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Julia Cooke

Interview by Alice Cary

Julia Cooke’s Come Fly the World gives readers a bird’s-eye view of the gritty, global history of Pan Am and its iconic flight attendants. Here she shares her thoughts on air travel, past and present, and offers some suggestions for making your own glamour when you take to the skies.

As an avid traveler and travel writer, how did you get interested in writing this particular story?
I met a few former stewardesses at a Pan Am Historical Foundation event at the Eero Saarinen TWA terminal at JFK Airport (before it became a hotel). I just loved talking to them. They seemed to have lived life elbow-deep in adventure; they talked about geopolitical events as if they'd had martinis with prime ministers the night before; they were sophisticated and smart and funny. One 70-something woman told me she rarely bought a return ticket when she traveled because “you never know.” I loved their attitudes and the way it felt like they owned the whole world, and I wanted to know everything about them. 

Your father worked for Pan Am. Can you tell us about your flying experiences as a kid and how they shaped you as a person and a writer? Do you remember your first flight?
My father was an attorney for Pan Am, but it was really my mom who was determined to make the most of his flight benefits. She used to pack us for both hot and cold weather, and we’d head to the airport to take whatever empty seats were heading somewhere interesting. We flew to Australia when I was around 3, before Pan Am sold its Pacific routes, and it took something like six different flights to get there!

I don’t remember my first flight (my mother tells me I was 4 months old), but I remember being in so many places with her. She is Italian American, so we went to Italy a fair amount, and I have vivid memories of going to the store to buy tomatoes in a small town we once stayed in when I was 4 or 5. 

The independence and flexibility of travel absolutely shaped me as a person. It made me accustomed to and curious about different kinds of people and languages from the start—and those same traits, I think, led me to be a writer. Now I read a lot in transit and like to eavesdrop.

Did your family help your research at all? Did you pick their brains for memories, and have they read your book?
They have. My father was a great resource for talking through the history. On a more personal level, it was revelatory to see events from my childhood gain context within the airline’s corporate history—that trip to Australia, which is one of my first memories, for example, wouldn’t have happened had Pan Am not sold its Pacific division to United.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Come Fly the World.

When you started this project, did you realize that it would contain such rich cultural and political history? What were some of your most interesting or surprising research discoveries?
I had no idea where the project would lead me, really, and I certainly did not think it would lead me toward the Vietnam War. I was so drawn to the contrast between the public image these women were asked to promote—beautiful, effortless, glamorous—and the really quite dangerous work they performed. I got outraged on their behalf at first; stewardesses were often stereotyped as being insubstantial when really their work contained grave stakes.

That said, it was still fun to peruse the detritus of the jet age—old dishes, uniforms, press photos and other ephemera. One surprise was the amount of fashion PR Pan Am engaged in; the airline hosted fashion shows in various countries and did shoots in custom clothing that I’d sincerely love to wear today. It’s hardly new or unusual for the grittier lived experiences of beautiful or fashionable women to be dismissed, but in this instance, the more I learned about both the projected stewardess ideal and their true-life experiences, the more I found it galling. What they’d done, en masse, was so evidently groundbreaking.

How did you find the women you profiled? Were they eager to share their stories, or did they voice any hesitations?
I found them mostly via Pan Am’s incredible network of former employees, as well as through one particular organization, World Wings International, which hosts events for former flight crew. I attended many luncheons and reunions in various places around the country and world (Savannah, New York, Bangkok, Berlin). Stewardesses’ social bonds, by the way, are a real inspiration for a younger woman to observe. They prioritize their friendships and take trips together and generally have a grand time. For the most part, they were very eager to share their stories. I did come across a few women who had experienced trauma on board and did not want to revisit their time with the airline, or who were hesitant to be interviewed by an outsider when so many actual Pan Am women are also working toward getting their own words into print. 

The mother and sister of one of the women you profiled cried when they found out she was taking her job as a flight attendant because they believed stewardesses were “loose and immoral.” Were the women you interviewed constantly fighting against this stereotype—which the airlines seemed to promote?
Constantly. And even more broadly than the “loose and immoral” stereotyping, many 1960s parents thought it was a job for less serious women. So many of the parents of these bright, well-educated, ambitious young women were disappointed at the idea that their daughters would serve businessmen and tourists in the sky; the fashion- and beauty-oriented PR machine had convinced them that there wasn’t much substance to the work. The disappointment often turned around when a stewardess was assigned to a prestigious military or presidential charter, however, or when they began to attend diplomatic events in West Africa, or more generally as their daughters learned to engage with so many different kinds of people. It was a crash course in being confident and authoritative anywhere they landed. The generous family travel benefits helped, too!

