This is an exciting time – I’m working with St. Martin’s Press on final plans to publish The Book of Isaias on October 4, and so many distinguished authors have provided endorsements that we’re almost running out of space on the book jacket.

I wanted to take a moment to thank all these authors and tell you more about them, listing the most recent endorsers first.

You probably remember the dramatic story of the Chilean miners who were trapped underground in 2010. They managed to survive until rescuers broke through to them and pulled them out one by one in a dramatic process that was followed around the world.

The 33 miners decided to share their story with just one writer: Héctor Tobar, a bilingual journalist from Los Angeles. Based on exclusive interviews with the miners, he wrote the bestselling book Deep Down Dark. You can learn more about him on his web site, hectortobar.com. I’m excited that he’s endorsed The Book of Isaias and I want to thank Fernanda Santos of the New York Times for putting me in touch with him.

Hampton Sides is a narrative nonfiction master and author of several books of history: Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, and most recently In the Kingdom of Ice. I met him at the Power of Narrative conference in Boston and he graciously agreed to help. Read more about him at hamptonsides.com.

Miriam Pawel is an alumna of the Los Angeles Times and a Pulitzer Prize-winner. We met at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference a couple of years ago and she’s offered valuable help and advice ever since. She’s author of the The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, the definitive biography of the late labor leader.

Amanda Eyre Ward is the author of several novels, most recently The Same Sky, a moving story about unaccompanied children traveling from central America to the U.S. Impressively, she based her novel on interviews with young people who had made the journey in real life.

Sam Quinones was one of the first people to advise me on the book-writing process after I met him at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference several years ago. A former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, he has made a huge impact with Dreamland, his National Book Award-winning nonfiction account of opiate addiction in America.

I met Ian Johnson in 2004 when I was applying for a job with The Wall Street Journal. I didn’t get the job, but we have stayed in touch for years, and he played an important role in helping me develop The Book of Isaias. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and an expert on China, he’s written several books and book chapters, most recently contributing to The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China.

If you’re curious to see what they wrote, we collected all of their quotes on at the bottom of this page.

I’d also like to point out that you can preorder the book now by going here.

I take none of this support for granted and I thank all of these writers for going out of their way to help spread the word about The Book of Isaias!

I’m at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in New Orleans, and people are picking up my tipsheets on the organizational tool Scrivener so fast that I can barely keep up. So I’m posting the tipsheet here! Here’s the link.  Scrivener plus Isaias flyer

Last year I spent hours going through pension documents for an investigative project entitled Our Financial Mess, which focused on problems within the Memphis city government. This year, the other members of the team and I won the Malcolm Law Award, Tennessee’s top prize for investigative reporting. We’ve also won national recognition, including being named finalists in the Investigative Reporters and Editors contest.

I want to acknowledge our leader Marc Perrusquia, Grant Smith and all the other members of the team.

Investigative reporting is at the core of my approach to journalism, and you’ll see that reflected in The Book of Isaias. Much of it is based on immersion reporting – that is, things I saw myself – but I also made a point of verifying facts through documents, ranging from a Florida death certificate to Government Accountability Office reports to internal e-mails sent between federal education officials. Investigative techniques made a strong story even better.

  Only a few years ago, the Mexican border city called Ciudad Juárez was one of the most dangerous places in the world. Now it’s coming back to life, and National Geographic just published an important story documenting the change.

I’m proud to say that both the writer and photographer on the National Geographic project contributed to The Book of Isaias. Writer Sam Quinones, a winner of the National Book Award, was one of the first people to offer me advice on my book project many years ago, and he was also one of the first to read my book manuscript and write a blurb for it. And photographer Dominic Bracco II worked with me on my crucial trip to Mexico in the summer of 2013. Some of his photos will appear in The Book of Isaias when it’s released this October.

I’m happy to know both of these journalists! You can see their work on Ciudad Juárez here.