Book news: Future shock

You may not have heard of the next generation of great scientists yet. Here’s your chance to get acquainted: Read What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science. The book’s editor assembled a cast of up-and-coming smart people and asked them to look into their space-time continuum portals for a look to the future of science. Among things they saw is a migration northward as climate change continues, and one doomsday scenario: The extinction of the human race. Homo sapiens exstinctus. The folks at VSL were appropriately terrified.

Publisher Random House says, “This wide-ranging collection of never-before-published essays offers the very latest insights into the daunting scientific questions of our time. Its contributors—some of the most brilliant young scientists working today—provide not only an introduction to their cutting-edge research, but discuss the social, ethical, and philosophical ramifications of their work. With essays covering fields as diverse as astrophysics, paleoanthropology, climatology, and neuroscience, What’s Next? is a lucid and informed guide to the new frontiers of science.”

Book news: Roommates anonymous

Chances are, if you’ve lived away from mom and dad for any length of time,  you either a) had a roommate from hell or b) were the roommate from hell.

Maybe you shared an apartment with a roomie whose laundry took on a smelly life form of its own or who never heard of washing dishes. Or perhaps you spotted the tell-tale hashmarks of a fork having scraped the contents of your peanut butter jar.

I Lick My Cheese: And Other Real Notes from the Roommate Frontlines by Oonagh O’Hagan is a compilation of real-life notes posted by roommates or “flatmates” as the original U.K. version termed them. They range from cute and fun to sarcastic to angry rants to really disgusting re-creations of certain, um, transgressions allegedly perpetrated by a room- er, flatmate.

The author’s Web site, roommatesanonymous.com, has a substantial collection of posted photos of said notes. The best of these are immortalized in hardcover in the recent U.S. book or its 2007 U.K. predecessor, I Lick My Cheese and Other Notes: From the Frontline of Flatsharing. You can log in and add your own stories from the “Frontline” at the Web site. Or just read in horror and be grateful your situation wasn’t that awful. Was it?

Book news: Dan Brown novel announced

Can’t get enough of Dan Brown?

Fans will soon feast this year, as the film adaptation of Angels and Demons hits the big screen next week, and another book featuring the Robert Langdon character, The Lost Symbol, will be published in September.

Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was a smash hit in 2003 and the Tom Hanks/Ron Howard movie was a hit (though not necessarily with critics) in 2006.

Brown’s latest book compresses the action into 12 hours. Doubleday is excited about  the prospects of another blockbuster, and the publisher plans a first printing of 5 millions copies – the largest first print in Random House Inc. history, says www.danbrown.com.

“This novel has been a strange and wonderful journey,” said Brown at his Web site. “Weaving five years of research into the story’s twelve-hour timeframe was an exhilarating challenge. Robert Langdon’s life clearly moves a lot faster than mine.”

Need a refresher on The Da Vinci Code? Start here.

Book news: Juiced – again

Sports Illustrated writer Selena Roberts has made a career out of reporting on Alex Rodriguez and his reported use of steroids.

A-Rod reveals new details, including allegations that A-Rod, also dubbed A-Roid  (he has several less-flattering nicknames among fellow New York Yankees), starting dabbling with performance-enhancing drugs in high school and continued in New York after he left the Texas Rangers, contradicting his admissions of drug use to date.

In a public statement about his steroid use, Rodriguez said he felt the pressure as baseball’s highest-paid player (not to mention the pressure-packed New York media cauldron) to do anything to be the best player possible.

A flurry of accusations, denials, admissions and so on preceded and followed baseball’s Mitchell Report on steroids, and no doubt more will come.

Names that pop up in the book include Madonna, trainer Angel Presinal, former Major Leaguers Kevin Brown and Jose Canseco (himself author of controversial books) and former coaches – even high school teammates. And, to quote the New York Daily News, ”dalliances with out-of-town floozies.”

Adding insult to injury, Roberts reports he was unpopular at Hooters, where baseball’s richest player tipped the minimum 15 percent.

A-Rod is set for May 12 publication by HarperCollins.

Other DelMio posts on baseball:

Veeck as in Wreck.

Three baseball must-reads.

Yankee Doodle not always dandy.

Book news: Free ride in the TVA

Baby's got a gun

Tor.com, purveyor of sci-fi and fantasy lit, gives away a fair amount of its properties no doubt in hopes of luring dollars from grateful readers.

This can present some risk. What if readers don’t like it? Or worse: What if they just go on reading the freebies, sponging all these books and short stories without ever spending a dime?

Well, it must work on some level, because Tor keeps doing it. A recent endeavor is a whacky short story by Terry Bisson, TVA Baby.

TVA Baby starts out in the skies over the Tennessee Valley, or the Mississippi River, depending on who’s right, and things (literally) take a rapid descent from there. It’s a bumpy ride, narrated with a unique point of view. Some comments by readers that followed found the occasional lapses in logic and continuity annoying, which might  miss the point. See for yourself.

Or if you prefer, hear for yourself.

And if you’d like to get a virtually limitless stream of free stuff from Tor, sign up here.

Elementary, my dear Strunk & White

Aspiring writers receive lots of advice, often conflicting advice.

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers,” Dorothy Parker once wrote, “the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘The Elements of Style.’ The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

Strunk & White have long found themselves on the bookshelves of many writers, nestled next to the dictionary, thesaurus, AP Stylebook and a few other select titles (We would include William Zinsser’s On Writing Well and James Kilpatrick’s The Writer’s Art). Last week, it turned 50, or 90-something, depending on your perspective.

