Ian Buruma | The China Lover

October 5, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is an exciting day on Sound Authors. We’ve got three guests on the show instead of the usual four. At the end of the show there’s a musician, Johnny Helm who’s going to join us, and he’s got some amazing tunes that we’re going to listen to. And of course, he’s an author of sound. And before that we’re going to listen to a couple of Sound Authors. I’ve got Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States and the poet laureate of New York. We’re going to talk to him later on in the show. And at the beginning, without further ado, I’m excited to speak to author Ian Buruma, who’s the author of The China Lover. Welcome to the show.

Ian Buruma: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: Well, tell me a little bit about The China Lover.

Ian Buruma: Well, it’s a novel, but based on the real life of a movie star who’s still alive, although now I think in her 90’s living in Tokyo, and she was born in China, northeast China, in Manchuria, and grew up speaking both Chinese and Japanese. So she came in very usefully during the war when the Japanese wanted to convince the Asians that the Japanese Empire was there to liberate Asia from the West, and unite Asians and so on. She was always cast in Japanese movies, propaganda movies, as the Chinese girl who was in love with Japanese soldiers, or brave pioneers. I first came across her as a film student in Tokyo when I actually saw some of these films in the film archives. The most famous of these films was actually, was recently well known in the United States, too, because it was used during the war for American Intelligence soldiers to learn Japanese.

Dr. Kent: Now you’ve gotten several awards recently. One for this book, and it was published last fall, and it was named one of Asia’s best books. What makes this book different from the many books you’ve written in the past?

Ian Buruma: Well, I’m not known as a fiction writer, so that’s different. I’ve written one novel before and there’s a very different kind of writing in that you’re not arguing any kind of case, or you’re not simply presenting a history or a section of history, or trying to breathe life into characters. That’s a different entity.

Dr. Kent: Well, and your most recent book before this was about Theo van Gogh, and fascinating story, the whole world was watching from Amsterdam. What is the difference between putting a book like that together, which is criticism and history and that, and then writing a fiction story that kind of gets at the same issues in a way, but it’s fiction?

Ian Buruma: Well actually, in the text of that book, the difference is not all that large, because that was a story with different characters, all of whom were very colorful. And in a way I used, didn’t make anything up, but I used sort of a novelistic form to describe what happened in Amsterdam. So I did take the various characters who ended up being involved in this terrible murder in a kind of fictional way. But again, without making anything up, which of course you do do in a true work of fiction.

Dr. Kent: And where did your interest in all of these subjects derive? Especially for the latest book, your interest in Asia? Where did that all start?

Ian Buruma: Well, my interest in Asia came fairly late, I didn’t grow up in it, there’s no colonial background in my family, or anything of that sort. Like most people who grew up in the 1960’s, I had a sort of vague attraction to the exotic East. And when I studied at university I thought I might combine that attraction to something that might be useful. So I studied Chinese, which now of course is quite useful. In those days that wasn’t really apparent yet. And I ended up finding, being more drawn to Japan than China, I thought maybe because when China was still on the (inaudible) and was not very accessible, nor very attractive, at least not to me, I wanted to make films. And so I got a scholarship to study film in Tokyo at a film school. And one thing sort of led to anther, it turns out I wasn’t really made for filmmaking, I didn’t have the patience, and I started writing. And so film and Japan, the Far East, China and film, all these things really came together in this novel.

Dr. Kent: And it’s really a fascinating thing, you know, the New York Times talked about how your novel is put together in several different ways, and of course it’s based on the real life character. How did you come across this character, and how do you go about fictionalizing an interesting character like her?

Ian Buruma: Well that’s always a tricky problem, especially when people are still alive. You don’t want to make some silly things up about them. And I have met, in fact for many years when I, I always wanted to write her story, and I never quite figured out how to do it. And I thought in between I might do it as a (inaudible), and I did talk to her, she was very forthcoming. Her life in Japan is a legend, literally the stuff of legends, I mean there are comic strips, and there’s a musical about her life there. There is at least one movie, there’s a TV soap opera, and so on. And so the last thing she wants to do is sit down with somebody with a recorder and depart from the legend. So I never got much out of her, and I decided that to really get inside the story that I wanted to tell, it was better to use my own imagination. Now in her case everything in the novel is pretty much recorded. It’s true. And where I’ve made things up are the people around her, and the narrators, of course, are made up, even though there are three in the book. People who knew her, based loosely on many different people. And they’re fictional.

Dr. Kent: And what got you into writing in the first place? Way back when, what inspired you to write your first book?

Ian Buruma: Well this was in Japan when I was there, as I said, first as a film student, and then I started making some films, and then worked as a photographer. But to make money I also wrote movie reviews for an English language newspaper called The Japan Times. And it turns out I was quite good at it, or so people told me. And I began to write more and make films less. And I sort of, I slipped into writing. But in my late 20’s, so unlike many writers I didn’t start on the school magazine and that kind of thing.

Dr. Kent: And what are you working on these days?

Ian Buruma: I’m now writing various essays, one of which is going to come out in the spring next year on religion and democracy.

