July 8

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
July 8, 1926: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross born.

Q&A with Gail Buckland

Gail Buckland is the author of the new book Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History, 1843 to the Present, a companion to an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Her many other books of photographic history include Who Shot Rock & Roll and The Magic Image. She is Distinguished Visiting Professor, and was Olympus Visiting Professor of the History of Photography, at The Cooper Union in New York.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Who Shot Sports?

A: I did a book on the history of rock and roll photography, which also accompanied an exhibition. It’s exhausting. I actually said [after that] with a smile on my face to a friend, This is the first time in my professional life I’m not working on a book—and he said, Sports! I said, I know nothing about sports!...

I have spent my professional life trying to expand the canon of photography…Things like rock and roll and sports tend not to be in the history books of photography…

I attempt to do projects that will be a popular and critical success. It gives me pleasure to bring audiences into the museums who wouldn’t ordinarily come, and do books that are not catalogs, though they accompany an exhibition. I did it my way! I liked working with a highbrow publisher for lowbrow subjects…

Q: You write, “The story of sports photography is also the story of innovation in photographic technology.” What were some of the greatest technological innovations, and how did they affect sports photography over the years?

A: When photography was invented, the mid-19^th century exposures were very slow. The last thing photographers were thinking about was the shutter...There’s a tale of Leland Stanford wagering that a horse had all four legs off the ground at one point; an artist had [portrayed] it incorrectly. Leland Stanford hired [photographer Eadweard] Muybridge to capture the horse in motion. He developed one of the earliest shutters…

The way I embrace sports photography is about capturing the body in motion. People don’t understand about early photographers—it’s a little like cooking. Everyone mixed their own formulas. With sports photographers, they would see what worked, and make faster lenses, and gradually figure it out.

They didn’t invent the Leica but were one of the first groups of photographers to say, This is the tool for us. It liberated them from big cameras and tripods. With the Olympics coming up, we’re all in awe of the camera angles. Even the GoPro is very adaptable to sports…

I had a Eureka moment. I wasn’t sure how to divide the book, and I was thinking in obvious ways. I realized I have to divide it [looking at] how photographers work—the vantage point. Where do they put the camera?

Even the greatest of photographers, you interview them, and you think they will say they had a great relationship with Michael Jordan. No, they will say, First I look for the background; Michael Jordan is secondary.

How do you make a picture composed and memorable? So much sports photography is disposable—it’s in a newspaper or a magazine, it’s chucked out. The schlock is mixed with the great pictures. My idea is, Let’s just show the great pictures!

Q: So what are some of the qualities found in the best sports photography, and how did you select the photographs to include in this book?

A: I think the best sports photographers use the same criteria as the best photographers [of any subject]—for me, that means a type of lasting quality. It isn’t about who is in the picture, necessarily, but our awe and wonder at what humans can achieve.

Part of it is a celebration of achievement. That becomes tied up with an aesthetic. [Etienne-Jules] Marey, a French scientist who studied motion and birds in flight…said the ancient Greeks were able to depict athletes and movements in friezes, vases, and then for centuries people weren’t observing the body correctly until photography…

When I select pictures, there are incredible moments that make for a picture. It’s not the winning goal, but for me it’s those pictures that connect with us for those magical reasons we can’t always define.

Before I had an inkling of doing a sports book, my son-in-law and two grandchildren came into my kitchen, and said, Why do you have so and so [sports figure] on your wall? I said, I don’t know who that is, but the composition reminds me of a Renaissance painting! He said, That’s why you have it?

Part of it is what connects to me. I look at thousands and thousands [of pictures] and make the selections. I look again, and cut it down. This is my 14^th book. I’ve been working on photography seriously since my early 20s, and I’m 68 now. You get better at it. A young person will react strongly to certain pictures, but will [those pictures] last 20 or 30 years?

Q: The book includes photographs from a wide variety of sports. Are there particular sports that lend themselves to excellent photography?

A: I had a hard time with cricket! I saw the film Concussion. My daughter says she won’t let her children play football. I am no fan of football, but before Astroturf the photographs were so picturesque—they’re covered in mud and charging like warriors. The composition is very powerful.

Soccer has wonderful balletic qualities. You think of Nureyev. Swimming is very elegant, and the diving! I tried to be as inclusive as I could. There’s rugby, soccer in Africa, traditional sports in Spain.

