People often ask me, how do you do your research?

And honestly, I wish there was a more exciting answer.

Because the truth is, most research is pretty dull.

Reading through mountains of dusty documents, hunting through hundreds of footnotes

to find that one elusive fact.

The real secret is what the Germans call Zitzflux, or sitting flesh.

The sheer ability to park your rear end on a chair and endure a task, however boring.

But every so often, something amazing happens during the course of research,

a little gold nugget in the muddy stream.

That actually happened to me with my most recent book, The Ice Pick Surgeon,

in regard to the title character, Lobotomist Walter Freeman.

In the book, I focus on the professional side of Freeman,

who performed 4,000 lobotomies during his lifetime, including many on children.

His most notorious case involved President John F. Kennedy's sister Rosemary,

who spent the rest of her sad life trapped in an asylum afterward.

But there's another side to Freeman, the personal side,

that I caught an unexpected glimpse of while researching the Ice Pick Surgeon.

I'd ordered a copy of a book written by Freeman, just to get a feel for his writing.

I honestly didn't think it would be that illuminating or interesting.

Boy, it was I wrong.

Because when I opened the book, the first thing I saw inside were several forgotten postcards,

written by Walter Freeman himself.

...