Dr. Kent: And will those go into a book at some point?

Ian Buruma: Yes, and it’s coming out in, it is coming out in a book, by Princeton University Press in the spring.

Dr. Kent: Well, wonderful. And so, The China Lover, of course, was published by Penguin USA. Was this one of your most enjoyable projects? Was it sort of, did it take over your life and you’re happy to get it out? What was it like?

Ian Buruma: No, well, I find writing, especially fiction writing too hard for it to be entirely enjoyable. It’s enjoyable to have done it, more than the actual process. But no it, well, it takes over your life sometimes. I didn’t write it in one sort of fell swoop, I did it in various stages, and so I don’t know. I try to take it in stride.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been such an honor talking with you. And the book is fascinating, and your career is also fascinating. People can find out more about Ian Buruma at his website, ianburuma.com. There’s a whole bunch of great stuff on there, as well as links to The China Lover. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Ian Buruma: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: And my next guest on the show is Billy Collins, who was once the poet laureate of the United States. Comes on back and we’re going to talk to him.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Entertainment, Fiction, History, Hollywood, PODCAST, TRANSCRIPTS

Steve Knopper | Appetite for Self-Destruction

September 19, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Steve Knopper [21:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Steve Knopper covers the music business for Rolling Stone magazine. His next book, on the record industry in the digital age, is due from Free Press/Simon & Schuster in January 2009. He is a Denver-based journalist who has written for Spin, Details, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, National Geographic Traveler, Wired, New York, Chicago, Backpacker, as well as the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, The Washington Post, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Denver Rocky Mountain News, the Miami Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and many books and websites.

He is the former on-air technology correspondent for Fox News Chicago and has appeared as an expert source on CNN, NBC News, MSNBC, WNYC-FM in New York, WXRT-FM in Chicago, and G4: Attack of the Show as well as in print publications such as Reuters. He has written or edited several books, most recently Moon Colorado, a travel guide. He also co-wrote, with rock-band manager extraordinaire and northwest Denver neighbor Mark Bliesener, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Band; it contains a foreword by Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips. For three years, he wrote the Daily Net Buzz column for Yahoo! Internet Life until that magazine folded in 2002. Steve’s specialty is pop music, but he writes about a range of other topics as well.

Born in Livonia, Mich., he moved to Boulder, Colo., at age 13 and wrote his first-ever story for the high school newspaper about students’ tastes in music. (Dig the extremely strange Patament reference.) After attending the University of Michigan and working for The Michigan Daily, he spent a year on the 5 a.m. obituary desk at the now-defunct Richmond News Leader in Virginia. After that, he became pop music critic and feature writer for the Daily Camera in Boulder; within four years he’d moved up in the Knight-Ridder Newspapers chain to the (Gary, Ind.) Post-Tribune, where he wrote about truck-stop prostitution, mob-style triple homicides and wigs. He quit the paper in January 1996 to become a full-time freelance writer, and has been happy that way ever since.

Steve lives in northwest Denver, with his wife, Melissa, and daughter, Rose. He has occasionally been known to rock.

Posted by admin | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Entertainment, Hollywood, PODCAST, Publishing

Raymond Benson | James Bond Novelist

September 18, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Raymond Benson [14:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From Wikipedia:

In 1996, John Gardner resigned from writing Bond books. Glidrose Publications promptly chose Benson to replace him. As a James Bond novelist, Raymond Benson was initially controversial for being American, and for ignoring much of the continuity established by Gardner. Benson had previously written The James Bond Bedside Companion, a book dedicated to Ian Fleming, the official novels, and the films. The book was initially released in 1984 and later updated in 1988. It was nominated for an Edgar Award by Mystery Writers of America in the Best Biographical/Critical Work category. Benson also contributed to the creation of a module in the popular James Bond 007 role-playing game in the 1980s. In total, Benson wrote six James Bond novels, three novelizations, and three short stories. He was the first Bond author since Ian Fleming to write short stories, although Benson’s stories are uncollected, unlike Fleming who had two anthology books published.

Since authoring Bond novels, Benson has had a number of books published, including original suspense novels Face Blind (2003), Evil Hours (2004), and Sweetie’s Diamonds (2006) as well as the non-fiction work The Pocket Essential Guide to Jethro Tull (Jethro Tull biography) (2002). In 2004, Benson began writing the first of two books based on the acclaimed video game series, Splinter Cell, although both are credited to the pseudonym, David Michaels. Further titles in the Splinter Cell series have also been credited to David Michaels, but were not authored by Benson. The first book, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell was published in 2004 followed by Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Operation Barracuda in 2005. In 2008 Benson wrote A Hard Day’s Death about a private investigator who looks into the death of a rock star. The book spawned a series with the second novel due out in 2009 called Dark Side of the Morgue. Benson also wrote the novelization to the video game Metal Gear Solid in 2008^[1] and will follow that up in 2009 with a novelization of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Raymond Benson continues to write a series of classic film reviews for the publication “Cinema Retro“.

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

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.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Art, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, History, Hollywood, PODCAST, TRANSCRIPTS