Peter Brown | The Curious Garden

October 26, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. It’s my pleasure on the show to welcome Peter Brown, who has written a gorgeous book, and the book is called, ‘The Curious Garden.’ Welcome to the show Peter Brown.

Peter Brown: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: Your website is equally as fun and fascinating as your book. It’s at once retro and new. Tell me about this book, ‘The Curious Garden.’

Peter Brown: ‘The Curious Garden,’ was inspired by a real place called the High Line which is an elevated railway in Manhattan that was used for about 75 years to transport commercial goods up and down the west side of Manhattan, and then in 1980 they shut it down, and for about 30 years, what happened was all sorts of wildflowers, and plants and trees started growing there, all by themselves. It became this sort of strange urban wilderness area up on this elevated platform in the middle of Manhattan. So I was really inspired by that, and I began noticing other places like that, other examples of nature kind of surviving in unlikely places. So I decided to make a story about a boy who discovered nature living in a really unlikely place - in the middle of his gray, dreary city, and then he takes care of it.

Dr. Kent: It’s such a great word, ‘curious.’

Peter Brown: It means a lot in this book too because the boy’s curious. His curiosity leads him to discover the few scraggly plants in the beginning of the story. The plants in the garden sort of take on their own personality: they’re curious, and the plants begin exploring the forgotten corners of the city. The concept of curiosity is a big part of the story.

Dr. Kent: So you are both the author and the illustrator, which I love because I’m a huge fan of Doctor Seuss, and a lot of those early books kind of have the vibe that your book has. You’re looking at it, and it’s art, and it’s tangible, it’s simple, but it’s also got that level of complexity to it. Who were your role models in figuring out how to do all this, and how do you work in both text and artwork?

Peter Brown: Well, I’ve loved storytelling ever since I was a kid. I had a great time writing silly little stories and drawing pictures for as long as I can remember. Some of the books that really made me want to make picture books were ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ by Maurice Sendak, and a lot Dr. Seuss’s books, and later in life, when I was in art school, I discovered a book called, ‘The Stinky Cheese Man,’ by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith which was really inspirational to me. Those are some of my influences.

Dr. Kent: ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ is now a movie. I’m actually planning on checking it out tonight. I’m a kid at heart.

Peter Brown: I actually just watched it a couple of hours ago on the IMAX. It was really great. So you’ll have a good time.

Dr. Kent: It’s one of those books that, when I was a kid, I opened up that book, ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ and you’re transported to a new world. I’m just looking at one of the layouts from your book, and there are these scenes, scenes with all sorts of little fun details, and there’s the kid way in the background. How do you picture these scenes in your mind before you sketch it out?

Peter Brown: This book was a long time coming. I first discovered the High Line, the inspiration for this book, back in 2002, and was kicking around this idea for years. Over the course of about five years, I was visualizing all different scenes of the world that I was slowly solidifying in my imagination. In that period of time, I’d do everything, I’d do tons of different scenes, most of which never made it into the book, the best of which did make it into the book. I had a lot to work with when I actually sat down and sunk my teeth into this project. I had a lot of background material to work with at that point. I really just imagined what it would be like to be this kid, to be Liam living in his dreary, grey city, and there’s not much color, there’s really no parks or trees or greenery or anything like that. Then all of a sudden he discovers a few things that are just barely surviving. I pretty naturally slipped into that kind of perspective and the story began to unravel itself before my eyes once I really got into his mindset. The perspectives in the different scenes just sort of made sense to me. He takes care of the garden and the garden recovers and thrives and spreads down the railway, and then out across the city. It had its own logic to it, and a lot of the illustrations reflect that straight line that I saw from the beginning of the story to the big finale.

Dr. Kent: Do you picture your reader when you’re writing this? Do you go back to being that age - the age of your readers? How do you get into the mindset of writing these books?

Peter Brown: I definitely have a big imagination and I definitely enjoy trying to picture the world from the point of view of my audience. I don’t have tons of interaction with kids. Some people will either have their own kids, or they’ll go to some sort of place where they can read their stories that they’re working on to an audience of children. I actually don’t have that - at least not yet. For me, it’s more about just remembering my childhood and remembering how I saw the world, remembering what was really exciting to me, or mysterious, or confusing, or funny, or silly. I spent a lot of time thinking about the things that I did for fun when I was a kid.