It’s hard work. The earliest photograph related to sports I could find was from 1843. Photography was announced to the world in 1839. You realize how early that picture is. The photo is great—[the subject] has such attitude. I looked through all the other photographs of this Mr. Laing [which have] a very traditional composition—dead as a doornail. Given a racket, he becomes animated. He becomes alive. It’s a wonderful foundation to sports photography—he’s conveying energy.

That’s something else in sports photography—the kind of energy communicated that’s infectious. It helps us understand why so many people love sports. It is tribal…I think people will be captivated by what’s there as opposed to what’s not there.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I babysat all day—I’m working on being a grandmother! I am a Distinguished Professor of the History of Photography [at The Cooper Union in New York]—I teach and I have a lot to do coming up for the opening of the exhibit.

I’m beginning to do interviews—there’s interest in a documentary based on the book. I’m looking forward to a summer without pressure! Last summer I was sitting at my desk for a minimum of [12] hours a day. I had this deadline…I was working on this for four years, very intensely.

People who have seen [the book], they feel there are so many people who would enjoy it!...In all my books, I try to sneak in my love for photography and extensive knowledge of the field…

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Carel van Schaik and Kai Michel

Carel van Schaik

Carel van Schaik and Kai Michel are the authors of the new book The Good Book of Human Nature: An Evolutionary Reading of the Bible. Van Schaik is a professor of biological anthropology at the University of Zurich. His other books include Among Orangutans and The Primate Origins of Human Nature. Michel is a historian and journalist who also lives in Zurich.

Q: In the book, you ask, "What, then, led the two of us to believe the Bible might yield other insights than those of interest only to true believers?" How do you answer this, and how did the two of you come to work on this book?

A: Believers and atheists alike are often bewildered by the Bible’s texts, trying to wrest meaning from its opaque verses. Much makes little sense or even seems wrong, and some of it is unexpectedly gruesome. In response, believers tend to studiously ignore certain passages, whereas atheists condemn the Bible wholesale.

We have always been fascinated by the Book of Books, and once found ourselves discussing Genesis. We wondered about why the Bible presents us with one disaster after another so soon after God had created the world and us: he threw his own creatures out of paradise, Cain killed his brother, a terrible flood drowned millions, the tower of Babel was abandoned unfinished, and fire and brimstone rained on Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Kai Michel

And the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the patriarchs, are also full of family feuds. All in all, Genesis is one long series of catastrophes. We asked out loud what many people must also have been asking themselves: why?

Believers know the answer: because humans are fallible. But if so, why did God create us in the first place? To the atheists this shows why God is a farce.

But we experienced a déjà-vu here: it all sounded so familiar. Over the past few decades archeology has shown that when people gave up being hunters and gatherers, life became all toil: people had to earn their living by the sweat of their brow. They grew to be less tall, were sicklier, and died younger than before. Jared Diamond once called the adoption of agriculture “the biggest mistake in the history of the human race.”

The newly invented institution of property led to inequality and monopolization and created the problem of how to transmit wealth across generations. Brothers, once their best allies, became deadly competitors; families were torn apart by strife or engaged in bitter feuds with other families. Droughts and floods afflicted the newly sedentary people. New epidemics ravaged entire populations.

Once cities and states arose, things went from bad to worse: the old in-group solidarity was broken, inequality and suppression exploded. So, Genesis was quite literally right: once we lived in paradise, but east of Eden it all went wrong.

If you continue reading beyond Genesis, you will find the text littered with commands and prohibitions. In fact, someone counted 613 of them in the Torah.

They have very little to do with the kinds of things we now think of when we talk about religion: they were not concerned with the meaning of life or other spiritual themes. Instead they were all about avoiding disaster. We find rules against injustice and exploitation, loads of prophylactic health and diet advice, and tons of suggestions as to how to keep families peaceful.

We therefore read the Torah as the heroic attempt to come to grips with all the urgent problems foisted upon us by agriculture and despotic states– all at a time when there was no form of natural science, and when instead each untoward event was seen as the punishment of a wrathful God, so all we had to do was to follow his commandments and all would be good.

That is why we see the Torah as an amazing cultural protection system, and why we think its authors deserve a place in the science hall of fame.

In fact, many of these problems still plague us to this very day. In our heart, we are still those old hunter-gathers, who feel like misfits in the modern world.

By reading the Bible using our reverse-engineering approach, we can identify the problems that the spectacular cultural evolution since the dawn of agriculture imposed upon us.

It also reveals where our cultural solutions remain imperfect: we’re still upset about injustice and suppression, we still yearn for social belonging, we still have trouble with being faithful ‘till death us do part, and once in a while we feel a vague discontent with our culture. In other words, we’re longing for paradise.

