Three Page-Turners…from Rebecca Burns

 Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. And sometimes, fiction reads startlingly like truth.

That’s the theme in this Page-Turners discussion between WABE’s Steve Goss and author and Atlanta magazine deputy editor Rebecca Burns. Rebecca has written several nonfiction works about Atlanta history—most recently, the book Burial for a King, about the funeral of Martin Luther King, Junior.

In this Page-Turners conversation, she talks about the book that made her realize that history can be as nail-bitingly compelling as a good novel, the novel that eerily echoes her own childhood, and an impossible-to-put-down history book constructed completely from the voices of the people who lived that history.

Broadcast version of story that aired Friday, December 13, 2013

In this extended version of this conversation, Rebecca Burns and Steve Goss discuss what makes historical literature written by journalists stand out, and Rebecca’s own current book-in-progress on the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917.

Extended version of Page-Turners conversation with Rebecca Burns

  Rebecca Burns’s Picks

• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
• Georgia, History Written by Those Who Lived It, ed. Mills Lane