Dr. Kent: In your bio, you talk about your grandfather, who loved to paint. How did you get into this? Of course, at a very, very young age, you crafted some books of your own, and you painted and drew. How did you get into all of this?

Peter Brown: I grew up visiting my grandparents and seeing my grandfather hunched over his desk, painting these little landscapes mostly from memory of places he’d seen on trips. Some things were more abstract as well. So I grew up realizing that making art was a good use of one’s time. I followed in his footsteps. He was never a professional artist, he was just an amateur artist, but I still learned that lesson. So I just drew, and I knew that that was a perfectly good thing for me to be doing. Like most kids, we wanted to be good at something, almost anything would be fine, so the thing that I happened to be good at was drawing. Once I got labeled as the artsy kid in class, I just went with it. I took that as permission to just be the art kid, and I just drew like crazy. That was how I started on my path to making art. A lot of the art that I would make would be telling stories, coming up with interesting characters, or interesting scenes that told a story. It was at a young age that I really fell in love with the storytelling, both with words and with pictures.

Dr. Kent: How do you do your final illustrations? Is it all on paper? Do you use your computer at all? What’s your method?

Peter Brown: I sketch the book out with pencil, and I’ll use the computer to cut and paste different little drawings that I might have done, to put them together in a single composition. Before I ever sit down to paint the final art, I’ll have each page printed out. I’ll have a computer printout of each sketch, but that sketch will be composed of different things that I cut and pasted all together. That’s the extent of my use of the computer. Although I do use the computer for color studies, so I’ll plan out the color for each illustration on the computer as well. Then when I sit down to make the final artwork, which is all done by hand with paint - with acrylic and guasch paint - I have these finished sketches; I have the finished color studies, so all the decision making is done, and really it’s just about me looking at those things as reference and putting paint on the canvas. I don’t paint on paper, actually. I paint on what’s called illustration board, which is essentially heavy duty cardboard with a really nice toothy paper surface to it.

Dr. Kent: How would you describe your style? It kind of has a little bit of - when you said your grandfather painted miniatures - it almost has a little bit of that feel to it, a little feel of American primitive. How would you describe your style in these books?

Peter Brown: I would say, my early books, ‘Flight of Dodo’ and the charter books, it was more dimension, it was more light and shadow and form. ‘The Curious Garden’ is a little bit flatter. For the earlier books, I was really trying to combine naive art, art by self-trained artists that have almost a childlike quality to them - I was trying to combine that sensibility with something like what you’d see in a Pixar movie: these realistic, detailed, rendered, dimensional forms of art. I thought if I could find a way to combine this really modern, hyper-realistic Pixar style with this childlike, naive art style, I could come up with something cool. So that’s what I was doing for the first few books. With ‘The Curious Garden,’ it’s similar to that, but as I said, this art is a little bit flatter, there’s not as much dimension to the shapes. Mostly because I knew there was going to be so much detail: so many flowers, so many bricks, and birds, insects, and flower stems, and all that kind of stuff. I wasn’t going to have time. It just wasn’t going to be practical for me to render every single detail as thoroughly as I had in some of my earlier books. So that’s why this book feels like my art, but with a little bit less dimension to it.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about your earlier books. It’s all great stuff. You’ve got ‘Chowder,’ and ‘Barkbelly’ and ‘Flight of the Dodo.’ How did you come up with these concepts? Are they still out there? Are you still promoting them?

Peter Brown: Yes. ‘Flight of the Dodo’ was my very first book. It was my first born, which is about a penguin who’s a flightless bird, obviously, and he gets pooped on by a flying bird, and decides that he’s had enough and he wants to see what flying’s all about, once and for all. So he gets his flightless friends together, and they build this hot air balloon. The fact of the matter is that I’ve actually, as silly as it sounds, I’ve actually been pooped on by a lot of birds over the course of my lifetime. One of those times just got me thinking. It was a pretty embarrassing incident: I was on a date, actually, with a girl. I remember being really embarrassed and humiliated, and for some reason I thought to myself: you know what would be even worse than what I’m going through right now is if I were a flightless bird being pooped on by a flying bird. As soon as that idea popped into my head, I knew I had something. So I jotted it down, and from there, that story wrote itself after that point. So that was a lot of fun.

Dr. Kent: You jotted it down on a napkin and impressed your date?

