An Interview With Bob Welch
Author of the critically-acclaimed new book American Nightingale - as seen on Good Morning America

AbeBooks: What books are you currently reading?

Bob Welch: Hampton Sides' Americana, Emily Yellin's Our Mothers' War and Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life.

AbeBooks: What's your favorite book or author? Why?

BW: For fiction, John Knowles' A Separate Peace, because it's the first novel that made me forget I was reading a book; instead, I was thinking "I'm there, at that private school." And for non-fiction, Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, because this story about a blueblood kid from the East dying in an abandoned school bus in Alaska was not only well-written, but well-reported. And far more difficult to report than his more well known Into Thin Air. And Philip Yancey's What's So Amazing About Grace, because I've never seen a book so thoroughly explore the most illusive act in American culture: grace.

AbeBooks: Are you a book collector? What do you collect, what's your most treasured book?

BW: In a blue-collar sort of way, yes. I collect Oregon Blue Books, the bi-annual almanac of the state, dating back to the '30s. (Forgive me, I'm a newspaper columnist at The Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore.) My most treasure book, by far, is a 1905 journal kept by my grandfather, Will Adams, of his sandlot baseball team in Portland, Ore., the Albina Tigers. (Non-published.)

AbeBooks: What fictional character from a book would you most want to have coffee with?

BW: Cassie Stearns Simpson, wife of Oregon Coast timber baron Louis Simpson, in Jane Kirkpatrick's A Gathering of Finches.

AbeBooks: What projects are you working on? Is there any news you would like to share with the world?

BW: Simon & Schuster's Atria Books just released (June 1) my book, American Nightingale, about the first nurse to die after the landings at Normandy. It is the true story of a Polish Jew who immigrates to America, grows up in Boston and ultimately writes a poignant letter to Stars & Stripes newspaper from a field hospital tent not long after splashing ashore at Utah Beach. But Frances Slanger isn't around to read the reciprocal praise from the soldiers who respond in writing. She's dead, having been killed in the German shelling of her field hospital the very next night. It's been praised by such notables as James Bradley and Hampton Sides, and Judith Bellafaire, chief historian of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation, says the book "may well start a sea change in public consciousness. No one who reads American Nightingale will ever again assume that every military hero killed in action was, is or will be male." OK, enough horn-tooting. More info: www.bobwelch.net.

AbeBooks: What's your fondest memory of being read to by someone else, or of reading to a group/person yourself?

BW: Mr. Brown. Fifth grade. Garfield School. Corvallis, Ore. After recess. Black Like Me and The Chronicles of Narnia. Introduced me to the fascination of the written word.

- Interviewed by Marci Crossan