Show Offs :: Oprah Winfrey's Favorite Things Articles :: ''Pillars of the Earth'' by Ken Follet- One of Oprah's Favorite Things
Oprah Winfreys favorite novel as revealed in her "Favorite Things" episode is Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth.
Television icon and arguably the most influential merchandiser on the planet, Oprah surprised her best fans in Macon, Georgia with a copy of the thriller. Audience members received hand signed copies of the suspense novelists latest work and scads of other merchandise Oprah has decided are the best personal care, gifts, home electronics and appliances on the market in 2007.
As per her style Ms. Winfrey kept the whole thing hush hush and when she announced that this would be the famous Favorite Things episode because Macon was consistently the highest rated city in the Oprah television universe the audience exploded with excitement and some into tears. Suffice to say all audience members went home with more than a good book.
''Pillars of the Earth'' by Ken Follet- One of Oprah's Favorite Things
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ABOUT KEN FOLLETT
Ken Follett Ken Follett was born on June 5, 1949, in Cardiff, Wales, the son of a tax inspector. He was educated at state schools, and graduated from University College, London, with an honors degree in philosophy. (He was made a fellow of the college in 1995.)
Follett became a reporter, first with his hometown newspaper, the South Wales Echo, and later with the London Evening News. While with the Evening News, he published his first novel, which was not a best-seller. He then went to work for a small publishing house in London, Everest Books, eventually becoming deputy managing director while continuing to write novels in his spare time.
Follett first hit the best-seller lists in 1978 with Eye of the Needle, a taut and original thriller with a memorable woman character in the central role. It was his 11th book, and his first success. The book won the Edgar award and was made into an outstanding film starring Kate Nelligan and Donald Sutherland.
He went on to write four more best-selling thrillers: Triple, The Key to Rebecca, The Man from St Petersburg and Lie Down with Lions. Cliff Robertson and David Soul starred in the miniseries of The Key to Rebecca. In 1994, Timothy Dalton, Omar Sharif, and Marg Helgenberger starred in the miniseries of Lie Down with Lions.
Ken Follett also wrote On Wings of Eagles, the true story of how two employees of Ross Perot were rescued from Iran during the revolution of 1979. It was made into a miniseries with Richard Crenna as Ross Perot and Burt Lancaster as Colonel "Bull" Simons.
Follett then surprised readers by radically changing course with The Pillars of the Earth, a novel about the building of a cathedral during the Middle Ages. Published to rave reviews in September 1989, it was on the New York Times best-seller list for 18 weeks. It also reached the number one position on lists in Canada, Great Britain and Italy, and was on the German best-seller list for an amazing six years. Pillars, in fact, was voted the third-greatest book ever written by some 250,000 viewers of the German television station ZDF in 2004, beaten only by The Lord of the Rings and the Bible. A similar poll conducted by the BBC ranked it 33 on a list of the 100 greatest novels.
For a while, Ken Follett abandoned the spy genre, but his stories still had powerful narrative drive, strong women, suspense and intrigue. He followed Pillars with Night over Water, A Dangerous Fortune and A Place Called Freedom.
Follett returned to the thriller with The Third Twin, a scorching suspense novel about a young woman scientist who stumbles across a secret genetic-engineering experiment. Miniseries rights were sold to CBS for $1,400,000, a record for four hours of television. It starred Kelly McGillis and Larry Hagman, and was broadcast in November 1997. (Ken Follett appeared briefly as the butler.) In Publishing Trends' annual survey of international fiction best-sellers for 1997, The Third Twin was ranked number two in the world, beaten only by John Grisham's The Partner.
The Hammer of Eden, another nail-biting contemporary suspense story, came in 1998. Code to Zero (2000), about brainwashing and rocket science in the 50s, went to number one on best-seller lists in the United States, German and Italy, with film rights snapped up by Gladiator producer Doug Wick in a seven-figure deal. Jackdaws (2001), a World War II spy thriller in the tradition of Eye of the Needle, won the Corine Prize for 2003, film rights were sold to Dino De Laurentiis. Hornet Flight, published in December 2002, about two young people who escape German-occupied Denmark in a Hornet Moth biplane, is loosely based on a true story. Whiteout., a contemporary thriller about the theft of a dangerous virus from a laboratory, was published in 2004.
Ken Follett is one of the world's most popular novelists. He has sold approximately 90 million books. His wife, Barbara, is a member of Parliament representing Stevenage, in Hertfordshire. They live in a rambling rectory with two Labrador retrievers, Custard and Bess. They also have an 18th-century town house in London and a beach house in Antigua. Ken Follett is a lover of Shakespeare, and is often seen attending the Globe Theatre in London. An enthusiastic amateur musician, he plays bass guitar in the band Damn Right I Got the Blues, and he appears occasionally with the folk group Clog Iron, playing a bass balalaika.
Follett served as chair of the National Year of Reading in 1998–1999, an initiative by the British government to raise literacy levels. He is president of the Dyslexia Institute, chair of the advisory committee of Reading Is Fundamental (UK), a trustee of the National Literacy Trust, a member of the Welsh Academy, a board director of the National Academy of Writing, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is active in numerous Stevenage charities and is a governor of Roebuck Primary School.
World without End, the long-awaited sequel to The Pillars of the Earth, was published in October 2007. It is set in Kingsbridge, the fictional location of the cathedral in Pillars, at the time of the Black Death, and features the descendants of the original characters.
Pillars-
Ken Follett has made a career of keeping readers at the edge of their seats, engrossed in his suspenseful spy thrillers. So what made him write about cathedrals in the Middle Ages? Follett sheds some light on the little book that could.
Nothing happens the way you plan it.
A lot of people were surprised by The Pillars of the Earth, including me. I was known as a thriller writer. In the book business, when you have had a success, the smart thing to do is write the same sort of thing once a year for the rest of your life. Clowns should not try to play Hamlet; pop stars should not write symphonies. I should not have risked my reputation by writing something out of character and overambitious.
What's more, I don't believe in God. I'm not what you would call a spiritual person. According to my agent, my greatest problem as a writer is that I'm not a tortured soul. The last thing anyone would have expected from me was a story about building a church.
So Pillars was an unlikely book for me to write—and I almost didn't. I started it, then dropped it, and did not look at it again for ten years.
This is how it happened.
KEN FOLLETT'S INSPIRATION (cont.)
When I was a boy, all my family belonged to a Puritan religious group called the Plymouth Brethren. For us, a church was a bare room with rows of chairs around a central table. Paintings, statues and all forms of decoration were banned. The sect also discouraged members from visiting rival churches. So I grew up pretty much ignorant of Europe's wealth of gorgeous church architecture.
I started trying to write novels in my middle 20s, while working as a reporter on London's Evening News. I realized then that I had never taken much interest in the cityscape around me, and I had no vocabulary to describe the buildings in which my characters had their adventures. So I bought An Outline of European Architecture by Nikolaus Pevsner. That book gave me eyes with which to look at buildings in general and churches in particular. Pevsner got really passionate when he wrote about Gothic cathedrals. The invention of the pointed arch, he wrote, was a rare event in history, when the solution to a technical problem—how to build a taller church—was also sublimely beautiful.
Soon after I read Pevsner's book, my newspaper sent me to the East Anglican city of Peterborough. I have long forgotten what story I was covering, but I shall always remember what I did after filing it. I had to wait an hour for a train back to London, so, remembering Pevsner's fascinating and passionate descriptions of medieval architecture, I went to see Peterborough Cathedral.
It was one of those moments.
The west front of Peterborough has three huge Gothic arches, like doorways for giants. The inside is older than the façade, with arcades of regular round Norman arches in stately procession up the aisle. Like all great churches, it is both tranquil and beautiful. But it was more than that. Because of Pevsner's book, I had some inkling of the effort that had gone into this. I knew the story of humankind's attempts to build ever taller and more beautiful churches. I understood the place of this building in history, my history.
I was enraptured by the Peterborough Cathedral.
Cathedral visiting became a hobby for me. Every few months I would drive to one of England's old cities, check into a hotel and study the church. This way I saw Canterbury, Salisbury, Winchester, Gloucester and Lincoln, each one unique, each with an intriguing story to tell. Most people take an hour or two to "do" a cathedral, but I like to have a couple of days.
The stones themselves reveal the construction history: stops and starts, damage and rebuilding, extensions in times of prosperity, and stained-glass tributes to the wealthy men who generally paid the bills. Another story is told by the way the church is sited in the town. Lincoln faces the castle across the street, religious and military power nose to nose. Winchester stands amid a neat grid of streets, laid out by a medieval bishop who fancied himself a town planner. Salisbury moved, in the 13th century, from a defensive hilltop site—where the ruins of the old cathedral are still visible—to an open meadow, showing that permanent peace had arrived.
But all the while a question nagged at me: Why were these churches built?
There are simple answers—for the glory of God, the vanity of bishops and so on—but those were not enough for me. The building of the medieval cathedrals is an astonishing European phenomenon. The builders had no power tools, they did not understand the mathematics of structural engineering, and they were poor: The richest of princes did not live as well as, say, a prisoner in a modern jail. Yet they put up the most beautiful buildings that have ever existed, and they built them so well that they are still here, hundreds of years later, for us to study and marvel at.
I began to read about these churches, but I found the books unsatisfactory. There was a great deal of aesthetic guff about elevations, but not much about the living buildings. Then I came across The Cathedral Builders by Jean Gimpel. Gimpel, the black sheep of a family of French art dealers, was as impatient as I with discussions about whether a clerestory "worked" aesthetically. His book was about the dirt-poor hovel dwellers who actually put up these fabulous buildings. He read the payroll records of French monasteries and took an interest in who the builders were and how much money they made. He was the first person to notice, for example, that a significant minority of the names were female. The medieval church was sexist, but women as well as men built the cathedrals.
Another work of Gimpel's, The Medieval Machine, taught me that the Middle Ages were a time of rapid high-tech innovation, during which the power of water mills was harnessed for a wide variety of industrial applications. Soon I was taking an interest in medieval life in general. And I began to get a picture of how the building of the great cathedrals must have seemed like the right thing to do for medieval people.
The explanation is not simple. It is a little like trying to understand why 20th-century people spent so much money exploring outer space. In both cases, a whole network of influences operated: scientific curiosity, commercial interests, political rivalries and the spiritual aspirations of earthbound people. And it seems to me there was only one way to map that network: by writing a novel.
Sometime in 1976 I wrote an outline and about four chapters of the novel. I sent it to my agent, Al Zuckerman, who wrote, "You have created a tapestry. What you need is a series of linked melodramas."
Looking back, I can see that at the age of 27 I was not capable of writing such a novel. I was like an apprentice watercolor painter planning a vast canvas in oils. To do justice to its subject, the book would have to be very long, cover a period of several decades, and bring alive the great sweep of medieval Europe. I was writing much less ambitious books, and even so, I had not yet mastered the craft.
I dropped the cathedral book and came up with another idea, a thriller about a German spy in wartime England. Happily, that was within my powers, and under the title Eye of the Needle, it became my first best-seller.
For the next decade I wrote thrillers, but I continued to visit cathedrals, and the idea of my cathedral novel never went away. I resurrected it in January 1986, having finished my sixth thriller, Lie Down with Lions.
My publishers were nervous. They wanted another spy story. My friends were also apprehensive. They know that I enjoy success. I'm not the kind of writer who would deal with a failure by saying that the book was good but the readers were inadequate. I write to entertain, and I'm happy doing so. A failure would make me miserable. No one tried to talk me out of it, but lots of people expressed anxious reservations.
However, I did not plan a "difficult" book. I would write an adventure story, full of colorful characters who were ambitious, wicked, sexy, heroic and smart. I wanted ordinary readers to be as enraptured as I was by the romance of the medieval cathedrals.
THE KINGSBRIDGE FAMILY TREE
The Pillars of the Earth is the epic story of the struggle to build the greatest Gothic cathedral of the 12th century. Explore the family tree of the small priory that dreams big.
THE KINGSBRIDGE FAMILY TREE
The Pillars of the Earth is the epic story of the struggle to build the greatest Gothic cathedral of the 12th century. Explore the family tree of the small priory that dreams big.
(AP) Oprah Winfrey went for the big time Wednesday with her latest book club pick, choosing Ken Follett's 973-page "The Pillars of the Earth," an announcement that will likely mean hundreds of thousands more sales for one of the world's most popular writers.
Follett, a 58-year-old native of Cardiff, Wales, is known for spectacular thrillers such as "Lie Down With Lions," "Eye of the Needle" and "World Without End," published last month, and a sequel to "The Pillars of the Earth," which came out in 1989.
Follett has called "The Pillars of the Earth," a love story set in England in the 12th century, his favorite novel. According to his Web site, the book still sells around 100,000 copies a year in the United States alone.
"My publishers were a little nervous about such a very unlikely subject but paradoxically, it is my most popular book," Follett writes on his Web site.
"It's also the book I'm most proud of. It recreates, quite vividly, the entire life of the village and the people who live there. You feel you know the place and the people as intimately as if you yourself were living there in the middle ages."
A year after "Pillars" came out, Follett agreed to a two-book, $12.3 million deal with the Dell Publishing Company. He reportedly has 90 million readers worldwide and recently signed with Penguin Group (USA) for a planned multigenerational trilogy set in the 20th century.
Oprah Winfrey's latest book club choice is a 973-page novel by Ken Follett.