Peter Brown: I always bring my little notebook with me wherever I go. I was in the public restroom and [laughs], I don’t even think I’d finished cleaning myself up before I started jotting down these ideas. I think she was impressed that I was able to turn those lemons into lemonade, so to speak. There was not a second date, unfortunately.

Dr. Kent: [Laughs] At least you got something out of it, exactly.

Peter Brown: I really did. It was probably the best date of my life.

Dr. Kent: There’s a little spot on your website, it’s called, ‘My First Book,’ and then you’ve got this little how to build your own little book for kids. It shows a book that you actually put together at six years old or so.

Peter Brown: That’s right.

Dr. Kent: Were you digging through old materials, and there it was? Or was this something that your folks said, ‘Hey, do you remember you did this?’

Peter Brown: When ‘Flight of the Dodo’ first was published, my mom sent me a little care package, including a lot of artwork that I made when I was a child. One of the things was this book, ‘The Adventure of Me and My Dog Buffy,’ which was the first book that I ever made for fun when I was six years old. I had completely forgotten about it. As soon as I saw it, it really brought me back. The funny thing is, that books is about a tree-climbing dog, and that factors into the story, because he can see out into the forest. Peter and his dog get lost in the woods and Buffy climbs the tree and he can see their house far away. As I was discovering this book that I’d made when I was a child, I was working on ‘Chowder.’ The really weird thing was that at that exact moment I was actually working on this illustration of Chowder the bulldog in a tree, which is a weird coming-around-full-circle back to this idea I’d had as a kid, but I hadn’t even thought about it. So maybe somewhere in the back of my head I have this obsession with tree-climbing dogs.

Dr. Kent: That’s great.

Peter Brown: So, yes, that was the first book I made. I made other books after that, but that book has been really handy because I do quite a bit of school visits these days. I go to schools and libraries all over the country, really, and do these presentations and I brought that book with me, the first book I ever made, and it’s been a great addition to my presentation. The kids get to see this book that I made when I was their age, and it’s a fun little story, but it’s certainly not brilliant; it’s just kind of silly - the kind of things that they’re working on, so it drives home the point that if they like writing and drawing, they should stick with it, because they could really do something with it, the way I have. The teachers of course love that I’m teaching that lesson to their students.

Dr. Kent: Right. All of your websites are fun to play around in also. Your Chowder website is very simple; it looks like a normal webpage, the pictures aren’t moving, and then all of a sudden, Chowder of course is drooling. Do you do those Flash illustrations also?

Peter Brown: Yes, I make my websites myself. My knowledge of Flash is quite limited, but I know enough to add some fun little details to my website. So, yes, the drool coming off of Chowder’s tongue was a lot of fun. On my website, Peter Brown’s Studio dot com, there’s this windmill that’s turning.

Dr. Kent: I like the sheep.

Peter Brown: Yes, you can roll over the sheep with your cursor, and they ‘Baa,’ and they run all over the place. I have a lot of fun with those websites, but they always end up being a lot more involved than I imagine. I always think I can bang it out in a couple of weeks, and six weeks later I’m still sort of slavering away on these things.

Dr. Kent: The books are fantastic. ‘The Curious Garden’ is out there in stores. It’s for children from three to eight, but honestly, I’m a huge fan of children’s books. I think it should be three plus.

Peter Brown: Yes, I agree, thank you.

Dr. Kent: It’s called ‘The Curious Garden.’ Awesome illustrations in there. I hope to chat with you again some time.

Peter Brown: Oh, thank you so much. This has been great.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Childrens, Art, TRANSCRIPTS, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Entertainment, PODCAST

Peter Brown | The Curious Garden

October 26, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Peter Brown [17:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From the JacketFlap website:

Peter Brown is a published author and an illustrator of children’s books and young adult books. Some of the published credits of Peter Brown include ‘Kaline Klattermaster’s Tree House,’ ‘The Fabulous Bouncing Chowder,’ ‘Snowbone,’ and now ‘The Curious Garden.’

