The Kennedy family in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Rosemary Kennedy is seated on the far right. / Photo © 1931 Richard Sears via Wikimedia Commons.

In the news this week, Rosemary Kennedy’s life finally surfaces, Phil Knight and Maynard James Keenan each pen a memoir, and Aaron Sorkin has a new project.

Out today, is a new book that tells the story of a little-known Kennedy: JFK’s sister Rosemary. Kate Clifford Larson’s Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter traces Rosemary’s life leading up to her lobotomy at age twenty-three, secretly arranged for by her politically ambitious father, and subsequent institutionalization. Considered intellectually disabled (she read at a fourth-grade reading level), Rosemary was beautiful, socially adept, and vibrant until the operation. Larson carefully reconstructs her life before and after through ample family correspondence, including mother Rose Kennedy’s diaries, school and doctors’ letters, and exclusive family interviews. [via Startribune.com] 

Phil Knight, chairman and founder of sportswear design giant Nike, will write his memoir with a release date of spring 2016. Yet to be titled, Knight’s story will cover his childhood as the son of a newspaper publisher and Nike’s first days, when Knight sold his waffle-soled running shoes to early aficionados from his green Plymouth Valiant, up through his current days as Forbes’s seventeenth richest person in the United States. Overseas factories will figure in too, as will a portrait of Nike as a startup: “Those from the early days at Nike were part of, and contributed to, an industry going through a revolution, and a world changing so dramatically, it is not likely a story like this will ever be told again,” said Knight. [via ABC News] 

While Aaron Sorkin considers whether to take on the Lucille Ball biopic we’re all waiting for, he will be working on an adaptation of Molly’s Game, Molly Bloom’s memoir of her life as skier-turned-mogul-turned high-stakes-poker-hostess who organized games for the likes of Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio — until the IRS began to take notice. No word yet on title or casting, but Mark Gordon of the Mark Gordon Company which optioned the title, will personally produce the film. [via CinemaBlend.com] 

Frontman of multi-platinum alt-metal bands Tool and Perfect Circle, Maynard James Keenan, is at last crafting a longer work. His autobiography, to be co-written with Sarah Jensen, is forthcoming from Backbeat Books, due out next fall. In the meantime, the music goes on, too: His side project, Puscifer, will release a new album this month, and both Puscifer and Tool will make appearances at  the Monster Mash festival in Phoenix. [via Loudwire.com] 

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David Jaher/Photo © Lara Rose

David Jaher received a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA in Film Production from New York University. At NYU, he was the recipient of the WTC Johnson Fellowship for directing. Jaher has been a screenwriter and a professional astrologer. A New York native and resident, The Witch of Lime Street is his first book. For Biographile’s Under the Influence series, in which authors reflect on their literary influences, David Jaher reveals his own unknowing literary mentor.

As a child, I first became aware of Houdini via a movie on television where he dies onstage attempting to escape from a water-filled glass tank. In fact, Houdini died in a hospital bed, the victim of an assault by an unstable McGill underclassmen who studied religion and boxing. Nevertheless, the movie presented a striking image that helped sustain the Houdini legend. The second time I can remember encountering Houdini, and this time more vividly, was when, as a teenager, I read E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Though Houdini is only a peripheral character in the book, to my mind his was the most alluring of Doctorow’s real-life portraits. Once again this wasn’t really the Houdini of historical record – in terms of the way he spoke, and the chronology of his life. But what Doctorow did, I later realized, was expand on something that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attempted in his long essay, Houdini the Enigma: present Houdini’s escapes in a panoramic montage that captured his flamboyance and relentless energy.

At that time, and later – during college and graduate school – I never had any intention of becoming an author. I never took a creative writing class or had any kind of writing mentor. But when I was in graduate film school I did have a chance to meet E.L. Doctorow. By then I had read another of his novels, Loon Lake, which I thought was as imaginative as Ragtime,  and yet unconventional enough that perhaps, I hoped, the film rights might be available.  I showed up at Professor Doctorow’s office at NYU one day and asked if we could talk. He quickly realized, of course, that I did not have the resources or connections to obtain the film rights to Loon Lake, which was already optioned, but he was generous in spending time and discussing books and movies with me. He was responsive, a great listener, and spoke to you without didacticism or any hint that he was one of the country’s greatest living writers. I remember thinking that if I had ever studied writing, he would have been an ideal mentor.

