Posts tagged with nonfiction
Self-help on the big screen (again)
According to Vulture, Reese Witherspoon is going to star in a fictionalized movie adaptation of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. I'm frankly amazed that What To Expect When You're Expecting made enough money to encourage still more self-help-book-inspired movies, but I guess things could be worse...
Another one I'll be skipping
Rupert Everett is planning to make his directorial debut with a movie about Oscar Wilde's final days. According to Variety, the biopic The Happy Prince will be a "comedy with tragic undertones", but if it's really a nonfiction account, I'm not sure where the comedy's going to come from...
Stranger than fiction
There's casting news trickling out about the upcoming movie adaption of Sheila Weller's nonfiction book Girls Like Us, which we reviewed (quite enthusiastically) several years ago...
A classic British mystery
Man, I don't understand the English. Apparently, two of England's biggest newspapers (the left-wing Guardian and the right-wing Daily Mail) are all up in arms over Pippa Middleton's plans to publ...
Just over $4.50 per page
If money is no object when it comes to books for your coffee table, check out The Impossible Collection of Fashion. This 144-page-long book is priced at a jaw-dropping $650, and features one hund...
Parenting in a digital age
NPR's "All Tech Considered" blog has an article up featuring a handful of parenting tips about girls and social media from Rachel Simmons, author of the best-selling nonfiction title Odd Girl Out:...
A mystery solved
When publisher Little, Brown & Company e-mailed booksellers a list of their upcoming books last week, there was a November 14th release that excited quite a bit of curiosity: Untitled, by Anonymou...
Moneyball on the big screen
The trailer's out for the film adaptation of Michael Lewis's 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Behold:I have zero interest in baseball, but I support anything that requires ...
An insider's look
My mother was absolutely fascinated by the Bernie Madoff scandal, but she's determined to wait until she is 100% certain she's found the most informative and in-depth book about his situation befo...
Congratulations, Dr. Lacks.
NPR aired a news story yesterday about an honorary doctorate of public service from Morgan State University posthumously awarded to Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose cancer cells ha...
A would-be Jane Bond?
According to the Times, former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson has signed a book deal with Penguin to co-write (with mystery author Sarah Lovett) a series of "international suspense" novels. T...
Knit Your Own Royal Wedding
I don't care about knitting or England's royal family, but Fiona Goble's new how-to book Knit Your Own Royal Wedding is undeniably adorable:How's that for a wedding souvenir? She even got the pri...
Encyclopedias for the people
In the ten years of its existence, Wikipedia has posted more than 3.5 million articles in English, but a recent New York Times article pointed out that barely 13 percent of its hundreds of thousan...
Kiss that diet goodbye
The Hollywood Reporter has announced that Anthony Hopkins is in talks to star in a film adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Stephen Rebello's 1998 non-fiction book. I'm havin...
One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, by Rebecca Mead
Do not give Rebecca Mead's 2007 book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding to anyone who has recently had a wedding*. Trust me, it will only depress them, and who wants to embark o...
Creepy real estate doesn't bring in the cash that it used to, apparently.
The house that inspired Jay Anson's "nonfiction" book The Amityville Horror: A True Story has once again been sold, this time for $200,000 less than its asking price of 1.15 million dollars. I'm ...
Chatting about the common cold
Salon.com has a fascinating interview up with science journalist Jennifer Ackerman, author of Ah-Choo! The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold. I had no idea I'd find the subject so interesting, bu...
The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
One of my goals for this summer was to read Sun Tzu's The Art of War. I'd like to say I had some noble purpose in mind, but the truth is I'm just a huge, huge nerd—I wanted to hone my war-mongering...
Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee
I cannot stand TV shows about hoarding. I am fascinated by the subject, but my limited experience with hoarders has convinced me that hoarding is an incredibly persistent condition that is diffic...
Free For All: Fixing School Food in America, by Janet Poppendieck
Janet Poppendieck writes like a lawyer, and we mean that in the best possible way. She's careful and she covers her bases—both highly desirable traits in a nonfiction writer, particularly wh...
Taming the West
NPR has a great interview up with Stephen Fried, author of the recently-published book Appetite for America, a nonfiction account of the life of entrepreneur Fred Harvey. Harvey created the Harve...
Never Tell Our Business to Strangers: A Memoir, by Jennifer Mascia
When Jennifer Mascia was five years old, her father was taken away by the FBI. It was the first sign that there was something different about her family—a difference that Mascia only dimly unders...
Superheroes and Beyond, by Christopher Hart
Christopher Hart's Superheroes and Beyond: How to Draw The Leading and Supporting Characters of Today's Comics promises to provide "the knowledge necessary to create great comic book characters......
Like The Rules, but even sadder.
Huh. It turns out Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him: The Case for Settling For Mr. Good Enough isn't a joke. It's a real book (due out next week!), not just fodder for AustenBlog's "It worked so well fo...
Michael Pollan's costly advice
Okay, I like Michael Pollan, and I've heard good things about Food Rules, his "pocket compendium of food wisdom". But, dude: it costs eleven dollars. For a collection of sixty-four paragraphs. For...
Comic Book Design, by Gary Spencer Millidge
Gary Spencer Millidge's Comic Book Design offers readers a colorful and informative tour of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the creation and promotion of comic books. He delves into cons...
In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue, by Lauren Weber
Many bookstores celebrate the first of the year by promoting two kinds of titles: diet guides and books about finances—both subjects likely to find a wide audience in the weeks following a ho...
The darker side of Ikea?
Salon recently posted a very interesting Spiegel article about a tell-all book by Johan Stenebo, a former Ikea bigwig with quite the axe to grind. Sadly, I don't read Swedish and I have no idea ho...
I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon), by Richard Polsky
In early 2005, art dealer Richard Polsky decided to sell a small Andy Warhol "Fright Wig" painting for $375,000. The sale originally seemed like a success, but Polsky had misjudged his moment, bad...