I wanted to answer the more interesting question. And that led me to want to answer the question, how is it that otherwise clever people end up believing crazy things? The usual sceptical take is, oh, they’re just stupid. But actually this guy was really not idiotic. I turned up there expecting the story to be simply, ‘This guy’s an idiot.’ It was going to be a funny, knockabout piece with someone silly. It’s six thousand, I believe, because you add up all the ages of the people in the Bible, and it comes to six thousand. It begins with me in the ‘deep north’ of Australia, which is a bit like the deep south of Mississippi, with a bunch of creationists who believe the world is six thousand years old. The Heretics was about the psychology of belief. Your earlier book The Heretics, published in the US as The Unpersuadables, brought you to meet some fascinatingly perverse fringe characters – creationists, Holocaust deniers, and others whose beliefs are demonstrably false. But it still took me some interesting places. That said, I think Selfie, my latest book, is the least adventurous kind of book that I’ve done.
Instead I love narrative nonfiction where people are kind of out there in the world – and of course that’s very much what I try to do in my own work.
Everyone tells me that I must read Sapiens and I haven’t, mostly because it feels like school, and I hated school. You’ve chosen to talk to us about ‘immersive nonfiction.’ How to describe that? Nonfiction, written by writers who put a focus on experiencing what they are writing about?įor me, it’s that feeling of just opening your front door, stepping out into the world and thinking, right: I’ve got a question here that I care about, I’m going to find out what the answer is, and I’m going to take you – the reader – on that journey.įor work I have to read a lot of science books, and I often find them quite dreary to read.
0 kommentar(er)