So we decided to subject the whole Bible to an evolutionary reading.

Q: In the chapter on Adam and Eve, you write, "Adam and Eve's fate throws up one question after another, and we have an urgent need to find meaning in the story." How do you interpret their story, and how does that differ, perhaps, from other interpretations?

A: Isn’t it utterly amazing that until today there is no uniformly accepted way of reading the first story in the Bible? Some say it is about humanity’s hubris, others argue it documents the birth of our knowledge of morality, yet others insist it reveals the omnipresent influence of evil forces, and so on and on.

Evidently, we modern readers have trouble squeezing meaning out of this story. God creates people, and they make a mistake in that they snack from a tree’s forbidden fruit – upon which God unceremoniously evicts them from paradise, forever and ever. Does that make sense? Could God not have been a bit more lenient?

So, what was the real goal of the Biblical authors? They wanted to make clear to their audience why we humans have to live in a world unworthy of the creation of a multi-talented God. They also wanted to stress that God is serious about His commandments. Genesis serves as the overture to the major piece: The Law.

Two things are really fascinating about this story. One is our reaction to God’s stern punishment. Our reluctance to accept God’s harsh verdict for what is really a minor misdemeanor simply reflects human nature: Our hunter-gatherer soul rebels against it. In the small groups in which we used to live and our psyche evolved, such utter lack of forgiveness did not exist.

Of course, transgressions caused indignation, but in most cases, mediation would ensure that everyone would make up and peace would be restored. This may sound overly romantic, but it was a bitter necessity: People were utterly dependent on each other. Reconciliation is one of humanity’s major strengths.

The second thing that enthralled us is that the story actually correctly describes the transition from foraging to food production that began in a few areas in the Middle East some 12,000 years ago and that the people must soon have interpreted this change as a change for the worse, as punishment.

Today we do not see it that way, of course, but we had to cross a deep valley of misery before we, or at least the lucky ones among us, emerged healthy and prosperous.

The Bible faithfully depicts the key problems of the new sedentary lifestyle. Humanity’s first transgression was a violation of property rights. Foragers do not understand that anyone can claim to own land or trees, and yet be from the same community.

The abstract notion of property had to be invented and asserted. Hunters and gatherers simply collected all the fruits they could find. And now someone suddenly says: “This is my tree. You are not allowed to take its fruits.” Little wonder that initially no one understood this rule and had to be rudely reminded of it.

Another major problem is patriarchy. Among nomadic foragers, women have a certain degree of economic and sexual autonomy. Now, all of a sudden, with the advent of agriculture and property that must be defended and inherited, men become strictly organized in patrilineal clans, and women are turned into tradable chattel.

The Bible talks about this: "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.“ And Genesis is right!

It is also right about its statement that women were punished for causing us to be thrown out of paradise by making giving birth a painful, even outright dangerous ordeal. Foragers do not have such problems, to a large extent because they were taller and probably also because they moved, labored and sat quite differently.

Q: In your introduction to the section on the New Testament, you ask, "But what made Christianity so enormously successful?" What are some of the ways in which you answer that?

A: Christianity owes its amazing success to its being the Swiss Army Knife among the religions of antiquity, for it was willing to adapt and incorporate new ideas, and so could serve a variety of functions.

Because our space is limited here, we can discuss only one issue, the one we just talked about: the continued presence of social injustice and natural disasters. The Torah had been quite explicit: All untoward events are God’s punishment for human transgressions.

Over time, however, it gradually dawned on the believers that even if one followed all the rules of the Torah, misery in the form of disasters, epidemics or injustice did not go away. How could God let it happen that true believers had to die for their faith, and so became martyrs?

In response to this crisis, already in the Old Testament, we see the emergence of two new concepts. First, Satan gains in prominence (think of the Book of Job), and, together with his army of demons, becomes responsible for the evil in the world. This means that the evil we experience is no longer seen as punishment but instead a test of the strength of our faith.

Second, the Book of Daniel is the first to broach the notion of an afterlife in heaven as God’s reward for steadfast faith in this life.

What the New Testament und early Christianity did was to refine and further elaborate on these new ideas – the devil and our resurrection at the Last Judgment.

Christianity decreed that it is the sacred duty of all true believers to fight the devil and his forces like Jesus did with the demons – and to close ranks with one’s fellow believers in this struggle. Ironically, its apocalyptic matrix unwittingly reinvents an ancient Stone Age adage: support your in-group friends and send your enemies to hell.

