Stranger than Fiction: Nonfiction authors Frank Bures, James Campbell, and Steve Coss discuss their new books

Frank Bures discusses The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World's Strangest Syndromes; James Campbell discusses Braving It: A Father, a Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey Into the Alaskan Wild; and Steve Coss discusses The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics.

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“[Frank Bures] is fearless in his reporting, generous in his spirit, and brilliant in his prose.”--Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

Frank Bures is the author most recently of The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World's Strangest Syndromes. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, Outside, Bicycling, and Wired, and have been included in a number of Best American Travel Writing anthologies. They’ve also been selected as “Notable” picks for Best American Sports Writing 2012 and the Best American Essays 2013. He lives in Minneapolis.

The Geography of Madness is an investigation of “culture-bound” syndromes, which are far stranger than they sound. Why is it, for example, that some men believe, against all reason, that vandals stole their penises, even though they're in good physical shape? In The Geography of Madness, acclaimed magazine writer Frank Bures travels around the world to trace culture-bound syndromes to their sources and in the process, tells a remarkable story about the strange things all of us believe.

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“Braving It--tender, wise, translucent--is not just an Alaskan classic, but a parenting classic. I read it with great fondness, hunger, and a deep satisfaction.”--Rick Bass, author of The Lives of Rocks and For a Little While

James Campbell mounted an expedition to New Guinea to retrace the route of the Ghost Mountain Boys and discovered a wilderness almost unchanged in more than sixty years. His book about that journey is The Ghost Mountain Boys. He is the author of The Final Frontiersman and has written for Outside magazine as well as many other publications.

Campbell’s latest book Braving It: A Father, a Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey Into the Alaskan Wild is the story of his journey with his teenage daughter to the far reaches of Alaska. When Campbell’s cousin Heimo Korth asked him to spend a summer building a cabin in the rugged interior, Campbell hesitated about inviting his fifteen-year-old daughter, Aidan, to join him. But once there, Aidan embraced the wild. She even agreed to return a few months later to help the Korths work their traplines and hunt for caribou and moose.

Campbell knew that in traditional Eskimo cultures, some daughters earned a rite of passage usually reserved for young men, so he decided to take Aidan back to Alaska one final time before she left home. It would be their third and most ambitious trip, backpacking over Alaska’s Brooks Range to the headwaters of the mighty Hulahula River, where they would assemble a folding canoe and paddle to the Arctic Ocean. The journey would test them, and their relationship, in one of the planet’s most remote places: a land of wolves, musk oxen, Dall sheep, golden eagles, and polar bears.

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“Stephen Coss has written an engrossing, original book about Boston a half century before the Revolution. It is a tale of medical drama, philosophical ferment, and journalistic beginnings and it is a tale well worth reading!”--Jon Meacham, author of Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

Stephen Coss brings to life an amazing cast of characters in a year that changed the course of medical history, American journalism, and colonial revolution in his latest book The Fever of 1721. During the worst smallpox epidemic in Boston history Cotton Mather, the great Puritan preacher, convinced Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to try a procedure that he believed would prevent death by making an incision in the arm of a healthy person and implanting it with smallpox. Inoculation led to vaccination, one of the most profound medical discoveries in history. Public outrage, however, forced Boylston into hiding, and Mather’s house was firebombed.

The Fever of 1721 is Stephen Coss’s first book. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.