Steve Sheinkin spent 10 years writing history textbooks, but in a way, it was a tortured decade of his life. Not because he found history boring or despised it; quite the opposite, really. What drove Sheinkin crazy as he composed chapter after chapter of juvenile curriculum was what he wasn’t allowed to include; information he felt students should know and stories he was sure would help them comprehend and remember what many consider a dry subject lacking intensity and excitement.
History textbooks are awful and kids hate them. I thought I was going to change the world by getting all these great stories into textbooks, but I soon found out the process is incredibly political and you can’t say anything controversial, said Sheinkin, of Saratoga Springs. `Kids always tell me history sucks, that’s the No.1 response I get, and it’s a fair thought because the stuff they read is so boring.`
Sheinkin didn’t act on his frustration right away. Instead, he squirreled away all the red inked material his editors rejected; until last July, when he published his first non-fiction history chapterbook `disguised` as a novel. Since then, he’s written three more, with his latest non-fiction thriller `The Notorious Benedict Arnold` released at the beginning of November.
`The most important thing is just how great he was before becoming a traitor; that’s the one thing everyone remembers about him, the treason and that’s fair. But before that, he was the star of some of the greatest action stories in American history., leading a march through the wilderness of Maine up to attack Quebec in winter of 1775. That’s what made him really famous. It was one of the great epic marches of military history; the kind of thing that would have been so famous in history today if he hadn’t become a traitor,` said Sheinkin. `There’d be movies and books and everyone would know it.`
But everybody doesn’t know about the disgraced general’s `heroic` feats, which is why Sheinkin has looked forward to writing this book for years now. He wanted it to be nothing like a textbook and more like a novel and adventure story, so kids would want to pick it up.
`I broke it up into cinematic scenes; all very short chapters each based on specific scenes of his life to keep it moving forward in the way you would find in a novel, not a history book,` said Sheinkin.
Sheinkin is so enthralled with the untold persona of Benedict Arnold that he fantasizes about what a blockbuster movie would look like.
`I hope maybe one day someone could make a movie out of it; it would be way cooler than anything George Washington ever did, that’s for sure,` said Sheinkin. `It’s a Bruce Willis kind of role, but maybe he’s too old for it now because Arnold was only in his 30s when he was this action hero kind of character.`
The first book of secrets that Sheinkin produced was called `King George: What Was His Problem?` Then came `Two Miserable Presidents` which centered around the American Revolution. One story he shares is about how John Adams and Benjamin Franklin had to share a bed one night because there was only one left at the inn, and they got into an `epic argument` over leaving the window open. The information is slightly irrelevent, said Sheinkin, but it doesn’t come across as so boring and gives flat characters a personality, something he feels would make kids more likely to retain information.
He also wrote `Which Way to the Wild West?` In one Lois and Clark episode, he offers a little known tidbit, which is that one of the expedition members accidently shot Lois in the butt while hunting.
`It’s not important to know, but again, that’s the trick. If you can get kids to think of them as real people, it’s no effort remembering the real important stuff,` said Sheinkin.
Sheinkin’s next book will focus on the Manhatten project and the race to build the atomic bomb.
`It’s also an espionage story about the race to build and steal the atomic bomb. I take a story told in just a few lines in textbooks and turn it into a global thriller,` said Sheinkin.
For more information or to purchase any of Sheinkin’s books, visit http://us.macmillan.com/author/stevesheinkin.
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