"I think it’s up to us to make our own glamour now."

Your book almost made me want to become a flight attendant—at least if I had been a young woman searching for a job in the 1960s. Do you lament the loss of glamour in the way we typically travel now?
That’s a complicated question. I’d absolutely love to have been able to sip a cocktail with the jet-setters in the upstairs lounge of a 747 in 1972, but I also value the workers’ rights now enjoyed by flight crews, the lower cost of travel and other, broader changes that have rendered the glamour so hard for airlines to capture. I think it’s up to us to make our own glamour now. For me it’s my window seat and my favorite scarf, the specific meals I look forward to in particular airports, meandering hallways with my powder-blue suitcase, a cup of tea or glass of wine at a café, people-watching from a quiet place. 

Of the many scenes you write about in Come Fly the World, which would you most like to have witnessed?For me it was the quotidian things in different global cities that my primary subjects mentioned—the travel routines they loved to slip into and the metropolises they loved. I heard about these scenes, like random Wednesdays spent exploring, over and over. I’d want to walk through Hong Kong with Karen Walker, eating at street stalls along the way and popping into galleries and shops, or to explore the souk in Beirut with Lynne Rawling before a daytrip to Byblos, or to play “shake the KGB” in Moscow with Hazel Bowie. And I would give a lot to be dancing to the Kiko Kids at the Equator Club in Nairobi on a Saturday night with Tori Werner and her friends. 

Your passages about the charter flights to Vietnam are particularly vivid and often heartbreaking. How did it feel to record such intense first-person accounts of this chapter of history?
It felt incredibly rewarding, a real honor to be told these accounts with such candor. A few of the women had never spoken in depth about their wartime experiences to anyone before—the stereotypes around stewardessing meant that most people didn’t ask them about these flights or even listen when a pretty woman tried to interject her first-person experiences of the war into a broader conversation. Some of the women just clammed up. A few had been carrying these memories and feelings around with them silently for decades. It was incredible, too, to speak with Vietnam veterans who told me about these flights from their perspectives, and to women who had served in the armed forces, too, to understand these flights from various angles. The sheer youth of the people going to war—the average age on one of those flights would have been around 20—staggered me. 

"As one feminist stewardess put it in the 1970s, they're 'too independent and curious about the world to sit around in a nine-to-five job getting cramps in their shoulders.'"

As you researched, did you collect any Pan Am artifacts? Do you have any favorites?
I did and do—one stewardess with whom I became good friends gave me a vintage Burberry silk scarf with a watercolor Pan Am flying boat on it. I cherish it.

Has writing this book changed your experiences as an airline passenger?
I look at flight crew very differently. They’re frontline workers, safety personnel, people who are still, as one feminist stewardess put it in the 1970s, “too independent and curious about the world to sit around in a nine-to-five job getting cramps in their shoulders.” And I’ve found that being curious about them and their stories (and being a generally courteous passenger) has improved my flight experience many, many times.

How and where have you spent your time during the pandemic? Where do you hope to fly next?
I have been at home in Vermont, isolating and working toward my next book (which will involve lots of travel). It has been so long since I’ve been on a plane—I had a baby, then was working on this book, then the pandemic—that my brain fizzles a bit when I think too hard about where I hope to go next. Favorite places I love and miss: Havana, Lisbon and the Portuguese coast, New York. And places a little farther off that I’d hoped or planned to visit for a long time: Nairobi, to visit a friend who moved back home there, for one. Everywhere, is the easy and difficult answer.

 

Author photo credit: Patrick Proctor

Author Julia Cooke shares her thoughts on air travel, past and present, and offers some suggestions for making your own glamour when you take to the skies.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

Judy Batalion

Interview by Alden Mudge

While hunkered down in her apartment with two young daughters, a 9-month-old son and her husband during the COVID-19 pandemic, Judy Batalion has heard rumors from neighbors and friends of marriages on the rocks because of close quarters and unrelieved familial contact. It’s not nearly the same, Batalion declares, but it reminds her of the Jewish families trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.

“Families were under high pressure, squeezed together, and studies show that in the [Warsaw] Ghetto, there was a very high rate of divorce,” Batalion says during a call to her apartment in Manhattan. She quips that her own home is “now also a preschool, an elementary school, a daycare, a corporate boardroom and a gym.”

