By Kitty Ferguson
Palgrave Macmillan | 320pgs
Release Date: January 3, 2012
Science writer Kitty Ferguson builds a revealing profile of physicist Stephen Hawking’s early life in the new book Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind. Hawking, best known for his research in the areas of theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity, is one of the world’s most renown scientists. With his lectures and writings, he has made highly complicated scientific theories interesting and palatable to the general public. “It’s not dumbing down [science]; it’s really making it accessible, hopefully, to a lot of people,” explains the author in an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air. Her book focuses on Hawking’s early childhood through his undergraduate and graduate work at Oxford and Cambridge respectively, and his diagnosis of ALS disease in the early 1960′s. At the time, doctors predicted he would not survive his 20′s, but the physicist has beaten the odds, and will celebrate his 70th birthday on January 8th. Read more…
Fan favorite, author Patricia Cornwell, is busy at work promoting her latest novel in the Kay Scarpetta series Red Mist. The 19th installment has the formidable medical examiner traveling to a remote women’s prison in Georgia to meet with an inmate who might have knowledge of the brutal murder of Jack Fielding, Scarpetta’s former deputy chief. While investigating Fielding’s death, the Dr. uncovers links to other murders committed across the country, as well as a potential international terrorist threat.
Besides unravelling a murder mystery, Red Mist, addresses the larger issues of death penalty ethics and the prison system. In a phone interview with The Oregonian, Cornwell spoke about working to keep the 22 year-old series interesting to herself and her readers. “It’s not a job,” she says, “it’s like a relationship that I treat with sensitivity and selflessness and that needs to be nurtured.” Read more…
By Richard Rhodes
Doubleday | 272pgs
Release Date: November 29, 2011
Summary:
Award winning author Richard Rhodes tells the surprising true story of the scientific contribution actress Hedy Lamarr made to the war effort during the 1940′s in his new book Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Beneath the surface, considerably more than just a pretty face, the sexy starlet had harbored a deep interest in all things mechanical from a very early age. The growing atrocities in Europe and an introduction to musician George Antheil, who shared Larmarr’s penchant for invention, prompted the pair to tackle the unlikely subject of a torpedo guidance system. They devised a system in which a plane could control a torpedo remotely, with each device maintaining communication while simultaneously cycling through different radio frequencies, preventing the enemy from breaking contact by jamming a single channel. This idea, known as spread-spectrum radio, was decades ahead of its time, and could not be implemented with the rudimentary torpedo technology of World War II, but is the basis for much of today’s widespread technology, such as WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS. Read more…
Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Robert K. Massie separates historical rumor from documented fact with his new book Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Random House, 656pgs). Massie has proven himself to be an enthusiast of all things Russian with his previous books, including the bestselling Nicholas and Alexandra and Peter the Great, and according to a review in USA TODAY, his enthusiasm does not wane with this new subject. Catherine, born into minor German nobility and married off to her second cousin, the heir to the Russian throne, at 16, is affectionately portrayed as intelligent, driven and forthright. Upon her marriage, she begins a rigorous self-education, learning Russian, adopting her new homeland’s Orthodox faith and devouring books on all subjects. Her actions endear her to the Russian people, though the citizenry feel quite the opposite about Peter, her arrogant and cruel husband. Just months into Peter’s reign, the reviled czar is overthrown and 33 year-old Catherine is enthroned, though the book posits that it is unlikely she orchestrated the coup. Read more…
By Stephen King
Scribner | 960pgs
Release Date: November 8, 2011
Stephen King’s new novel, the highly anticipated 11/22/63, arrives in stores today. The opus, which falls just short of the 1,000 page mark, follows English teacher Jake Epping through a time portal in his friend Al’s basement on a quest to prevent the assassination of JFK. Using the name George Amberson, Jake enters the past in the year 1958, and spends the next 5 years working towards changing the outcome of that fateful day, moving to a small town in Texas, falling in love with a sweet librarian and encountering a troubled young man named Lee Harvey Oswald along the way. Will Jake be able to change history? If so, will the future of the world better for this change? Read more…
Happy Pig Day!, the latest in the hugely popular Elephant and Piggie picture book series by author and illustrator Mo Willems was released last month. The cartoonist recently spoke with Jeff Labrecque at Entertainment Weekly and discussed the genesis of his two quirky main characters. “Elephant and Piggie are the first characters that I created that I intended for multiple books. I really developed them almost in the way that you would develop television. I knew that they were going to have to carry a lot of weight…I knew there were things that I hadn’t imagined that they were still going to have to handle,” Willems explained. Read more…
Apple fanatics around the world are hotly anticipating the arrival of Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 656pgs) the biography by Walter Isaacson, which hits shelves on Monday October 24. Isaacson, a high-profile biographer, was granted Jobs’ full cooperation with the book and was allowed exclusive access to the highly private entrepreneur. The pair met for dozens of interviews, the last taking place a few short weeks before the creative visionary’s passing on October 5. In an interview with the Associated Press, Isaacson provides an early glimpse into Jobs’ private life. Their conversations touched on many subjects, including the impetus for the Apple name, which Jobs came up with after visiting an apple orchard during his experimentation with a fruitarian diet. He felt the name was “fun, spirited and not intimidating.” Read more…
Preeminent book designer Chip Kidd discusses the concept behind the beautifully designed cover art for Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, 1Q84 (Knopf, 944pgs), in a short video posted on the Los Angeles Times website today. To align with the book’s theme of parallel realities, Kidd printed part of the 4-color artwork on transparent vellum which overlays the artwork printed on the cover stock beneath. The occurrence of two moons in the book’s plot is also referenced in the design of the end papers. In the video, Kidd also alludes to a mystery involving the book’s page numbers, but readers will have to puzzle that one out themselves, once the book is released here in the U.S, on October 25. Read more…
Fans of The Walking Dead get a double dose of zombie mayhem with the premier of season two of the AMC television series last night and the recent release of The Walking Dead: Rise of The Governor (Thomas Dunne Books, 320pgs), a book written by story creator Robert Kirkman and horror writer Jay Bonansinga. This is the first novel for The Walking Dead franchise, which began as a series of comic books. “I always thought about branching out into prose and doing a Walking Dead novel,” Kirkman explains in a interview with USA Today. “With the hype around the second season and the comic book series doing so well, it seems like the perfect time to launch it.” Read more…
By Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 416pgs
Release Date: October 11, 2011
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jeffrey Eugenides will publish his first new novel in almost a decade with the release of The Marriage Plot. Set at Brown University in the early 1980′s, the story focuses on an emerging love triangle between three soon to be graduating seniors. At the center of the triangle is Madeleine Hanna, an English major enamored of the romantic ideals of Austen and Joyce, who meets the brilliant, but emotionally troubled, Leonard Bankhead in a Semiotics seminar. On the sidelines is Mitchell Grammaticus, a smart and practical religious-studies student who carries a torch for Madeleine. After Graduation Leonard and Madeleine move in together and eventually marry, though Leonard’s emotional state continues to deteriorate. Mitchell embarks on a trip through India to find his true path, but cannot stop pining for Madeleine. He is inextricably drawn back to the U.S., but his return home complicates Madeleine’s marriage. Will this novel end happily ever after? Read more…
