Hello!

Hi, Folks!
Karen, here. I want to thank Prof. Vardell for inviting me to join you here. I’m excited to participate, and thrilled that you’re reading my books. I’ve very much enjoyed reading your comments. I’ll try to answer some of your questions here and more over the next week or two.

First, a little background: I began writing nonfiction for kids after a really bad day at work. My oldest daughter had a deep interest in history and biography, and I was distressed to see the quality of a lot of stuff out there. I thought maybe I could combine my growing interest in kids’ books with my experience as a business journalist in making complicated topics clear to readers.

I write for young people with a particular mantra in mind: Nonfiction provides context for a complicated world. You all know how complex our world is. But how do young people make sense of that? How can they put today’s news in some broader place, so that it has more meaning? They just don’t have much experience to bring to all this information flowing in. But as they move into their early teen years, they will begin to see a bigger world beyond their own and they should have great resources, beyond Google and Wikipedia, available to them. I think that’s one place where libraries, librarians, and books remain really important.

I also have a passionate interest in social change, how it happens, and why— all related to the power of any one individual to make a difference. (Or, as Steve Jobs said, “to make a dent in the universe.”) My “big picture” books—SIX DAYS, LET ME PLAY, and BOOTLEG—all try to get at this subject. One day we could drink and the next day we couldn’t—and that profoundly changed us. But how? One day, we had money and then we didn’t? Why, and what happened then? There was a time when girls couldn’t play sports—or go to med school. Who knew?

So, to answer Kathleen’s great question right at the start, I do set out to write social histories. Informational surveys are for textbooks, or Wikipedia. Christina and Jessica ask about why I included specific stories—the car salesman in SIX DAYS and Leroy Ostransky in BOOTLEG. There’s an old adage for writers: Show, don’t tell. Personal stories that illustrate specific themes move a story along and provide lots of valuable information in a readable, memorable way. To me, that’s what separates good narrative nonfiction from the run-of-the mill stuff. It takes a lot more research and persistence to find great, meaningful stories and substantive, entertaining details than to just gather some facts and figures and write them up. That’s what sets Candace Fleming’s and Jim Murphy’s books apart from everyone else’s.

As for Leroy, I especially wanted to show young people what prohibition looked like from a kid’s perspective. There is an enormous amount of material out there about prohibition, but none of it looked at it from the view of a young person. I did a ton of research to find those stories—Leroy’s, Raymond Parks’, Kenneth Nestell’s. For whatever it’s worth, not one review that I know of has mentioned this—but I thought it was very important. In fact, my own, personal subtitle for the book was “Drinking for Children.”

Okay, I’ve gone on too long now. I’ll answer Cheryl’s question about Sam Walton and privacy next time. I’m running into the same issue with this new project on Steve Jobs.
Thanks so much for your interest and your questions!
Karen Blumenthal