23 Science Books That are So Exciting They Read Like Genre Fiction

The list, care of io9.

Susan Orlean on Rin Tin Tin

20 Essential Books About the Next Step in Human Evolution

The list, care of io9.

JFK Assassination Movie Forthcoming

"Parkland," co-produced by Tom Hanks, will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy.

From a story in the Guardian...


Titled Parkland after the Dallas hospital in which Kennedy, his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jack Ruby (who killed Oswald) all passed their final hours, the film will be shot in nearby Austin. It is aiming for a 2013 release to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the former US president's death in November 1963.

The script is based on the book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F Kennedy, by the Edgar award-winning author and former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman are among the producers for a project that will be shopped to buyers at the annual American Film Market in Santa Monica next week.

150 Best Science and Tech Reads

The list, categorized by subject matter, care of Electric Typewriter.

Blast Off Into Space...

...with a good book.

The New York Daily News offers some suggestions, here.

And have you SEEN this Mars stuff? Awesome....

Collecting Lewis & Clark Books

AbeBooks explores the books about the explorers.

From the post...

There had been an initial flurry of interest in the expedition after the men returned. Patrick Gass, the Corps’ carpenter, published the first and bestselling account of the adventure, Journal of Voyages and Travels, in 1807. It went through four American, a British, and a French edition in the first five years. But by the time the Lewis and Clark's official report was published in 1814, reader interest had evaporated. 

A new edition of Lewis and Clark’s journals would not appear in the United States until 1842, when nearly everyone involved was dead. The Lewis and Clark legend has been revived only in the past 100 years, and with that new interest came a fascination for Sacagawea, the pregnant, 16-year-old Indian girl who served as their translator on the expedition. Hundreds of books have now been devoted to the feats of the Corps of Discovery, and after two centuries, the public now shows an enduring interest in their feats of discovery.

Tree of Life

The first-known sketch of an evolutionary tree describing the relationships among groups of organism, by Charles Darwin, here.

The Rivers of America

Fine Books & Collections revels in the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Rivers in America series.

From the blog post...

A succession of publishers: Farrar & Rinehart; Rinehart & Co.; and Holt, Rinehart & Winston, as well as several editors: Constance Lindsay Skinner, who planned and started the series; Stephen Vincent Benét; Hervey Allen; and Carl Carmer, kept the series going during some of the darkest days in our nation's history. The books, written by some of the finest writers of their time, and illustrated by artists, some of whose work today hangs in fine art museums, captured and preserved the folklore and history of not only the United States, but of Canada, and even of a river in Panama, The Chagres: River of Westward Passage.

How a Book About Fish Nearly Sank Newton's Principia

Poor sales of lavishly illustrated book forced Royal Society to go back on promise to finance publication of Newton's Principia.

From an article in the Guardian...

The debacle played out in the 17th century when the country's most prestigious scientific organisation ploughed its money into the lavishly illustrated Historia Piscium, or History of Fishes, by John Ray and Francis Willughby.

Though groundbreaking in 1686, the book flopped and nearly broke the bank, forcing the Royal Society to withdraw from its promise to finance the publication of Newton's Pricipia, one of the most important works in the history of science.

Today, digital images from Historia Piscium, including a stunning engraving of a flying fish, are made available with more than a thousand others in a new online picture archive launched by the Royal Society.

The Question of Nonfiction

From James Frey to Mike Daisey the issue of truth in nonfiction continues to be a source of angst, perturbation, inquiry, fun, argument, and discussion.

Here, on the Los Angeles Review of Books' sparkling new website, a few authors have a quick say, in a series of LARB One-Minute Films.  Some find the argument that fidelity to fact is the essence of nonfiction, including the memoir, to be an impossible and perhaps uninteresting goal; some find our culture's inability to agree on the solidity of fact to be a sign of the apocalypse.

A Field Guide to Field Guides

Wired takes a fun romp through field guides - from birds to bird poop.

What are the Boundaries of Literary Non-Fiction?

Author John D'Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal discuss it, here.

Martin Amis' Video Game Book?

Indeed.

From a piece in the Millions...

Like most Amis fanciers, I had heard of the existence of this video game book –- the full title of which is Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines –- but knew very little about it. What I did know was that he dashed it off at some point during the time he was writing Money, one of the great British novels of the 1980s, and that it has long been out of print (a copy in good nick will cost you about $150 from Amazon). And I knew, most of all, that Amis was reluctant to talk about it or even acknowledge it. Nicholas Lezard of The Guardian once suggested to him (facetiously, surely) that it was among the best things he’d ever written, and that it was a mistake to have allowed it to go out of print. “The expression on his face,” wrote Lezard, “with perhaps more pity in it than contempt, remains with me uncomfortably.”