In sum, Christianity urges us to no longer quietly endure evil and adversity as God’s punishment, but to actively resist it, indeed wipe it off the face of the earth. Although this is of course not the only reason for Christianity’s success, it played a major role.

Q: You write toward the end of the book, "Far too few are aware that [the Bible] is the product of almost 1,000 years of work..." How would you describe the history of the Bible?

A: We see the Bible as humanity’s diary – a running commentary on all the unexpected events in one’s life. One millennium long, it was a work in progress, with authors editing existing books, sometimes quite drastically, and adding new texts of their own.

With every new book, the scribes also tried to update the explanations for the continued existence of earthly misery, but also inevitably produced the many inconsistencies that today’s readers find so puzzling. The Bible is quite literally the Book of Books, a pluralistic product of cultural evolution.

Judaism still maintains this updating tradition. New interpretations and comments continue to be added to their new diary, the Talmud.

Christianity chose another path. The Christian Church had to establish its authority on its diverse and scattered, and therefore more unruly constituency, and so decided to canonize the Bible.

As a result, exegesis now became the job of an elite group of experts, whose conclusions were broadcast to the believers as binding dogma. The Bible became a fossilized text – the Holy Writ of a perfect God.

One could argue that was the Bible’s fall from grace. With every passing year, the Bible becomes slightly more outdated, widening the gap between the Book of Books and its readers. Little wonder that today’s readers are befuddled by many of the stories.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Carel continues to do his anthropological work, focusing on primates in an attempt to unravel what made us human, whereas Kai is already busy writing his next book, on an archeological topic.

But more importantly, together, we are planning to carry on the cultural evolution project by subjecting the books of other religions to a similar analysis, regarding them too as diaries.

By seeing how people responded in different places to somewhat different combinations and severities of problems and catastrophes, we hope to refine our definition of what it is to be human.

Obviously, a full analysis would require many years of study by a coordinated group of scholars. That is way beyond our ken, so we are dreaming of setting up an institute of cultural evolution that would provide a home for this enterprise.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: If you read the Bible as humanity’s diary, as the documentation of our ancestors’ heroic struggle to come to terms with a world for which we were not made, to figure out how to avoid injustice and despotism, wars, catastrophes and disease – if you do this, it becomes absolutely clear why no one can possibly use the Bible’s words as the justification for fundamentalism in any shape or form.

Instead, if you do this, you will be able to appreciate the Bible in its full glory: as the Good Book of Human Nature, a book that concerns all of us—believer, agnostic or atheist. Everyone reading the Bible from an evolutionary perspective will come away with a better understanding, if not of God, then at least of the human condition.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

July 6

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
July 6, 1935: The Dalai Lama born.

Q&A with Cathi Unsworth

Cathi Unsworth is the author of the new historical crime novel Without the Moon. Her other books include Weirdo and Bad Penny Blues. She has worked at a variety of publications, including Sounds, Bizarre, and Melody Maker. She lives in London.

Q: You write in your author's note that Without the Moon was based on two actual cases. What did you see as the right blend of fiction and history as you wrote the book?

A: It’s an instinctive thing that is very hard to define. But the writing I have admired most in noir fiction – James Ellroy’s LA Quartet, David Peace’s Red Riding and everything by Jake Arnott – has always been a combination of real events and fiction that conspire to tell a picture of history that has been forgotten by mainstream historians, history told from the point of view of the people on the blunt end of it, rather than the victors.

And it is always women on the blunt end of it, so the cases I have chosen to write about are a continuation of a theme that began when I wrote a book called Bad Penny Blues that came out in the UK in 2009.

It was a reimagining of an unsolved case in which eight women were murdered and their naked, strangled bodies placed in a strange, apparent pattern, in and around the river Thames, west from Hammersmith.

Whoever did these killings was never apprehended, but the press wove a myth around him, dubbing him Jack the Stripper – the women being left naked was obviously a gift to those headline writers. And of course the forked shadow of Jack the Ripper never leaves the British imagination.

What I wanted to investigate was these sporadic outpourings of violence against women that manifest themselves in these so-called Rippers, but written from the perspective that it was the women who has their lives so brutally taken away from them that are the important people here.

I also wanted to look into the society around the time of these killings, which in the case of that book was the very interesting period between 1959-65 when Britain was recovering from the privations of the War and its young people were forging new identities that questioned the former order of the Establishment.

