7 Questions With Author Steve Kemper

 

Steve Kemper has been a freelance journalist for 40 years and has written for many

national publications. He is the author of four books, including three books of

narrative history: Our Man in Tokyo: an American Ambassador and the

Countdown to Pearl Harbor, which won the Dillon Award from the American

Academy of Diplomacy; A Splendid Savage: the Restless Life of Frederick Russell

Burnham; A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles Through Islamic Africa; and

Code Name Ginger: Dean Kamen’s Quest to Invent a New World. More

information at  www.stevekemper.net .

1. How and when did you get hooked on history?

2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and

why?

During childhood, too far back to pinpoint. I got hooked first on family history,

stories about things that had happened to my parents, grandparents, and great-

grandparents before I was born. I didn’t realize it then, but those stories illustrated

why the past matters and how it can feel alive in the present. In grade school and

high school during the late 1950s and 1960s, I got the standard rote education in

history, but it didn’t snuff my interest, probably because I read lots of books about

the Civil War and the saga of the westward movement, with mountain men, scouts,

Indians, pioneers, cowboys. Very incomplete stories, of course, which newer

histories are still filling in. In college and grad school my attraction to history was

intensified by literature that brought the past alive, including the great 19 th century

American, European, and Russian novelists, and 20th century writers from five

continents. These works led me to books about history, including accounts of

exploration.

After grad school I spent the first 30 years of my career as a freelance magazine

journalist. I was reading history mostly for pleasure, not work. When the Great

Recession decimated magazines, I switched from interviewing live people to

interviewing dead people, and started writing nonfiction narrative history, which

accounts for three of my four books.

3. How does history play a part of your professional life/career?

As a freelance journalist for forty years, I've researched, written, and published articles in numerous national publications, and I've published four books.

4. Why is studying/knowing history important?

5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and

why?

I’ll start with the usual answer and then offer a proviso. Knowledge of history can

theoretically help us avoid future mistakes and enrich our understanding of both

the present and ourselves. For those things to happen, we need to appreciate the

truth captured by Faulkner’s observation, “The past is never dead. It’s not even

past.” It baffles me that people understand the tragedy of an amnesiac cut off from

the past, but are complacent about their historical ignorance of things that helped

shape the world they live in, such as slavery and imperialism and evergreen

fascism.

The proviso: historians sometimes do their subject a disservice by over-

emphasizing its solemn importance, which can sound like an admonishment to eat

your peas. Better to follow Horace’s dictum: instruct but also delight. Yes, history

is important, and when delivered engagingly it’s also endlessly surprising and

entertaining. Too many people think of history as dusty and settled, a boring record

of dead people and obsolete events, but the past seethes with passions and heroics

and absurdities and evil, because it was made by vibrant humans intent on their

plans and schemes and fears and dreams about the present and the future—like us.

Compelling books of history resurrect the dead and make them breathe again in

their pulsing eras. If a writer does that for readers, the importance of the past will

be both clear and stirring.

   

6. Your most recent book, Our Man in Tokyo, is the story of

Ambassador Joseph Grew, American ambassador to Japan in the 1930s, a subject

and period few Americans know much about. We’re pretty Eurocentric in our

view of WWII. Why is Grew’s story an important and interesting story to tell?

You’re right about our Eurocentric view of WWII. Almost everyone knows a bit

about Hitler and Nazism and the holocaust, but far fewer (including me, before I

started this book) are familiar with events in Japan and Asia during the same

decade. The situation there was equally volatile, fascinating, and consequential, not

only for the U.S. but for the world. As our ambassador to Japan from 1932-1942,

Grew interacted with all the main players in Japan and the U. S. while trying to

prevent Japan’s imperial megalomania from sparking a war with the West. He

wrote thousands of pages about this in his diary, letters, and diplomatic dispatches.

This trove helped me recreate his day-by-day thinking and experiences. Grew’s

story is obviously important history. It’s also disturbingly pertinent today.

7. How do you get ideas for your book subjects and, once you decide

on a subject, what does the work look like in terms of research and writing

timelines? Do you have a routine established?

I choose my subjects by following my curiosity. That leads to a lot of dead-ends,

but I always enjoy the trip. I know that thousands of great stories remain untold, so

I keep looking until I stumble upon one that seems certain to keep me challenged

and engaged throughout the long journey required to research and write a book.

The subject also has to attract a good advance. I seem to need about two years to

do a book. My routine: get to my desk or destination early, research or write until

suppertime, then repeat for six or seven days a week until finished.