Booknotes

Booknotes: America's Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas.
Brian Lamb, Ed.
New York: Time Books. Random House. 1997.

On C-Span, Brian Lamb interviewed only authors of nonfiction. He would have nothing to do with fiction. Montesquieu: I have never known any trouble that an hour's reading would not dissipate. Questions Brian Lamb asked on his program Booknotes: Where do you write? Do you use a computer? How did you research this? What first got you interested in writing about this? How did you get a publisher's attention? How long did it take you to write it?

Doris Kearns Goodwin creates an environment in her home office that evokes the period she's writing about. David McCullough stopped writing a book about Pablo Picasso because he found in his research that he did not like him. A Stillness at Appomattox had all the narrative quality and the art of the written word about something that really happened: David McCullough. As he read, Shelby Foote asked himself, how did the author do this? Forrest McDonald: The book began with a political controversy which I wanted to understand. Edmund Morris: I remember once spending seven hours on one sentence--seven hours. I looked at it the next morning; it was a pretty banal sentence; that's writing.

Edmund Morris: the writer's perennial problem, from the very first page, is, how do you get the reader's attention? Visiting Reagan's home town showed Edmund Morris more about Reagan than he could have learned from spending a year studying books. I have not done the last volume of Reagan's life, except for the last line, and I won't tell you what it is. Writing is a luxury because you can edit; when you talk, you can't take back what you said. TR wanted to change things, the usual motivation for a politician. Politicians are men of action.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I write it all out in longhand, and then the worst stage is I then copy it all over, so that the typist can read the writing and that's when I edit. Four years of research and two years of writing, but I still needed to do research. Albert Murray: American have an experimental attitude and inventiveness. Carlo d'Este: For Patton, men, not machines, won battles. Joseph Ellis: The normal notion that you could look at a person's library and be able to tell by looking at the titles what the basic drift of the person's thinking and opinions were--you would be driven mad by John Adams, because Adams liked to buy books that he disagreed with. Nicholas Basbanes wrote articles that he later expanded into books. Nicholas Basbanes: In my book, I describe a postal employee who was a bachelor and lived out in Los Angeles. Just loved books. Spent all of his income--everything--on books Filled his house. Couldn't move. I think he finally had to sleep in the kitchen. Died among his books, alone. Found him two or three weeks afterwards.

Stephen Ambrose: Eisenhower's eyes would lock on yours and never leave them. Martin Gilbert: It was my ambition that you would open the book anywhere and read a page and say halfway down, "I never knew that." We live in an age where, much as one would like to sit down and read books, you can't.

bell hooks: I think, for me, there's something about handwriting still that slows down the idea process; at the computer you just zoom ahead, and you don't have those moments of pause that you need. Before interviewing McNamara, Paul Hendrickson spent four or five days just trying to find and understand everything I could about this man's life. Richard Norton Smith: Washington, the man, is so much more complicated, nuanced, subtle, shrewd, than the image we've been given. Clare Brandt: "I always write a first draft that has everything in it, and it reads about as interesting as a laundry list-- "First he did this, and then he did this."

John Keegan: I have a sort of an eighteenth-century view of what being educated is, which is having read the major works of literature, having an understanding of the broad periods of history into which the world's past is divided, perhaps speaking another language. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university. Daniel Boorstin: You see, the most important thing in making a big book like this is the outline, seeing where you're going; I spent almost as much time on the outline and revising it as I spent on the actual reading and writing. The Americans took thirty years to write and The Discoverers and The Creators, nine years each. Robert D. Richardson, Jr.: Emerson and Thoreau are the people I read when I'm feeling bad; come away from reading them feeling better about myself and the world and my friends and the country.

Neil Baldwin: One of the first things I did before starting this book was I read every single word that had ever been written about Thoma Eidson. Dr. James Billington: It was very interesting reading these used books growing up because they had underlining in them. Why did they underline this passage and not that one; what kind of person is this, that read that book? Books give perspective on things. I think people are busy taking things apart without putting them together in academia. Nell Irvin Painter: And one of the things I was trying to do here was to humanize Sojourner Truth, to show her as an individual, with her own life and her own experiences, in addition to this symbolic black woman. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: An autobiography is something that attempts to explain how John Smith became John Smith; a memoir is more of an attempt to record an era. George Will: I think that a lot of writers hate to write; they like the research.

Evan Thomas: I just write as fast as I can for three months to get a manuscript down, to get a basic, rough draft; spend a lot of time and odd hours reworking it--early in the morning, sometimes late at night, sometimes at lunch--whenever I can get a spare hour. Pete Hamill: I think the one thing you find out when you stop drinking is just how much time you have. William Prochnau: People have asked me, "When did you come up with the idea of this book?" And I respond, "About five years after I began"; the book started out as a totally different idea. Stanley Karnow: ...there is a temporal quality to journalism as opposed to literature or poetry. Johanna Neuman: For diplomats, delay is often the secret weapon...the calming of tempers, of fever, of emotion, is often something that diplomats use quite well.

Richard Rhodes: I think that writing is something that people find hard to start, primarily because they are afraid--afraid they don't have the right to speak, afraid no one should care about what they have to say. Writing this book gave me the chance to look into something that had been puzzling me for years. Robert Kaplan: Reading liberates you. Thomas Friedman, quoting David Ignatius: When you're writing this book, always imagine whether the reader is going to want to turn the page. James B. Stewart: I guess maybe everyone has had this experience--one high school teacher that just made the world come to life. Richard Nixon: We are not a nation of readers anymore.

Al Gore: I think most people write books as if they're going to be read from front to back continuously; I'm not sure everybody reads that way. Bill Clinton: This book didn't sell well because I didn't promote it; books sell when people go around and go on book tours and talk about them and do interview shows, sit in bookstores and sign copies for hours. Mikhail

Linda Chavez: I think that assimilation is the ony model that works in a society as diverse as ours, that if each and every group keeps its primary attachment to the ethnic group or the racial group or the religious group that it's divisive.

Gorbachev: Books should not be replaced by anything, by TV or any such thing, because books make it possible to think more deeply.