Writing that book was very difficult because the story was so obscured but it really opened my eyes to how little I knew about things that had gone on in the part of London where I’ve lived in for the last 30 years.

It left me with the conviction that it is more rewarding to write about crimes that have already been committed as part of our collective hidden story than to make things up. Not that anyone ever just makes things up when writing fiction anyway.

So I decided I would like to follow this trail back further. While I had been writing Bad Penny, thematic links had come up with a couple of cases from the 1940s.

One was that of Gordon Cummins, a trainee RAF pilot who went on a murderous rampage during one week in 1942, earning himself the press-derived nickname of The Blackout Ripper.

The other was of the so-called Blitz Witch, the medium Helen Duncan, who was put on trial under 17th century witchcraft legislation.

In the end, Helen only gets a small scene in this book (though there will be more to come in the next) and another case, that of the murder of Margaret McArthur on Waterloo Bridge, just after Cummins’ arrest, took over for the second half of the novel.

This was because a historian called Nick Pelling, who had read Bad Penny and approved of it, got in touch with me. Nick had been researching this case with an aim to write a non-fiction account but this was stymied by his failure to trace what had become of the Canadian solider who was tried for the offence.

He very kindly handed his files to me, in order that I might try and make sense of them through fiction, and at the very least, write something of a requiem for this forgotten woman.

Nick’s own researches had linked the MO of Margaret’s murder with that of Cummins and the trail of terror the Blackout Ripper had left in his wake, so in the end, the focus of the novel narrowed down to those two weeks in February 1942 when London’s women were being attacked by two servicemen who were supposed to be on their side.

Q: Can you say more about how you researched this novel, and how you decided on the chapter titles, which come from songs of the era?

A: Apart from Nick’s research, I read a lot of books about the period, most valuably An Underworld at War by Donald Thomas; the memoirs of the detective Edward Greeno, the fingerprint expert Fred Cherrill and biographies of the forensics pioneer Sir Bernard Spilsbury, who all worked on the Cummins case; and consulted the files kept at the National Archive in Kew on the Cummins case.

But I also used another technique I had learned writing Bad Penny that you correctly identify – the music of the era.

This was perhaps the greatest pleasure of writing the book for me – along with compiling the slang dictionary at the back. But the big band era of jazz is probably my favourite music ever.

It’s strange, but this music gave one of mankind’s worst and darkest eras of racial intolerance and madness its best, most vital, multicultural and brilliant soundtrack – the collective works of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and, in London, the doomed romantics Al Bowlly and Snakehips Johnson, who themselves were tragic victims of the Blitz – being the swinging starting point.

I also really enjoyed the creepy children’s songs of Henry Hall, he of "Hush, Hush, Hush, Here Comes The Bogey Man," to play with, which gave me a title for the first section of the novel that couldn’t be beaten, given that, in ‘30s slang, a bogey man is also a policeman.

Interestingly, I recently read an interview with Jerry Dammers from The Specials in which he cited another Henry Hall classic, "Teddy Bear’s Picnic," as the sonic inspiration for their classic single "Ghost Town." You can really hear it, when you know that, too.

Music, more than anything other than smell, really brings an era back into focus, I think. It might not be very nice to have a scratch’n’sniff book, given some of the content, but it is great that you can now easily compile the soundtrack to this novel and swing along with it.

Those songs had really beautiful lyrics, too. My favourite example of this, the one that always makes me want to cry, is Al Bowlly’s version of “The Very Thought Of You.”

Q: Do you know how your novels will end before you start writing them, or do you change things around as you're writing?

A: No, I never exactly know how the stories are going to end when I am writing them. Even when you have the outline from real life, you can’t explain why people do the things they do.

For example, in the whole of the writing for this book, I had to work my imagination the hardest at the point Margaret McArthur agreed to step foot on the bridge with her killer.

It was another thing I was completely ignorant of, before I met Nick Pelling, but the Waterloo Bridge of today, designed by George Gilbert Scott, was still being built during the War. So she was basically walking out onto a building site.

I knew she had done it but I was at a loss to explain why – she was in her 30s, a woman of the world, known for her wit and experience in dealing with men, according to the police officers who had known her from her regular beat along The Strand.

Although not much else was known about her. Margaret was Irish and apparently well educated. She had largely given up streetwalking after she met her common-law husband Charles Beattie, a docker from Deptford.

But something had happened between them. The night she was murdered, Margaret had done a flit. So, though not perhaps desperate, she was a troubled woman with a lot else on her mind besides making enough money to keep her going. Which might explain why her instincts failed her that night.

