Hampton Sides, IN THE KINGDOM OF ICE: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette
[0:01]Hi, this is Vivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast.
[0:05]Moms don't have time to read books, and speaking of books, I have two of my own books
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[0:35]at ziviowens, because I always post about everything.
[0:38]Enjoy the show!
[0:41]Hampton Sides is the author of In the Kingdom of Ice, the grand and terrible polar voyage
[0:46]of the USS Jeanette.
[0:49]Hampton is the author of the best-selling narrative histories, ghost soldiers, blood
[0:54]and thunder, hellhound on his trail, and, again, in the Kingdom of Ice.
[0:59]His most recent book on desperate ground was named a best book of the year by the Washington
[1:03]Post and his under development for the screen.
[1:05]Hellhound on his trail, about the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hunt for his killer,
[1:10]was the basis of the acclaimed PBS documentary Roads to Memphis.
[1:14]His journalistic works have been frequently anthologized, and he has a two-time National
[1:18]Magazine Award finalist.
[1:20]His network on a book about the fateful last voyage of Captain James Cook, which we discuss.
[1:25]Also, starting May 20th, 2022, is the inaugural Santa Fe Literary Festival, which anyone
[1:33]who has near Santa Fe should definitely check out.
[1:35]We discuss it on this podcast.
[1:38]There will be many other people.
[1:39]Hampton Sides is going to be in conversation with John Grisha, and other participants
[1:44]include Margaret Atwood, Joy Harjo, John Grisha, as I said, Sandra Cisneros, George
[1:49]or our Martin Emily St. John Mandel from Station 11, and many more.
[1:53]And Hampton will be talking about his book in the Kingdom of Ice.
[1:57]Authors explore issues at a time of extraordinary change in politics, race, immigration,
[2:01]the environment, food sustainability, and more.
[2:05]As the festival will offer good old-fashioned storytelling.
[2:09]Walking tours in the famous historic town with delicious food tastings are part of the
[2:13]package of this debut event, which I am so sad that I cannot attend this year, but I definitely
[2:18]want to put it on the calendar for next year.
[2:20]The festival is a destination event not to be missed.
[2:24]The fiscal sponsor is the 501c3 Fractured Atlas, and their founding partners include the
[2:29]City of Santa Fe, the Independent and the Independent Espenial, collected works bookstore,
[2:34]the Santa Fe Public Library, the Whittner Biner Foundation for Poetry, Table Magazine,
[2:38]the New Mexican, and the authors Guild.
[2:41]By the way, they are also giving away two tickets for seven stage events to see more
[2:47]about the festival, have a look at all of the amazing events at sfliteraryfestival.org.
[2:54]Again, that's sfliteraryfestival.org.
[2:59]And listeners to this podcast, if you want to enter the giveaway for two tickets to this
[3:03]event starting May 20th, 2022 in Santa Fe, email info at zibbyowens.com and just write giveaway
[3:12]or Santa Fe.
[3:13]And we will randomly select two people.
[3:15]Thanks for listening.
[3:17]Welcome, Hampton.
[3:18]Thank you so much for coming on mom's don't have time to read books, to discuss in the
[3:21]kingdom of ice, and also your career, and also the literary festival.
[3:28]So welcome.
[3:29]Oh, thank you.
[3:30]Great to be with you.
[3:31]That was a mouthful.
[3:33]So we originally were connected through the festival.
[3:36]So tell me more about it.
[3:37]I know it's the inaugural year.
[3:39]There's a whole slate of amazing guests coming.
[3:42]Tell me about your involvement.
[3:43]I know you were a fellow or something for one year.
[3:45]So tell me all about it.
[3:47]Well, Santa Fe is a little hit down here in the desert, southwest, and yet we've always
[3:55]prided ourselves on being a place that artists and bohemian folks and musicians and especially
[4:01]writers come to, maybe to get away from the rest of the world and to dream up all kinds
[4:07]of great novels and poems and screenplays and novels and so forth.
