PowellsBooks.Blog

[Editor's Note: Mike Dooley reads at the Bagdad Theater on Thursday, November 5th, 2009, at 7 p.m. Click here for details.]

Describe your latest book/project/work.
Infinite Possibilities is a treatise on the nature of reality revealing our divine, supernatural heritage and what it takes to find happiness and fulfillment in the jungles of time and space. We're alive during exciting times. There's a metamorphosis of consciousness taking place on our planet; the old is giving way to the new, naivety is giving way to truth, and spirituality is about to take on an entirely new meaning. Those who embrace the truth about our powers and responsibilities will usher in a golden age unlike anything ever experienced in recorded history.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Scared to Death, But What the Heck.

Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
Ayn Rand, We the Living. Her last three books were works of profound art: philosophical, romantic, ...

[My new book] starts in 1960 with a woman named Lois Rabinowitz, who was evicted from Manhattan traffic court for attempting to pay a parking ticket while wearing slacks. This was...

My latest book is Nothing Was the Same, a continuation of my earlier memoir, An Unquiet Mind, which described my experiences with manic-depressive (bipolar) illness and my work as a professor of psychiatry who suffers from the same illness that I study and treat....

What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
I wouldn't date any fictional character, as I've done that before and it's really not what you might think. But I would like to pal around with the witty and lyrical Mercutio and try to keep him from getting killed....

Share an interesting experience you've had with one of your readers.
There are a number of those. Fortunately, my books don't seem to attract dangerous nuts (I did a signing once with Anne Rice in her pre-religious days. That woman attracted nuts), but there are people like the woman who stood in line for four hours in order to be first in line at a booksigning — for the express purpose of whipping off her shoe and...

Who's wilder on tour, rock bands or authors?
Well, I know plenty of authors who tour like Grand Funk Railroad, with groupies in every city, leather jackets on the expense account, and steak from room service... and those are women! I can't wait to...

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
Being a hostess in a Japanese nightclub. I was 23, fresh out of university, on the road, needing to make some money to travel onward, and I found myself in Tokyo, where it was too...

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
My submarine-inventor hero, Narcis Monturiol, the subject of one of my books, wrote in his diary that he conceived of the idea for a submarine while sitting on a certain rock on the Cape of the Crosses near the town of Cadaques on the northern coast of Spain. So I went...

Describe an interesting experience you've had with one of your readers.
When Empire Falls came out, the first stop on my book tour was Denver. Perhaps because the school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky, was the real world inspiration for the brutal climax of that novel, it didn't occur to me that there might very well be people from Littleton at my Denver reading. There were. The first woman I spoke to....

Describe your latest book.
Why do we cook? Traditionally we see cooked food as a pleasant luxury without any particular significance for human evolution. We like hot meals for their smells and tastes and textures and for helping protect us from disease. Yet, depending on our personal preference, we can eat our food either cooked or raw, be it apples, carrots, or even beef.

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human says conventional wisdom is wrong. Cooked food is a necessity in almost every human lifestyle. All societies cook their food. The only people who live without eating any of their food cooked are "raw-foodists," members of rich societies who for health-related or philosophical reasons have committed themselves to a restricted diet. The diets of raw-foodists come from domesticated animals and plants (especially fruits and nuts) that have markedly higher nutritional quality than wild foods. Yet despite eating foods of exceptional quality compared to anything one can find in the wild, raw-foodists tend to suffer such a deficiency of energy that in addition to being thin, most raw-foodist women are ...