The American South and its peculiar emphasis on the beauty pageant, which was hardly the first place one might find him, since he has spent much of his adult life earning advanced degrees in various sciences from M.I.T., Stanford, and the University of Michigan. Yet he came to writing the book, his publishing debut, from a childhood spent with a mother and four sisters who all came up through the pageant circuit. At once an appreciation and an investigation of the world of Little Dolls, Pell weaves the stories of a number of pageant kids into a vibrant narrative of love, loss, and cutthroat competition.