Invasion of the Space Invaders, then, is the madwoman in the attic of Amis’ house of nonfiction; many have heard rumors of its shameful presence, but few have seen it with their own eyes. I recently discovered a copy in the library of the university where I work, and I don’t think the librarian knew quite what to make of my obvious excitement at this coup. (“Wow,” I said, giving a low, respectful whistle as she handed it across the counter. “Would you look at that?”) It’s a deeply strange artifact: an A4-sized, full color glossy affair, abundantly illustrated with captioned photographs, screen shots, and lavish illustrations of exploding space ships and lunar landscapes. It boasts a perfunctory introduction by Steven Spielberg (“read this book and learn from young Martin’s horrific odyssey round the world’s arcades before you too become a video-junkie”), complete with full-page portrait of the Hollywood Boy Wonder leaning awkwardly against an arcade machine like some sort of geeky, high-waisted Fonz. We’re not even into the text proper, and already its cup runneth over with 100-proof WTF.

An Illuminated "On the Origin of Species"

Rare Books in the History of Scientific Discovery

Eureka! There's a new exhibit at Johns Hopkins highlighting some true bookish treasures.

From a piece in the Washington Post...

There’s the 1566 unbound pages of Nicolaus Copernicus’s “De Revolutionbus Orbium Colestium” (“On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”), in which the Polish astronomer posited that the sun, not Earth, was the center of the solar system. A few steps away, there’s a 1613 study on sunspots by Galileo. Across the room is a 1953 article by Cambridge biologists James Watson and Francis Crick that discusses DNA’s double-helix structure.

As a small joke, Havens placed early journal printings of rival physicists Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein in the same case.

The scope of the exhibit is so momentous it’s easy to get caught up in the sweep of successive discoveries without thinking of the man who made such an experience possible.

5 Essential Books about 9/11

The list, care of the Los Angeles Times.

The Guardian takes note of 20 best 9/11 books.

Under the Banner of Heaven - The Movie

Ron Howard's next project?

From a small piece in the Hollywood Reporter...

One day after their high-profile adaptation of The Dark Tower was tumbled by Universal, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer are leading the charge of another adaptation, Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer.

The rights to the book is in the process of being acquired by Warner Bros. and the plan includes having Dustin Lance Black, who wrote Milk and Warner¹s J. Edgar, pen the screenplay.

Imagine would produce and Howard would direct.

Many Business Books, But Few Written Well

The New York Times laments that there's not very many well-written books on business.

From the piece...

The problems are as varied as the books themselves; enumerating them could take an entire page of this newspaper. Some are too technical, some not technical enough. Some topics are hopeless: I’m not sure anyone can shape the Greek debt crisis into a narrative an American would read.

Some authors aren’t able to gain access to the business people they chronicle, and thus produce books that feel incomplete. Some don’t know how to tell a story. Some don’t even try. Some books just plain put me to sleep.

I co-wrote my first business book in 1990 — it did O.K. — and ever since, I’ve wondered why so few take flight. There are theories, the kind business writers will discuss after a couple of beers but generally refrain from debating in public.

For one thing, these books aren’t easy to create. Businesses, and especially American corporations, offer scads of compelling human dramas, the vast majority of which go untold, even unnoticed. It’s the corporate world’s zeal for secrecy — and the tendency of companies to avoid publicity they can’t control — that makes these tales tough to find and even tougher to tell.

The difficulty of spinning a good business yarn, however, doesn’t fully explain quality issues. One problem for the business reader is that too many of the authors aren’t gifted writers; they are chief executives, professors and experts in their field, and the lack of professional craftsmanship shows.

Cliffhanger: On Extreme Survival Stories

This plotline rarely changes; the details are grisly, the scenarios harrowing. Yet we can’t get enough of such stories.

From a piece on the Millions...

Krakauer has parlayed his mountaineering adventures in exotic locales into a successful writing career. Into Thin Air, his gripping nonfiction account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, popularized and epitomized a genre that has in many ways become synonymous with Krakauer: the true-life extreme survival story. Stories in this genre follow a predictable pattern: an individual sets out on an adventure, things go horribly wrong, he or she confronts the possibility death, and lives to tell an incredible story. Disaster pushes man to the edge between life and death, and a lucky few live to tell about it. This plotline rarely changes; the details are grisly, the scenarios harrowing. Yet we can’t get enough of such extreme survival stories.

Take, for instance, Lauren Hillenbrand’s latest nonfiction bestseller Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, which relates Louis Zamperini’s improbable true adventures, from shipwreck and starvation to shark attacks and torture. Zamperini’s extreme story is filtered through Hillenbrand’s capable narration, but it has much in common with other first-person survival accounts, including Aron Ralston’s 2005 book, Between a Rock and a Hard Place. Ralston’s book chronicles his amputation of his own arm following a bouldering accident in a Utah canyon, and was adapted into a successful Hollywood movie (127 Hours) starring James Franco, who was nominated for an Oscar for the role. In 1974, Piers Paul Read published Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which charted the grim ordeal of a South American rugby team after their plane crashed in the Andes mountains and they resorted to survival cannibalism in order to stay alive.

Why are we so fixated with such tales, gory and clichéd as they may be?