While I don’t do a ton of author interviews here on the blog (I do plenty of interviews as part of my day job!), I always get a thrill when I have the chance to ask more experienced writers and journalists to talk a little bit about their craft.
Mitchell Zukoff, the author of this year’s winner of the Indie Lit Award for Nonfiction, Lost in Shangri-La, was gracious enough to answer questions put together by the nonfiction panel including how he found the topic the story, what it was like to travel to New Guinea during research, and one piece of writing advice he offers his students.
Search: lost in shangri-la
And finally, the last two books that were part of the nonfiction list for the Indie Lit Awards this year! These last two books — Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckhoff and In the Garden of Beasts by Eric Larson — were rereads for me. Rather than write two new reviews, I thought I’d link back to my original thoughts and share some impressions I had of the books in the process of reading and thinking about them again.
One Sentence Summary: After a pleasure flight of enlisted American men and women crashes in an uncharted part of New Guinea, a dramatic rescue is organized to save the survivors who are living amid a prehistoric tribe that calls the valley home.
One Sentence Review: Lost in Shangri-La exemplifies the best qualities of strong narrative nonfiction and was truly unputdownable.
On November 5, 1942 a C-53 Skytrooper carrying five American airmen took off from Iceland to return to their home base on the western side of Greenland. Midway through the trip, the plane inexplicably crash landed on an ice cap. Although none of the passengers were killed, the men would need to be rescued. The U.S. military sent search and rescue planes out looking for the lost crew, but the plane and the men on it seemed to have disappeared.
Four days later, a B-17 bomber searching for the missing C-53 was caught in a storm. Despite the pilot’s best efforts, the B-17 hit a glacier and, again, crash landed. The nine airmen and volunteers all survived the crash, but their predicament forced another series of search and rescue missions through the dangerous Arctic landscape. When the B-17 was located, two members of the U.S. Coast Guard attempted a daring rescue mission using a Grumman Duck amphibious plane to bring the men back. But their plane disappeared in a storm and, 70 years later, remained trapped somewhere in the expanse of Greenland’s glacial tundra.
December Boo, Katherine: Behind the Beautiful Forevers (narrative nonfiction) Semple, Maria: Where’d You Go, Bernadette (fiction) Heller, Jason: Taft 2012 (fiction) Cullen, Dave: Columbine (nonfiction) Hoffert, Melanie: Prairie Silence (memoir) Condie, Ally: Matched, Crossed, and Reached (YA fiction) Collins, Gail: As Texas Goes… (nonfiction) Kidder, Tracy and Todd, Richard: Good Prose (nonfiction) November Yalom, Marilyn: How the French Invented [...]
Last week, the winners of this year’s Indie Lit Awards (book awards given out by literary bloggers) were announced, and I posted reviews of all five shortlisted books here on the blog. But in the frenzy of posting all those reviews (and getting to write about a Hunger Games-related book in time for the movie premier), I didn’t get to spend much time reflecting on the awards more generally. Hence, the topic of today’s post.
Berlin 1961 is outside my normal nonfiction reading and, to be honest, if it hadn’t made the nonfiction short list for the Indie Lit Awards, I probably never would have read it. The Cold War and the Berlin Wall are both outside my political frame of reference — too recent to really have found their way into my history reading, but too far back for me to even remember. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I was only three years old. The first major crisis-level event I remember clearly is the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, and the first event I understood the political repercussions for is the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.
I had a really good month of reading in February. Things were a bit slow in the beginning, but picked up after I took a little blogging break. By the end of the month I was able to finish 11 books, for a total of about 3,784 pages.
Time // 10:15 a.m.
Place // At my desk in my home office/library/cat playroom.
Eating // An egg over hard on toast. This has been my breakfast of choice lately. Yum.
I skipped my weekly morning writing session at a coffee shop yesterday morning — it was really, really cold, and I just wanted to spend the morning in my pajamas reading Raised Right by Alissa Harris — so I’m feeling a little behind starting up today. I actually was really lazy yesterday, so I have the bulk of my weekend project list to finish today… going grocery shopping, making chicken noodle soup, doing laundry, writing our BAND discussion for February, catching up on reviews, and completing my first day of week four of Couch to 5K. It’s going to be a busy day!
