Archives de catégorie : Narrative Nonfiction

BONES, BLOOD, BREATH de Susan Wise Bauer

In the tradition of Sapiens, bestselling author Susan Wise Bauer’s BONES, BLOOD, BREATH is a gripping and thought-provoking take on human history told through humanity’s evolving perceptions of illness

BONES, BLOOD, BREATH: How Sickness Shapes Our World
by Susan Wise Bauer
St. Martin’s Press, TBD
Manuscript available Fall 2021

In illness, Bauer provides a surprising new lens through which to consider all of human history—she argues that bodily sickness and our conception of it has shaped our culture, our philosophies, and our religions, and has directly and indirectly affected how we view others, how we view ourselves, and how we fashion our world. She argues that sickness is the great mirror that reflects back our most urgent and eternal questions: Why does calamity descend without warning? How can we explain it? And how do we fight back? Told in a propulsive narrative style that brings sweeping history to life through intimate individual stories—the feverish Mesopotamian sufferer; the plague victim who dies alone, the last in his village; the seventeenth-century teenager racked by smallpox; the Congolese grandmother watching her family die of Ebola—Bauer takes readers on a journey from humans’ earliest days when sickness was an unsolvable mystery, evidence that humans were powerless to the unseen forces of gods, to more modern times and the birth of germ theory, when secularism grew alongside our fear of contamination. A multidisciplinary human history like no other, BONES, BLOOD, BREATH is a big think book that tells a large-scale, vivid, chronological story, stretching around the world from ancient times until the present—it will change the way we understand who we are.

Susan Wise Bauer is a writer, historian, and educator. Known for combining meticulous research with gripping detail to offer her readers sweeping and engaging big-picture narratives, Susan is also an in-demand speaker and expert. She is the author of eighteen books, including the educational classic The Well-Trained Mind (with Jessie Wise), now in its fourth edition with over 250,000 copies sold. Her four-volume educational series The Story of the World has sold over 1.5 million copies since 2001. Bauer has a bachelor’s degree in English language and linguistics with a minor in Greek; a Master of Divinity in Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Literature; an M.A. in English language and literature; and a Ph.D. in American Studies, with a concentration in the history of American religion. Susan writes, reads, lectures and consults, and runs a family farm and bed-and-breakfast. With its broad, multi-disciplinary approach, and propulsive story-driven writing, BLOOD, BONES, BREATH is poised to be her breakout title.

FACEBOOK: The Inside Story, by Steven Levy

From renowned tech writer Steven Levy, the definitive history of one of America’s most powerful and controversial companies: Facebook.

FACEBOOK: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Dutton/PRH, February 2020

In his sophomore year of college, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. The site caught on like wildfire, and soon students nationwide were on Facebook. Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognizable from Zuckerberg’s first, modest iteration. It has grown into a tech giant, the largest social media platform and one of the most gargantuan companies in the world, with a valuation of more than $576 billion and almost 3 billion users. There is no denying the power and omnipresence of Facebook in American daily life. And in light of recent controversies surrounding election-influencing “fake news” accounts, the handling of its users’ personal data, and growing discontent with the actions of its founder and CEO, never has the company been more central to the national conversation. Based on years of exclusive reporting and interviews with Facebook’s key executives and employees, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Steven Levy’s sweeping narrative digs deep into the whole story of the company that has changed the world and reaped the consequences.

Steven Levy is Wired’s editor at large. The Washington Post has called him “America’s premier technology journalist.” His previous positions include founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has written seven previous books and has written for Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Levy has also won several awards during his thirty-plus years of writing about technology, including for his book Hackers, which PC Magazine named the best sci-tech book written in the last twenty years; and for Crypto, which won the grand e-book prize at the 2001 Frankfurt Book Fair.