Jane Fonda’s next book focuses on the climate crisis and her Fire Drill Friday weekly demonstrations in Washington D.C.
FIRE DRILL FRIDAYS:
Bold Moves for a Burning Planet
by Jane Fonda
Penguin Press, July 2021
Since October 11th, Jane Fonda has been leading weekly Friday protests in Washington D.C. in her now iconic red coat, heeding the urgent call of young activists like Greta Thunberg to take fighting climate change to the streets. She and the Friday actions have gotten so much media attention, in part because of Jane’s unyielding commitment in the form of civil disobedience, in which other celebrities and growing crowds of activists have been inspired to participate.
In the book, she writes of her awakening from an environmentally responsible lifestyle to an urgent need to engage in global activism as she hikes in Big Sur. With urgency as well as her signature humanity and humor, Jane will take readers with her as she leaves her comfort zone, bonds with activists young and old, experiences each week’s actions, is arrested and spends time in jail. In addition, she will write about how she learns from experts before the events—activists and scientists—about everything from stopping fossil fuel production to the impact on health and women. As she says, so many of us feel overwhelmed; we need to connect the dots to better understand what needs to be done.


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.
FOMO speaks directly to the dark side of social media lurking below all the colorful memes and hashtags and explores how FOMO is a powerful, persistent and widespread mindset that causes stress, insecurity, jealousy, and even depression in individuals in its sway.Writing with urgency, vision and brio, Patrick is opening a window on a pervasive condition that affects a huge number of people in their personal and business relationships – filled with real life stories, current research, and personal insights, FOMO: Fear of Missing Out is provocative, timely and highly persuasive in defining a cultural ethos of our digital-driven age and calling for change. There is no similar book on the market or in the works.
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.