Booknotes:
America's Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas

• Biographer David McCullough on how he retraced Harry Truman's steps from the Capitol to the White House on the day Truman learned FDR had died.



• Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam on how he prepares to write by having "a very lazy cappuccino," and why five hours in a library is "like eating salted peanuts."



• Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on the six years she researched and wrote about Roosevelts in a study filled with pictures of FDR and Eleanor.



• Shelby Foote on how he wrote his 1.5 million-word Civil War trilogy -- longhand, with a dip pen, over the course of 20 years, while always sleeping in the room where he worked.

• Norman Mailer, who has finished more than 25 books, on his philosophy of writer's block.



• Charles Kuralt on the writing office he designed to look "like a seedy, failing, small gentlemen's club."



• Colin Powell on the transition from hiding his emotions as a general to sharing them as an author -- and on what it's like to autograph exactly 60,001 books during a five-week tour.



• First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton on what it's like to raise a child in the White House.



• Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the late suppers she'd make for her husband in 10 Downing St.