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Comics, Art, Childrens, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Entertainment, PODCAST

Tony Fucile | Let’s Do Nothing

October 9, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Tony Fucile [13:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Tony Fucile has spent over twenty years designing and animating characters for cartoon feature films. During the first fifteen years, he put pencil to paper to help bring life to characters from The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Lion King, and The Iron Giant. And in the last six years, he put mouse to mouse pad for the Oscar-winning Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, for which he was a Supervising Animator. Tony’s first picture book for children, Let’s Do Nothing!, was released by Candlewick Press in Spring 2009. He’s currently working on a chapter book series by Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee about two friends named Bink and Golly. He’s also excited to begin work on Mitchell’s License, a picture book by Hallie Durand to be published by Candlewick Press. Tony was born in San Francisco and currently resides nearby with his wife, Stacey, their two kids, Eli and Elinor, and two Chihuahuas (Pedro and Kahlua).

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Comics, Art, Childrens, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Sharon Waxman | Loot & Hollywood

April 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Sharon Waxman | Author of LOOT [22:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sharon is an incredible author, researcher, and gossip columnist! What a pleasure to chat with her about her diverse skills and interests, and most importantly about the amazing book LOOT! This is one of my favorite titles of the year, and I truly enjoyed chatting with Sharon. More about her from her website:

Sharon Waxman is an author and award-winning journalist, currently working on a book about stolen antiquities. “Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World,” will be published by Times Books in November 2008.

Who ought to own the trophies of history, Western museums, or the countries that were plundered over 200 years? “Loot” takes readers on a journey to the countries where ancient civilizations began and to the great museums where their treasures now reside in a quest to understand the tug-of-war between East and West.

Waxman was a Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times until January 2008. Before joining the Times, she was a correspondent for the Washington Post based in Los Angeles, from 1995 until 2003.

As a long-time observer of the entertainment industry, Waxman’s is an influential and independent voice. She has covered studio sales and corporate mergers, the Oscars, the film festivals and the unusual personalities that make up Hollywood. She has taken readers deep inside the filmmaking and deal-making process, getting to know the key players and artists who make the movies. She is the author of the best-selling book, “Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors And How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System” (HarperCollins, 2005), about the emergence of a new generation of writers and directors in the 1990s, making landmark films in a corporate-run Hollywood.

Waxman began covering Hollywood for The Washington Post’s Style section in 1995, becoming the paper’s first correspondent to cover the industry from Los Angeles. She began her career as a foreign correspondent, and was sent on reporting stints to the Middle East during her years at the Post.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Waxman attended Barnard College, where she studied English literature, then earned a Masters of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East Studies from St. Antony’s College at Oxford University.

Having learned both Hebrew and Arabic during her studies, Waxman got her first real journalism job with the Reuters news agency in Jerusalem, covering the first Palestinian intifada in 1988 and 1989. At the end of 1989 she moved to Paris. While there, she covered the economic unification of Europe and the velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union collapsed. For six years she covered the culture, politics and economy of France and other parts of Western Europe as a freelance and contract writer, with frequent forays into Eastern Europe and North Africa. She wrote for a variety of U.S. newspapers, including The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, The Los Angeles Times and numerous other outlets, eventually landing a contract with The Washington Post. The Post then offered her a full-time position in a place she never expected to land: Los Angeles.

During her years in Hollywood, Waxman has become a frequent commentator on matters of movie and media culture. In 2000, she won the prestigious feature writing award for Arts & Entertainment writing from the University of Missouri. While at the Post, she returned to the Middle East on several occasions to write a series about Islamic culture, to cover the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Waxman lives with her family in southern California.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Travel, Art, Religion, Politics, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Hollywood, PODCAST

Nina Burleigh | Live on Sound Authors

February 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is the author of Unholy Business: A true tale of faith, greed and forgery in the holy land. Author Nina Burleigh has written a few acclaimed books and this is her latest. A gorgeous cover, incredible content, welcome to the show Nina Burleigh.

Nina Burleigh: Thank you, it’s nice to be here!

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this. I’m so intrigued by just like so many people by the true stories coming out of the Middle East and the holy land of treasures, of religious persecution and religious rights and histories. How did you get into this and what’s the background of this book Unholy Business?

Nina Burleigh: Well, I got into it because I was reading the New York Times a couple years ago, procrastinating writing another book actually and read this story about these five men who had been indicted for allegedly forging some very famous archaeological objects with inscriptions on them that purported to be the first material evidence of the existence of Christ and the first material evidence of Solomon’s Temple ever found in archaeological record among other objects. And I read this and I thought boy this is curious. I had not heard about these objects; one of them is very famous, it’s called the Jane Ossuary. It’s a little coffin that came to light in the market in antiquities around 2002.

