Booknotes: America's Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas

In essays that let the authors speak for themselves, Booknotes includes David Halberstam, who explains how he readies himself to write by having "a very lazy cappuccino;" Doris Kearns Goodwin, on spending six years working on her Roosevelt book in a study filled with pictures of FDR and Eleanor; Civil War historian Shelby Foote, explaining why he has to sleep in the room he writes in; Stephen Ambrose, on why he became a historian instead of a doctor; Norman Mailer, on why he never gets writer's block.