[4:12]So it seemed like a no brainer when it when the idea came to the four a couple of years
[4:18]ago to create, finally, a Santa Fe literary festival that would really bring together some
[4:23]of the greatest writers in the country, if not the world, to celebrate this peculiar spot
[4:29]here in the foot of the Rocky Mountains that has this long history of letters.
[4:37]Then COVID interrupted the plans for two straight years, maybe it was even three years.
[4:44]And so finally, it's coming together.
[4:46]And this year we're going to have, let's see, we have John Grishon coming.
[4:50]We have Margaret Atwood coming.
[4:53]We have Colson Whitehead coming.
[4:55]Of course, George R. R. Martin, who wrote Game of Thrones, lives here in Santa Fe and
[5:00]will be a big part of the festival.
[5:02]On and on it goes, just a kind of an embarrassment of riches for this first year.
[5:07]We'll see how it works in whether this will sustain itself, I believe it will.
[5:11]And I think the objective of this is to put this festival kind of like on a par with a handful
[5:18]of other major events like this that are in the West, particularly the Sun Valley
[5:24]Writers Conference and the Aspen Ideas Festival, probably those are two that spring to
[5:29]mine to celebrate, you know, letters in the Southwest, but also Santa Fe cuisine.
[5:35]And you know, there's going to be all kinds of field trips so that participants can get
[5:40]out and be with authors and have a little bit more intimacy than just, you know, some giant
[5:45]festival.
[5:46]Like, you know, there are a few in the country that are huge, but they've almost gotten
[5:50]too huge.
[5:51]There's very little sense of where you can actually meet with writers.
[5:56]So I think that's the goal here is to make this kind of a heavily curated and, but very
[6:02]intimate, small scale festival, but with large scale ambitions in terms of the quality
[6:08]of the people that are going to be coming.
[6:10]So that's it.
[6:11]Can anybody sign up to come open to the public, you know, there are fees for these events,
[6:16]of course.
[6:17]And, you know, it depends on your level of, you know, how deeply you want to get into it.
[6:23]But yeah, and my involvement has just been mainly to to to rope in some writer friends
[6:28]of mine to come to Santa Fe.
[6:30]It's really not a tough ask usually to get people to get on a plan and come to Santa
[6:33]Fe anyway.
[6:35]And John Grisham is a friend of mine.
[6:37]And so I'm going to be interrogating him on stage about his career and his most recent
[6:43]book.
[6:44]So it's going to be, it's going to be a great, it's going to be a great event on so many
[6:46]levels.
[6:47]I know.
[6:48]When I heard about it, I was like, oh, could I make this work going to say, I've
[6:51]actually never been to Santa Fe, it's on my wish list of American cities I have yet to
[6:56]check out.
[6:57]So it's May 20th to 23rd, 2022, everybody should go.
[7:02]Very cool.
[7:03]Please come.
[7:04]And we'll have plenty of chili here for anyone, whether it's red or green.
[7:10]And you know, and this is the first year we'll see.
[7:13]I think it's just going to get bigger and bigger as the years go by.
[7:16]So cool.
[7:17]I always wanted to start my own literary festival, which is I know pie at the sky dream,
[7:20]but you never know.
[7:21]Anyway, yeah, that's the that's the issue.
[7:25]Well, maybe I'll, I don't know.
[7:27]Anyway, it's very cool that you guys are doing this and I'm sorry.
[7:30]I can't be there this year, but I want to come one of these years because it sounds
[7:33]amazing.
[7:34]Okay.
[7:35]In addition to your role as festival starter, most people probably know you're I knew
[7:40]you because of ghost soldiers, which I read when it came out well back and loved it.
[7:45]And I still have it.
[7:46]I can't find it, but I have it somewhere prominent because I see the cover all the time.
[7:50]So I feel like it might actually be in my mom's house.
[7:52]Anyway, I see it all the time.
[7:53]So I feel like this is such a treat just for that.
[7:58]I actually listened to part of this book, which was really neat as I was buffing around
[8:02]New York City listening to, you know, ice flows and former, you know, newspaper editors
[8:07]and people stranded and all of that.
[8:10]So definitely made my, made my walk from drop off a little more exciting.