A movie was made out of it, a book was made out of it, it’s supposed to be the box that held bones of Christ’s brother James. I didn’t know that Christ had a brother either so I read this and thought this is interesting. What kind of people would make proof for the faithful? And who among the faithful want proof? Because in my growing up around the Mennonites in Michigan, I’m not a Mennonite but I knew a lot of faithful people and they didn’t need physical proof. Faith is an ephemeral thing. So I started to look into it and I eventually went over to Israel and got off the plane, I had never been there before, I got off the plane just to see if I could talk to the detectives who had unraveled the case and whether or not I would be able to talk to the dealers of these antiquities.

When I got off the plane it was like being in a movie. Everything that happened was strange, mysterious, these eccentric characters, it was like being in The Maltese Falcon/The Davinci Code. Walking a back alley of Jerusalem to the Jerusalem meeting these men in these shops that are just piled to the rafters with stuff like Peruvian oil lamps or supposedly Peruvian oil lamps and mammoth swords and coins that the money changers may have held in temple and I learned there’s this whole industry in buying and selling of stuff that really dates back to the ancient times or medieval times when European pilgrims started going there to bring relics back.

Now, its just more high tech. basically what these guys are alleged to be doing is taking real old stuff that comes out of one of the 30,000 archaeological sites in Israel and the west bank and inscribing these objects, altering them mostly with inscriptions of ancient Hebrew or Aramaic to make them look like their related to actual biblical characters and events. Therefore validating certain things that made them more famous.

Dr. Kent: The validation is the interesting thing and that’s what you talked about a second ago and I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the old city of Jerusalem. It’s a wonderful place. Every maze comes back to the main road, dark little corners, beautiful place. What is it that drives people to Jerusalem, drives people to holy sites? Makes people see Jesus’ face in a piece of toast as well as with this, I’ve heard of the James Ossuary of course with a lot of the population. Why are people drawn to oh, this could be…?

Nina Burleigh: Well I think people bring their belief system to looking at objects like that and I mean people I did speak with people who were over there digging. Some of these archeological sites, many of them in fact, have people from the seminaries, students from theological schools working in the summer because they need power and these kids will go over there and dig. It just means a lot to them to be in the place that they’ve read about or heard about since they were in Sunday school. Then you have the tourists who go over there in busloads, older people mostly who have the time and money.

There are busloads of westerners going through that country, up and down that country day after day being dropped off at archaeological sites that may or may not contain proof of certain stories in the bible. They lap it up because they grew up believing these stories and now they’re in the country, in the region of the world where the stories were written and the ancient cities are there. So its understandable certainly but what was happening here is these men were alleged because they have not yet been convicted by the way, the trial continues to go on four years later. They played with those belief systems and played on peoples emotions and that’s what really got the Israeli authorities angry enough to investigate this for two years.

The agency that investigated is really under funded, its called the Israel Antiquities Authority and its supposed to oversee and keep from being funded these 30,000 archaeological sites. There’s only 12 men and they cant possibly keep up with it. There’s a huge private trade in very high end stuff. Now tourists wouldn’t be buying it but I learned in the search that the real mark of these men were these very wealthy collectors in the United States, in London, in Switzerland and in Tel Aviv who happened to have a taste for ancient things.

Certainly it’s a bit like collecting baseball cards. These guys collect million dollar ancient ### that had ancient kings name on them or something and the forgers or forger were or was making stuff for them really. Then he got kind of pugilistic, he’d been getting away with it for a very long time, ten years, 20 years, and made these two objects that were really important to religious believers, both Christian and Jewish.

Dr. Kent: So part of this whole thing is deception and I love at the very beginning of your book you’ve got a quote by Amil Zolav, and it says, “We are a civilized people and of what use is civilization if it doesn’t help us to deceive and to be deceived in order to make life more worth the living.” I find it, I’m one of the subscribers to there was a real Christ and he had a real family and et cetera, which makes me fascinated by this whole topic. Then there’s others that say oh no, of course he didn’t and all of that. It feels like all of it’s a little about deception. The founders of the church might’ve been trying to deceive. What’s the role of deception in this whole thing?

