“Science + History = Whole Picture”
On my “final” draft of Bones in the White House: Thomas Jefferson’s Mammoth, I drew a line of little mastodons trooping across the bottom of the manuscript pages. Each animal bore a date that matched a sidebar fact or referenced the main text. I thought this was a clever way to remind readers of the march of time.
The first little mastodon (or “mammoth,” as the creature was called in Jefferson’s day) was labeled “700 million years ago,” the second “13,000 years ago,” the third “11,000 years ago,” inching along like an Ice Age glacier to the time period of the story. … more