[8:15]Can you, can you tell listeners a little bit about your latest project and how you stumbled
[8:20]up on this story and why you felt compelled to share it?
[8:23]Well, in the kingdom of ice is a story that I kind of found out about through kind of
[8:27]through the back door kind of thing where I got an assignment with National Geographic
[8:31]to write about a Norwegian explorer.
[8:34]They sent me to Oslo to learn about this explorer, uh, Frichof Nansen and, uh, to go to
[8:40]this museum in Oslo called the, the from, which is dedicated to this amazing vessel, the
[8:45]from that, uh, both Nansen and other Norwegian explorers, uh, used to do all, all these exploits
[8:53]during the age of a heroic age of exploration.
[8:56]And when you go to the from museum, you just keep seeing references to this earlier expedition
[9:01]and American led expedition that tried to reach the North Pole by sailing to the North
[9:07]Pole because there were these at that time, uh, rather crazy ideas that there was a warm
[9:12]water basin at the top of the world, uh, we had to get through the ice, but then there
[9:17]was going to be like, it's almost like a bathtub of warm water, then you could just sail
[9:21]to the North Pole, obviously mistaken science there, a group of Americans in 18, starting
[9:27]in 1879 tried to do just that and their ship drift, got caught in the ice drifted in the
[9:34]ice for two years.
[9:37]And finally, the ship was crushed by the ice and sank to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean
[9:42]and these 33 men and their 40 dogs were stranded very near the North Pole, but they
[9:48]didn't make it to the North Pole.
[9:50]Uh, now that it was just a question of their own survival, how are they going to make it
[9:54]home?
[9:55]And that, so, so that kept seeing references to this Jeanette expedition this
[10:00]American-led expedition in Oslo.
[10:03]And because this Norwegian explorer,
[10:06]Frichof Nansen, they basically tried to duplicate
[10:09]the American expedition,
[10:10]but to do it in a differently designed vessel,
[10:13]a vessel that he thought could withstand
[10:17]the pressure of the ice.
[10:18]Because it was clear they were drifting
[10:20]in the right direction,
[10:21]generally speaking, the prevailing currents
[10:24]and the prevailing flow of the ice pack
[10:26]was bringing them to the North Pole.
[10:29]I want the labor, the story of Nansen.
[10:31]That's a whole nother chapter.
[10:33]And there's endless appeal, I think, out there.
[10:36]I found in writing this book for these Arctic tales of woe.
[10:41]And there's just people out there
[10:43]who can't get enough of Shackleton and the Endurance.
[10:46]And Nansen, of course, and all the different American
[10:51]attempts on the North Pole.
[10:52]There's something about the hardship,
[10:55]the kind of monotony of the landscape,
[10:58]the just being stripped down to the elements.
[11:02]And of course, the classic themes,
[11:04]scurvy, mutiny, cannibalism, you know,
[11:09]how these guys survive against all odds?
[11:13]Of course, often they don't survive.
[11:14]That's the big question.
[11:16]And of course, with this book, I don't exactly say
[11:20]when you open up the jacket and you read the flap copy,
[11:23]I don't say, what happened to these men?
[11:25]Because, and this is really why I wrote,
[11:28]this is the finally the answer to your question.
[11:30]Why did I...
[11:31]Take your time.
[11:32]This is what I write, you think.
[11:33]There's that I felt like this is a story
[11:35]that should be kind of in the national shorthand
[11:37]of heroic survival stories.
[11:41]This is the American Shackleton story.
[11:44]And why wasn't it well known?
[11:47]I mean, if you asked people, you know,
[11:49]100 people on the streets of there in New York,
[11:52]have you heard of the voyage of the USS Jeanette?
[11:56]Probably like three of them, maybe have heard of it.
[11:59]It's a very obscure tale.
[12:00]And yet in its day, it was front page news,
[12:04]international news, everyone knew the names of these voyagers
[12:08]for almost three years.
[12:09]There was, you know, it's basically a vigil, you know,
[12:12]when will these men return?
[12:14]Will they return?
[12:17]Do they die up there?
[12:18]Where are they?
