September 11, 2001 (ePub)

Where were you the day John F. Kennedy was shot? Imagine being a cub reporter at UPI's Dallas office, sent out to answer the terrible question: Is the president alive or dead? Author Wilborn Hampton was that reporter, and the events of that day would change the course of his life.

Born and raised in Dallas, Wilborn Hampton had just graduated with a BA in English literature from the University of Texas and planned to pursue a career in theater and literature. Covering the assassination, however, made him decide to become a journalist. "There was something exhilarating about being right in the eye of such a tornado of history. It was both horrible and exciting," he says. "I did go on to become a foreign correspondent, and I covered three different wars in the Middle East and a lot of other page-one banner headline stories. But nothing ever came close to what I felt that day in Dallas, just two months out of college, on my first job."

Now an editor at the New York Times, Wilborn Hampton has drawn on his rare "I was there" insight to take young readers to the heart of some of the twentieth-century's most world-changing events. "An entire generation that was not even born when those shots were fired has now reached adulthood," he says of his reasons for writing Kennedy Assassinated! The World Mourns. "It seemed time for me to attempt to put on paper, from my limited view in the eye of the swirl of history, what a sense of loss that day brought to those of us who were then young adults." The author's second book with Candlewick Press, Meltdown: A Race Against Nuclear Disaster at Three Mile Island, is a suspenseful hour-by-hour, behind-the-scenes account of the worst nuclear power accident in the United States, thirty-four years after the bombing of Hiroshima. "As future scientists search for a replacement for oil and coal, they must be aware of the inherent dangers of atomic energy," Wilborn Hampton says. Wilborn Hampton also gives young readers a

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