Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BLACK HOLES de Becky Smethurst

Award-winning University of Oxford researcher Dr Becky Smethurst charts five hundred years of scientific breakthroughs in astronomy and astrophysics.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BLACK HOLES
by Becky Smethurst
Macmillan UK, September 2022
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Right now, you are orbiting a black hole.

The Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun orbits the centre of the Milky Way: a supermassive black hole, the strangest and most misunderstood phenomenon in the galaxy.

In this cosmic tale of discovery, Dr Becky Smethurst takes us from the earliest observations of the universe and the collapse of massive stars, to the iconic first photographs of a black hole and her own published findings.

She explains why black holes aren’t really ‘black’, that you never ever want to be ‘spaghettified’, how black holes are more like sofa cushions than hoovers and why, beyond the event horizon, the future is a direction in space rather than in time.

Told with humour and wisdom, this captivating book describes the secrets behind the most profound questions about our universe – all hidden inside black holes.

Becky Smethurst is based at the University of Oxford, where her specialism is in how galaxies evolve together with their supermassive black holes. In 2022, she was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s Research Fellowship. Her YouTube channel, Dr Becky, has over 750,000 subscribers and engages 2 million viewers each month with her videos on weird objects in space, the history of science and monthly recaps of space news. She also has 128k followers on Instagram and 40k on TikTok.

OUR FAMILIARS d’Anne Coombs

How do animals guard, serve, and care for us? And how and why do we love them so much?

OUR FAMILIARS:
The meaning of animals in our lives
by Anne Coombs
Upswell (Australia), August 2024
(via Black Inc. Books)

Anne Coombs spent a lifetime working to understand the profound answers that come from these two deceptively simple questions. Before her death in late 2021 she researched the topic extensively and reflected deeply on her own experiences with animals, both domestic and in the paddocks. The animals in her life were privy to her deepest and darkest emotions: her despair, her tears and her love. Opening with the story of Anne’s childhood familiar, Elsie the goat—and introducing Lena the donkey, her beloved dogs, Charlie the cat, the cows on the farm, and Vincent the horse—this tender book takes us on an expansive journey that is part personal memoir, part insightful research, and part noble call to action.

In OUR FAMILIARS Anne has left us with a beautiful meditation on the awe-inspiring responsibility we take on with other living creatures: from their containment and loss of freedom, to our intense and mysteriously mutual love. With wit, humour, and insight, she asks us to feel wonder as we watch how our animal companions live, and to empathise deeply with OUR FAMILIARS.

Anne Coombs was a journalist, author, political activist, and philanthropist. She authored five books, including No Man’s Land (Simon & Schuster, 1993), Sex and Anarchy: The life and death of the Sydney Push (Viking, 1996) and Broometime (Hodder Headline, 2001), co-authored with Susan Varga. Her final novel, Glass Houses, was published in 2023 by Upswell. Anne was one of the founders of Rural Australians for Refugees. She was a board member and chair of GetUp! She shared a passion with her partner for a fairer Australia, advocating for refugees and people seeking asylum. In recent years Anne was a frequent essayist and commentator, and a regular contributor to the Griffith Review. She also wrote a feature film script set in Australia’s far north, currently being developed for production. Anne died at her Exeter home in December 2021.

COUPLES d’Orna Guralnik

A groundbreaking, definitive, once-in-a generation book about why couples fall in love, how they find themselves in inevitable crisis, and why it’s important—not just for them—how these crises are resolved.

COUPLES:
The Crisis of Intimacy and the Influence of Big History
by Dr. Orna Guralnik
Penguin Press, 2027
(via The Gernert Company)

You may know Orna Guralnik from Showtime’s docuseries Couples Therapy, or from her excellent New York Times Magazine piece « I’m a Couples Therapist. Something New is Happening in Relationships ». Before Guralnik was a television star, however, she was a revered, influential academic—in fact, this was why the producers of the show approached her. Guralnik is part of a groundbreaking psychoanalytic movement which sees the self as nested in one’s community—collectives, as she terms it—as opposed to in conflict with civilization (as Freud thought), and understands that the unconscious cannot be set aside from the influence of history and politics (so goes much present-day thinking). As she has written in the New York Times, « psychoanalytic exploration is just as much about our deep ethical dilemmas regarding how to live with one another, and our environment, as it is about our early family dramas; my patients’ repressed experiences with the ghosts of their country’s history are as interesting as with their mothers. »

Following several couples along their dramatic developmental arcs, we learn that the person who is most important to us, who we depend on the most, is also the exact person who is destined to fail and misunderstand us. Crisis is set into motion when differences become unbearable; couples find themselves caught up in maddening, repetitive cycles. They must then move from black-and-white thinking and blame to an understanding of the unconscious forces that guide them. The knowledge that these unconscious forces can be generational—a mother’s immigration trauma, say, or a father’s childhood poverty—enables us all to better understand personal conflicts in the context of shared history. Analysis that leads to the understanding of difference and the acceptance of multiple perspectives can heal the relationship with one’s partner—and also those in the world at large. The roots of Big History touch us all.

Dr. Orna Guralnik is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. She is on faculty at NYU Postdoctoral Institute for Psychoanalysis and at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City, where she lectures and publishes on the topics of couples treatment and culture, dissociation and depersonalization, as well as culture and psychoanalysis. She is co-founder of the Center for the Study of Dissociation and Depersonalization at the Mount Sinai Medical School. Dr. Guralnik is a graduate of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. She has completed the filming of several seasons of Showtime’s documentary series Couples Therapy.

THE DEADLIEST! d’Eleanor Spice Rice, illustré par Max Temescu

A series by a funny, expert scientist.

THE DEADLIEST!
by Eleanor Spicer Rice PhD & illustrated by Max Temescu
Norton Young Readers, 2025
(via Gillian MacKenzie Agency)

The Deadliest Spider & The Deadliest Big Cats – Winter 2025

Snake & Flower – Summer 2025

Insects & Sea Creatures – Fall 2025

A humorous STEM graphic novel series for ages 6-9, starring comedic line-ups of deadly (and not-so-deadly) species, each vying for the title of *the* deadliest, as if in a talent contest, while offering scientific facts throughout.

Dr. Eleanor Rice is a celebrated entomologist and author whose books include the nonfiction series Your Hidden Life (Candlewick) and upcoming picture book, After the Rain (Candlewick).

Max Temescu is an illustrator and designer currently based in Baltimore, by way of Philly, New York, St. Louis, and some other places. He loves drawing stories centered on the outdoors, climate justice, careful observation, research, and animals. He has also worked as a book and greeting card designer.

EDEN UNDONE d’Abbott Kahler

An incredible true story of murder, romance, and a fateful search for utopia in the Galápagos—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ghosts of Eden Park

EDEN UNDONE:
A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II
by Abbott Kahler
Crown, September 2024
(via Writers House)

At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. One was so devoted to a life of isolation that he’d had his teeth extracted and replaced with a set of steel dentures.

As Hancock and his fellow American explorers would witness, paradise had turned into chaos. The three sets of exiles—a Berlin doctor and his lover, a traumatized World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian baroness with two adoring paramours—were riven by conflict. Petty slights led to angry confrontations. The baroness, wielding a riding crop and pearl-handled revolver, staged physical fights between her two lovers and unabashedly seduced American tourists. The conclusion was deadly: with two exiles missing and two others dead, the survivors hurled accusations of murder.

Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia—and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.

“One of my favorite writers has knocked it out of the park yet again. In EDEN UNDONE, Abbott Kahler has created a book as fantastic as the true story she weaves. With taut prose and sublime storytelling, she crafts an atmospheric page-turner, ominous and thought-provoking, with the best last line I’ve read in decades.” —Kate Moore, New York Times bestselling author of The Radium Girls and The Woman They Could Not Silence

“In describing Abbott Kahler’s wickedly gothic tale, one is tempted to reach for handy literary or cinematic references. There’s a dash of Conrad. A bit of Hitchcock. Notes of Melville, Darwin, and Robinson Crusoe—and certainly more than a whiff of Lord of the Flies. But really, EDEN UNDONE is completely its own thing. Bizarre, mesmerizing, and compellingly tragic, Kahler’s fine book confronts an essential truth about those who ditch civilization: Try as we might, humans cannot elude the tyranny of our own nature.” —Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of The Wide Wide Sea

“Kahler (the author of previous books, including Sin in the Second City and The Ghosts of Eden Park, under the name Karen Abbott) has a gift for writing gripping histories that are both sensational and thoroughly documented. Possibly her wildest book yet.” —Booklist, starred review​

Abbott Kahler, formerly writing as Karen Abbott, is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; and The Ghosts of Eden Park, which was an Edgar Award finalist for best fact crime and a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award. Her debut novel, Where You End, was published January 2024.