[12:18]It's like sending men to the moon, of course,
[12:20]back in those times, there was no way to communicate.
[12:23]So for all those reasons, I thought it was just a great
[12:25]classic, you know, gilded age story of survival essentially.
[12:33]And, you know, this was a time when America was beginning
[12:37]to finally emerge from the devastation of the Civil War
[12:41]and began to kind of flex its muscles on the world stage
[12:44]and compete with the European powers in various ways.
[12:48]And, you know, this was partly a scientific expedition.
[12:52]It wasn't just an adventure.
[12:54]They were trying to prove all kinds of scientific
[12:56]and pseudo scientific theories.
[12:59]And so it was just kind of an interesting time
[13:01]where you begin to see a glimpse of modern America.
[13:05]And all of this is happening at the same time,
[13:08]a newspaper publisher that you alluded to earlier,
[13:10]James Gordon Bennett, who was the publisher
[13:13]of the largest newspaper in the world at that time,
[13:17]that the New York Herald.
[13:19]He personally bankrolled this expedition,
[13:23]even though it was run by the US Navy,
[13:26]it was paid for by this eccentric dude from New York,
[13:30]who nearly stole the show, for me,
[13:33]when I was writing this book, I became so infatuated
[13:37]with this eccentric Playboy, you know, multi-millionaire guy,
[13:42]who, you know, he had sent Stanley to find Livingston
[13:45]in Africa and had this huge blockbuster newspaper hit
[13:49]with that series of stories.
[13:51]And he was looking for another adventure
[13:54]to bankroll to really just to create great copy
[13:57]for his newspaper.
[13:59]And it's just as great as to the animals escaping the zoos
[14:03]and all that.
[14:04]Yeah, he was into, he was not above creating,
[14:10]you know, yeah, dramas on the page
[14:13]that were not exactly true
[14:14]just to prove some kind of weird point
[14:16]or eccentric idea that he had.
[14:18]But anyway, for all these reasons,
[14:19]I just thought it was just fascinating story
[14:22]that I thought everyone should know about in this country.
[14:24]And of course, they, you know, I think also,
[14:28]there is this thing that a lot of historians
[14:31]year and four are fantasized about.
[14:33]And that is, you know, finding an obscure story
[14:37]that was important and consequential in its day
[14:40]and resuscitating that story
[14:42]and hopefully bringing it back to the level
[14:45]of where you think it ought to be, you know,
[14:48]sort of in the pantheon of tales of American history.
[14:53]No, you communicated that so well in the book
[14:55]when you were saying like, this was the event of the summer.
[14:57]Like this is what everybody was doing.
[14:58]It's hanging on all of these updates, right?
[15:01]And it's hard to believe sometimes
[15:03]that the things that we all collectively find so important
[15:07]and that grip our attention, like an election or this or that.
[15:10]And that in the hundred years,
[15:11]there's something nobody's gonna remember
[15:13]and somebody's just gonna have to dig into,
[15:15]oh, yeah, you know, this was like a really big deal at the time.
[15:17]Yeah, it makes what we're going through now,
[15:21]put, get put into more perspective.
[15:24]Yeah, yeah.
[15:25]Now, most of the story takes place in Russia.
[15:28]And, you know, I think that our relationship with Russia
[15:32]back then was very complicated and weird,
[15:35]but actually, friendlier, unfriendlier terms,
[15:39]much friendlier terms and then it is now.
[15:41]I went to Russia, I went to Siberia to research the book,
[15:45]which was a really fascinating trip in and of itself.
[15:47]Because, I mean, this was where they finally made landfall
[15:52]dragging the small boats across the ice pack
[15:55]and then finally sailing across the Arctic Ocean.
[15:59]They made landfall in this really, really remote part
[16:02]of Yakuchia Siberia, which is 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
[16:08]And just to get there, it took, you know,
[16:11]like a week of, you know, planes, trains and automobiles
[16:15]so it finally get to the spot.
[16:17]And that was a big part of the story, actually, for me,
[16:20]also was to just to physically go to these places
[16:23]where these men, so I'll tell you this,
[16:25]some make it home.