After graduating from film school with a degree in production, I began working on a screenplay featuring Houdini that would become the basis for a nonfiction book – when I wound up working with an agent who thought it was great literary material. Before writing that book, The Witch of Lime Street, I reread Ragtime for what must have been the third or fourth time. Although it does not take place during the same era, it manages to capture the spirit and rhythms of its period through every line that Doctorow wrote. Ragtime is like a time capsule and that was what I aspired to for my own book. I was particularly drawn to the way Doctorow, heavily influenced by John Dos Passos, presents various vignettes of historical characters that captured the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century. When I finally completed a reviewable draft of The Witch of Lime Street, the first person I wanted to approach for a book jacket blurb was Doctorow. I obtained his home address (he was now retired from NYU) and my editor sent out a galley to him. But he was very sick by then and on the day I turned in the final revisions on my book, we learned that he had died. I suppose what I am trying to get across is that often the best literary mentors are those who have never read your work, though you, repeatedly, have read theirs.

Read more from authors on influence here.

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Vladimir Putin/Photo © Pete Souza/WhiteHouse.gov

Steven Lee Meyers opens The New Tsar, his new biography of Vladimir Putin, with several pages describing thirty-year-old Putin using his wits and mettle to survive a hostile climate. But the scene is not the post-Communist Russia of the 1980s. It is Leningrad, 1941, and the Putin in question is not the man who would go on to rule Russia in the post-Perestroika twenty-first century but his father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin. As Meyers makes clear, and as every Russian knows, in order to make sense of the Russia we know today, one must begin with the past.

Just as Putin grew up hearing stories about his father’s heroism in the Great Patriotic War — a narrative, Meyers writes, “reshaped by time and memory, one that might have been apocryphal in places and was certainly far from complete” — Putin’s own father undoubtedly grew up hearing his father’s stories of life before the Revolution, and so on, reaching back to the days of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. To get a sense of the long chain of Russian rulers who preceded Putin and influenced both his life and his country, check out the following biographies and memoirs.

Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie She was born into a German family of minor nobility in 1730, but from the start, the girl who was called Sophia was determined to change her fate. She started by changing her name, to Catherine, when she traveled to Russia at the age of fourteen, intent on marrying a prince. She got her wish, and went on to rule Russia for more than three decades, a period that included the tumult of the French Revolution. As Massie writes, Catherine was truly ahead of her time, and helped prepare the country for the challenges and opportunities of modernity.

Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power during the Russian Revolution, John Reed, a poet and journalist from America, was there. A friend of Lenin’s and passionate advocate of revolutionary socialism, Reed wrote a firsthand account of the events of November 1917, giving both historical perspective and man-on-the-scene descriptions of the exhilaration and chaos of one regime toppling as another came to power. Both an artifact of a time of incredible optimism and also a portrait of Lenin as a man and a leader, Reed’s book is a valuable time capsule of Russia at the start of the post-Imperialist era.

Stalin by Stephen Kotkin Millions died as the result of Stalin’s indomitable will, and millions more saw their lives and families destroyed. But the man behind this sweeping, deadly power was born in a position of utter powerlessness. The son of a poor cobbler, Joseph Stalin trained to be a seminarian before he got swept up in the fervor of the Russian Revolution. Following Lenin’s death, he shrewdly consolidated power to take over leadership of the Soviet Union, and imposed harsh policies of collectivization and industrialization, sending all critics and adversaries to the Gulag. As Kotkin writes in this first volume of his biography, Stalin’s humble beginnings only set the stage for his thirst for total domination, making the breadth of his reach at the height of his power all the more extraordinary.

Khrushchev by William Taubman Stalin’s successor was a complicated man and Russia still struggles to make sense of his legacy, Taubman writes in the first full-length American biography of the Russian leader. Khrushchev supported Stalin’s brutal regime for twenty years and defended his murderous tactics. But he also publicly denounced the dictator’s crimes, and brought to light many secrets of his reign of terror. As a leader himself, Khrushchev reformed Communism, and brought the world to the edge of annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Gorbachev: On My Country and the World by Mikhail Gorbachev As the last leader of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev presided over the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet regime in Eastern Europe, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, and the introduction of democratic process. But the road to democracy was hardly smooth, and the country suffered food shortages, ethnic violence, and increased organized crime. In this memoir, the former leader reflects on his tenure and the problems facing modern Russia and the world in general, which now lie in the hands of leaders like Putin.

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Salman Rushdie/Photo courtesy of the author

Salman Rushdie is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Satanic Verses, Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), and more. His most recent novel is Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature. For Biographile’s Under the Influence series, in which authors reflect on their literary influences, we turned to Rushdie’s writings on the nature of influence in the life of a writer.

The Australian novelist and poet David Malouf tells us that “the real enemy of writing is talk.” He warns particularly of the dangers of speaking about work in progress. When writing, one is best advised to keep one’s mouth shut, so that the words flow out, instead, through one’s fingers. One builds a dam across the river of words in order to create the hydroelectricity of literature. I propose, therefore, to speak not of my writing but rather of my reading, and in particular of the many ways in which my experience of Italian literature (and, I must add, Italian cinema) has shaped my thoughts about how and what to write. That is, I want to talk about influence.

