OK, ceasing my Mary Roach jig, I move on to other new nonfiction. Bunch o' stuff coming down the pike. The following are all scheduled for fall release.
While I'll admit that I just heard about this book for the first time today, Julie & Julia is apparently riding a North-Shore-Oahu-sized buzz wave. It's a "pointless quest" book—which happens to be one of my favorite kinds of books (Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, The Know-it-All, etc) by the way—in which the author (Julie) sets out on a year-long cooking project to prepare every recipe in Julia (that would be the "Julia") Childs's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. According to BookStandard's buzz on the buzz on this book, the project started as a blog and ended up as a book deal that the author herself, on the blog, described as "a really obscene book deal, in fact officially What's Wrong with Publishing Today." (Scheduled for fall, from Little, Brown).
Since we're already seated at the table, here's another culinary entry: Don't Try This at Home: Disasters and Memorable Mishaps from the World's Greatest Cooks and Chefs. (Why "cooks and chefs" I wonder? Any foodies want to offer an expert opinion on the distinction?) The publisher (Bloomsbury) succumbs to adjectival excess (hilarious, raucous, outrageous, wildly entertaining) in the book description, but with an October release date, this anthology could be good reading just in time for the holiday cooking (a.k.a. "second degree burn") season.
And another pointless quest: True Fans: A Basketball Odyssey by Dan Austin (Lyons Press). Interestingly enough, a book apparently based on a documentary (what's the nonfiction version of a novelization? A factualization?) that, according to Kirkus, won the People's Choice Award (the documentary did, that is) at the Banff Film Festival. Another October release.
Here's what the publisher has to say:
...details the journey Dan, his brother Jared, and best friend Clint Ewell started when they hopped aboard their bicycles and headed east from the pickup court at Venice Beach, handlebars pointed toward the NBA Hall of Fame. It was a basketball pilgrimage, shooting hoops on sandlots across the country, looking for enlightenment under a net. In their bicycle trailer, which they called "The Ark of the Covenant," they carried a few gallons of peanut butter and an unused basketball, on which they collected the signatures of those who helped them on their journey, from the Reverend Kevin Smith, who let them sleep behind his church, to Dick Simmons, a coal miner who offered them five dollars he could scarcely afford to part with. They would bring this ball to the Hall of Fame, and ask that it be included in the permanent collection. What would America do, the book also asks, if three guys on bikes with a basketball in tow showed up and begged for a handout?
As long as we're working up a sweat, we have mountaineer Arlene Blum's Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life (Scribner). Booklist calls it, "an engaging, well-written adventure that also serves as a social history of women's roles. It should be required reading for young women of today who haven't experienced the closed doors and closed minds that Blum conquered as a women student, scientist, and climber."
There's more new nonfiction to come, so stay tuned.
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