Nina Burleigh: Well I don’t know about the founders of the church, I didn’t get into that. This is a book really about modern criminals and a modern crime in the current era. I don’t get into the history of the church and their activities but certainly deception is, when you’re playing with peoples belief system, deception is actually easier and one of the things they were doing was they would target certain scholars to validate these objects and the scholars they picked very cleverly were people who had strong belief systems; either Catholics or orthodox Jewish and they would bring them these things and it was very difficult for the scholars when confronted with something like the bone box that contained James’ bones, the brother of Jesus, for them to be sort of distant about it.

I think there were a lot of emotions tied up so there was a lot of forethought in how they would bring these objects to the public. They had to get them validated by scholars first and really what’s happened is the scholarship of biblical archaeology is what’s on trial in Jerusalem right now with this forger and his cohorts. The alleged forger and his alleged cohorts because they keep bringing these experts in, scholar after scholar and then the defense attorney who are like the best paid lawyers in Israel, they’re like OJ Simpson’s lawyers, they take these scholars and they just shred them. The scholars aren’t used to being questioned like that, they’re used to being treated with enormous respect from students, right?

Reverential other scholars at conferences, they’re not used to being queried about minutia like well was the menorah 2000 years ago eight inches high normally or three inches high? Here’s a book that says they’re three inches high and you’re saying this one is fake because its only three inches high, well here you said this, you’ve contradicted yourself in this speech here and every one of them has been basically impeached or just made to look like a fool. The judge will make the call on this, the judge is no closer after four years to knowing whether this stuff is fake or not let alone whether these guys are committing a fraud.

Dr. Kent: So set the stage a little more. I love of course I know Jerusalem pretty intimately from living there and being in the old city so often but for people who haven’t been there I think it’s a mysterious place but when you’re there its so real, so dirty, and the way you describe that one store front that was piled with these alleged antiquities, the whole city is like that. Like there’s layer upon layer, it’s a big layered big city. Talk about your description. What does that have to do with this story? And I know your other books, Mirage, Napoleon Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt and Unsolved Murder, a very private woman you published in 1998, you’re really intrigued by twisted stories.

Nina Burleigh: Well yes! I guess that’s right you’re picking up on my interest in the dark side and you’re right. I don’t know why. I guess I am one of those people who wants to poke around and see what’s under the, so far it hasn’t been to my detriment to see what’s going on in a dark corner or dark room you’re not supposed to go into but yeah when I was a kid I wanted to be an archaeologist and then I wanted to be a detective, when I was about nine years old, those were my twin desires and of course I became an English major and spend most of my time correcting peoples pronouns now and sitting in a chair and writing.

My life is not that glamorous, but I did get to live that out by going over there and live out; I didn’t realize until later when I started talking about it that I was kind of living out this childhood dream and that’s why everything about the writing of it was so vivid. I was able to bring that place to life I think because it just jazzed me. I got this fascinating writers of history, great mystery, these eccentric characters, people you just cant make up. The billionaire who collects 6,000 objects of archaeology. He’s an enormously wealthy man and that’s what he’s doing with his money in his 80s, that and smoking Marlboro Lights.

His house, his apartment is this Tel Aviv penthouse and his London apartment which he got as a payment of debt from the King of Jordan years ago, they’re just like indoor markets. People just come to him; I sat at his table and he told me his life story. He was a child rabbi in 1920 Jerusalem, which was an Arab city at that point, his family had been there for generations and his dad was very strict and he was dyslexic and the dad threw him out on the streets in Jerusalem and he ended up sleeping in these caves with Arab urchins. That’s how he started finding coins when he was a kid and that’s what his obsession now, in his late life obsession goes back to this childhood obsession with finding God because his dad was a very religious man and he couldn’t read so he abused him.

Its just a fascinating story and then the dealers themselves; these guys who none of them will tell you a straight answer for where they got the stuff but they basically get it from these Palestinians who are on the other side of the line who go to these unguarded sites with metal detectors and dig stuff up, come back, bring it to the edge of the checkpoint, 50 yards in, the dealer will go in, pay the guy or his middle man, and the minute he crosses back over the line the stuff is like 100 times more valuable than what he paid for it. If he can get away with it because the Israel antiquities authority cant keep up with all this, he can get away with it and sell it to some collector in Switzerland or London, well he’s just made a ton of money.