Uncomfortable? Sure. But nothing like the disruption and terror of Jewish life in Poland under the Nazis, which Batalion describes in The Light of Days, her groundbreaking narrative history of the young Polish women at the forefront of the Jewish resistance. “The norms of family life were turned upside down,” Batalion says. “Many of the men were afraid to leave the house. It was easier for women and children to leave or escape, to go out to hunt for food, to smuggle, even to physically squeeze out through the ghetto walls. So there was a cascade of role reversals.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Light of Days.

Those reversals were part of a confluence of events that led a number of idealistic, restless, brave young Jewish women—some of them barely teenagers—to volunteer as couriers, informants and fighters in the struggle against the Nazis in Poland. Batalion first discovered fragments of their stories in a slender, musty book written in Yiddish that she found in the British Library.

Batalion grew up in Montreal, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. After graduating from Harvard, she spent a decade in London earning a Ph.D. in art history and developing a career as a comedian. “In England I was dealing with issues of my own Jewish identity, because being Jewish there seems so rare,” she says. “I wanted to write a performance piece about strong Jewish women, and I wanted a few historical figures to frame the piece.” So she went to the library.

Batalion was stunned by her discovery of the book, whose title translates as Women in the Ghettos. “I knew right away there was something to it,” she says. She was eventually awarded a grant to translate the book into English, but the translation work required significant contextual research. As her research grew, the translation project morphed into a parallel history project that became The Light of Days.

"I wanted to tell these women’s stories, and I thought telling it as a story would be more appealing to readers."

“Very little has been written in English, even academically, about these figures,” Batalion says. “And the bits that have been written read like encyclopedia entries—a snippet here, a snippet there. But those snippets don’t end up meaning anything. It’s hard to remember them. I wanted to tell these women’s stories, and I thought telling it as a story would be more appealing to readers.”

At the center of Batalion’s book is Renia Kukielka, whose commitment to resistance began when she was 15 years old. “She was a woman of action,” Batalion says. “As her children told me, she wasn’t someone who looked right and left and right and left. She just went! She had gut instincts. . . . She was savvy, smart and daring.”

The Light of Days follows the arc of Kukielka’s life through the early 1940s. Along the way, her story interweaves with those of about a dozen other female activists—such as Bela Hazan, who went undercover in a remarkable way. “At the height of the Holocaust, she worked as a translator and served tea to the Gestapo,” Batalion says. There’s even a photograph of Hazan with two other Jewish activists at a Gestapo Christmas party. “She lied to them that her brother had died so she could get a pass to travel to Vilna. The office sent her a condolence card! Later she masqueraded as a Catholic woman to help Jewish people in the infirmary at Auschwitz.”

“This is not a narrative about the Holocaust that I’d ever heard before. I kept feeling that if I didn’t tell it, who would?"

Then there was Frumka Plotnicki, who was “an introverted, serious person, a person the whole movement looked to and who refused to [escape the ghetto],” says Batalion. “Time and again she was told to leave, but she couldn’t. She had to be there to fight. She was one of the few who went down shooting.”

When Batalion began working on The Light of Days, she discovered that not even a general narrative history of the Jewish resistance in Poland existed. Working from sometimes contradictory memoirs and recorded testimonies, Batalion’s first task was to create a chronology of the resistance—a laborious but necessary effort that adds context and depth to the story she tells. The book has more than 900 endnotes, down from the original 3,000, and two dozen illuminating photographs.

Batalion acknowledges that the valiant women she portrays in The Light of Days were not the only female Jewish resistors in Poland or Europe. They’re just the first ones we’ll be able to read about in such depth. “It felt so important for me that these stories are told,” Batalion says. “This is not a narrative about the Holocaust that I’d ever heard before. I kept feeling that if I didn’t tell it, who would? In the most difficult, tortuous circumstances, they stood up. The bravery of these very young women inspired me.”

Judy Batalion tells the long-hidden stories of a number of idealistic, restless, brave young Jewish women who volunteered as couriers, informants and fighters in the struggle against the Nazis in Poland.
NonfictionBlack HistoryAmerican History

Clint Smith

Interview by Alden Mudge

Clint Smith, whose spellbinding How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America is a must-read, grew up in New Orleans. He remembers frequently passing the city’s Robert E. Lee monument, riding along Jefferson Davis Parkway and attending a middle school named for Robert Mills Lusher, another leader of the Confederacy. 