“Influence.” The word itself suggests something fluid, something “flowing in.” This feels right, if only because I have always envisaged the world of the imagination not so much as a continent as an ocean. Afloat and terrifyingly free upon these boundless seas, the writer attempts, with his bare hands, the magical task of metamorphosis. Like the figure in the fairy tale who must spin straw into gold, the writer must find the trick of weaving the waters together until they become land: until, all of a sudden, there is solidity where once there was only flow, shape where there was formlessness; there is ground beneath his feet. (And if he fails, of course, he drowns. The fable is the most unforgiving of literary forms.)

The young writer, perhaps uncertain, perhaps ambitious, probably both at once, casts around for help; and sees, within the flow of the ocean, certain sinuous thicknesses, like ropes, the work of earlier weavers, of sorcerers who swam this way before him. Yes, he can use these “in-flowings,” he can grasp them and wind his own work around them. He knows, now, that he will survive. Eagerly, he begins.

One of the most remarkable characteristics of literary influence, of these useful streams of other people’s consciousness, is that they can flow toward the writer from almost anywhere. Often they travel long distances to reach the one who can use them. In South America, I was impressed by the familiarity of Latin American writers with the work of the Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The editor Victoria Ocampo, who met and admired Tagore, had arranged for his work to be well translated and widely published throughout her own continent, and as a result the influence of Tagore is perhaps greater there than in his own homeland, where the translations from Bengali into the many other tongues of India are often of poor quality, and the great man’s genius must be taken on trust.

Another example is that of William Faulkner. This great American writer is little read in the United States these days; certainly there are few contemporary American writers who claim him as an influence or teacher. I once asked another fine writer of the American South, Eudora Welty, if Faulkner had been a help or a hindrance to her. “Neither one,” she replied. “It’s like knowing there’s a great mountain in the neighborhood. It’s good to know it’s there, but it doesn’t help you to do your work.” Outside the United States, however – in India, in Africa, and again in Latin America – Faulkner is the American writer most praised by local writers as an inspiration, an enabler, an opener of doors.

From this transcultural, translingual capacity of influence we can deduce something about the nature of literature: that (if I may briefly abandon my watery metaphor) books can grow as easily from spores borne on the air as from their makers’ particular and local roots. That there are international families of words as well as the more familiar clans of earth and blood. Sometimes – as in the case of the influence of James Joyce on the work of Samuel Beckett, and the subsequent and equal influence of Beckett on the work of Harold Pinter – the sense of dynasty, of a torch handed on down the generations, is very clear and very strong. In other cases the familial links are less obvious but no less powerful for that.

When I first read the novels of Jane Austen, books out of a country and a time far removed from my own upbringing in metropolitan, mid-twentieth-century Bombay, the thing that struck me about her heroines was how Indian, how contemporary, they seemed. Those bright, willful, sharp-tongued women, brimming with potential but doomed by the narrow convention to an interminable Huis-clos of ballroom dancing and husband hunting, were women whose counterparts could be found throughout the Indian bourgeoisie. The influence of Austen on Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is plain to see.

Charles Dickens, too, struck me from the first as a quintessentially Indian novelist. Dickensian London, that stenchy, rotting city full of sly, conniving shysters, that city in which goodness was under constant assault by duplicity, malice, and greed, seemed to me to hold up the mirror to the pullulating cities of India, with their preening elites living the high life in gleaming skyscrapers while the great majority of their compatriots battled to survive in the hurly-burly of the streets below. In my earlier novels I tried to draw on the genius of Dickens. I was particularly taken with what struck me as his real innovation: namely, his unique combination of naturalistic backgrounds and surreal foregrounds. In Dickens, the details of place and social mores are skewered by a pitiless realism, a naturalistic exactitude that has never been bettered. Upon this realistic canvas he places his outsize characters, in whom we have no choice but to believe because we cannot fail to believe in the world they live in. So I tried, in my novel Midnight’s Children, to set against a scrupulously observed social and historical background – against, that is, the canvas of a “real” India – my “unrealist” notion of children born at the midnight moment of India’s independence, and endowed with magical powers by the coincidence, children who were in some way the embodiment of both the hopes and the flaws of that revolution.

Within the authoritative framework of his realism, Dickens can also make us believe in the perfectly Surrealist notion of a government department, the Circumlocution Office, dedicated to making nothing happen; or in the perfectly Absurdist, Ionesco-like case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, a case whose nature it is never to reach a conclusion; or in the “magical realist” image of the dust-heaps in Our Mutual Friend – the physical symbols of a society living in the shadow of its own excrement, which must, incidentally, also have been an influence on a recent American masterpiece, which takes the waste products of America as its central metaphor, Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

If influence is omnipresent in literature, it is also, one should emphasize, always secondary in any work of quality. When it is too crude, too obvious, the results can be risible. I was once sent, by an aspiring writer, a short story that began, “One morning Mrs. K. awoke to find herself metamorphosed into a front-loading washing machine.” One can only imagine how Kafka would have reacted to so inept – so detergent – an act of homage.

