Tanzania. France. The Amazon. Belgium. These are just a few of the places Candice Millard has traveled for her writing.
Now based in Leawood, Millard spent several years living in New York, where she was an editor and writer for National Geographic. Her stories took her around the globe.
“I wrote about people in Mongolia who still use eagles to hunt with,” she says. “I wrote about dinosaur eggs. I wrote about ancient rock art. The big one I got to do was a story about Aksum in northern Ethiopia. They still claim to have the Ark of the Covenant. It’s kind of amazing.”
In tandem with her migration to a Midwest home base with her growing family, Millard shifted from magazine journalism to authoring books. The idea for her first published book, The River of Doubt, was inspired by a friend. “[He] had written a book called 1912, which was about the election of 1912,” Millard says. “Theodore Roosevelt lost that election, and he went to the Amazon and went down the River of Doubt as a form of self-punishment.” The river is a treacherous and uncharted part of the Amazon, where “Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron,” as Millard wrote in her book. She went on to compose a book proposal about this event, which led to a bidding war among the top eight publishing houses in New York. The River of Doubt hit bookshelves in 2006.
Millard’s niche lies in uncovering and detailing historical events that many haven’t heard about. Her second book, Destiny of the Republic, was sparked by a deep dive she was doing on Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the first known metal detector to locate a bullet in the body of assassinated president James Garfield. (He ended up dying not due to the assassination but rather medical malpractice. Fascinating, right? More on that in Destiny of the Republic.) Millard’s most recent book, Hero of the Empire, details Winston Churchill’s capture and escape as a prisoner of war in South Africa when he was in his 20s.
Millard is also quick to note that there’s no shortage of archival and historical research resources here in Kansas City, some of which she uses for her books. “My new book is set in World War I,” she says. “I’ve been doing research at the World War I Museum, which we’re so lucky to have. It’s an incredible resource for anybody interested in history. They have a great archive, and the archivists there are fantastic.” She also appreciates the fresh renovations at the Truman Library and the influence it has not just in Kansas City but nationwide.
Speaking of her new book, which she is currently writing, Millard gives a quick plot teaser: The factual story revolves around three female characters who hid allied soldiers left behind after their battles during WWI. “One is a nurse in Brussels hiding soldiers in her clinic; another is a school teacher just over the border in northern France hiding them in her classroom; and the third is a princess in France hiding these men in her castle.”
One of the biggest—and most enjoyable—challenges Millard faces is telling these stories without them sounding like a history textbook. To accomplish this, she’s mindful of incorporating foreshadowing and cliffhangers into her narratives. “There’s a difference between a subject and a story,” she says. “A subject is what you read in history class. You know, you’re memorizing dates and places and names. History is a story, and you have to think about how you’re going to tell it.”