Speaking by phone from Washington, D.C., Smith tells me that when his hometown removed Confederate statues and memorials in 2017, he began wondering, “What does it mean that I grew up in a city, a majority Black city, in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people? How does that happen, and what does the process of reckoning with that look like?”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of How the Word Is Passed.

By that moment in 2017, Smith had given up his lifelong quest to become a professional soccer player (he was good but not quite good enough) and turned to literature, writing and performing slam poetry “just as obsessively as 15-year-old me stayed up until 3 a.m. watching second division [soccer] teams from the Netherlands on cable TV.” He had also published an award-winning book of poetry and taught high school English, and he assumed he would teach for the next 30 years. “I loved talking about literature with teenagers,” he says.

But Smith’s teaching experiences had raised larger questions about the role of education in our society. He began reading widely about the philosophy and practice of education by writers who were “thinking about using the classroom to help students understand that the world is a social construction,” he says. “It can be deconstructed and reconstructed into something new. The essence of that is that you don’t have to accept the world as an inevitability. It can be transformed.”

Pursuing this interest further, Smith entered a multidisciplinary Ph.D. program at Harvard. During graduate school, he freelanced for The New Yorker, the New Republic and the Atlantic (where he’s now a staff writer) as a way to distill the history and theory he was learning in the classroom into a more approachable format.

“You don’t have to accept the world as an inevitability. It can be transformed.”

After New Orleans removed its Confederate statues in 2017, Smith began writing a series of daily poems to explore issues around “growing up surrounded by Confederate iconography,” he says. He eventually decided the subject needed something lengthier and wrote two prose chapters, but he was unsatisfied with the results. Then a visit to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home, which Smith details in the brilliantly prismatic first chapter of his book, presented him with the format for How the Word Is Passed: Talk to people. Respectfully, interestedly. And do enough research to contextualize their stories and delineate the difference between history and nostalgia.

“When I went to Monticello in the summer of 2018, I had never done a lot of reporting,” Smith says. “I’m not someone who walks up to strangers and asks them questions. That’s not a part of my natural ethos. But I did that at Monticello, and it transformed what I hoped the book could do. My own ideas about what these people and places meant had to be in conversation with what these people and places meant to other people.”

Some visitors he talked to were astonished, sometimes disheartened, to learn of the moral inconsistencies of Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, who, like so many of the Founding Fathers, owned enslaved people. Recent scholarship has revealed that Jefferson fathered children with enslaved women, most notably Sally Hemings, and kept his children enslaved. In fact, Smith found his book’s title in the oral history of Hemings’ descendants. 

“Slavery existed for a hundred years longer in this country than it has not existed. We forget that sometimes.”

In recent years, Monticello has made an effort to tell the stories of the people Jefferson owned alongside the story of Jefferson himself. But not all the historical sites of enslavement that Smith visited for his book—Louisiana’s Angola State Prison, Blandford Cemetery for Confederate veterans in Virginia, the African Burial Ground in New York City, the House of Slaves on Gorée Island in Senegal and others—probe their complicated histories as much as Monticello does. Smith’s fascinating, nuanced book illuminates this struggle to acknowledge and reckon with these histories on both individual and societal levels.

“My grandfather’s grandfather was enslaved,” Smith says. “My grandmother’s grandfather was born right after emancipation. The history that we tell ourselves was a long time ago wasn’t in fact that long ago. Slavery existed for a hundred years longer in this country than it has not existed. We forget that sometimes. We forget how much it shaped this country. We forget the extent to which that past is still with us.”

 

Author photo credit © Carletta Girma

Clint Smith, whose spellbinding debut nonfiction book is a must-read, shares his thoughts on reckoning with Confederate landmarks and locations where Black people were enslaved.
NonfictionAudioHistory

Ibram X. Kendi, Keisha N. Blain, Sarah Jaffe, Amber Beard & Molly Lo Re

Interview by the editors of BookPage

In the monumental audiobook of Four Hundred Souls (14 hours), edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, essays and poems chronicling 400 years of Black American history are read by a vast chorus of 87 narrators. Editors Kendi and Blain discuss the transformation of their groundbreaking book into audio, and they’re joined by Penguin Random House Audio producers Sarah Jaffe, Amber Beard and Molly Lo Re, who offer a peek into the production process.

How early in your conception of the book did you begin to plan for the specific challenges and opportunities of the audiobook?
Ibram X. Kendi: The plans for the audiobook came much later in the process, after the book was finished. We really wanted to actualize what I wrote about in the introduction, that this community of writers was like a choir.

Keisha N. Blain: Like Ibram, I thought the diversity of thought in the book would be best represented with a large cast of narrators. Using a full cast really captures the different voices at play in collecting the experiences of 90 contributors.

“There are few powers more important than the power to tell your own story.”

What’s one benefit of listening to the audiobook of Four Hundred Souls that you don’t get from reading the print book?
Blain: The contributors we gathered for Four Hundred Souls are all outstanding writers. And while that talent is apparent on the page, hearing those same passages read out loud and performed is a revelatory and moving experience.

Considering how much language has been used to control Black lives for hundreds of years, how does a choral audiobook like this one reclaim Black power?
Kendi: There are few powers more important than the power to tell your own story. Black people have been fighting for this power for centuries, and we claimed this power for Four Hundred Souls.

Blain: The attempts to silence Black people—and especially Black women—are a defining feature of American history. The audiobook of Four Hundred Souls aims a direct challenge to those efforts by giving voice to a communal history written and narrated by Black people.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of the Four Hundred Souls audiobook.

Some of the book’s essays are read by their authors, others by actors. Tell us about the process of matching essays with narrators.
Sarah Jaffe, Executive Producer: We wanted to assemble a cast that felt true to the project of the book, and to do that we knew we needed a plurality and a diversity of narrators. A combination of authors and actors, with a few celebrities among them, felt like the best way to do that, blending familiar and famous voices with fresher ones, and even some who had never done this before, juxtaposing different vocal textures.

Four Hundred SoulsWe identified a few authors who would be particularly good fits to read their own work: those renowned for their work in the audio world; poets who are skilled performers; an array of legendary activists and public speakers; and professors who perform at the front of a classroom every day and know how to make their words sink in and sing in a different way.

When it came time to pair actors with the rest of the pieces, we wanted to be really thoughtful about how we did that. I’m a firm believer that while actors can do anything, everyone (actor or not) does their best work when they’re working on something they’re passionate about. And since this book is largely about how Black America is not a monolith, we wanted to give our cast the chance to choose the pieces that resonated most with them. So instead of just assigning pieces, we gave actors the option to choose what they wanted to read.

Amber Beard, Associate Producer: If they felt a personal connection to a particular essay or story, then that would only make the reading that more poignant.

Molly Lo Re, Associate Producer: It meant a lot of puzzle-piecing behind the scenes, but I think you can tell with each narrator that they have a strong connection to the subject matter. That extra investment is key in making this audiobook really special.

“I’m a firm believer that while actors can do anything, everyone (actor or not) does their best work when they’re working on something they’re passionate about.”

Was there any essay or piece that was particularly difficult to pair with a narrator, or perhaps one that stuck out in your mind as especially important to get right?
Jaffe: They were all important to get right! Honestly, one of the best parts about handling casting the way we did is that it allowed us to learn a lot more about the actors we worked with. We paired actors with pieces that they chose because they were about their hometowns or mirrored their personal histories, or were by or about people they had a connection to, or as at least one actor told me, spoke to their souls. I’m so grateful. The more I know about each actor and what interests them, the more it helps me to be a better producer and pair them with future projects that I know they’ll be excited about.

Beard: I’m a longtime admirer of Phylicia Rashad’s work, so I can’t help but get excited to hear her eloquent voice. In general, we wanted to try to stay true to each piece’s point of view, so we did try to pair each with a narrator who reflected an aspect of what was being written about. But as this is a shared community experience, we didn’t make that a hard and fast rule.

Lo Re: What I personally love about the finished product is that the performances are simultaneously intertwined yet separate strands. The audiobook is undoubtedly a collective endeavor, with voices coming together to share 400 years of the African American experience. But at the same time, each essay is given voice by a different reader with their own perspective, performance style, vocal tone. For me, it was less about getting individual pairings “right” and more about making sure we got the overall experience of listening to the book right. This meant casting as wide a net as possible when looking for readers.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more of the year’s best full-cast audiobooks.

