NON-FICTION AUTHOR PROFILES Nonfiction writers tell the Exacting Editor about research, redesign, packaging, truth, self-discovery, setbacks and self-promotion. How and why this series              Scan the whole roster

As Federal personnel director from 1981 to '85, Donald J. Devine earned his Washington Post designation as "Reagan's Terrible Swift Sword of the Civil Service." Today he directs the Federalist Leadership Center and holds a professorship at Bellevue University. His early career was as a professor of political science at the U. of Maryland and he has authored seven books. "A vigorous and able man who wants to prove government can be managed," said the Wall Street Journal; and it's that very cauldron -- where presidential policy change, group and administrative interests, and "neutral bureaucracy" notions bring matters to a boil -- that makes this Winter 2009 discussion bubble:

www.ExactingEditor.com/DonDevine.html

Novels receive the PR hype, but nonfiction books build their drama with diligent research and new truth. In fact, the "life course" of a book is its own drama -- from the founding idea, to the push for sponsorship (which can take various forms), to the sift and sort of themes and personalities, to the budgeting and marketing, to repackaging under pressure. This Q&A with Kathie Durbin conveys that palpably pulpy process superbly: Learn how one generates a book about 40 years of business and politics in and around the planet's largest temperate rain forest. You need to be a methodical reporter while making sure the plot remains lively -- and the best interviews require boats and planes!

www.ExactingEditor.com/KathieDurbin.html

Partly due to its intimidating price tag, this book has never been reviewed -- but that will soon change. Authored by Stonehill College Professor Emeritus of History James J. Kenneally, it's the biography of the only Republican House Speaker between 1930 and 1995 -- Joseph W. Martin Jr. of Massachusetts. "He never went to college. He worked for the Sun Chronicle first as a newspaper delivery boy and then as the managing editor" and ultimately became Speaker during the GOP-controlled 80th and 83rd Congresses. Look for that Q&A no later than November. For now, here's more about the author:

Born in Tennessee, Maury Klein "came to the University of Rhode Island [in 1964] to begin a teaching career that, to my astonishment, continued there for 44 years." Our January Q&A centers on his Days of Defiance (1998), The Power Makers (2008), and the in-progress "A Call to Arms: America Mobilizes for World War Two" (Bloomsbury USA). Klein became a historian because it occurred to him "that in a history class one could teach anything that interested him [and] one of the most recurrent themes in my work is the most basic question of all: What is an American?"

www.ExactingEditor.com/MauryKlein.pdf

Donald Worster is one of America’s most accomplished historians of nature and ecologists. He gave us the definitive account of John Wesley Powell and will soon do the same for John Muir. For this website, Worster outlined what a writer discovers -- in historic nooks and crannies, as well as about himself -- in striving to produce a landmark biography. Our Q&A also has him describing a movement less and less easy to pigeonhole: “What does it mean to be an environmentalist in India? What does it mean to be a free-market environmentalist today? What does it mean to be an African-American environmentalist?”