I’ll have a new book coming out a year from now. Titled Face in the Mirror: A Surgeon, a Patient, and a Second Chance at Life, it tells the story of Andy Sandness, a young man who underwent a face transplant at the Mayo Clinic in 2016. The publisher is Mayo Clinic Press.
The book’s forthcoming release has me thinking about book talks, radio and podcast interviews, and all the other ways authors get word out about a new book. I’ve been remembering an odd phenomenon I noticed after the publication of my last book.
Often, at public readings or events, someone in attendance would refer to my work as a novel, even though it was clearly a nonfiction book. When that happened, I would correct the person who misspoke and say that I write factual books only and do not make up anything.
Many times, that approach left the other person looking confused, and I did not know why. Later I realized that a segment of the reading public refers to all books, fictional or factual, as novels. If its pages are bound between covers, a book is a novel regardless of its content.
This time around, I’ll ignore the misappellation. Readers will understand that what’s in Face in the Mirror cannot be invented.
Do you know someone who loves history as a writer or reader? Please direct that person to this link to subscribe to Damn History, my free monthly newsletter for readers and writers of popular history. It offers links to notable recent popular-history writing, resources, and updates on my own work.
Origins: How I wrote about three nudist sisters
How I discovered, wrote, and sold a strikingly distinctive magazine article to The Atlantic In 2018, I published an article in The Atlantic about three middle-aged sisters, long estranged from one another, who reunited and…
Origins: Three Nudist Sisters
How I discovered, wrote, and sold a strikingly distinctive magazine article to The Atlantic In 2018, I published an article in The Atlantic about three middle-aged sisters, long estranged from one another, who reunited and…
Resolutions for journalists and everyone else
In 1955, TV newsman Chet Huntley was worried about the state of journalism. He decided to try to change his own behavior. We can adapt his resolutions to change ours.…
A virtual funeral changes perspective
An eminent neuroscientist died last week at the age of 95. He made important discoveries and helped countless people with complicated medical conditions. But he died during the COVID-19 pandemic in…
The Short and Wondrous Career of Harry Glicken
When I knew Harry Glicken during the mid-1970s at Venice High School in Los Angeles, I could not imagine my classmate as a history-maker of the future. He was disheveled,…
The U.S. Vice President Who Wrote a Pop Music Hit
Barry Manilow, Van Morrison, the Four Tops, Cass Elliot, Isaac Hayes, Bing Crosby and Nat “King” Cole all owe a lot to a now obscure United States vice president and…
The Black Stork: A physician’s cinematic argument for eugenics
This year marks the centennial of one of the most infamous movies of the silent era, which made a case for allowing disabled infants to die and sparked a national…
America’s First Pop Psychologist
When Joseph Jastrow died in 1944 at age 80, he was almost a forgotten figure in American psychology and certainly an irrelevant one to many minds. Decades earlier he had…
Is There Any Truth to Truth Serum?
Remember the routine from black and white espionage dramas of the 1940s and ‘50s? The bad guys detain a suspected spy, who won’t talk even after a rough interrogation. Soon,…
The Nazi Brain Removal Caper
After the end of World War II, a Nazi leader dies in Allied custody under strange circumstances. An American military psychiatrist longs to prove his pet theory by having the…
Does your company operate like the Third Reich?
When I wrote my book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII (PublicAffairs Books), which is about an…
Fighting the Legend of the “Lobotomobile”
Many people believe that the developer of the most dreaded form of psychiatric surgery traveled America in a camper van that he slyly called his “lobotomobile.” It’s a myth. I…
Getting Started as a Writer of History
Journalism is the first rough draft of history, Alan Barth declared. Or is it the reverse, that history is just journalism, as Joseph Campbell mischievously asserted? Either way, there’s much…