Are there any other audiobooks with a big cast that you drew inspiration from for this production?
Jaffe: George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo has a famously large cast and is one of the most ambitious audiobooks I’ve ever listened to, and that’s probably the book that came up most often in thinking about how to approach Four Hundred Souls. I don’t think it’s an accident that both books are about a reckoning with American history, the unreliability of conventional historical narratives and the ways in which both remarkable and everyday people make and are enmeshed in history. Both books try to make the human details that shape a nation’s character visible, and both make it clear that in order to truly reckon with our past and present, we need to hear a plurality of voices telling their stories. Dr. Kendi and Dr. Blain’s idea for a community history is genius and groundbreaking in this way.

Beard: This was my first time casting an audiobook with a cast this large. I think it was a great opportunity to work with narrators that we’ve always wanted to and also discover new ones that we’ll definitely want to continue to work with in the future.

Lo Re: Honestly, because of the added complications of the coronavirus, this one felt like a completely different beast. We recorded in December 2020 and January 2021, under the looming shadow of rising COVID-19 cases. The vast majority of people read from home studio setups, and we approached every aspect of the production with the question, How can we do this in the safest way possible?

Books for Black History Month 2021

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Six books to deepen your knowledge of our country’s past, including Four Hundred Souls.

Is there any particular performance from this collection that stuck with you after you heard it?
Kendi: I loved Danai Gurira’s performance [of Martha S. Jones’ “1774–1779 The American Revolution”], and Professor Blain’s closing oration was powerful.

Blain: I loved Phylicia Rashad’s performance of Bernice McFadden’s essay on Zora Neale Hurston.

Jaffe: All of the poetry gave me goosebumps, especially J.D. Jackson reading Jericho Brown’s “Upon Arrival,” and Patricia Smith reading her poem “Coiled and Unleashed.” But the choral transitions between pieces might be my favorite part of this production. We wanted to underscore the community nature of this book, and so throughout the program, our editor mixed a variety of voices announcing the title of each piece and each five-year range. As you’re listening, it really does feel like a cohesive history told to you by a community, with each member taking their turn to speak.

Beard: I am a longtime poetry nerd, so I’m always thrilled to get a chance to bring poems to life via audio. I was particularly drawn to Mahogany L. Browne’s poem, “Morse: John Wayne Niles . __. . Ermias Joseph Asghedom.” The opening lines, “Gunshot wound / is a violent way to say gone missing,” are so potent and resonant with what happens in our world today. Also the use of Morse code added a unique element.

Lo Re: One thing that we did with this audiobook that I’d like to bring to other audiobooks is having everyone say their own name for the credits. I absolutely loved the way it gave contributors a tad more ownership over the final product, like a curtain-call moment.

“It becomes intimate and multifaceted and overtly personal in a way history often isn’t. That’s powerful. This is a powerful book.”

Is there anything that surprised you once you heard the final audiobook?
Kendi: I framed the 90 contributors to Four Hundred Souls as a choir in the introduction, but hearing the choir through the audiobook surprised me, pleasantly.

Blain: Hearing the different performances amazed me. I knew Four Hundred Souls was an ambitious project, and co-editing it further revealed how unique it was to have so many contributors across so many fields and genres. However, the audiobook revealed how truly impressive the book is—and I am proud to be a part of this wonderful project.

Jaffe: We always say this about audiobooks, but it really does bring the text to life—maybe more so in this book than almost any other I’ve listened to. You hear these layers of history and experience speaking to you in chorus, filtered through this powerful writing and these beautiful performances, and occasionally as you’re immersed in what you’re listening to, you recognize a voice, which gives you that feeling of, “Hey, I know this person!” Maybe they’re telling you something you never knew before or never thought about that way before, or just something you really needed to hear someone say out loud and name as true. It becomes intimate and multifaceted and overtly personal in a way history often isn’t. That’s powerful. This is a powerful book.

Beard: So many of these stories are unknown. To put real, human voices to them helps give them life and power. These are stories that need to be heard and shared. I thought it was such a beautiful thing to have this literal chorus of voices speaking the truth of the African American experience.

Lo Re: The thing that probably most surprised me was how effective the layered voices sounded throughout. While we had planned on incorporating collective lines in the audiobook from very early in the process, I didn’t really know what the final version would sound like. I imagined the lines would be read as one voice—but the way that the final version pulls out individual voices and the voices appear to be coming from different physical spaces is so much richer and completely bowled me over. The brilliant editors at Tim Bader Audio deserve so much credit for how delicately they mixed together these sections.

 

Kendi photo by Stephen Voss. Blain photo by Chioke l’Anson.

Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain are joined by Penguin Random House Audio producers to discuss the monumental cast recording of Four Hundred Souls.

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