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Our speaker was Cynthia Bass, author of Maiden Voyage.
History is her Passion - Research is her Forté
Novelist Cynthia Bass is an avid student of history - she reads about it and she writes about it. Her two major works are fictionalized accounts of historical events: Sherman’s march to the sea and the sinking of the Titanic. She also has had more than a dozen nonfiction articles published. Click here to view the list.
Her talk, titled "Past Tense," described how you can write historical fiction without a history degree. She told us about how she researches for her historical fiction. The careful researcher also had a few words to say about the use of anachronistic dialog in some moden portrayals of Elizabethan times.
Bass was born in Washington, D. C., a city filled with history. Maybe that’s what sparks her passion for the subject. Her works in progress: Two novels, one about the German atomic bomb, the other about the Great Plague of London.
Ms. Bass received the B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of California, Berkeley. She currently resides in Danville, California.
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Here are some links to descriptions/reviews of her novels:
"Maiden Voyage"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0553378899/titanicmp3A/
http://www.click-here-now.com/movies/book-Maiden-Voyage-of-the-Titanic.htm
"Sherman's March"
http://horizons.skyline.net/Arts/book_reviews/sherman/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0553375474/mocivilwarbookstA/
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Novels:
Sherman's March Villard
‘94 (hardcover edition)
Sherman's March Bantam ‘95
(paperback trade edition)
Maiden Voyage
Villard
‘96 (hardcover edition) Contra
Costa Times Book Club selection!
Maiden Voyage
Bantam
‘97 (paperback trade edition)
Maiden Voyage
Bantam
‘98 (paperback mass edition)
Short Stories:
"The World Tour of 'Eighty-Eight" Elysian Fields Quarterly, Vol. 12,
1, 1993
"The Double Game" Elysian Fields Quarterly, Vol. 12, 2, 1993
"One-Nothing" Elysian Fields Quarterly, Vol. 13, 2 1994
Nonfiction Articles:
"The Making of a Baseball Radical" The National Pastime, 1982
"Why the Titanic Story Sails On," The Wall Street Journal, 12/18/97
"05:29:45, 16 July 1945: the day Trinity changed our world," San
Francisco
Examiner, 7/16/98
"Fascist evils led to building, using A-bomb," USA Today, 8/6/98
"Concern sparked bomb development," San Francisco Examiner, 8/6/98
"Unconditional Surrender," San Francisco Examiner, 9/2/98
"A Faraway Country: the Munich Agreement," San Francisco Examiner,
9/30/98
"Martians Land in New Jersey!" San Francisco Examiner, 10/29/98
"Honoring veterans by Honoring Peace," San Francisco Examiner, 11/11/98
"Two Versions of Gettysburg," San Francisco Examiner, 11/19/98
"Pearl Harbor and a Nation's Defining Moment," San Francisco Examiner,
12/7/98
"Christmas Calculus: Isaac Newton and the Spirit of Self-Sacrifice,"
San Francisco Examiner, 12/23/98
"Woodrow Wilson and the 14 Points," San Francisco Examiner, 1/18/99
"Lessons from our Victorian Ancestors," San Francisco Examiner, 1/25/99
"Lincoln, Darwin and the Survival of the Kindest," San Francisco
Examiner,
2/12/99
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