But they’re all ### these guys; they’ll sit there and tell you its like listening to Scheherazade, you’ll see an object and say where did that thing come from and they’ll sit there, they’ll make you coffee and they’ll weave this tale about what it means and the Canaanites, and the philistines and the this and that and you’re sort of discombobulated by the end of it. Of course if you wanted to buy it then they put the price tag on it if you were in the market for it. What the Israel antiquity authority claims is that 90 percent of the stuff in the shops caveat emptor is fake. So if you’re a tourist and planning to go over there, just keep in mind when you’re bringing this coin back to church and you’re thinking this thing was traded in the templar, this was may not be the case. Be happy that you got your souvenir but don’t go paying $1,000 or something unless you’ve got an expert next to you.

Dr. Kent: The folks in the old city of Jerusalem are expert bargainers. I remember going for cookies and bargaining for the price on cookies because I was a foreigner and freshly learned Arabic and sat for 20 minutes with a store owner in the middle of the walkway and bargained the cookies down and he was enjoying it immensely. It was an art, they have the art of bargaining over there.

Nina Burleigh: That’s right.

Dr. Kent: What I find so fascinating about our discussion and about this book, which is out on the Smithsonian label which is really cool, is that its about the personalities and so many of these tales are kind of like the items itself. You read the books and think well do I believe that or not? Where as this one tells the stories of the people.

Nina Burleigh: Yes, I was really interested in the people more than the objects. This is why there are no pictures of objects in the book. The characters made the story, the characters I think I make them come to life in that book and I’m real happy with it because when I look at it I feel like I accomplished what I set out to do, which was to use the crime story as a way to kind of tell a large, talk about a larger world that people know very little about, which is this world of objects being bought and sold in the context of middle eastern politics and the seething kind of conflict between the three religions in Jerusalem, which is where this is all taking place.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been such an honor chatting with this book and on a side note, I have a good friend Sally Shields who is a fellow instructor at your writer’s conference I believe next week, right?

Nina Burleigh: I know, she just sent me an email; in Mexico yeah.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about that workshop.

Nina Burleigh: Well I’m going to teach a 2-day workshop called A Million Stories in Naked City kind of just basically for people who want to learn how to write their own non-fiction tale. Whether they be a personal memoir or something they come across that they find interesting and I want to talk about how what genres there are and the good models to follow and just some basic rules about how to sit down in a chair. First how to research and organize your material and then how to keep yourself interested and the reader interested by outlining and structuring the book properly.

Dr. Kent: Then hopefully how to fulfill your childhood fantasies.

Nina Burleigh: That’s right.

Dr. Kent: This is a wonderful book; Unholy Business. I’m only a couple pages in but I’m psyched to read the rest.

Nina Burleigh: Great I hope you enjoy it!

Dr. Kent: Yeah, and its called A true tale of faith, greed and forgery in the holy land. Its been a great fun chatting with you.

Nina Burleigh: Can I add one thing? Go to my website www.ninaburleigh.com and click on the book and I believe its through Amazon you can download pages of it for free so you can see whether you’re going to like it. You cant get the whole book that way but I think once people start reading it they told me they cant put it down, so I invite everyone to have a look at it.

Dr. Kent: So we’ll check you out at ninaburleigh.com and yeah absolutely. People will be psyched to read a couple pages. So unholy business, its available just about everywhere and we’ll talk to you next time. What’s your next project?

Nina Burleigh: I have just made an agreement to write a book about the Amanda Knox case in Italy, which is another extremely dark murder mystery involving a university of Washington exchange student accused of killing her British roommate.

Dr. Kent: Wow.

Nina Burleigh: In a very mysterious circumstance and the prosecutor in the case this Italian prosecutor has a very active imagination and has charged her with participating in an orgy or satanic rite and he believes there’s this satanic cult in Italy that’s existed there for centuries so its about this girl pitted against this prosecutor. The new world mountain climber in gortex and pot smoker basically and that’s how she got herself into trouble; pitted against this old world prosecutor who represents severe, rigid Catholicism Italian tradition, which really respects a great dark secret and this fresh faced American girl looks like Mona Lisa.

Dr. Kent: Wow, as always you’re right on the path of really exciting stories.

Nina Burleigh: Thanks, I hope I can talk to you about that one when it comes out.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely. This book is Unholy Business, Nina Burleigh, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Nina Burleigh: Thank you, take care.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is called Snowblink. We’re going to listen to a track from their album, it’s called the Tired Bees. It’s a beautiful song, incredible duo out of Canada and we’ll talk to them right after we listen to this track.

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