Susan Freinkel

Susan Freinkel is the author of American Chestnut: The Life, Death and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree, published by the University of California Press in Nov. 2007. Her next book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, will be published by Houghton Mifflin in the spring of 2011.

Freinkel is a science writer whose work has appeared in a variety of national publications including: Discover, Reader’s Digest, Smithsonian, The New York Times, Health, and Real Simple. In 2005, she was awarded an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, which allowed her to conduct much of the research for American Chestnut.

A graduate of Wesleyan University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freinkel began her career as a reporter at the Wichita Eagle-Beacon in Wichita, Kansas. She soon became one of the paper’s lead project writers, working on series that explored such diverse issues as: AIDS in the heartland, the precarious state of rural hospitals, the brain drain from Kansas, the changing nature of families. In 1989, Freinkel moved to San Francisco and began covering legal affairs and the business of law for The Recorder newspaper and American Lawyer magazine. Her career took a whole new direction in 1998 when she joined the staff of Health magazine and started writing about consumer health and medicine. Since 2000, she has worked as a freelance writer.

Her interests run wide. She has covered subjects ranging from adoption to weight control, from coyote hunts to mad cow disease, from new psychiatric treatments to the quest to develop a blue rose. She became interested in the American chestnut while writing a story for Discover magazine about a mysterious disease that was threatening California’s oak trees. Researching sudden oak death, she learned about the granddaddy of forest epidemics – the chestnut blight – and became caught up in the spell of that older story. Freinkel spent nearly three years researching and writing American Chestnut, the first book on an ecological catastrophe that profoundly reshaped the American landscape and the way we think about the natural world.

The American chestnut once was one of America’s most common, valued and beloved trees – a “perfect tree” that ruled the forests from Georgia to Maine and was so important to the people of the southern Appalachian Mountains that they embraced it as their cultural icon. In the early twentieth century, an imported plague swept through the chestnut forests with the force of a wildfire. Within 40 years the chestnut blight had killed close to four billion trees and the species was left teetering on the edge of extinction. Most experts considered the species beyond salvation. But not all were willing to let it go. For more than a century, a succession of unconventional characters have fought to save the chestnut, drawing on every weapon that science has to offer in their battle against the blight. In profiling that impassioned fight, Freinkel found a rich story of love and commitment which offers inspiration for grappling with the environmental problems we face today.

Freinkel lives in San Francisco with her husband and three children.