conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first two paragraphs for a book with the title 'People of the Book'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: People of the Book
  I like to work alone, in my own clean, silent, well-lit laboratory, where the climate is controlled and everything I need is right at hand. It's true that I have developed a reputation as someone who can work effectively out of the lab, when I have to, when the museums don't want to pay the travel insurance on a piece, or when private collectors don't want anyone to know exactly what it is that they own. It's also true that I've flown halfway around the world, to do an interesting job. But never to a place like this: the boardroom of a bank in the middle of a city where they just stopped shooting at each other five minutes ago.
  For one thing, there are no guards hovering over me at my lab at home. I mean, the museum has a few quiet security professionals cruising around, but none of them would ever dream of intruding on my work space. Not like the crew here. Two were bank security guards, two were Bosnian police, here to keep an eye on the bank security, and the other two were United Nations peace-keepers, here to keep an eye on the Bosnian police. All having loud conversations in Bosnian or Danish over their crackly radio handsets. As if that wasn't enough of a crowd, there was also the official UN observer, Hamish Sajjan. My first Scottish Sikh, very dapper in Harris tweed and an indigo turban. Only in the UN. I'd had to ask him to point out to the Bosnians that smoking wasn't going to be happening in a room that would shortly contain a fifteenth-century manuscript. Since then, they'd been even more fidgety.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Six.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: People of the Book
  I like to work alone, in my own clean, silent, well-lit laboratory, where the climate is controlled and everything I need is right at hand. It's true that I have developed a reputation as someone who can work effectively out of the lab, when I have to, when the museums don't want to pay the travel insurance on a piece, or when private collectors don't want anyone to know exactly what it is that they own. It's also true that I've flown halfway around the world, to do an interesting job. But never to a place like this: the boardroom of a bank in the middle of a city where they just stopped shooting at each other five minutes ago. 
  For one thing, there are no guards hovering over me at my lab at home. I mean, the museum has a few quiet security professionals cruising around, but none of them would ever dream of intruding on my work space. Not like the crew here. Six of them. Two were bank security guards, two were Bosnian police, here to keep an eye on the bank security, and the other two were United Nations peace-keepers, here to keep an eye on the Bosnian police. All having loud conversations in Bosnian or Danish over their crackly radio handsets. As if that wasn't enough of a crowd, there was also the official UN observer, Hamish Sajjan. My first Scottish Sikh, very dapper in Harris tweed and an indigo turban. Only in the UN. I'd had to ask him to point out to the Bosnians that smoking wasn't going to be happening in a room that would shortly contain a fifteenth-century manuscript. Since then, they'd been even more fidgety.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I stood on the steps of the tall redbrick house for a long time, trying to get up the guts to knock on the door. It was in my favorite part of Brookline, the edgy part right near Alston where the burrito joints give way to the kosher groceries and the street life is equal parts artstudenty goth and Jewish frum.
  There's a very good chance I never would have knocked at all, if another group of mourners hadn't arrived behind me and just sort of swept me inside with them. The door opened on a dozen or so loud voices, all talking at once. Someone handed me vodka in a shot glass. Somehow, I hadn't pictured shivah like this. I guess that was the Russian part of Russian Jewish.
  The house also wasn't at all what you'd expect, going by the conventional exterior or by the fact that an eighty-one-year-old woman had lived here. The inside had been all opened up, in a very contemporary way, with white walls and light pouring in from well-placed skylights. There were tall, spare ceramic vases with twisted branches in them, and Mies chairs and other vintage-modern, Bauhaus-y pieces.
  On the far wall, there was a very large painting. It was a gorgeous, burning expanse of Australian sky with just a strip of hard red desert implied in a few lines of paint in the lower quarter of the canvas. So simple, so powerful. It was one of the pictures that had made the artist's name in the early 1960s. You could see one from that series in just about any major museum that bothered at all with Australian art. But this was one of the greats. The best I'd seen. We had one ourselves—I mean, Mum did—at the house in Bellevue Hill. I'd never thought about it that much. She had quite a few trophy paintings: Brett Whiteley, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd. Always the big boys with the big names. No reason why she wouldn't have an Aaron Sharansky.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about painting.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I stood on the steps of the tall redbrick house for a long time, trying to get up the guts to knock on the door. It was in my favorite part of Brookline, the edgy part right near Alston where the burrito joints give way to the kosher groceries and the street life is equal parts artstudenty goth and Jewish frum. 
  There's a very good chance I never would have knocked at all, if another group of mourners hadn't arrived behind me and just sort of swept me inside with them. The door opened on a dozen or so loud voices, all talking at once. Someone handed me vodka in a shot glass. Somehow, I hadn't pictured shivah like this. I guess that was the Russian part of Russian Jewish. 
  The house also wasn't at all what you'd expect, going by the conventional exterior or by the fact that an eighty-one-year-old woman had lived here. The inside had been all opened up, in a very contemporary way, with white walls and light pouring in from well-placed skylights. There were tall, spare ceramic vases with twisted branches in them, and Mies chairs and other vintage-modern, Bauhaus-y pieces. 
  On the far wall, there was a very large painting. The kind of painting that knocks your breath out of you. It was a gorgeous, burning expanse of Australian sky with just a strip of hard red desert implied in a few lines of paint in the lower quarter of the canvas. So simple, so powerful. It was one of the pictures that had made the artist's name in the early 1960s. You could see one from that series in just about any major museum that bothered at all with Australian art. But this was one of the greats. The best I'd seen. We had one ourselves—I mean, Mum did—at the house in Bellevue Hill. I'd never thought about it that much. She had quite a few trophy paintings: Brett Whiteley, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd. Always the big boys with the big names. No reason why she wouldn't have an Aaron Sharansky.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Before writing "An Insect's Wing" I had many long conversations with members of the family of Dervis Korkut, and am in especial debt to Servet Korkut, who was by her husband's side and supported his many heroic acts of resistance during the fascist occupation of Sarajevo. I hope that the Korkut family will find my invented family, the Kamals, in sympathy with their humanistic ideals. For details of the experiences of young Jewish Partisans, I relied on the harrowing account by Mira Papo, which is in the collection of Yad Vashem, where the librarians were most helpful.
  For letting me spill kosher wine on bits of old parchment, for explaining the fine points of video spectral comparators, and for being an Aussie when I wasn't sure that the career I'd invented for Hanna was all that plausible, I am thankful to my paysan Narayan Khandekar at the Straus Center for Conservation. While I learned a great deal about the career and the technical aspects of conversation from both Andrea Pataki and Narayan Khandekar, the fictional characters Hanna Heath and Razmus Kanaha bear absolutely no resemblance to either one of these real-life professionals.
  I would not have had access to all the riches of Harvard's libraries and museums were it not for a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, for which I am most grateful to Drew Gilpin Faust. Judy Vichniac led an amazingly supportive staff at the institute. The Radcliffe fellows, especially the members of the Tuesday writers' table, helped shape my thinking and writing in myriad ways.
  I also relied heavily on the insights of my early readers, especially Graham Thorburn, the Horwitz team of Joshua, Elinor, Norman, and Tony, Rabbi Caryn Broitman of the Martha's Vineyard Hebrew Center, sofer stam Jay Greenspan, Christine Farmer, Linda Funnel, Clare Reihill, Marie Anderson, and Gail Morgan.
  Thanks hardly seem adequate for my editor Molly Stern and my agent Kris Dahl, who are, as ever, my indispensable supports and two of the most formidable professionals in publishing.