Posts tagged “biography”

Overnight Code on Good Morning America

Posted on March 31, 2021

I tend to make a lot of lists. Grocery lists. To-do lists. Books-I’d-Like-To-Read lists. Books-I’d-Like-To-Write Lists. And so on and so forth. These lists keep me from forgetting important things, but they also keep me focused.

Before Overnight Code came out in January, I made a list of things that I hoped would happen for this book. Then David and I went about our business talking to groups, giving media interviews, chatting with book clubs and doing Zoom events with bookstores. We’ve had some wonderful support along the way, everyone from booksellers, to his university, to reporters, and friends who have enlisted us to speak to their book club, their enormous law firm, the political science department at their HBCU, etc. We’re grateful for everything that has been happening for this book and take none of it, and no reader, for granted.

If you’ve read this far, thank you a million times from the bottom of my heart for supporting David, me, and Overnight Code. It has been a tremendous privilege and honor to share this story with you. It has also been a great amount of fun for us both.

Now…

There was one thing I really wanted and I wrote it down on my list. I wanted Raye Montague’s story to return to Good Morning America. It’s where Raye first got big national attention in February 2017, when she talked about her life as the U.S. Navy’s Hidden Figure. It’s what got a certain special literary agent’s attention, which, in turn, led to Overnight Code. It’s responsible for launching the Paige and David literary show that has been running hard since January 12, 2021. A lot of things started there, on that show, and I had this twitchy little feeling that things needed to come full circle. I began pitching the book to them, looking for different angles each time. After a couple of tries, I heard nothing. I wasn’t surprised because it is a large, national show with a lot of busy people. But last week, I pitched it again, and a producer got back to us. At that point, things started moving really fast and feeling really unreal. They interviewed us. We sent them photographs and five copies of the book that didn’t arrive, and one copy of the book that did. Even though all of these signs seemed to point to them committing to the story, the nervous part of me knew that something could happen and the segment about Overnight Code could get bumped. So I didn’t want to tell anyone about it.

Because what if…

This past Monday, fifteen minutes before the end of the show, they aired this segment. It was exciting enough to see Robin Roberts hold up a copy of our book…

…but when I saw it on the Jumbotron outside GMA’s Times Square studio, I almost had a heart-attack. I just couldn’t believe it, and still can’t. But I am tremendously grateful to Robin Roberts, her producer Danielle Genet, and the rest of the GMA crew for helping us share this story with the nation. Somewhere, up above, Raye Montague is looking down on all of this, smiling. She’s not only getting her due, but lifting others up in the process.

The Raye Montague Challenge

Sunday, March 28 was Raye Montague Day in Little Rock, and David read Julia Finley Mosca’s The Girl With a Mind for Math to children via a Zoom event with Pyramid Art, Books and Custom Framing. Pyramid has become one of my favorite independent bookstores, and its owner, Garbo Hearne, has been a tremendous supporter of Overnight Code. On Sunday, Ms. Hearne issued a challenge to Central Arkansas: by next year’s Raye Montague Day, she wants to see a copy of The Girl With a Mind for Math and Overnight Code in every school and community organization library in the state. The Little Rock Water Reclamation Authority has already kicked off the challenge by purchasing and donating 100 books, and we are grateful to them for getting things going. Ms. Hearne wants Raye Montague to be a household name in Arkansas, and we thank her for that. Here’s hoping people are up for the challenge, not just there, but all over the nation, too.

 

Categories: Books, Uncategorized

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Overnight Code Update

Posted on February 24, 2021

OVERNIGHT CODE has been out in the world for a little more than a month now. David Montague and I have been busy giving talks to civic groups, bookstores, media and pretty much anyone else who will have us. The book has been optioned for a possible TV/film project, and David will soon be telling a Smithsonian Channel film crew what it was like to grow up as Raye Montague’s son.

We are incredibly grateful for the interest in the book, and hope to continue connecting with potential readers in the coming months.

One Little Rock-area Rotary Group said this about one of our talks:  “After last night, we were so in shock about how well they spoke and talked to us about the book. We felt like we made two new friends at the end of the program. It was that good.”

I wrote in the book about how David and I have a shared love of snacks. We also like making new friends, too. If you’re unable to make a book talk, why not have us meet with you and your book club via Zoom? If you reach out to us through our websites, we’d be happy to discuss putting together a great evening for you and your group. So far, people have been profoundly inspired by Raye Montague’s life story. Inspiring others was her life’s work, after all, and we hope to keep spreading her words and wisdom.

And if you’ve read the book already, we’d love to hear what you think about it. Please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads with your thoughts about it, and spread the word about this story with your friends. Yes, it is a book about a trailblazing engineer, but more than that it is a story of a survivor who fought tooth and nail against the obstacles placed in her way to achieve a lifelong dream.

After all, who among us hasn’t tried to overcome an obstacle at some point in our lives? Writing about Raye was fascinating for me, in part because of the things like engineering that made her tick, but also because of the unbelievable drive it took to take her from the point A of the Jim Crow South to the point B of a person who revolutionized the way the U.S. Navy designed and built its ships. In her words:

You don’t have to be an engineer to get something out of insights like these. And they’re all over this book! So if you pick up a copy, please consider sharing your favorite Raye Montague quote online, and tag it with #OvernightCode #TheQuotableRayeMontague so David and I can see what’s resonating with you. I’ll share some of your favorites in a coming post!

On Loving Your Local Indie Bookseller

I realize that it is often fastest and easiest to buy your books and other things from Amazon. I have nothing against anyone who does that. However, I am a huge fan of independent bookstores, and a big believer, especially in this pandemic year, in supporting small businesses like these any chance we get. Why I love indies: well-curated selections, personalized service, great author programs for kids and adults, and tremendous support of authors, period. For example, The Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore hired an accordion player for my July 14, 2017 talk there about THE GENERAL’S NIECE, and I’ve obviously never forgotten about it.

In a year like we’ve had, these community gems have supplied us with the books and puzzles and such that have made these weird times tolerable. That’s why I will always tell book groups that if you can, please buy from a local independent, and if you don’t have that at your disposal, please buy from bookshop.org, or indiebound.com. What people do next is up to them, but I will gently and consistently push supporting indies until my last breath.

Which reminds me: Read It Again, which hosted David and me for a virtual book talk on February 13, had to close their doors temporarily due to a broken water heater that flooded their store. If you can, please consider donating to the GoFundMe campaign on their website, which will help them with repairs and moving into a temporary space. Or, you can order books and gift cards from their website, which will help them too.

Do you have a favorite independent bookstore in your hometown? If so, what is it, and what do you like so much about them? Please let me know in comments. I’d love to be featuring your favorites here from time to time.

On Liking Your Co-Author

Dean Karayanis of The History Author Show had us on to talk about Overnight Code for Black History Month. During one part of the show, David and I were laughing about our quest to narrow down the number of pictures we used in the book. It was a bit of a struggle, because there are so many good pictures of his mother at work and at home. I said on the show that we got to picking on each other a little bit, and Dean said he often wondered whether co-authors genuinely like each other, or whether they suffer through each other’s quirks just to get the word out about the book. Now I can’t speak for David, obviously, but I can speak for myself. My joy about working with David Montague and giving these talks with him is 110 percent real, and unfortunately for him, he will never get rid of me.

By the way, Dean really knocked our socks off with all the work he put into this video. It’s an excellent tribute to David’s mom, and we hope you’ll take some time to watch it:

Some Events

We’ve been chatting up a storm lately, and we’ll be closing out February with a book club full of people that David grew up with in Maryland. I suspect that I may just want to pop some popcorn, kick back, and listen to some of the stories that I’m sure will be told. I already know that David and his best friend once got into a wild fight with squirt bottles of ketchup and mustard. Who knows what else I might learn this week?

At the beginning of March, we are giving Zoom talks to the Bryant (Ark.) Rotary at 1:45 p.m. EST on March 4, the El Dorado (Ark.) Rotary at 1 p.m. EST on March 9, and to the University of Arkansas, Little Rock at 1:30 p.m. EST on March 11. I will post the UALR information as soon as it is available. On that day, we will be talking about Raye’s life using artifacts from her archival collection at the Center for History and Culture.  More talks are coming, but these are the ones we have on the books right now.

What I’m Reading

I just finished Cicely Tyson’s memoir JUST AS I AM, and highly recommend it. It’s the beautiful and profound story of the critically acclaimed actress’s life, activism and love for jazz trumpeter Miles Davis.

Now, I’m reading Janet Skeslien Charles’ novel, THE PARIS LIBRARY, because I’ve been having these recurring dreams about being in Paris, people-watching, or sitting in a park reading. Review likely to come, but for now, let’s just say I’m enjoying the escape.

What I’m Excited About

I’m thinking about what I might want to do next, book-wise. As I sort it out, I’ve been doing some freelancing and I’m really, really excited about this profile I just wrote about a total freaking icon of Swinging Sixties London. When I can share more, I will. But for now, just know that I’m about to take you on a really fun ride and I can’t wait!

Please reach out to let me know what’s on your mind, what you’re reading, whether you have any questions. I’d love to hear from you!

 

 

 

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How Dunkirk Brought the de Gaulles Together Before France Fell

Posted on August 1, 2017

Christopher Nolan’s World War II tour de force “Dunkirk” has captivated moviegoers and reviewers since its release on July 21. It’s the story of the harrowing, heroic rescue of 400,000 Allied troops from the French port city of Dunkirk after German forces stormed into the country. Nolan’s film focuses on the rescue mission itself, not the aftermath in France. In THE GENERAL’S NIECE: THE LITTLE-KNOWN DE GAULLE WHO FOUGHT TO FREE OCCUPIED FRANCE , I write about the havoc Dunkirk wrought on the French population, and how it brought the de Gaulle family together before their beloved country fell to the Nazis. Here is an excerpt:

***

If there was to be a last stand in France against the German forces that laid waste to the country, some military men believed that it would take place in windswept Brittany. Xavier waited for his marching orders that June in a home that teemed with family members. Armelle, her two small children, Genevieve, and Roger awaited the arrival of Xavier’s frail, eighty-year-old mother, Jeanne, who was fleeing German attacks on the port of Le Havre, not far from where she lived with her daughter, Marie-Agnes; son-in-law, Alfred Cailliau; and their children. Jeanne had been a widow since May 3, 1932, when her husband, Henri, died at age eighty-two. In the years after Henri’s passing, Jeanne’s health had begun to decline too, and she became consumed with seeing her sons before war separated them again.

It was not an easy feat, given the situation on the ground. The German Luftwaffe had begun bombing Le Havre on May 19, 1940, and continued their attacks for the next two evenings. British troops fired antiaircraft guns as Nazi planes dropped bombs on warehouses, factories, shipyards, and Le Havre itself. When large numbers of Dutch and Belgian refugees began arriving in the town by train, locals panicked and thought that the Germans were winning. A dark mood descended over the public as air-raid sirens became commonplace.

The bombing continued in June when the British began evacuating at Dunkirk. Not all troops could be rescued, so they escaped to other ports along the country’s northern coast, striving to find a way back to England. Nazi planes tried to prevent their return by bombing Le Havre ten more times. Bedlam ensued as local officials tried to evacuate residents. Many wanted to flee incoming Nazis by heading for Brittany, but trains could not long travel in that direction because they had to go through the train station in Rouen, which was almost sixty miles to the east. That station was closed, but Jeanne was so determined to see her boys that she traveled 475 miles south to Grenoble to see her son Jacques before getting one of her grandsons to drive her 571 miles north to see Xavier.

After Jeanne’s arrival in Paimpont, nineteen-year-old Genevieve comforted the delicate old woman, whose anxiety gave way to vivid memories from her girlhood of France’s humiliation by the Prussians at Sedan in 1870. She felt like she was reliving those dark days, and her weakened heart couldn’t bear it. Her granddaughter reassured her that it wouldn’t happen like that, not again. Charles would come to visit his mother and Xavier’s family en route to London, where he’d meet with British prime minister Winston Churchill on June 15. After that visit Genevieve assured her grandmother that France would fight back — yes, right there in Brittany.