[16:27]They don't all make it.
[16:29]I'm not gonna say who makes it and he doesn't.
[16:32]It is just, you know, you think, well,
[16:36]they finally made it to open water
[16:38]and they're getting into their small boats
[16:41]to sail across the, you know,
[16:43]their journey is basically over and out.
[16:45]They're, and then you think, okay,
[16:47]they're making landfall.
[16:49]Now they're, now all their ordeal is over.
[16:51]No, their ordeal is just beginning
[16:53]and winter is starting to arrive
[16:56]and they're starting to freeze to death
[16:58]and they have to fend off, you know, polar bears
[17:01]and, you know, they have to hunt for their food
[17:03]and it just goes on and on and on.
[17:06]So, you know, that's, I guess,
[17:09]another aspect of the story that really appealed to me
[17:11]is that, you know, it just has all these phases,
[17:15]you know, of suffering.
[17:17]It's like suffering porn, I guess.
[17:20]I feel like though you're drawn to this, right?
[17:22]A lot of your stories are about getting through
[17:25]what seems like unbearable misery
[17:27]for a human to withstand.
[17:30]Where does that come from?
[17:32]I really, I really don't know.
[17:34]I don't think I personally am that sort of person.
[17:37]And, you know, I'm not someone who likes to test,
[17:41]you know, test myself physically.
[17:44]But I, you know, I came before I was a historian,
[17:46]I worked for a good number of years
[17:49]for a magazine called Outside.
[17:52]And outside when we were, when I was an editor there,
[17:55]you know, we were always looking for these kinds of stories,
[17:59]you know, survival stories, but also just that theme
[18:03]of sort of what combination of traits are people able
[18:07]to summon to get through an ordeal of some sort, you know,
[18:10]what kind of leadership qualities do they have?
[18:13]What kind of, maybe a sense of humor
[18:15]to get through a situation that is obviously not funny.
[18:19]Or, so that's a theme that keeps you kept coming up there.
[18:22]And I probably sort of threw osmosis.
[18:25]I picked up a lot of that.
[18:26]And, but it is a kind of classic theme.
[18:30]It's like, I'm always wondering how I would have gotten
[18:34]through an ordeal like this.
[18:35]And I think the readers are too,
[18:37]as they turn pages, they're thinking,
[18:40]how would I, you know, how would I get through that?
[18:42]And what combination of attributes do I have within me?
[18:47]You know, sometimes to your own surprise.
[18:49]You don't often these guys, they don't know they have this,
[18:53]you know, and it's what's also interesting is that
[18:55]almost invariably there's some guy way down
[18:58]the pecking order who emerges as the real heroic person.
[19:03]It's not necessarily the officers.
[19:06]Some of my books are set in war.
[19:07]And that's often true as, you know,
[19:09]the real heroes are the grunts sometimes
[19:11]who never knew they had it in them.
[19:13]And they finally find out under pressure.
[19:17]Is there, has this happened to you?
[19:18]Has there been a situation in your life where, you know,
[19:21]you didn't know how much resilience you had
[19:24]until you were faced with it?
[19:25]I suppose so.
[19:27]But I'm, you know, nothing on the level of the,
[19:31]the books that I've written, you know,
[19:33]where I've never been in a survival,
[19:35]like a dire emergency survival situation like that.
[19:38]But sometimes it takes though these extremes
[19:42]right to get us out of something
[19:44]that we're struggling with ourselves in a way, right?
[19:46]Like most of us will never have to face things.
[19:49]I mean, you know, not good here,
[19:51]but most of us will never know what it's like
[19:53]to have to find our own food in an ice block or whatever.
[19:59]But there are certainly.
[20:00]challenges we face every day where it's hard to get through
[20:03]or we're not sure how.
[20:04]And I think looking to situations,
[20:08]I feel like I'm drawn to memoirs where people get through
[20:11]all these hard things like abuse or addiction
[20:14]or whatever, I'm drawn to those stories
[20:16]because it inspires me in a way
[20:18]because whatever I'm going through,
[20:20]I'm like, well, I'm not going through that,
[20:21]but look at that, that was really extreme
[20:24]and they got through it.