While I am writing I am always researching at the same time, and turning up nuggets of new information that often change what I had been thinking, so I am constantly adapting what I am doing.

I don’t think it’s possible to ever know entirely where you are going within a book, and if you did, it would take a lot of the excitement away from it.

For me, writing a book is like going on a long, strange journey, which sometimes feels more real than reality itself. What other jobs offer you the opportunity to travel in space and time like that? 

Q: Can you say more about the authors that have influenced you?

A: The aforementioned James Ellroy, David Peace, Jake Arnott and also the great English noir novelists Derek Raymond and Patrick Hamilton are probably my post pivotal influences – I think you can see a lot of Hamilton in Without the Moon and there are a scattering of deliberate homages to him in it.

I think Hamilton and Raymond are very similar writers who shared an obvious affinity for the London lowlife and got all their best characters and dialogue from that demi-monde of pubs, theatres and spielers.

There are also a lot of writers from the ‘30s and ‘40s not recognised in the usual “Golden Age” canon such as the wonderful Alexander Baron (Britain’s Nelson Algren, I reckon), Arthur La Bern, James Curtis, Robert Westerby and Simon Blumenfeld; as well as your own great Canadian Queen of Noir, Margaret Millar, and the similarly-minded tough-talking dame, Dorothy B Hughes, plus women who have straddled the worlds of noir writing and music, Lydia Lunch and Joolz Denby. If I wanted to form a girl gang, those are who I’d choose to ride with!

Q: What are you working on now?

A: A book that links to Without the Moon – I have an idea for an interlinking series of novels taking place in the 1940s that I hope I can pull off. It centres on the character Ross Spooner, who has a small part in Without the Moon, introduced at the Helen Duncan séance.

The next book will be about his part in the investigation of the Blitz Witch and also another, I think much more dangerous woman with occult leanings, which is also based on another true story that is even stranger still. There are elements that are pure Dennis Wheatley, so I think it will be called That Old Black Magic.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Deborah, I have probably rabbited long enough if you have been kind enough to listen to it all. But if you do want more, there’s loads at www.cathiunsworth.co.uk.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

July 5

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
July 5, 1890: Frederick Lewis Allen born.

Q&A with Miranda Paul

Miranda Paul is the author of the children's picture book One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of the Gambia, a winner of the 2016 Children's Africana Book Awards. Her other books include Trainbots and Whose Hands Are These? She lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Q: You write that you first learned about Isatou Ceesay's story when you were a volunteer teacher in the Gambia. Why did you decide to write a picture book about her?

A: At first, we thought about writing a longer story—Isatou has launched many projects and has lived a remarkable life overall. But when I began freelancing for many children's and educational markets, I realized how the story of her starting the recycling co-op would resonate with young readers.

Children often have great ideas, and others don't always take them seriously. They are dreamers and visionaries, and they're also very passionate about our planet and animals. I decided to write a picture book because Isatou's story naturally fits this form—it's visual, powerful, and easily incorporated in an educational setting.

Q: What does she think of the book?

A: Isatou worked with me throughout the development of the book. I remember one night when I was in Njau, even before it had sold to the publisher, she translated the story into Wolof and read it for the women. Everyone commented that they were hopeful they'd see their story put on an international stage.

Isatou recently told me how people in Gambia are loving the now-published book. It's a significant honor.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book, and what do you see as the perfect age range for its readers?

A: I hope readers take away some inspiration and knowledge, and that the book fosters an appreciation and admiration for what these women have accomplished.

At one of my recent book presentations, an adult came up to me and said "I see this book is labeled for ages 5-9, but I loved it. It should say ages 5-99!" I think I'll second that opinion.

Q: How are the environmental conditions these days in Isatou Ceesay's village?

A: In Isatou's village, things are remarkably better. Not only have the women cleaned up most or all of the large "dustbins," they're also doing organic farming. They place collection bins in other villages and have trained hundreds in the recycling techniques.

Their projects with WasteAid UK and others have been reported upon internationally, sending occasional updates on their new waste management projects.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I'm working on more picture books. I've got some fiction and non-fiction titles in the works, but right now my husband Baptiste Paul and I have been working on a title similar to One Plastic Bag, about another environmental hero from Africa.

It's already been years in the making, as these kinds of book take time and resources to complete.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: During the writing of this book, Isatou and I helped a friend deliver a baby together. They named her Isatou-Miranda! I think that's one of the most special experiences in the world.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb