Larry Zuckerman, author

 

Spinning off my expertise in and passion for the First World War, I decided to write a novel about a returning veteran who's earned a pile of combat medals, yet who becomes a pariah. My experience as an at-home father taught me that nothing's as explosive as beliefs about gender, and how one behaves (or is supposed to behave) as man or woman. Here's the story of a trailblazer who's anything but a radical, and his unlikely ally, a maverick in her own right:

 

In 1919, Rollie Birch returns a war hero to Lumberton, a (fictional) logging town in Washington, grieving his wife's death. When he quits his father's construction company to tend his infant daughter full-time, Lumberton is aghast, and gossips snicker that the child isn't even his. Meanwhile, timber heiress Kay Sorensen dreams of a business career, but her lawyer husband, back from the army, interrogates her about the bank account she opened and soon tells her to quit her job. Kay wonders whether the war changed him. Rollie might know—the men served together—while Rollie thinks Kay might know whether his late wife cheated on him. But Kay and Rollie have disliked each other since high school—and in Lumberton, secrets combust once they're shared.

 

 

 

As a historian, I've always been passionate about the First World War, what I consider the event that shaped the twentieth century. About twenty-five years ago, I reread the Barbara Tuchman classic, The Guns of August, and noticed that she talked about the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 but gave no hint about what happened afterward.

 

This book is the result, and the story I tell proves that trailblazing can bring about evil as well as progress. The German occupation of Belgium, with its intense surveillance, wholesale expropriation, and forced labor for military purposes not only created a totalitarian state before the word entered the language but foreshadowed the Nazi Occupation of Europe in the subsequent war.

 

I'm proud that a Belgian publisher took up my book; what a thrill it was to be invited to speak at Het Andere Boek, the Antwerp book fair, and to be interviewed. To my knowledge, The Rape of Belgium remains the only full-length work in English about the German invasion and occupation--the entire Belgian wartime experience.

 

 

I owe my fifteen minutes of fame to this book, which came about in a manner fitting the subject. One Chanukah thirty-odd years ago, I held a potato pancake and wondered, idly, how that marvelously useful vegetable, the potato, made it to just about every country in the world.

 

The answer astounded me, as it would have any sixteenth-century European who'd run across the potato, an unheralded import from the Andes. For decades--centuries, in places--the spud was despised as evil for its misshapen appearance, underground habitat, ability to regenerate from pieces of itself, and kinship with nightshades, a family that includes known poisons (and others once mistakenly thought to be, like the tomato). As if that weren't enough, the potato was believed to be food fit only for the poor, who couldn't afford anything better, and to inspire laziness and spread a range of diseases from scrofula to leprosy to cholera.

 

Nevertheless, within two centuries, the potato had taken over Europe, with astonishing success. The lowly tuber supported population explosions, providing a lifeline for rural folk when punitive land laws threatened their livelihoods; and it offered the means of subsistence for city dwellers struggling to cope with the rise of industry and factory labor.

 

A vegetable as an improbable trailblazer. Who'd have thought it?

 

I had a lot of fun with this book too. I got on NPR, both national and local affiliates, and in 2009, was invited to give the keynote address to the World Potato Congress, meeting that year in Christchurch, New Zealand.