Perhaps because so much second-rate writing is derivative – and because so much writing is at best second-rate – the idea of influence has become a kind of accusation, a way of denigrating a writer’s work. The frontier between influence and imitation, even between influence and plagiarism, has commenced of late to be somewhat blurred. Two years ago, the distinguished British writer Graham Swift was accused by an obscure Australian academic of something odorously close to plagiarism in his Booker Prize-winning novel Last Orders: the “substantial borrowing” of the multi-voiced narrative structure of his novel from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The British press whipped this accusation up into a sort of scandal, and now Swift was accused of literary “plundering,” and those who defended him were sneered at for their “lofty indulgence” toward him. All this in spite of, or perhaps because of, Swift’s ready concession that he had been influenced by Faulkner, and in spite, too, of the awkward fact that the structures of the two books aren’t really so very alike, although some echoes are apparent. In the end such simple verities ensured that the scandal fizzled out, but not before Swift had been given a media roasting.

Interesting, then, that when Faulkner published As I Lay Dying, he himself had been accused of borrowing its structure from an earlier novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. His retort is the best possible answer that could be given: that when he was in the throes of composing what he modestly called his tour de force, he took whatever he needed from wherever he could find it, and knew of no writer who would not find such borrowing to be completely justified.

In my novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a young boy actually travels to the ocean of imagination, which is described to him by his guide:

He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each colored strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that … the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

By using what is old, and adding to it some new thing of our own, we make what is new. In The Satanic Verses I tried to answer the question, how does newness enter the world? Influence, the flowing of the old into the new, is one part of the answer.

In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino describes the fabulous city of Octavia, suspended between two mountains in something like a spider’s web. If influence is the spider’s web in which we hang our work, then the work is like Octavia itself, that glittering jewel of a dream city, hanging in the filaments of the web, for as long as they are able to bear its weight.

“Influence” from Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie, published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, copyright © 2002 by Salman Rushdie. Used by permission.

Read more from authors on influence here.

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Lewis Carroll in 1863 / Photo by Oscar G. Rejlander

If you’re stirred by these literary words, be sure to amble down our archive of inspiring author quotes.

This week in history we mark a lesser-known holiday: National Mad Hatter Day, held annually on October 6.

Though Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass have been cultural touchstones over the course of the last century and a half, relatively few folks know much of their quirky, eclectic creator, Lewis Carroll.

To start with, Lewis Carroll wasn’t the writer’s real name. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, and photographer, and held a post as an Anglican deacon. If you’re having trouble picturing the king of literary nonsense (an actual genre) embroiled in math or being ordained, you likely aren’t alone. Yet, in a certain fashion this mishmash of strengths and pursuits makes sense: Who but someone with the highest grasp of logic could bend it (and break it) so delightfully? Who better to turn the concept of concrete reality on its head than a person deeply committed to analyzing what precisely makes up that reality?

In this fashion, the creators of National Mad Hatter Day chose this seemingly arbitrary date for their holiday with distinct intent: The slip of paper sticking out of The Hatter’s top hat says “In This Style 10/6.” Although that text isn’t meant to represent a date (it is actually a price tag listing the cost of the hat in pre-decimal British currency), it does seem fitting that, to celebrate Carroll’s work, we’ve flipped the meaning of his words.

So in honor of Carroll and his creation, The Hatter, we’ve pulled together some of the writer’s most logically trying quotes and thoughts.

1. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” (The Hatter’s Unsolvable Riddle, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865)

2. “If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics – it does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, so long as there is enough of them.” (Three Years in a Curatorship, By One Whom It Has Tried, 1886)

3. “And as to being in a fright,/ Allow me to remark/ That Ghosts have just as good a right/ In every way, to fear the light,/ As Men to fear the dark.” (Phantasmagoria, 1869)

4. “Now that’s a thing I WILL NOT STAND,/ And so I tell you flat.” (Phantasmagoria, 1869)

5. “As you have invited me, I cannot come, for I have made a rule to decline all invitations; but I will come the next day.” (Qtd “Lewis Carroll,” Strand Magazine, 1898)

6. “I suppose every child has a world of his own – and every man, too, for the matter of that. I wonder if that’s the cause for all the misunderstanding there is in Life?” (Sylvie and Bruno, 1889)

7. “Here is a golden Rule to begin with. Write legibly. The average temper of the human race would be perceptibly sweetened, if everybody obeyed this Rule! A great deal of the bad writing in the world comes simply from writing too quickly.” (Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing, 1890)

8. “Sentence first, verdict afterwards.” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865)

9. “So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865)

10. “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are!” (Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1871)

11. “You may call it nonsense if you like,” she said, “but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!” (Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1871)

12. “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” (Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1871)

13. “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” (Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1871)

The post Mad as a Hatter: 13 Weirdly Wise Words from the Works of Lewis Carroll appeared first on Biographile.

Harry Turtledove/Photo © M.C. Valada

Harry Turtledove is the award-winning author of dozens of books, including The Man with the Iron Heart, The Big Switch, In the Balance, and Aftershocks. His latest book is Bombs Away. He is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos and have three daughters and one granddaughter. In the spirit of Biographile’s Under the Influence series, in which authors reflect on their literary influences, our peers at AuthorCuts captured Turtledove talking about the one book to which Harry Turtledove owes, well, everything – all in the space of a minute.

We like to talk to authors about influence, inspiration, habits, motivation, and all things that play into their lives as writers. Rarely, though, does an author attribute so many parts of their lives to one book. In a quick minute, Harry Turtledove attributes L. Sprague de Camp’s 1939 novel, Lest Darkness Fall, as the impetus behind his doctorate, marriage, bibliography, and children. Watch below.

Read more from authors on influence here.

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Each month, Biographile combs through the upcoming releases in biography and memoir across publishers to provide a look at the most exciting forthcoming titles of that month. October is keeping us rolling in all that is rock with the likes of Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, and Carrie Brownstein, plus some fun takes on history you thought you knew, big celebrities sharing their inner struggles, and a harsh truth from Ted Koppel. From now to Halloween, don’t miss out on this month’s best reading.

M Train by Patti Smith (10/6) On the heels of her National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, Patti Smith is back this month with a new book that has everyone buzzing. Filled with her signature photographs and lyrical writing, Smith reflects on her adulthood as an artist and creator. Ditching linear narrative from the start, Smith offers readers her thoughts on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee with a grace and cohesion only she could achieve. With rave reviews across the country already rolling in, M Train is going to be a major book of the season.

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello (10/13) Even in a sea of powerful music memoirs and autobiographies (see above and below!), Elvis Costello’s Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink stands out. Not only does he give readers glimpses into his past and provide some healthy perspective on his own rise to fame, but alongside the release of this tome, Costello is putting out a curated collection of his music called “Unfaithful Music & Soundtrack Album.” Made up of thirty-eight songs, including oldies from his catalog and a handful of new tracks, the album is intended to highlight the themes and emotions presented in the book. Going deep inside the music is elevated to a whole new level in Costello’s hands.

My Journey by Donna Karan (10/13) Donna Karan’s memoir will be a must-have for all the fashionistas out there, but like Karan herself, there’s more to this story than meets the eye. Yes, her life story is peppered with the rich and glamorous, but it’s also one that’s poignantly human and surprisingly relatable. As a well-known designer and the founder of brands such as DKNY, Karan might seem untouchable and above it all, but her struggles to make sense of grief and chaos will strike a chord with anyone in search of answers and clarity, and her determination to go on in the face of loss are sure to inspire even the hardest hearts.

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell (10/20) For many, just seeing that Sarah Vowell has a new book out will be exciting news. For readers new to Vowell’s work, be warned: This isn’t your grandfather’s history. As ever, Vowell delights in peeling back the dry layers of academic discourse and exposing the idealists and heroes of yesteryear for what they were: totally human. In her wholly unique style, she takes readers through the noble triumphs of the Revolutionary era — and all of the petty bickering and mind-numbing bureaucracy it took to reach them. In this book, she focuses on General Lafayette’s years in Washington’s army, detailing how he came to fight in the American Revolution and how he contributed to the establishment of our nation. Don’t miss out on this incredibly enjoyable way to learn about American history.

Becoming Nicole by Amy Ellis Nutt (10/20) From Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter, Amy Ellis Nutt, comes a story of ever-increasing relevance. When a young couple, Wayne and Kelly Maines, adopted identical twin boys, they had no idea the challenges that were in store for their new family. As their adopted son Wyatt grew, so too did his insistence that he was actually female. Amy Ellis Nutt follows a child’s struggle to balance identity and acceptance, the family’s endeavors to overcome long-held views about gender, and their growth as a family unit around Wyatt as he becomes Nicole.

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein (10/27) Every superhero has an origin story. As it happens, that’s also true of rock icons. In Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, the guitarist and vocalist of the band Sleater-Kinney sheds some light on hers. As a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Brownstein had little idea that her location and tumultuous family life would coincide perfectly to enable her to flourish as an artist. Now her memoir, looking back on those formative years with the band, offers the kind of intimacy and insight fans and enthusiasts will eagerly devour.

Lights Out by Ted Koppel (10/27) In this chilling report, Ted Koppel sheds some much needed light on an overlooked hole in our national security. While we are busy thinking of ways to prevent violent, physical attacks, one weak point remains unguarded. Three electric power grids are responsible for the majority of power generated throughout the country, and we’re one well-designed attack away from any one of those grids going dark — for months. And yet, despite this possibility and the fact that both China and Russia have capabilities to penetrate this grid, there is no recovery plan in place should something happen. In this impressive bit of investigative journalism, Koppel asks a big question with urgency and authority: Will ordinary civilians be able to survive this kind of disaster?

Wildflower by Drew Barrymore (10/27) In this collection of personal stories, award-winning actress Drew Barrymore shares glimpses of her past with humor and warmth. As it’s the first book the actress has written about herself since the age of fourteen, she has a lot to say. From her early independence, to getting stranded at a gas station in the middle of the country, to coping with her father’s death, Barrymore shares the lessons and exploits that made her the person she is today.

Brand Luther by Andrew Pettegree (10/27) When Martin Luther posted his famous ninety-five theses in 1517, it did not spark the Protestant Reformation overnight. Despite the frequent oversimplification of the relationship of these two events, there’s much more to the story of Luther’s protests than his message. Pettegree argues that it all comes back to Luther’s brand. As an early adopter of the printing press, Luther partnered with artist and businessman Lucas Cranach to create a distinctive package for his message: the pamphlet. This unique way of reaching out to the masses sparked almost as much discussion as the content itself. And though pamphlets are a far-cry from the technology we enjoy today, living in the age of persistent technological advances and more persistent branding, readers will easily recognize parallels to Luther’s success in our own world.

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Tamara Ellis Smith/Photo courtesy of the author

Tamara Ellis Smith earned her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Richmond, Vermont, with her family. Another Kind of Hurricane is her first novel. For Biographile’s Under the Influence series, in which authors reflect on their literary influences, Tamara ponders longing and how it can overtake us until we set it aside.

In April 2013, two of my running partners and I went to Jericho Research Forest. This is a huge forest managed by the University of Vermont. It has dozens of trails that weave in and out of designated research areas, up mountains and along streams. I lived right on its edge when I first moved back to Vermont in 1999 and spent hundreds of hours inside it.

“I know these trails like the back of my hand,” I told my friends as we set out for our Sunday run.

But I hadn’t been in the forest in a long time, and it had changed. New trails had been cut. Others had overgrown. And I got us lost. Very lost. We ended up – after many hours bushwhacking in various directions – on a road far from where we had started. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. All I needed to do was make a quick phone call to my husband, and he would be there to drive us back to my car. But as we pushed our way through the last tangle of tree branches, I lost it. I mean lost it. Tears streamed down my face. I could barely breathe. My body shook. My voice was hiccupy and high as I apologized to my friends.

“I’m sorry,” I wailed. “I thought I knew where I was–”

An overreaction to be sure.

Except … at that time, I was two years into the process of adopting a child (who would become the son we now have), and I was five years into the process of writing, revising, and trying to sell a novel (which would become Another Kind of Hurricane).

These two processes – adopting my son and selling my novel – were the things I longed for most in my whole life. I had never worked so hard for anything, ever. And I had never experienced such a tough journey. A bunch of steps forward, then one back, being forced to let go, then being asked to double down and work hard again. A sense of intense longing had taken up residence inside me – somewhere near my heart, lodged against the curve in my ribs. I felt it in my heartbeat; I felt it when I breathed. My longing was thick like the vines that wind their way around trees. It was practically impenetrable.

I needed to know where I was in the Jericho Research Forest because I felt so deeply lost inside of that longing.

Once my friends helped me settle down, we talked about what was going on for me. And I realized that I had been doing two things with my longing: I was trying to transform it, turning it into jealousy (She got that, but I’m probably entitled to it more than she is, damn it) or denial (I never wanted that, and even if I did, which I didn’t by the way, but even if I did, I certainly don’t want it now). I was also allowing it to consume me (I feel this longing so badly and so deeply that I think, in fact, I AM this longing. Where are my hands and feet and heart and mind? They have been taken over by the body-snatching longing monster.).

But my friends asked me, their arms securely around my shoulders, “What about just letting it be?”

Later that day, one of them came over to my house and gave me this:

Picture of the actual bed of longing my friend Stef made for me.

A bed for my longing. She had made me a bed for my longing. A place to let it be.

And so, with the help of my friends, from that lost run I found something.

Longing is not a bad thing. It might not be the most comfortable feeling in the world (think a slightly too sharp object stuck under your rib), but if it is given a place to call home, longing smooths itself out, and is even kind of sweet-looking as it rests there. Longing is not a bad thing at all. It lets us know what matters in our lives. It points to our dreams. It reminds us that we have hearts and minds, and that they are beating and buzzing all the time. From that moment on – with some bumps along the way, of course – I laid my longing next to me as I filled out yet another government adoption form or rewrote another chapter of my novel.

Another Kind of Hurricane was sold about a year later, on April 3, 2014. Later that day, I got a phone call from our social worker, letting us know that the adoption committee wanted to match us with a child. My book sold on the same day I found out about our son. Two excruciatingly long processes in the soil, sun, and rain – and they flowered at exactly the same time.

The magic of those two journeys being so intertwined is a blog post for another day. But I will say this here: There is an essential quality to my son’s life right now; an authenticity buzzes through him. Maybe this is because he is, in a way, being reborn as he adapts to his new life with my family. And that newborn time is all about essence and core and what-you-see-is-what-you-get, right? And this – this essentialness – is what we strive for in our writing, isn’t it? The transparency and truthfulness of the human spirit that breaks open the hearts (and minds) of our readers. That inspires them – in even the smallest ways – to live fully inside themselves.

Longing is an essential thing too. And in the end, it turns out, it is something to embrace. Like the friends who run with you through the thickest forest. It is a guide, like they are. It is a light.

Picture of Jafeth and me at my book launch on July 15, 2015. Photo taken by Shem Roose/ shemroose.com

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Brian Panowich/Photo © David Kernaghan

Brian Panowich was a touring musician for twelve years before settling in East Georgia with his family. He now works full-time as a firefighter. Bull Mountain is his first novel. For Biographile’s Under the Influence series, in which authors reflect on their literary influences, Panowich shares his revelation about inadvertent inspiration.

A month or so after my novel, Bull Mountain, sold to G. P. Putnam Son’s, I scooped up my wife and took a trip to New York to meet all the key players instrumental to my budding career as a writer.

First was lunch with my agent, Nat Sobel, and his partner, Judith Weber, and then onto an informal sit-down with my editor, Sara Minnich Blackburn. The meeting would also include several members of the publicity and marketing team for Putnam. Sara led me through the hallways and book-covered cubicles of a real New York publisher, and I marveled at the fact that most of the people she introduced me to knew my name. I finally ended up in a small conference room with six wonderful women all excited about being involved in various capacities with my novel.

Now, normally, I can work a room full of women will a little of that good ol’ boy charm I inherited from my father, but in this instance – a serious fish-out-of-water scenario – I was scared to death. After talking about the book for a few minutes, an unassuming fella dressed in business casual and sporting a killer pair of transparent wayfarers came into the room and took a seat. Immediately I felt like I could breathe a little easier now that there was another guy in the room, and one clearly used to being around all these powerful women. My plan was to just watch him, and navigate accordingly.

Once the conversation volleyed his way, he casually introduced himself as Ivan, and asked me if I had ever read The Fortunate Pilgrim by Mario Puzo. I had not. He was surprised to hear that, as he went on to say that my novel reminded him very much of that book as well as Puzo’s legendary masterpiece, The Godfather. He went on to elaborate that it wasn’t just the content of the stories, but that the two of us shared similar writing styles. What do you say to that? Other than, “Thank you. Thank you very much.” It was an incredible compliment and an astute observation, and not far off the mark at all.

Both books, Bull Mountain and The Godfather, are studies on family and the blood ties that can get so tangled that no one involved can ever become truly free of them. Both books also focus deeply on the fathers-and-sons aspect of family. That was the core of my book. Was I influenced by Mario Puzo’s book, or the trio of beloved films based on it when I wrote Bull Mountain? In the beginning, and well through most of the first draft, I would have said no, not at all. My book involved a family that operated outside the rule of law, sure, but my book was about Southern pride and the rarely talked-about part North Georgia played during the government hiccup known as prohibition. My book was about showing how villains are most often the heroes of their own story. My book was about generations of family who weren’t about to just let its youngest and latest son pretend like he wasn’t born to this dynasty of blood and tradition. My book – after reading through a solid second draft – was, yes, more than obviously influenced by The Godfather. Which also happened to be one of my own father’s favorite books and all-time favorite movie.

Fathers and sons, right?

The Burroughs family is vastly different from the Corleones in a lot of ways, with the one major difference being that money is, and never was, the point to their Southern enterprise. That top position was always land – home and kin above all else – but the traditions and the family dynamic Puzo captured so gloriously in his books about the Cosa Nostra are not too far a stretch from what’s been going on in those mountains of North Georgia since way before the Italians first arrived in this country. It’s also very apparent after reading the final pages of Bull Mountain that Clayton Burroughs is not the Michael Corleone of the Burroughs family. (That story is coming up next.) But still, I welcome the comparison, and as daunting as the compliment might be, I accept that graciously as well, especially coming from that nice guy with the cool glasses on Putnam’s marketing team that helped ease the tension at that initial meeting on Hudson Street in New York. It wasn’t until after, as Sara walked me out and explained to me how to use the subway, that she told me that “Ivan” was Ivan Held, the President of Putnam and the man who gave the nod to buying my book in the first place. I kept it together until Sara left, but once she was gone, I nearly passed out.