Happy birthday, The Elements of Style.

The Elements of Style rose to prominence in 1959 when E.B. White revised William Strunk’s original text four decades after Strunk first self-published the book while an English professor at Cornell (White was his student in 1919). It got some free press from White in The New Yorker and a boffo review in the
New York Times.

Elements has been revised several times since then, although it still can seem a tad quaint at times. And not all writers or “experts” appreciate Strunk & White’s “little book” of rules for writers. Then again, rules were made to be broken, no?

Found in translation: Postcard resistance

German novelist Hans Fallada wrote his World War II-era novel, Every Man Dies Alone, based on the real-life resistance movement started by a middle-aged couple in circa 1940 Germany. The couple distributed anti-Nazi messages on handwritten postcards all around Berlin.

Fallada, a successful novelist before the war, never saw the book go to print. He suffered from mental illness and died of a morphine overdose in 1947 just months before it was published, reports veryshortlist.com.

But now the story is being published in English.

Otto and Anna Quangel started their campaign after learning that their only son had been killed during Germany’s invasion of France.

“Mother! The Fuhrer has murdered my son,”  read the first postcard Otto wrote and left to be seen in public.

Famous Holocaust survivor Primo Levi calls Every Man Dies Alone “the greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis.”

Resistance is not always futile.

Book news: No strings attached

The newspaper columnist who “discovered” the musician who became the subject of columns, then book, and now movie tells how his encounter with Nathaniel Ayers led to this series of events, culminating – for now – in the movie being released amid a ton of buzz starring Jamie Foxx and  Robert Downey Jr.

Steve Lopez talked to NPR a year ago about how this unlikely friendship grew: “Lopez says his friendship with Ayers has ‘always been a two-way street, it’s not just me doing for him.’ The writer explains that the musician re-ignited his passion for journalism and gave him a sense of well-being: ‘You know, there’s this humility, there’s this good feeling I have from giving something,’ Lopez says.”
The story is pretty well-known at this point, of how Ayers had been a promising violinist at the prestigious Juilliard School who dropped out as he struggled with schizophrenia. He moved to L.A. and landed on the streets there.
As Lopez wrote about Ayers in the Los Angeles Times, readers sent instruments to Lopez on behalf of Ayers. One thing led to another, Ayers got off the street and into an apartment and treatment for his mental illness.

Hear excerpts from the movie and from Lopez on radio before the movie was released: “It was the violin that turned my head,” he told NPR, then he noticed the player was in rags and the violin had only two strings.

The book is  The Soloist: A Lost Dream, and Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music.

Book news: Crime of the century

It’s early in the new century; societal upheaval seems everywhere; new industries are being born as older ones die; and news seems to travel instantaneously.

Welcome to 1911.

Vanished Smile by R.A. Scotti takes a look at an event that occurred nearly 100 years ago and triggered one of the biggest sensations of its day: Crime of the century! Media frenzy! Scandal! Celebrity suspects! International Public outcry and huge, public displays of grief.

She truly is a woman of international mystery.

Mona Lisa has long been the subject of song and mystery, and continues to intrigue us still.
In this fictionalized mystery based on very real events, Scotti’s story unfolds like this: “The prime suspects were as shocking as the crime: Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, young provocateurs of a new art. As French detectives using the latest methods of criminology, including fingerprinting, tried to trace the thieves, a burgeoning international media hyped news of the heist.”

In reality, the painting was stolen by a former Louvre worker, Vincenzo Peruggia, who reportedly hid inside the museum on Aug. 20, 1911, and made off with the famous painting. He kept it in his Paris apartment for two years before returning to Italy with it. Apparently Peruggia expected to be rewarded for returning the Mona Lisa to Leonardo Da Vinci’s homeland, Italy.

He was rewarded with a trip to jail.

The painting was returned to Le Louvre in 1914.

Peruggia (his name is usually spelled Perugia, reports Wikipedia) was released from jail after a short time and served in the Italian army during World War I.

In an interview, author Scotti talks about the mystique of the Mona Lisa that attracted her to the story and how she was not even aware that the Mona Lisa had once been stolen (that makes at least two of us). But once she started investigating the theft, many conspiracy theories came to light.

“There is no question that Peruggia—aka ‘Leonardo’—performed the actual theft. He left his calling card. The left thumbprint on the frame was his, and examinations by French and Italian experts proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the Mona Lisa he returned was the same painting that he stole. But the idea that Peruggia was the lone thief is implausible. Although I don’t believe he acted alone, I could not crack the case. Who was behind the theft and, even more puzzling, why, remains a baffling mystery that will probably never be solved.

Speaking of Da Vinci mysteries, one of this century’s most popular books still grabs attention: The Da Vinci Code.

Book news: Hawking on the mend

After reports came in of Stephen Hawking being gravely ill, family members said the author of A Brief History of Time was expected to make a full recovery.

Hawking, who has been in a wheelchair for years and communicates via a voice synthesizer, was touring the United States when he contracted a chest  infection. His condition worsened back at Cambridge and he was rushed to a hospital Monday for tests and treatment.

Wednesday, he was reportedly doing better.

He developed symptoms of motor neurone disease at the age of 21 and was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), the most common form of motor neurone disease. He has defied the odds by living more than 40 years with the disease, which typically kills patients in five years or less.

The Cambridge University professor is widely regarded as the best-known living scientist. In 1988, he published A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.
In 2004 he announced he had solved the Black Hole paradox, admitting that black holes may allow some information to escape them. He had argued in a friendly bet with other scientists that black holes destroy everything that falls into them.