it thinking, well, this will be like writing a whole lot of really long magazine pieces -- uh, wrong. Totally wrong. The reporting and research I had to do for the book was extremely challenging and daunting at times, and there were lots of surprises along the way just substantively, but I honestly think the most surprising element of actually writing the book was how difficult, and time-consuming, and frustrating writing a book can be. It takes a certain type of discipline and concentration that I never had to exercise before, and I had to learn it. As a result, I had to go through something like five drafts before I had a real "book." And in the meantime, it drove my boyfriend and all of my friends and family kind of crazy, not to mention my editors at Rolling Stone who called me regularly to ask "are you done yet? when are you coming back to work?..."


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

JM: Probably having a tough time finding a job, to be honest... I've been a journalist since the 1990s and it's the only "job" I've ever had. I'd love to live overseas, maybe in Africa, where I know a lot of people and have worked before, but I have a feeling I'd wind up writing from there just as easily...


JG: What else are you reading right now?

JM: I just finished Robert Stone's "Dog Soldiers," which is a really wonderful, but extremely dark book about the 1970s, and may start another one of his books fairly soon. But in the meantime, I'm reading Joe McGinniss's new book about Sarah Palin, "The Rogue," which I need to read for a story that I am working on....


JG: What's next for you?

JM: I'm working on something about the resurgence of the Religious Right at the moment, and then we'll have to see... there are a few ideas I have, but right now they're still in the incubation stage.


For more on "Inside Scientology," visit the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt website.

"1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" by Charles Mann

Charles Mann, 1493 (Credit: Random House, J.D Sloan)


Jeff Glor talks to Charles Mann about "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Charles Mann:
One beginning point was the home of our friends Laura and Bob, who own a tree farm near our home. I can't remember how this came up, but suddenly Laura was talking about how tree farms all over New England were being invaded by earthworms. Until the English came, Laura said, there were no earthworms in the northern U.S. or Canada. The worms were all carpetbaggers, and they were doing terrible things to northern forest ecosystems.

Laura and Bob are good friends, but I thought they must be nuts. When I had some time, I went to the library and discovered a) they were 100% right about the worms; and b) the worm invasion was only a small part of a giant ecological explosion that was set off by Columbus.

I knew a bit about this explosion, because I'd read Alfred W. Crosby's wonderful books, "The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism." Al had been the first one to notice that Columbus had set off an exchange of species between Eurasia and the Americas, and that this Columbian Exchange had played a big role in human history. Now I learned that, inspired by him, historians and ecologists and geographers had learned a vast amount of new material about the processes he had identified.

Over the years, I had got to know Al Crosby a little. I began to bug him about updating his stuff. He didn't want to--he was on to new things. Finally he said, "Well, if you think it's such a good idea, why don't you do it?" I took his offhand quip as license. "1493" is the result.

I like to think that I added something, but at bottom the book was inspired by dinner conversations with interesting friends and reading interesting books.


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

CM: I'm not sure, but I was certainly surprised, riding in a small boat between islands in the Philippines, to see that the engine was literally held together with vice-grips. Another big surprise occurred when I was in a two-seater plane over eastern Bolivia, and the pilot asked me to take over while he crawled out of his seat and rummaged around in the back luggage compartment.


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

CM: As a kid I wanted to be an astronaut or a cartoonist or a particle physicist. I don't know which I would be worst at.


JG: What else are you reading right now?

CM: Right now? I just finished writing a long non-fiction book, so I've been reading fiction. I'm mostway through J.G. Farrell's "Siege of Krishnapur" (really good) and partly through some other books. An hour ago I came back from my local book store, where I somehow acquired more books: Octavia Butler's "Kindred," Bruce Duffy's "The World as I Found It," and John Crowley's "Four Freedoms." I don't know whether I'll start those or wait till I finish the others.


JG: What's next for you?

CM:
My daughter wants me to write a children's book that she can illustrate. The book would be based on a series of bedtime stories that I told the kids about two Japanese beetles, Bill and Fred. They eat roses and live in the world's biggest greenhouse and have misadventures. I haven't got around to proposing this to my publisher, though.

For more on "1493: : Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" visit the Random House website.

"On Canaan's Side" by Sebastian Barry

Sebastian Barry, On Canaan's Side (Credit: Penguin Group)

Jeff Glor talks to Sebastian Barry about "On Canaan's Side," a first-person novel told through the eyes of an aging Irish Cook named Lilly. The story spans seven decades, all the way back to the end of the first world war. 


Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Sebastian Barry: I had a great aunt Lilly who went to America in the twenties. I used to think it was because she couldn't bear the fall in grace of her father, who was chief-superintendent of the old imperial police force in Dublin before independence. But I was shocked to discover that she left under threat of death from the old Irish Republican Army. I wanted to follow her there as it were, if only to offer the strange comfort of a made-up book... Also, my great friend Margaret Synge, who died recently, inspired the novel. Her grandson came back from the war in Afghanistan and tragically took his own life. Margaret, already in her eighties and very unwell, said to me, in her little bedroom, 'Why did He not take me? I was ready to go.' The saddest and most courageous thing I ever heard.


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

SB: That America, where I have worked briefly and visited many times over the last 35 years, seemed in the upshot like a 'home place'. Although my grandfather held an American passport, I have no right to call myself a citizen. Nevertheless there is a secret citizenship maybe of the heart. The depth of attachment to the places and people I was writing about really surprised me. I had feared going so far, as an 'Irish' writer -- and it felt like a long journey, but homeward.


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

SB: My grandfather, who was in bomb disposal in the Royal Engineers during WWII, wanted me to join the army, so I might have been a rather neurotic, nervous soldier! I left Trinity College Dublin in the 1970s and all job applications from me were rejected, so maybe I wouldn't have been good for much else besides writing. I remember a bank wrote back to me saying, 'Your application charmed us, but you are the least qualified person ever to apply to us...' My first longing was to carry on where Bob Dylan left off, but he never did leave off exactly...


JG: What else are you reading right now?

SB: I am re-reading the entirely marvelous book, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," published in 1970, and rightly never out of print since. A great masterwork of its subject.


JG: What's next for you?

SB: I have just finished all the publicity for "On Canaan's Side" in Britain and Ireland, and am walking and running the Wicklow mountains every day to get fit for a two-week book tour in the US in the second half of September. This is where writing seems sometimes very like boxing! Luckily there is never anyone in the mountains, so no one can see the uninspiring sight of me running along -- or stumbling as I should call it more accurately.


For more on On Canaan's Side, visit the Penguin Press website.

"Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It" by Don Peck

Don Peck, Pinched (Credit: Random House, Dupont Photographers)

Jeff Glor talks to Don Peck about "Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Don Peck:
In 2009, as I was talking to labor economists, economic historians, and students of major financial crises about what had just happened, almost all of them were saying that recovery was likely to be very, very slow. And when I started reading histories of extended hard times -- the Depression, but also the 1970s and the 1890s -- I began to see the many, many ways (some of them quite surprising) in which society can change as tough times linger beyond a few years. It also struck me how periods like this one leave legacies that often last for decades -- changing the character of generations, the size and structure of families, the paths of different cities and communities, and so on.

So I thought it would be interesting and valuable to try and write about how this period is changing -- and will continue to change -- our society, based on a combination of history, direct reporting, and analysis. I also thought that there might be value in underlining just how deep and long-lasting the damage from periods like this one can be, and suggesting some public actions that can help us recover faster.


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

DP: When I started my reporting for this book (and the Atlantic article that preceded it), I thought young people would bear the lightest scars from the Great Recession -- twenty-something's have fewer responsibilities, and are in and out of the job market anyway, so I figured they'd be able to cope more easily with a bad job environment. But in fact, both history and economic research show that today's young adults are likely to bear some of the deepest and most enduring scars from this period. The first few years on the job market are incredibly important to setting one's career trajectory, and a lot of research shows that people who first come into the job market during a recession not only start out behind, they never catch up to where they would have been had they graduated into better times. The Millennial Generation, on the eve of the recession, was as audacious a generation as this country has ever known. But the character of the Millennials, as well as their financial futures, are changing in this period, in complicated ways. Most of those changes are unfortunate, but some are positive -- and all of these changes are likely to endure well beyond recovery.


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

DP:
My first (short!) career was in management consulting, and the one thing I miss about that occupation is the problem-solving element. If I weren't a writer today, I'd probably be doing some form of policy analysis -- some of my interests are a bit wonkish, and that sort of work would combine writing, research, and analysis, all of which I enjoy.


JG: What else are you reading right now?

DP:
Coming off a year of reading and writing almost exclusively about the recession, I've been binging on the "Game of Thrones" series, which I think is a terrific imagination of medieval statecraft, among its other attractions. In between, I'm reading David Kennedy's upcoming book, "Don't Shoot," a fascinating examination of strategies to reduce crime in America's most violent places, and also the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant (don't ask).


JG: What's next for you?

DP:
I want to continue writing about the economy, with more focus on how we can recover and build a more resilient society. I'm very interested in Sun Belt cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix, places that were middle-class meccas and are now struggling -- so I'd like to write about how these places can recover, what they're doing to replace housing construction as big industries, and what looks promising in general.


For more on "Pinched," visit the Random House website.

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