He thinks the right historical stories can yield contemporary lessons. The near-eradication of the buffalo was an environmental crisis with contemporary parallels to global warming.

"If we're open to those lessons from history, then we really can have the potential to avoid the mistakes we've made in the past if we're wise enough. That's my hope for historical fiction and for nonfiction historical books, that they teach us something, that we don't have to learn through personal experience," he said.

His favorite books include Larry McMurtry's epic Western novel "Lonesome Dove" and Norman Maclean's novella, "A River Runs Through It." ("It's one of two books that ever made me cry. The other was 'Old Yeller' when I was about 8 years old," he said.) He looks up to Wallace Stegner's writing about the West and Bernard DeVoto's books on the fur trade.

While reading a nonfiction book on the fur trade era, he came across a few paragraphs that caught his eye, "this quick summary of this guy Hugh Glass who had been mauled by a grizzly bear, robbed and abandoned by his comrades, crawled back to the last vestige of civilization to survive, re-equipped himself, and went out to seek revenge," he said.