Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

BILLION DOLLAR LOSER de Reeves Wiedeman

A fast-paced, juicy narrative nonfiction title in the vein of Michael Lewis or Ben Mezrich, BILLION DOLLAR LOSER is the inside story of WeWork and its CEO, Adam Neumann, which tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious, and improbable, rises and falls in American business history.

BILLION DOLLAR LOSER:
The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman
Little, Brown, October 2020
(chez The Gernert Company – voir catalogue)

In its earliest days, WeWork promised the impossible: to make the American work place cool. Adam Neumann, an immigrant determined to make his fortune in the United States, landed on the idea of repurposing surplus New York office space for the burgeoning freelance class. Over the course of ten years, WeWork attracted billions of dollars from some of the most sought-after investors in the world, while spending it to build a global real estate empire that he insisted was much more than that: an organization that aspired to nothing less than « elevating the world’s consciousness. » Moving between New York real estate, Silicon Valley venture capital, and the very specific force field of spirituality and ambition erected by Adam Neumann himself, Billion Dollar Loser lays bare the internal drama inside WeWork. Based on more than two hundred interviews, this book chronicles the breakneck speed at which WeWork’s CEO built and grew his company along with Neumann’s relationship to a world of investors, including Masayoshi Son of Softbank, who fueled its chaotic expansion into everything from apartment buildings to elementary schools. Culminating in a day-by-day account of the five weeks leading up to WeWork’s botched IPO and Neumann’s dramatic ouster, Wiedeman exposes the story of the company’s desperate attempt to secure the funding it needed in the final moments of a decade defined by excess. Billion Dollar Loser is the first book to indelibly capture the highly leveraged, all-blue-sky world of American business in President Trump’s first term, and also offers a sober reckoning with its fallout as a new era begins.

Reeves Wiedeman is a contributing editor at New York magazine, and has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn but still calls Kansas City home.

UNDER THE SKY WE MAKE de Kimberly Nicholas

It’s warming. It’s us. We’re sure. It’s bad. But we can fix it.

UNDER THE SKY WE MAKE
by Kimberly Nicholas, PhD

Putnam, April 2021
(chez Neon Literary – voir catalogue)

After speaking to the international public for close to fifteen years about sustainability, climate scientist Dr. Nicholas realized that concerned people were getting the wrong message about the climate crisis. Yes, companies and governments are hugely responsible for the mess we’re in. But individuals CAN effect real, significant, and lasting change to solve this problem. Nicholas explores finding purpose in a warming world, combining her scientific expertise and her lived, personal experience in a way that seems fresh and deeply urgent: Agonizing over the climate costs of visiting loved ones overseas, how to find low-carbon love on Tinder, and even exploring her complicated family legacy involving supermarket turkeys. In her astonishing book UNDER THE SKY WE MAKE, Nicholas does for climate science what Michael Pollan did more than a decade ago for the food on our plate: offering a hopeful, clear-eyed, and somehow also hilarious guide to effecting real change, starting in our own lives. Saving ourselves from climate apocalypse will require radical shifts within each of us, to effect real change in our society and culture. But it can be done. It requires, Dr. Nicholas argues, belief in our own agency and value, alongside a deep understanding that no one will ever hand us power—we’re going to have to seize it for ourselves.

Dr. Kimberly Nicholas is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund, Sweden’s highest-ranked university. Born and raised on her family’s vineyard in Sonoma, California, she studied the effect of climate change on the California wine industry for her PhD in Environment and Resources at Stanford University. Since then, she has published over 50 articles on climate and sustainability in leading peer-reviewed journals, and her research has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, Buzzfeed and more. She has also been profiled in Elle and The Guardian, and gives appearances at around 50 lectures each year, such as the recent Climate Change Leadership summit.

PUSHEEN POSITIVITY JOURNAL de Claire Belton

Let Pusheen lift you up! Practice gratitude, self-love, and pawsitivity with this guided journal featuring prompts inspired by the internet’s favorite chubby tabby cat.

