Book back story Articles

Guest post by Susan Kushner Resnick, author ofGoodbye Wifes and Daughters

I’ve been opening readings for my nonfiction book about a Montana coal mine disaster by acknowledging the obvious: I don’t belong with this story. What, I asked the audiences across the state of Montana, is a New Englander who has no connection to the west and had never met a miner before starting the book, doing here? Then I tell them how I found my subject. Or, rather, how the subject found me.

It all started with E.B. White. After reading The Trumpet of the Swan to my son, I decided I wanted to see the Montana swan preserve where White set a main part of the novel. A little research showed that the area isn’t as populated with trumpeter swans as it used to be and that it’s not near anything else that a conventional tourist would want to see. But Yellowstone isn’t far, and Grand Teton National Park isn’t far from that. We made plans to visit the...

A guest post by author Ronald Florence

Every non-fiction book has a backstory—the choice of the subject, the vagaries of research, the emergence of an individual or group, the search for authentic voices.  I had encountered the story of the effort to ransom the lives of as many as one million Jews in the Holocaust as a footnote to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, described as a Nazi plot, and called a trick played on naïve Hungarian Zionists, but as I read through the secondary literature, I found myself imagining how members of a rescue organization in Budapest would react to the possibility of saving hundreds of thousands of fellow Jews from the fate that befell the Jewish populations of occupied Europe.  The episode, and the reactions it provoked from the Allies, the Nazis, the Zionists, and relief organizations and lobbies also seemed an opportunity to examine the political complexity of the...

A guest post by author Christopher White

A guest post by author James Scott.

My recently completed book, The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship, proved to be an interesting marriage of investigative reporting and family history. The Liberty was a spy ship sent into the Middle East in 1967 to monitor what we now know as the Six-Day War. On the fourth day of the war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the Israelis strafed and torpedoed the Liberty as it steamed in international waters, killing 34 men and injuring 171 others in what is still a highly controversial affair.

I have a personal connection to the story: My father was an engineering officer on the Liberty. He was awarded the Silver Star for his efforts to prevent the ship from sinking, an impressive accomplishment for a young man who happened to celebrate his 24th birthday the day of the attack.

The book’s research involved gathering...