Extras

Why I wrote Robert F. Kennedy: Crusader

John Kennedy was assassinated the week I was to have my Bar Mitzvah. To everyone I knew he had been the symbol of hope and his murder cast a shadow on the adult life I was just about to begin. Well, maybe not begin, but begin to imagine. When Robert Kennedy ran for the Senate in New York, my parents did not like him. They saw him as an opportunist, nothing like his brother. I agreed. But years later I began to hear of another Bobby. For the generation of people younger than me, Jack Kennedy was a figure from history, a person from long ago. Bobby was their hero. My wife tells me her immigrant father wept when he heard Bobby had been shot.

So who was Bobby? Pale shadow of his brother? Ambitious conniver? Crusader for the poor and unfortunate? Martyr? The first book I happened to read about him was a collection of his speeches called The Gospel According to RFK. But I then soon found The Dark Side of Camelot. This was getting interesting: the mixed reactions to Bobby I grew up hearing were matched by warring books.

I wrote this book to try to make sense of a person people either hated or loved. And then something else happened. The more I wrote about him, the more I found myself writing about the 1960s. I came to feel that the contradictions in Bobby were also the different faces of that tumultuous age. I loved having the chance to explain what those years were like to readers who know them only from retro fashions, old songs, or textbooks. The English poet William Wordsworth wrote about what it was like to be alive during a similar time of hope and change, fury and war: The French Revolution. He spoke of his friends as "we who were strong in love." That is how we, too, saw ourselves. And then he got it exactly right, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven!" That does not mean we who were young were always right. We were often wrong. But we were full of energy and anger, hope and delicious rage.

Finally, my 21st century life shaped the book as much as my teenage years. When I learned that the world was nearly destroyed in 1961 because the only way the Soviets in Washington could reach Moscow was by handing a telegram to a bicycle messenger, I realized that Bobby's biography was also the story of the beginning of the digital age. His life spanned from the age of movie and radio to the dawning of the internet. For people my age, writing about Bobby was all about the issues and causes we cared about. We judge him in the context of racial conflict of the 60s, or the dark days of the 70s. But as I wrote this book I saw how dated those concerns have become. Writing about Bobby now means connecting him to the world we live in, which is the age of the internet. It was exciting to see his story anew, not just as a reflection of the cold war and the politics of protest but as a step in the growth of media and communications.

I hope all of these impulses: making sense of the bad Bobby and the good; passing on a sense of the 60s, linking Bobby's story to the digital age come through to you, my readers. Most of all, this was fun to write. I hope that comes through, too.

Why I wrote John Winthrop, Oliver Cromwell, and the Land of Promise

Every day our TV sets and computer screens are filled with news about bloody conflicts that pit Americans and their European allies against people called Muslim extremists. We hear of preachers on both sides who call this conflict a Holy War, who predict that the end of days is near. I felt compelled to write this book to show that, at one crucial time in the history of England and New England, many of the beliefs that we now associate with our enemies were popular here. It is my hope that by understanding our own history we can make better sense of our present. Why were extreme religious views so convincing in the seventeenth century? How and why did they evolve into beliefs such as religious toleration, separation of church and state, and trust in political democracy that are so important to us now? These are both historical questions and the most compelling current events issues.

As the grandson of a rabbi, and seventeen generations of rabbis before him, I am sympathetic to the power of religious belief. I think we dismiss the Puritans too easily, adopting a kind of easy contempt for them as pinched, rigid, repressed. Religion brought great joy to many Puritans. And it was that faith that enabled them to work so hard to build the Massachusetts colony. I wanted young readers to get to know these founders of New England as they saw themselves. But I also wanted readers to meet people such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson who challenged the Puritan leadership in its own language, and brought new ideas to America.

Writing about this period gave me a chance to get to know Oliver Cromwell, which was a real treat. He was a fascinating, compelling leader who is, to this day, the most controversial person in English history. I hope that readers find his battles as interesting as I did.

Finally, in Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado I began the story of the colonial period -- the two centuries in which American and English history were inseperable. I wanted to continue that story through the seventeenth century. American history is not now and never has been separated from world history, and that internationalism is both a theme of this new book, and of this trilogy as a whole.

Why I wrote Art Attack:

I grew up going to art exhibitions and plays with my father the way other children went to baseball games. In high school I had teachers who created Happenings and joined in all-night readings of Joyce. These experiences left two distinct legacies: the sense that radical art has something to offer at any age, and the sure knowledge that you need an initial guide to get you oriented. You can't tell the avant-garde players without a scorecard. ART ATTACK is a kind of illustrated program guide that shows what happened, and why it all matters.

I started college at the end of the 60s, and the only thing I wanted to study was cultural and generational borderlines. At first I thought my major would be medieval heresy, which seemed a perfect example of a clash of beliefs. But when I returned to graduate school many years later, I decided to focus on a more recent era. I wanted to understand the relationship between the Armory Show and New York, and that of Rite of Spring and Paris. Two scandals, two cities. But even that was not quite right. And I wound up concentrating on William Crary Brownell, a very conservative editor at the turn of the century. Older now, I needed to understand the border from the other side.

While I was in graduate school, I began to work as an editor of books for children and teenagers first at Harper, now at Holt. I wanted to figure out how to create books that were as challenging and novel as the ideas that surround us, and yet would engage younger readers. I wanted to edit books that were as smart, curious, passionate, and individual as their readers.

ART ATTACK is this biography set between covers. It is about borderlines of art and of generations, yet it seeks to erase the artificial borders that limit who should read what, or how they read it. This is one book that is meant to be read with loud music blasting in the background -- after all, that is exactly how I wrote it.

Young Adult Books

Extras

Why I wrote Robert F. Kennedy: Crusader

Why I wrote John Winthrop, Oliver Cromwell, and the Land of Promise

Why I wrote Art Attack: