April 2013

All in Good Time

Cape Cod Life  /  April 2013 /

Writer: Jeff Harder / Photographer: Amanda McCole 

All in Good Time

April 2013

Cape Cod Life  /  April 2013 /

Writer: Jeff Harder / Photographer: Amanda McCole 

With more than 80 nonfiction books to his credit, history author Martin Sandler has hit his stride—with no plans to slow down.

Photo by Amanda McCole

There was a time when he hadn’t expected to write even one. Sandler grew up in New Bedford shortly after the city’s textile industry migrated south, oblivious to his own family’s poverty. As a student, he went from top of his class in middle school to a standout second baseman in high school. “I was more interested in hitting a baseball and chasing girls than I was in books or writing,” he says, “and I was much more successful with hitting a baseball.” Sports were his “way out,” he says: he earned an athletic scholarship to Providence College, which provoked a passion for American history that carried him through graduate school at Brown University. “It became clear to me when I was in college how much I loved history,” he says. “That these people, who were giants and less than giants, have come before me and walked before me, that I could stand under the arch at Fort Ticonderoga and know that George Washington stood there, and that he spoke to his troops by reading the speech I had just read. I’d get chills from it.”

He spent 13 years teaching history, first in secondary schools around New England and later as a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and Smith College, and the initial plan was to stay in the classroom. But it was the textbooks—those hardcover slabs of boredom—that turned him into a writer. “There were these exciting activities, like ‘Go home and memorize a list of presidents, come back, and give ‘em to me by rote tomorrow,’” he says. “I thought, It’s got to be better than this.” He submitted two unsolicited chapters of his utopian textbook, and to his surprise, a publisher was interested. In 1971, Allyn & Bacon published The People Make a Nation, Sandler’s first book.

He has relished the life of a full-time writer ever since, rattling off an average of more than two books a year for adults and young adults alike. His oeuvre includes a six-book American history series for the Library of Congress, several histories of photography, and works like Why Did the Whole World Go to War?, which reframe the complexities of history for children. There have been detours into television: Sandler was a writer and guiding force behind This Was America, a series hosted by William Shatner and based on his book of the same name, and The Entrepreneurs with Robert Mitchum. But the allure of books endured in a way that sitting between takes on a TV set did not. And after 25 years of living in Boston and Newton and spending weekends in Marstons Mills, he and Carol made a permanent move to Cotuit in 1997.

Instead of enjoying a quiet retirement by the sea, Sandler is as prolific as ever. In fact, three of his most substantial works have been published in the last five years: Resolute, which links the 19th century search for the Northwest Passage to the desk in the Oval Office and earned a Pulitzer nomination; Lost to Time, a collection of stories about the unsung people and places that made lasting contributions to history; and The Impossible Rescue, a tale of three men sent across the Alaskan tundra to save the crew of a whaling ship locked in ice during the winter of 1897. “He takes subject matter which, in many cases, people are unaware of, but should know about—pieces of history that have just been lost,” Phillips says. “And even though many of his books are really written for young adults, they are written in such a way that adults can read and enjoy them.”

Jeff Harder

Jeff Harder is a freelance writer who has written for many publications. For a five-year-period he was also a managing editor at Cape Cod Life Publications and famously wrote profiles on 17 interesting Cape and Islanders for Cape Cod LIFE’s Annual Guide—one each for all 15 Cape Cod towns as well as Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket—and he did this several years in a row. He also enjoys bulldogs, mixed martial arts, and spending time with his family.