[20:25]So that's helping me in whatever silly thing
[20:27]I have to deal with, which doesn't feel silly to me,
[20:29]but you know what I mean.
[20:31]Right.
[20:32]Well, I guess I've been drawn to a number of these stories
[20:35]saying, my ghost soldiers was what you say
[20:38]you read a long time ago, was about the baton death march,
[20:42]which is one of the worst chapters
[20:44]in American military history, the surrender at baton
[20:49]and the death march leading to these prison war camps
[20:52]that were squalid and horrible
[20:55]and run by the Japanese and how these men survived
[20:59]all of that only to face what seemed to be
[21:03]an imminent execution by the Japanese.
[21:06]And so the Americans found out about this
[21:08]and sent the US Army Rangers in to try to rescue
[21:12]the last survivors of the death march.
[21:14]I guess that theme is there in that book as well.
[21:17]So maybe it's looking back over,
[21:22]I've done now six of these,
[21:24]that theme is present in almost all of the books
[21:28]that I've written, so different versions,
[21:30]different iterations of it, but yeah.
[21:32]You can just take this back to therapy this week
[21:34]and see what you can make in.
[21:36]I'm kidding, I was looking though on your website before
[21:39]and to your point about the baton death march.
[21:42]And I mean, I just sat here like staring at the men
[21:45]who were so emaciated, the prisoner.
[21:48]I mean, it's hard to even imagine like that level
[21:53]of suffering and just staring at what becomes
[21:56]of the grown man's body, you know,
[21:58]it's like similar to Holocaust pictures.
[22:00]And you know, there's just this something gruesome
[22:02]and you can't take your eyes off it
[22:04]as you try to wrap your brain around it,
[22:06]but it's the same.
[22:08]Well, and you know, the other joy,
[22:11]the real joy of doing that book
[22:13]and some of these other books that I've done
[22:15]is getting to meet these guys, you know,
[22:17]and into their lives as they're looking back
[22:20]and trying to ask again these same questions.
[22:23]How did I get through that?
[22:24]Why did I survive and so many of my comrades didn't?
[22:28]And you know, the grace and the stoicism
[22:31]that most of them had, you know,
[22:33]I'll take that with me for the rest of my life.
[22:35]You know, unfortunately, most of them have passed on
[22:37]almost, I'm sure all of them have at this point,
[22:40]but that was one of the greatest experiences
[22:42]of my writing career was getting to know these,
[22:46]I call themselves the battling bastards of baton.
[22:49]And you know, these are tough, these are tough dudes.
[22:52]It's one thing for you to resuscitate
[22:58]so many of these law stories or highlight well-known ones
[23:01]and from a historian's perspective,
[23:04]but it's another to then be able to write them
[23:06]in such a vivid captivating sort of propulsive way
[23:10]as if we don't know the ending of these things
[23:12]where you sometimes you just know the ending already.
[23:14]So how did you get into that part of writing?
[23:17]Like how did you hone that skill?
[23:19]Does it practice?
[23:20]Like, did you know you wanted to write?
[23:23]Did you know more?
[23:24]You just wanted to tell the stories and writing came after?
[23:26]Like, how did writing itself fit into your career trajectory
[23:30]and make you into the software?
[23:31]Yeah.
[23:32]Well, you know, I guess academic history
[23:36]has often quite well-deserved reputation
[23:39]for being deadly dull.
[23:42]You know, chloroform and print, you know,
[23:43]I'll put you to sleep real quick.
[23:45]Most academic history, most, I went to Yale.
[23:49]I was a history major.
[23:54]And I don't regret it.
[23:56]It was some of the greatest, you know,
[23:59]that was one of the great history departments
[24:01]in the country.
[24:01]But I don't really remember like the word pleasure
[24:08]being often ascribed to the reading of history,
[24:12]the writing of history, the kind of history
[24:15]that we were taught to, in our thesis papers
[24:19]or, you know, to write, it was kind of more legalistic writing.
