Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2022 Adult Nonfiction

RECOVERY TAKES FLIGHT de Scott Weidensaul

Through active conversations with biologists, conservationists and others around the globe, world-renowned naturalist Scott Weidensaul explores the groundbreaking progress that’s being made for birds.

RECOVERY TAKES FLIGHT:
Saving Birds (and Saving The World)
by Scott Weidensaul
W.W. Norton, Fall 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

As grim as the recognition that we’ve lost nearly 3 billion birds—a third of our avifauna in North America, in the past 50 years—may be, there are many places where the tide is being turned. Globally, at scales hyperlocal or hemispherically immense, work is being driven not just by scientists and conservation professionals but also by average people—ranchers in the West, rice farmers in Colombia, Indigenous Dene communities in Canada, poor rural women in India, isolated Polynesian islanders, rural villages in the Carpathian Mountains, and many more. And because birds are so diverse, so ubiquitous, and with their migrations cover virtually every square mile of the planet’s surface, if we can create a planet that works for birds, it will work for everything else, including us.

*A Pulitzer Prize finalist
*A New York Times bestselling author

Scott Weidensaul is a Pennsylvania-based naturalist and one of the most respected natural history writers in the US. He was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for his book Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds, and has written more than 30 books on birds. He is a contributing editor to Audubon magazine and a columnist for Bird Watcher’s Digest. For the past 20 years Weidensaul has overseen one of the largest owl-migration research projects in the country, and he is one of fewer than 200 licensed hummingbird banders in the world.

MY MURDER de Katie Williams

A propulsive, darkly comic novel, set in the near future, in which a young mother is cloned and brought back to life following her own murder, but comes to suspect that there is more to the story of her life and death than anyone is telling her.

MY MURDER
by Katie Williams
‎Riverhead, June 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Lou is a happily married mother of an adorable toddler. She’s also the clone of the original Louise who, along with four other victims of a local serial killer, has been brought back to life by a government project to return the women to their grieving families. But as the new Lou re-adapts to her old life and attends a support group for murdered women, questions surface about what exactly preceded her death, and how much to trust those around her. Understanding the truth may determine what comes next for Lou.
Darkly comic, set in the near future, MY MURDER offers an exploration of ideas about personal identity, domestic life, and reinvention, within a suspenseful, surprising, and entertaining mystery.

Katie Williams is the author of the novel Tell the Machine Goodnight, a Kirkus Prize finalist, New York Times Editors’ Choice, and NPR Best Books of 2018. She is also the author of the young adult novels Absent and The Space Between Trees. Her short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Best American Fantasy, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, and elsewhere. Katie is an assistant professor in fiction writing at Emerson College in Boston.

MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING de Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard

Weaving together cultural criticism, personal narrative, historical diversions, and on-the-ground research, MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING is a search for pure, loud, vibrant sensory experience and the knowledge that can only come from that source.

MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING:
In Pursuit of Sensuous Life in the Digital Age
by Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard
Ecco/HarperCollins, Summer 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

As physical life on earth grows increasingly fraught and imperiled, technology moves to take us out of our bodies and into our screens. Capital is flooding into the development of the metaverse, designed to engulf us even more fully in tech’s trackable, commodifiable sphere.
And as the influence of these newly manufactured modes of experience promises to grow more fixed and invasive, it is not hyperbole to suggest that the years ahead will require us to reckon with questions that, at first glance, may seem surreal: What is the point of physical life? What are our bodies for?
Although we are saturated by an overload of stimuli, we engage with our actual physical senses—touch, taste, sight, scent, and sound—less and less. It’s no surprise we face an epidemic of depression and disassociation; no wonder that, in an era that demands engagement, we often find ourselves numb, forgetful, and detached. We need an urgent and necessary alternative: a return to the vital purpose and pleasure of our embodied senses.
This is precisely the mission of MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING, a multi-hyphenate work of narrative non-fiction offering a radical reappraisal of the five senses in our break-neck technological world, as well as our sense of time, place, and of self.
With the improbably intermingled properties of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING is a personalized, thematically anchored quest narrative that proposes a defiant way forward for sensory life.

Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard was born in Chicago in 1992, the year Apple declared handheld devices would change the world. A 2021 finalist for the Krause Essay Prize, her work has appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, The Paris Review Daily, Vulture, The Times Literary Supplement, The Idler, The White Review, The New Statesman, and elsewhere in print and online. Her research on the societal impacts of artificial intelligence has received recognition and funding from the Royal Society, the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence in Cambridge and Oxford. A graduate of Stanford and the University of Cambridge, she has, for better or worse, spent several years working in the tech industry.

ATTENTION SPAN de Gloria Mark

A book on the crisis of focus, by Dr. Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research, and a leading expert in the fields of attention, multitasking, and human-computer interaction.

ATTENTION SPAN:
The Surprising Science of How We Focus, Why That’s Changing, and How Rhythm Became the New Flow
by Gloria Mark
Hanover Square Press, early 2023
(via Park & Fine)

Psychologist Gloria Mark began researching how technology affects human attention when the first personal computers were beginning to arrive in offices. Over the last 30 years, she has tracked changes in our attention spans, stress levels, and the fundamental way our brains process information.
Now in ATTENTION SPAN, Dr Mark shows how much of what we think we know about attention is wrong. She explores the current crisis of focus and productivity that is so deeply entwined with rising rates of anxiety and depression, and investigates what we might be able to do about it. Delving into the newly celebrated concept of ‘kinetic attention’, she introduces a more balanced understanding of the rhythm between deep focus and less focused states, which may actually serve to make us happier and more productive in the long term.

« Gloria Mark is the definitive expert on distraction and multitasking in our increasingly digital world. Her book is a must-read for anyone concerned about our diminishing attention span. » —Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of A World Without Email and Deep Work

Dr. Gloria Mark is Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research, and a leading expert in the fields of attention, multitasking, and human-computer interaction. Dr. Mark has spoken on stages that include SXSW, Talks at Google, Microsoft Faculty Summit, and the Aspen Ideas Festival, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR, Quartz, Slate, and more.

THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD d’Erik Hoel

In a sweeping intellectual narrative, award-winning neuroscientist and author Erik Hoel argues there are two fundamental perspectives on reality: the intrinsic and the extrinsic. The intrinsic perspective is that of consciousness and experience, the feelings and sensations that make up your waking world. The extrinsic perspective is that of science, which views the universe as a set of mechanisms and relations.

THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD:
Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science
by Erik Hoel
Avid Reader, Fall 2023
(via Writers House)

The two perspectives have had an uneasy, sometimes troubled relationship. Throughout history some cultures have emphasized one perspective more than the other, which has radically changed how humans think about and conceptualize our own selves. Technologies and media often implicitly enforce one perspective: for instance, television and movies take the extrinsic perspective, exploring the world of relations and images, while literature and novels take the intrinsic perspective, exploring the world of consciousness.
Hoel offers a whirlwind tour of the two perspectives across the ages, like how the intrinsic perspective is absent from Homeric epics and earlier eras, its historical development and ultimate culmination in the invention of the novel, the separation of the two perspectives by Galileo Galilei when he recommended science remove the observer to focus solely on the extrinsic, and the reintroduction of the intrinsic perspective to science by Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, who proposed a search for the neural correlates of consciousness that continues to this day.
Hoel shows how our picture of reality is incomplete following Galileo’s separation and emphasis on the extrinsic. The ignored intrinsic perspective sheds light on fundamental scientific questions like causation, emergence, how the brain functions, the biological purpose of dreaming, artificial intelligence, and even why humans create art. He reveals how our own culture is becoming more based in the extrinsic perspective over time, neglecting the intrinsic and forgetting the importance of human consciousness, all to its cultural, scientific, and artistic detriment.
Ultimately, the two perspectives have stood apart for too long and must be reunited. To this end Hoel proposes a way to merge the intrinsic and the extrinsic in a radical new theory of consciousness.

Erik Hoel received his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Madison-Wisconsin. He is a research assistant professor at Tufts University and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in the NeuroTechnology Lab, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Hoel is a 2018 Forbes “30 under 30” for his neuroscientific research on consciousness. His first novel, The Revelations, was published in April 2021 by The Overlook Press. He lives in Massachusetts.