Brittany. The very shape of the peninsula on which the French army hung their dwindling hopes jutted out toward the English Channel and Atlantic Ocean like the hand of a drowning man begging for help. Two weeks before Petain’s radio address, the military devised a plan that would gather forces along Brittany’s Rance and Vilaine Rivers to fend off an enemy assault. As French troops kept up a stiff resistance along those rivers, allies from Great Britain could stream through the ports west of that line of defense to come to the country’s aid. A prolonged fight under this strategy would allow France to keep its lines of communication open with its allies and, in case of trouble, make it easier to relocate the state’s armed forces and government ministers to London or North Africa.

Two days after Petain addressed the nation, Charles de Gaulle, who had been recently appointed undersecretary of war and national defense, held secret meetings with commanders about the feasibility if this scheme. The overwhelming consensus: Such resistance was futile. There were simply not enough troops to hold off a German advance. General de Gaulle bid farewell to his wife and children. He was headed to London, he told them because things were very bad.

“Perhaps we are going to carry on the fight in Africa,” de Gaulle told his wife, Yvonne. “But I think it more likely that everything is about to collapse. I am warning you so that you will be ready to leave at the first sign.”

The signs were everywhere. After securing passports, Yvonne and the children left on June 18 to join Charles in England.

On the morning of June 18, Xavier de Gaulle and several other reservists were ordered to march west in an effort to regroup against the enemy. His family joined him on the crowded streets in an procession riddled with anger, shame and fear. All around them there was a growing feeling that whatever came next would be in vain. Genevieve lingered close to her grandmother, “this little old lady, dressed in black, so tiny and easy to miss,” so she didn’t fall behind and get lost in the crowd. Throughout the day the young woman reassured the matriarch, as she worked through her own tormented emotions about this turn of events.

By evening, they had walked forty miles to the town of Locmine and faced their first Nazi soldiers. They looked like war gods, Genevieve thought; their smart black uniforms and chiseled features exuded strength and pride as they breezed past on motorcycles and tanks. Some reservists cried because it was clear that there was no hope left and no will to fight this aggressor. As the crowd grew numb with dismay, a priest ran toward them from the other side of the town square. He was excited because he had just heard a French general speak on BBC radio.

“He said we may have lost a battle,” the priest cried, “but not the war. The general’s name was de Gaulle.”

Thrilled by the news, Jeanne de Gaulle, broke from the crowd and ran to the priest.

“Monsieur le Cure, that’s my son!” she cried as she tugged on the sleeve of his cassock. “That’s my son! He’s done what he ought to have done!”

A country away, Charles de Gaulle couldn’t have known how his mother reacted to his decision to offer France another way, but Genevieve remembered the moment as one of her grandmother’s last great joys. For Charles, it was a lonely affair, because as he heard himself speak into the BBC microphone, he realized his life would never be the same. Up until then he had been devoted to both the army and the nation he served. And yet he was not the sort of man to capitulate, which was why he had broken with his superiors and headed to London, to condemnation. At forty-nine years old, fate had lured him away from all his predictable patterns and responsibilities. He was obligated to the France he once knew, and he summoned his countrymen, uncertain of who might hear or put their trust in him.

Few people caught the general’s broadcast, but the ones who did began risking their lives to spread his word.

***

Excerpted from THE GENERAL’S NIECE: THE LITTLE-KNOWN DE GAULLE WHO FOUGHT TO FREE OCCUPIED FRANCE, published by Chicago Review Press. Copyright 2017 by Paige Bowers. All rights reserved.

Categories: Books, Culture, france, History, Popular Culture, The General's Niece, Writing

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Falling Upwards

Posted on May 7, 2014
hotairballoon

For years, my mother was fixated on taking this luxury hot air balloon trip with a group that promised private luncheons with real-life countesses and afternoons of drifting over Burgundy’s vineyards and medieval castles. When she spoke of it, all dreamy-eyed, it inspired that sort of feeling in me that many eager-to-please oldest children get, the one that screams “Someday, when I’m able to afford it, I will make this dream come true for my mother. Someday I will give her this bird’s eye view of France.”