[24:22]It was like, come up with an argument, come up with a thesis
[24:26]and then summon your data to prove your thesis
[24:31]and build your argument towards a summation
[24:34]that really proves that your thesis was absolutely correct.
[24:37]And then you might even go in personally
[24:39]and defend your thesis and in front of your professors.
[24:42]And, you know, that's kind of a legalistic.
[24:45]I mean, it's almost like a lot,
[24:46]but lawyers took over the history departments
[24:48]of America a long time ago,
[24:50]forgetting that there's all these other kinds of writing,
[24:52]the other ways of telling history
[24:55]that should be at least equally valid, you know,
[24:58]narrative being the one that I seized on, I guess.
[25:02]You know, like, history can be really interesting
[25:07]to read if it's, if someone pays attention
[25:11]to the way it's written.
[25:13]And not just the, you know, do you have the data,
[25:16]do you have the facts, do you have the argument,
[25:18]do you have the provocative thesis?
[25:20]But just, you know, like all the qualities
[25:22]that make for a good novel or a good screenplay
[25:26]or a good piece of drama on stage, you know,
[25:29]some of those kinds of qualities, you know,
[25:31]apply them to the raw stuff of history
[25:34]and then you end up with, you know,
[25:36]you end up with a beautiful narrative
[25:37]that reads sometimes at its best like a novel,
[25:41]but happens to be true.
[25:43]And so I, you know, weirdly,
[25:44]I think that, so I grew up in Memphis
[25:48]and the first writer that I ever met
[25:51]was a narrative historian and he was one of the best.
[25:55]He was, he was this Civil War historian named Shelby Foot
[26:01]who wrote this massive trilogy of the Civil War
[26:04]and was the kind of the star on the Ken Burns
[26:07]documentary, you know, on the Civil War,
[26:10]with the beard and the pipe and the amazing Delta accent
[26:14]and his son, Huggie and I were friends and we were-
[26:18]Oh, I know him.
[26:19]You know Huggie?
[26:20]Yeah, I went to dinner.
[26:22]I know him.
[26:24]I went to dinner at my friendly carpenter
[26:26]and Elliot Ackerman's house and he was there.
[26:28]Yeah, yeah, well, we're good friends
[26:31]and we were in a band together and-
[26:33]Oh my gosh, stop too funny.
[26:35]So I tried to do everything we could to prevent his father.
[26:40]Shelby from actually writing the trilogy
[26:44]of the Civil War by cranking up the Hendrix
[26:47]and the paint floor, you know, but anyway,
[26:50]but I got to know Shelby in high school
[26:53]and then after college did a series of interviews with him.
[26:57]And, you know, I think he was enormously influential
[27:00]in terms of finding what this sort of subgenre is,
[27:04]you know, of narrative history where, you know,
[27:06]you don't have footnotes.
[27:08]You don't necessarily have an argument or the thesis.
[27:11]I don't, I think you'd be hard pressed to figure out
[27:14]what Shelby foot's thesis was of the 3000 page trilogy.
[27:20]Other than he wanted people to turn pages,
[27:22]he wanted people to, it was the interested in character,
[27:26]primarily character development.
[27:28]He was interested in plot and he was interested in
[27:30]like things like foreshadowing and, you know,
[27:34]highlighting an event that happened, you know, in 1861.
[27:39]And then somehow building in a crescendo
[27:42]towards things that happen at sort of say epimatics.
[27:46]And so, you know, these are things that were kind of rubbed off
[27:51]on me.
[27:52]It's like, oh, the stuff of history can be, you know,
[27:54]can be literature, at least can aspire to be literature.
[27:57]And I don't know that I'm not saying I've always succeeded
[28:00]at that, but I've always aspired to that.
[28:02]And so I think that's where it came from.
[28:05]Combination of, yeah, I mean, Yale was, oh my gosh,
[28:08]some of the greatest lecturers, some of the greatest characters
[28:12]on who in that history department.
[28:15]But I didn't love, gosh, I hated history papers.
[28:19]I hated that argumentative style.
[28:22]I hated expository writing.
[28:24]I guess I was, I spent all my time in college actually working
[28:27]on campus newspaper, like the Yale Daily News
[28:31]and a magazine called The New Journal, which I was the editor of.
[28:35]So I guess, you know, I was always straddling the fence
[28:37]between, you know, I had a journalist or am I historian?
[28:41]And I think even today, I think of myself as a journalist
[28:46]who writes about history, as opposed to just a historian,
[28:50]which I know a lot of people say, you know,
[28:52]you can't even call yourself a historian
[28:54]unless you have a PhD in history.
[28:56]And I don't buy that, but there is that school of thought.
[28:59]So I don't talk, I don't talk to those guys.
[29:03]And then quickly, what are you working on now?
[29:06]Are you on, at work on another adventure?
[29:09]Yeah, well, my most recent book actually is, was a book
[29:14]about a battle in the Korean war called The Chosen Reservoir.
[29:17]And that came out, it actually came out two years ago
[29:20]just before COVID.
[29:21]I timed it just right, I think.
[29:23]But now I'm working on a book about the third voyage,
[29:27]of the final voyage of Captain Cook, James Cook,
[29:31]not Captain Hook, that was the pirate,
[29:34]and not Captain Crunch, who, one of my favorite captains,
[29:39]but Captain Cook, who, in his third voyage,
[29:43]was given this assignment to try to figure out, you know,
[29:46]it's taken me right back to where the Jeanette story
[29:48]took place, which is, you know, Alaska and Siberia.
[29:52]He was trying to get up and over Alaska or through Alaska
[29:57]and find the Northwest Passage.
[29:59]And of course, he didn't.
[30:00]find it. All he found was ice and he nearly got caught in the ice twice. But along the way,
[30:05]he stumbled upon this island called Hawaii that was not on any maps. And so he was the first European
[30:12]discover of Hawaii. And so when the ice nearly trapped him in Alaska, he decided, I got to go back
[30:20]south and winter somewhere warm. Why don't we go back to that glovely place Hawaii? And he did,
[30:27]and of course, he was murdered in Hawaii by the Native Hawaiians. And so it's another sprawling
[30:34]adventure story, I guess, with a pretty resounding and controversial ending. It's been weird
[30:40]working on this book because Captain Cook, like so many white dude explorer types from the colonial
[30:47]era, is being canceled all over the world. And you statues are coming down or being vandalized,
[30:55]you know, he's kind of persona non-grata in New Zealand now in Australia and all over Polynesia,
[31:03]of course, somewhat for some somewhat understandable reasons, although Captain Cook was really
[31:10]an explorer. He was an explorer and a relatively enlightened explorer and one of the greatest navigators
[31:17]of all time. But exploration is generally viewed as the first wave of colonialism.
[31:24]He's placed his first and put him on the map, which he did. And then what came after Cook
[31:30]is a whole nother story of, you know. But anyway, so I'm working on this thing. I've got a
[31:38]zillion books here behind me. I've been reading and traveling. This unfortunately is a project
[31:43]that has required a lot of hardship travel to places like Tahiti, all over France,
[31:50]sorry for you. I hope that I, New Zealand, someone's got to do it. I've been between lockdowns and so
[32:00]forth. I've been having some pretty interesting trips in the wake of Captain Cook.
[32:05]Well, I can just see that whole trailer on Captain Cook. Anyway, my seven-year-old son could make
[32:12]you a really fun trailer for that if you want to. Well, I'm sure that your panel at the Santa Fe
[32:17]literary festival with John Grisham will be amazing. And that sounds like a totally unique
[32:22]opportunity. So, if any listeners are going to be in Santa Fe March 20th to 23rd, when is your
[32:28]actual panel? Do you know? May may may. Oh my gosh. May. Yeah, I can't speak. May 20th to 23rd.
[32:36]Anyway, I have to thank you so much. This was really fun. Thanks for chatting with me.
[32:41]Take care. Okay. Bye-bye. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read
[32:48]Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zebioans and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[32:54]Also, sign up for my newsletter at zebioans.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of
[32:59]authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for the
[33:04]Sound Editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and