I've been a teacher: in Syracuse, New York; Omaha, Nebraska; and Virginia Beach, Virginia. And I've taught in elementary school, middle school, high school, and in a community college.

I've also been a newspaper woman: a general reporter, a business reporter, and an associate editor and editorial writer at Norfolk's Virginian-Pilot.

We have three children and five grandchildren.

I have to admit, my love affair with history is not long standing. When I was in school, like almost everyone else, I hated history. Dull stuff about dead people is the way I thought of it. So what happened?

I discovered the stories. I found out that those folks in the history books were real people. They didn't live in the past. They inhabited the present, their present, and it was filled with problems and stress and nastiness and decency and heroism–just as any time is. I began to see history as a detective story, and sleuthing the past became an adventure–and a whole lot of fun–and that's what I hope to convey to my readers.

Because I was unhappy with the books my children were reading in school, and there was a body of literature calling for a new American history, I sat down to see what I could do. A study done at the University of Minnesota showed that children's comprehension of journalistic writing was 40% higher than comprehension of the kind of writing found in standard texts. I was a journalist who had been a teacher. It seemed a good fit. I started writing, sending manuscripts to teachers in classrooms in seven cities. I got comments and listened.

I had no idea what I was getting into. It's been a terrific journey. The books seem to appeal to readers of all ages: I have hundreds of letters from readers, many from school age students but quite a few from parents. Here's a favorite. It comes from a Virginia boy, "I don't usually like to read, but I read your book all the way through."

My first books make up a ten-volume series called A History of US. That's "us" as in all of us. As one young reader told me, "there's a pun in there." 

Mine are storyteller's books. One of my goals, in the history books and in the new science series, is to encourage reading–especially nonfiction reading– which is the essential skill of the Information Age.

To find a story in a subject is to discover its essence. If we can get our children to write story-centered nonfiction, they'll have to research, do some critical thinking, and organize and use their thoughts. Few things can prepare them as well for the challenges of the 21st century.

         Maybe it was my computer, or cell phone, or microwave. Maybe it was the Internet. Whatever, the information age was everywhere, changing the way I lived and worked. And I had no idea of the basic ideas behind it. In the 20^th century I hadn’t much cared; but I could no longer pretend. My ignorance of science was annoying. I realized that we live in the greatest scientific era ever, that science underlies the art and literature and politics of our times—to say nothing of the technology—and that I, like many of my peers, hardly knew a neutron from a neuron. And so, I decided it was time to tackle the subject: to attempt to become scientifically literate. For me the best way to learn something is to write about it, or teach it. Perhaps that explains my two careers: as author and teacher.  And that’s why I undertook The Story of Science.

I started, as I’ve done before, at a bookstore, looking for books to give me an overview of the subject. That meant searching for the stories and people behind modern science from its inception in ancient Greece to the astonishments of today’s cosmology.  But when I delved into contemporary physics—especially quantum theory and relativity--I didn’t understand much that I was reading.  I was prepared for that. Since I was six, I’ve always read books that are over my head. How do I handle them?  Mostly by just skipping the stuff I don’t understand and plowing ahead. I find that eventually things fall into place. Sometimes I read a book more than once. On the second go round, like the second time I see a movie, I begin to notice and comprehend things that I missed the first time.