She really makes the book hers, and those are the kinds of books I'm interested in reading. There's no sentence in any of her books that could be written by anybody else.

I understand she's funny, but what makes her succeed? They definitely deal with nonfiction, but they have fun with it. She's got something similar to Ian Frazier, whom I also adore. What was the first Sarah Vowell book that you read?Īssassination Vacation was the first, and then I worked my way back. Fenn, which is also about the Revolutionary War. In my reader I have Pox Americana by Elizabeth A. Whatever she is thinking becomes a part of the book. I read things on my computer, I listen to audio books, and I read printed books, so first, I have Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell, whom I love. It made an impression that stuck with me.'' 'I really loved Studs Terkel's Working and reading how deeply people got into their work and how it formed their perspective. 'All three books came from the same place, which is my interest in people talking about their work,'' said Johnson, who lives in the Hudson Valley. She has also written two other books profiling particular professions: librarians in 2011 with This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All and obituary writers in 2007 with The Dead Beat. Johnson, 61, has worked for Esquire, Redbook and Outside magazines and was a staff writer for Life, where she wrote profiles and obituaries of celebrities, including Diana, Princess of Wales. 'The past is everywhere around us, and the forgotten is always underfoot,'' wrote Johnson in her book Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble, a nonfiction work that delves into the lives of archaeologists in places including Machu Picchu, a Caribbean slave plantation and Fishkill, N.Y.

Lives in ruins by marilyn johnson