I just finished The Craft of Interviewing by John Brady, and as it often happens, it's not the practical advices that are most interesting, but the spirit, the philosophy of the vocation.

We Americans like interview so much that we create them. Daniel Boorstin has called the interview a "pseudo-event," artificial news, in which things happen not of their own volition -- as do fires, floods, acts of God and rage -- but of our volition. ...

"Sometimes I think it's another sign of the sad necessity of our crowded, lonely lives," suggests George Garrett, "an urgent, hopeless reaching out to touch something real, a deep hunger for something authentic when everything else seem false, a desire to believe at least in the possibility of the naked truth."

Interviewing is, above all, the unexpected. Its joy is not unlike what Gloria Steinem once said of writing in general: "It's the only thing that passes the three tests of métier: 1) When I am doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead; 2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, once in a while, pride; and 3) it's frightening."