PUSHEEN POSITIVITY JOURNAL
by Claire Belton
Running Press Studio, October 2020
(chez Carol Mann Agency – voir catalogue)

With 50+ sweet, lightly guided prompts, this journal will encourage you to record memorable moments with friends, reflect on what you love about yourself, and list the things that make you happiest (pizza, cookies, other snacks). With adorable illustrations throughout, space for list-making and journaling, and ideas for pampering yourself, it’s a fun new way to interact with Pusheen, Stormy, Pip, and the gang. The PUSHEEN POSITIVITY JOURNAL is the latest addition to a collection of Pusheen activity kits and gift books published by Running Press Studio. These include the Pusheen Mini Cross-Stitch Kit, Pusheen Mini Magnetic Kit, Pusheen Postcard Book, I Like You More Than Pizza: A Fill-in Book, and Pusheen Poster Book.

Claire Belton is an artist and entrepreneur based in Chicago. She spends her time petting cats, drawing cats, and pursuing cat-related endeavors.

GOODBYE EASTERN EUROPE de Jacob Mikanowski

Eastern Europe is disappearing. Not the physical place, but the idea. Whatever held the region together in the mind’s eye — a shared experience of occupation and exclusion, the permanent-seeming weight of economic backwardness, treasured memories of defeat — is gone, or at least not as present as it had been.” – Jacob Mikanowski

GOODBYE EASTERN EUROPE
by Jacob Mikanowski

Knopf, Winter 2021
(chez Frances Goldin Literary Agency – voir catalogue)

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the bonds that held all the various nations of Eastern Europe together as Soviet satellites have dissolved, calling into question what exactly connects them, and whether there was ever any such place to begin with. But, Mikanowski argues, there really was something more to Eastern Europe than shared political subjection. Eastern Europe had a particular character, and this book will name and describe the peculiar flavor of the place, from the Baltics to the Balkans, from Prague to Kiev. Part history, part travelogue, part reading of the disparate canon of Eastern European literature, GOODBYE EASTERN EUROPE will be a work in the tradition of Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia, or Simon Winder’s Germania or Danubia—an anatomy of a region as refracted through its literature, and a fascinating exploration of an incredibly diverse, complex, and surprising terrain.

Jacob Mikanowski is a journalist, critic and essayist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Guardian, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. He grew up in the US, but his family is Polish.

I, WITNESS, collection dirigée par Dave Eggers & Zainab Nasrati

A landmark new nonfiction upper middle-grade series curated by literary legend Dave Eggers and International Youth Congress member Zainab Nasrati. Inspiring, engaging, and utterly absorbing, I, WITNESS gathers together the world’s foremost teen activists, writers and changemakers to tell their stories. Filled with accounts of extraordinary challenge from voices across the globe, it’s a one-of-a-kind series by the leaders of tomorrow—a rallying call to action, a praise song to youth resilience, and a testament to the incredible power of shared stories.

I, WITNESS Series
curated by Dave Eggers & Zainab Nasrati
Norton, Summer 2021
(chez Writers House – voir catalogue)

Book #1, ACCUSED, tells the story of Muslim-American activist Adama Bah, who, at the age of 16, was wrongly seized by the FBI on suspicion of being a suicide bomber. Her experience provides a riveting window into the damaging effects of racial profiling and post-9/11 discrimination. Book #2, HURRICAINE, is the astonishing account of Salvador Gómez-Colón, who raised over $160,000 for families devastated by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico (read more about Salvador here).
Books #3-4 tentatively to follow over the next 12 months.

The International Congress of Youth Voices was founded by Dave Eggers and Amanda Uhle and is an assembly of the world’s most exceptional teenage writers and activists. You can read more about the organization here.

 Dave Eggers is the acclaimed author of several books for adults and children, and is the winner of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the TED Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His establishment of the International Congress of Youth Voices is a natural extension of his well-known activism including the founding of 826 National and his ongoing involvement with ScholarMatch. Dave and co-founder Amanda Uhle are working alongside Danish activist (and congress delegate) Zainab Nasrati to shape the series. Bestselling illustrator AG Ford will provide cover art for each book in the series in order to give it a unified look.