Quick Story: I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author living in Southern California. My latest books are Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash, and A Man and His Mountain: The Everyman Who Created Kendall-Jackson and Became America's Greatest Wine Entrepreneur.
My other books include Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart's Green Revolution, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year In the Life of Juvenile Court, Mississippi Mud, and Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America's Soul.
Backstory: When I was six I decided I wanted to be a writer, and I’ve been at it ever since. I started my writing career in newspapers, and I think I probably would have paid them, instead of the other way around, for the thrill of seeing my byline in print. As a newspaper reporter, I gravitated toward stories that allowed me to dig behind the scenes and beneath the surface, looking for questions others hadn't asked or imagined. I loved that work.
When I left newspapers to write nonfiction books, I suddenly had weeks or months, rather than hours or days, to immerse myself in the inner workings of the places, characters and events I seek to understand and write about. I had found the greatest job I can imagine.In my books, I try to take readers inside worlds most don’t get to visit or see close up on their own. My first stories were about crime — real-life murder mysteries— and I still enjoy reading and writing true crime. But I've pursued broader and more varied narratives in my more recent books. I’ve written about the nation’s crumbling juvenile justice system, the California high school that went from worst to best in the state, the harrowing but surprisingly humane world of a neonatal intensive care unit, the front lines of a modern-day Scopes Monkey Trial, a Gulf Coast murder mystery solved by the victims’ own daughter.
Lately – in Garbology, Force of Nature, and Eco Barons – I’ve focused on narratives about the environment, sustainability and the critical issue of waste embedded in our economy and culture. I believe the environment to be one of the most important stories of our age – for ourselves, and for our children.