Years after the fact, I realize that it might behoove me to make a slightly different dream come true for her, because neither of us is so great with heights, let’s just say. But I think we are both understandably swoony about the idea of the idea of a hot air balloon voyage. There’s a certain romance to seeing the world from a different perspective and, well,  drifting aimlessly over verdant pastures with a glass of champagne in hand. There’s also a certain adventurous spirit to getting into a balloon and not knowing just exactly where you’ll land.

fallingupwardsHistorian Richard Holmes captures these sentiments in Falling Upwards: How We Took To The Air, a deliciously quirky account of flight before the age of airplanes. He writes:

Throughout history, dreamlike stories and romantic adventures have always attached themselves to balloons. Some are factual, some are pure fantasy, many (the most interesting) are a provoking mixture of the two. But some kind of narrative basket always seems to come tantalisingly suspended beneath them.

Here’s the narrative basket in Holmes’ book: Balloons have not only been important to our understanding of the world, but crucial to shaping our ideas about what the future could — and should — be.  Some of the more obvious ways balloons have been instrumental to this understanding is by offering us new views of our planet, allowing us to study and forecast the weather, and enabling us to spy on enemies during wartime. But balloons have also been useful propaganda tools and muses for the new (at the time) genre of science fiction. And yet, there was still some early sense that balloons could only take us so far, that we would need to develop some sort of mechanized bird of sorts if we truly wanted to soar. Even the writer Victor Hugo declared that “the future lay with the bird, not the cloud.”

The Wright Brothers get all the press for developing the bird in question, but it is only after reading Holmes’ book that we recognize how much the Wrights owe to these early — and largely unknown — pioneers of flight. Holmes’ narrative teems with all sorts of strange characters who took to the air in the spirit of education and entertainment alike. One of my favorite stories is about Sophie Blanchard, a woman who overcame blancharddebilitating anxiety to become Napoleon’s Aeronaute des Fetes Officielles. She was renowned for standing in a silver gondola and drifting high above Paris in a white, low-cut dress and a hat full of colored feathers. Over time, Blanchard’s aerial shows became more daring, involving fireworks, colored smoke and rockets that flew from her delicate rig. Her daring cost her her life on July 6, 1819, when her silk balloon caught fire and sent her falling to her death. The stunned crowd originally cheered because they thought that the flames were all part of the show.

One eyewitness wrote:

In a few seconds, the poor creature, enveloped and entangled in the netting of her machine, fell with a frightful crash upon the slanting roof of a house, and thence onto the street, and Madame Blanchard was taken up a shattered corpse!

Although Blanchard was one of ballooning’s first casualties, she was a trailblazer, and filmmaker Jen Sachs is currently turning her life story into a beautiful animated film that is scheduled for release next year. But there were some near-absent trailblazers in this otherwise delightful book: The Montgolfier Brothers, who invented the hot air balloons that started all the fuss. I would have liked to have read more about them here, but Holmes is such a good raconteur…that it’s okay. Really. Drifting through these tales of a really rich and overlooked period in history was a fun ride.

 

 

Categories: Books, france, History

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Fall Reading List

Posted on September 28, 2012

One of my friends asked me what it was like now that I was out of graduate school and could read anything I wanted. I said it was great, but I was still reading plenty of French history. “The difference is, you have a choice now,” she told me. The truth may be that I have no choice at all. It may be that I can’t help myself anymore.

At any rate, here is a list of some of the books I’ll be reading this fall, broken down by genre. I’ll try to review some of these reads here from time to time. If you have any recommendations for me, please don’t hesitate to leave them in comments.

Rock and roll memoirs on my Kindle

Life by Keith Richards — My fondest Keith Richards memory dates back to when I was an undergraduate in college and

+Read more

Categories: Books, Culture, france, Lifestyle, Popular Culture

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