I’ll never forget the casual compliment that became a shared opinion among a lot of readers once Bull Mountain was released, but I did forget everything Sara told me about the subway and ending up walking all the way back to Time Square.

It’s also worth noting that when my wife and I got home from that trip to New York, there was a package on my doorstep than contained a copy of Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim. Signed, “I hope you enjoy it. –Ivan Held.” Needless to say, it now sits on the top shelf of my bookcase next to the rest of my prized possessions.

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Tom Brady/Photo © John Sohm/Shutterstock

John Pollack is the author of Shortcut: How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas. Formerly a Presidential Speechwriter for Bill Clinton, he is now a consultant advising Fortune 500 companies and public sector leaders on issues of strategy, communication and creativity. John’s other books include Cork Boat: A True Story of the Unlikeliest Boat Ever Built, and The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History and Made Wordplay more than Some Antics.

What does Watergate – the scandal that forced Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation from the presidency – have to do with Deflategate, the 2015 kerfuffle over air pressure in NFL game balls?

Almost nothing but a tenuous analogy: They’re both described as a “-gate.” Ever since The Washington Post uncovered that the president’s aides had directed so-called plumbers to plant eavesdropping devices in Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, the -gate suffix has been used to suggest crime and cover-up. Labeling something a -gate is to suggest that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

Except where there isn’t. And that’s the thing about analogies: Even the simplest, most seductive analogies can be wrong – and bring disastrous consequences. Consider the lyrics that vaudeville songwriter Jack Norworth penned for his 1908 hit Take Me Out to the Ball Game, in which he wrote “and it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out.”

Those happy words carried little consequence until they were appropriated in 1994 as an analogy to sell California voters on a “Three Strikes and You’re Out” ballot initiative. Approved by seven in ten voters, it imposed automatic sentences of twenty-five years to life on people convicted of their third felony.

Over time, about half of all U.S. states passed three-strikes laws of one sort or another. And while such mandatory sentencing did lead to the lengthy incarceration of more violent criminals, “three strikes” laws also snagged tens of thousands of nonviolent offenders, too. Soon, people were being sentenced to life in prison for third offenses that included shoplifting videotapes, passing bad checks, or breaking into a parked car to steal a handful of change from the cup holder. As a result, the nation’s prison population more than quintupled.

Can one attribute the widespread passage of three-strikes laws to the lyrics of a baseball song, or the rules of the sport? Not entirely. But baseball legitimized three strikes as a standard of justice – after all, three strikes is fair in baseball, so why not in the courtroom?

In a decade when the public’s appetite for serious policy debate had been reduced to little more than sound bites, “three strikes and you’re out” served as a moral call to action that both simplified and sold the idea of definitive justice. The United States now boasts the highest prison population in the world, with 2.3 million people behind bars – nearly a quarter of all prisoners, globally. The cost to taxpayers? As much as $75 billion every year.

On the positive side, consider the analogy that Steve Jobs chose to convince millions of people that they could use a computer for the very first time: the computer “desktop.” Collaborating with a small, relatively unknown software start-up called Microsoft, Apple transformed the Mac’s screen into a virtual “desktop” featuring documents, folders, a clipboard, scissors, paste, and even a trashcan. Blank documents looked like white paper, which one could virtually “stack” and “overlap.” The trashcan “bulged” until it was “emptied.” Choices appeared on “menus” and in “windows.” And nearly every operation was quick and easy to execute, because all a user had to do was “point” and click. In making this simple analogy between a horizontal, physical desktop and a vertical, virtual “desktop,” Apple transformed the computer into an intuitively simple tool that just about anyone could learn to use – not in weeks, but in minutes.

As many tech historians have noted, Apple didn’t invent the computer mouse, nor the graphical user interface that enabled users to “click” virtual “buttons” on the screen in front of them. Far from it – those innovations had been conceived by computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute and advanced by researchers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. But upper management at Xerox failed to recognize the mass-market implications of their research team’s pioneering work and, for a small grant of Apple stock, gave Jobs and one of his top engineers the right to mimic it.

After Apple introduced its Macintosh computer in 1984, millions of people suddenly discovered not just that they could use a computer, but that they wanted one of their own, too. While Apple would soon fire Steve Jobs, the desktop analogy he had championed continued to flourish and spread. Over the course of the following three decades, it would not only enable the daily work of billions of people around the world, but also reshape the way people interacted with digital devices generally, and therefore with each other. In the broadest sense, the genie Jobs had released – democratic access to computing power – was out of the bottle forever, and the information age had truly begun.

At their very best, analogies inspire new ways of thinking, enable invention, and help people see things in new ways. At their worst, analogies deceive, manipulate, and mislead. That’s why it’s so important to hone your analogical instinct and learn to tell the difference. After all, if you don’t master analogies, analogies will master you.

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