I write books for middle grade and for high school ages, and they are quite, quite different. And sometimes people ask me, “how come you write about archaeology, you write…” I’m working on a book on paleoanthropology, but I also write about J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Kennedy and Sir Walter Raleigh, and “why do you write about such widely varied topics,” and I think, really, behind everything I do, I just love nonfiction.
It’s actually a love affair. I get to be in love with what I am doing, because it’s just so interesting. Why wouldn’t you want to have a career which involves finding out questions you want answered, getting to answer them in interesting ways, trying to write about them beautifully and share them with young people? What isn’t perfect about that, and so I guess to me, life is interesting.
What is nonfiction? I was just talking to 7th graders in Houston, and I was talking about history. And many times kids think “I’m not into history,” and I say, “what is history? History is everything that human beings have ever done, as understood in every possible way by other human beings. How can you not find something in that that appeals to you?” I often begin discussions with young people when we talk abut what is history, I say, “Every single thing in your life is the beginning of a historical question.
“Why did you have cereal for breakfast? Why do you wear those shoes?” There’s a great academic book on who invented the jump shot. If you think about it, basketball was invented in 1896 by James Naismith in Springfield, Massachusetts. Everything that happened on that court had to be invented. Therefore it has a history. So history is just, think of life as an advent calendar, where you open the door and behind each thing is a treasure, is a mystery.
Well, I get to open those doors and investigate those treasures, so I do think that beating behind everything I do is this love affair that I get to play out on the pages.