RUSH: Tom in Dexter, Michigan. You’re next, sir. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello. I got an inside-baseball question regarding the Rush Revere book.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: You successfully elicited a visceral, emotional response with Cam and his evolution as you get through that. You put a lump in my throat, and as a writer I know that’s an extremely hard thing to do without being treacly. How do you get through the audio books? I assume this is an emotional thing for you to do and have your voice not crack when you read the audio book.
RUSH: Wait a minute. I need to stop you here because you have just offered a very sincere, wonderful, profound compliment to me, and it deserves more than the 30 seconds I have left to answer. It also presumes that — well, it doesn’t presume. But for you to understand this compliment, you have to have read the latest book.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Since it only came out Tuesday, I don’t know how many have read it yet.
CALLER: We won’t spoil it.
RUSH: Well, no. I can’t. I can get close. I at least want to tell people what you mean, but that’s a profound compliment you have given me. He got a lump in his throat reading the evolution of one of our characters learning something about his father, is about as much as I can say right now. So he’s asked me, how did I get through reading that in the audio version without getting a lump in my throat. And now I have to delay the answer because of the constraints of time, but I appreciate the call, Tom. Don’t give up. I’ll have the answer later on in the program.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I never did get a chance to answer the question from Tom in Dexter, Michigan. He’s a writer, and he’s read the latest Rush Revere book. Oh, by the way, folks, I don’t like to complain about things, and this really is not a complaint. It’s more of an advisory. I’m not even sure it’s purposeful, but we began hearing this week from people who tried to purchase Rush Revere and the American Revolution online.
Amazon, for one place. People were hearing back that they were sold out. I said, “That’s not possible.” We know how many they originally bought. I mean, they’re preparing for the usual massive number of sales here. We’re getting into the holiday season. So we inquired about it, and it was the usual, “Sorry, it was a computer glitch.” Anyway, they’re not sold out.
So if you get that message when you try to buy the book online, just persevere. Keep trying. Some people like sellouts, purported sellouts ’cause it creates this illusion of overwhelming demand. But we don’t need to create that illusion. The overwhelming demand (chuckles) is there, and it’s been dealt with accordingly. Anyway, this guy called from Dexter, Michigan, a writer, and he described one of the characters in the book.
He’s a young student who time travels with Rush Revere and Liberty, whose father in the military, in the book, is deployed to Afghanistan, and Cam doesn’t understand it. That’s one of the themes in the book, because the book’s dedicated to the military. In a lot of ways, it’s a tribute to the United States Military, all branches. He said that when he read it, he got a lump in his throat at a certain stage of the story.
He wanted to know how I was able to read the audio version without getting a lump in my throat or choking up or some such thing, and then he made some comment about writing events like that. The writing aspect of it is… There’s no training. It’s just empathy. We write these books for a host of reasons, which I’ve detailed. We want ’em to be entertaining. We want ’em to be accurate.
It’s crucial that they’re historically accurate.
We go to great pains. There’s a mission behind them. We want the reader to understand the wondrous aspects of the American founding. We want them to love it, to appreciate it. We want them to know the sacrifices that the people who founded this country made. So there’s a natural empathy that occurs when you’re writing about these great figures in history, when you’re writing about these seminal moments.
By the same token, the present day theme in the book is about this young man’s awakening and realization of what a hero his father is, on a par with the heroes of the American founding. This character, Cam, comes to realize the greatness of his father by time traveling back into American history and meeting General George Washington on the eve of one of his battles.
Concord and Lexington are two of the battles that are portrayed in the book. And there is a moment in time in the book where Cam and his father come together, and Cam figures it all out. That’s the lump-in-the-throat period. I’m not gonna say any more ’cause I don’t want to destroy the lump in your own throats you get when you read this.
But his question, he was trying to flatter me. It was a very complimentary question, and this audio version, reading this one, there was… I don’t know. There was probably… I don’t want to put down the other two, because they’re excellent, too. I mean, I did them. But you hope that each one’s better than the one before no matter what you’re doing in life, and that’s the same thing here.
The emotion, I think, in these scenes was more so than in the others. It was easy to do. It was fun to do when you’re really into it, when you believe it — and throughout this entire process, we couldn’t wait for this to be done and people to see it. That’s how proud of it we all are. So I just realized I hadn’t answered his question about it and I wanted to be sure and take the time and do that.