In an interview on Narrative Non-Fiction

Before we start with your five books I want to know why you are so interested in narrative non-fiction as a genre?

When I was young I thought I would be a novelist but I quickly discovered I found real life more compelling. I became a journalist because of this, and eventually moved toward longer works so I could make sense of life in ways that daily deadlines do not always allow. 

Both my books have taken over five years to research and write, and each has allowed me to really dig into subjects that are nuanced and extraordinarily important – though they may not be the stuff of headlines. This work allows the kind of sustained intellectual commitment you don’t always get as a journalist. And it has taught me some wonderful new skills – like how to research and bring to life a time 400 years ago. So moving to narrative non-fiction has been a very natural progression for me, and probably one I always wanted. In my opinion, some of the very best writing today is coming out of this genre. It’s a terribly exciting time though perhaps not yet well enough appreciated.

Tell me about your first book, Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder. 

This is an incredible saga about the sinking – in deep water – of a ship filled with gold at the end of the California gold rush, a sea tale that is then twined with the contemporary story of a young engineer’s efforts to recover the sunken treasure by developing the world’s first robotic submersible, capable of working with precision at great ocean depths – obviously a technical achievement we are all thinking about now with the oil spill on America’s gulf coast. The book opens in 1857 with a nail-biting reconstruction of the ship’s last days and the hurricane that took the ship down. Here, Kinder traces the fates of several families on board the SS Central America. The opening establishes a wrenching human tragedy. From there Kinder jumps to the 1960s and a land-locked farming community in Ohio where the engineer, Tommy Thompson, grew up. Thompson would spend decades obsessed with the ship as he sought to locate its wreck and recover her lost cargo. The Central America was carrying almost 600 people when she went down and a staggering amount of gold. It foundered near North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Kinder does a remarkable job here of translating really arcane engineering, scientific, nautical, financial and other material into crisp and arresting prose. He educates and entertains – two keys that are essential to this sort of work. He’s so good at it that he can write everything from a heart-stopping three-word sentence to a 200-word monster that, incredibly, still works. The book’s longest sentence describes the ship’s final moments. It is so loud and twisting and wild that it grabs the reader and takes her down with the ship – gasping for breath. 

When I teach this book I always make my students stop there, and read the passage aloud in its entirety. Then I point out that the ship’s final plunge happens in this single, extraordinary 202-word sentence. It drives them crazy! And they immediately see how the language mirrors the dizzying, suffocating, final trip to the bottom. 

I suppose I have this book in mind right now in part because of the oil spill off the Louisiana coast. For anyone who wants to grasp the challenges of working at this depth, I can’t think of a better book. Kinder captures the cold, the incredible pressure, the salt, the darkness and other challenges subs of this sort must handle. He does so not in tortured technical language but by walking us through Thompson’s journey as he takes on this enormous challenge. The young engineer’s only real competitors are the US Navy, which poured millions into research and development, and the ever-looming threat of bankruptcy. I won’t give away the ending, but what a thrilling story this is about the power – and the quirkiness – of the individual human spirit in the face of almost unimaginable odds.