Archives par étiquette : Crown Publishing Group

ZODIAC: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR de Ai Weiwei, illustré par Gianluca Costantini

In this beautifully illustrated and deeply philosophical graphic memoir, legendary artist Ai Weiwei explores the connection between artistic expression and intellectual freedom through the lens of the Chinese zodiac..

ZODIAC: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR
by Ai Weiwei
illustrated by Gianluca Costantini
Ten Speed Graphic, January 2024

As a child living in exile during the Cultural Revolution, Ai Weiwei often found himself with nothing to read but government-approved comic books. Although they were restricted by the confines of political propaganda, Ai Weiwei was struck by the artists’ ability to express their thoughts on art and humanity through graphic storytelling. Now, decades later, Ai Weiwei and Italian comic artist Gianluca Costantini present ZODIAC, Ai Weiwei’s first graphic memoir.
Inspired by the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac and their associated human characteristics, Ai Weiwei masterfully interweaves ancient Chinese folklore with stories of his life, family, and career. The narrative shifts back and forth through the years—at once in the past, present, and future—mirroring memory and our relationship to time. As readers delve deeper into the beautifully illustrated pages of ZODIAC, they will find not only a personal history of Ai Weiwei and an examination of the sociopolitical climate in which he makes his art, but a philosophical exploration of what it means to find oneself through art and freedom of expression.
Contemplative and political, ZODIAC will inspire readers to return again and again to Ai Weiwei’s musings on the relationship between art, time, and our shared humanity.

Ai Weiwei leads a diverse and prolific practice that encompasses sculptural installation, filmmaking, photography, ceramics, painting, writing, and social media. Born in Beijing, China, in 1957, he is a conceptual artist who fuses traditional craftsmanship and his Chinese heritage, moving freely between a variety of formal languages to reflect on contemporary geopolitical and sociopolitical conditions. Ai Weiwei’s work and life regularly interact and inform one another, often extending to his activism and advocacy for international human rights.
Gianluca Costantini is an Italian cartoonist, comic journalist, and activist. He has contributed to numerous publications and is the author of several graphic novels. He is well know for his drawing related to human rights campaigns all over the world. He collaborates with organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, ActionAid, and SOS Méditerranée. In 2019, he received the Art and Human Rights Award from Amnesty International.

NUMBER GO UP de Zeke Faux

The harrowing, highly entertaining inside chronicle of how FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and a cast of fellow nerds and hustlers convinced the world to send trillions of dollars of real money to buy useless virtual coins—from a Bloomberg Businessweek writer.

NUMBER GO UP:
Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Currency/PRH, September 2023

After years on the financial world’s margins, crypto went mainstream in 2021. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady and Justin Bieber endorsed it, and Washington bigwigs debated new regulations. It seemed like everyone knew someone who was bragging about their returns from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and other bizarrely named “digital assets.” FOMO spread: Was crypto the new path to financial freedom? Unspoken was that hardly anyone knew how it worked. To borrow a phrase from crypto parlance, the only thing that mattered was “number go up.”
Observing this mania, Zeke Faux decided to embark on a quest to pull back the curtain on the wizards behind this new financial machinery. He first sets his sights on Tether, a digital currency dreamed up by a former child actor from the 1992 Disney film The Mighty Ducks. Tether had become crypto’s de facto bank, with $69 billion pouring into it. Each Tether was supposedly backed by one dollar. But where was the money?
As he chases this mystery around the globe, Faux is driven by a nagging question: Is it all just a global confidence game of epic proportions? In the Bahamas, he meets Tether’s biggest customer: Sam Bankman-Fried, a schlubby 29-year-old who Fortune once suggested was “the next Warren Buffett.” In El Salvador, he discovers what happens when a country decides to gamble its treasury on Bitcoin. A spam text message leads him to a crypto-fueled human-trafficking ring in Cambodia. And in Lugano, Switzerland, he finally tracks down the mysterious former plastic surgeon who runs Tether.
Then, in 2022, the crypto bubble burst, and Tether’s biggest customers started collapsing one by one. It culminated in November, when Bankman-Fried’s FTX failed in spectacular fashion. Faux returns to the Bahamas and takes readers inside the glittering sadness, lies and delusion of SBF’s luxury loft in the days after FTX’s implosion, revealing the emptiness at the center of the crypto industry. Fueled by the absurd details and authoritative reporting that earned Faux the title “our great poet of crime” (Matt Levine), NUMBER GO UP is a riveting account of the biggest financial mania the world has ever seen.

Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News in New York. He’s a winner of the Gerald Loeb award for explanatory business journalism and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel award, and a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Faux lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their three children.

THE INSECT APOCALYPSE de Brooke Jarvis

A scientific exploration of the insect world that reveals the alarming diminishment of insect life across the globe in the era of climate change.

THE INSECT APOCALYPSE
by Brooke Jarvis
Crown, March 2025

Drawn from the author’s astonishing and deeply disturbing article for the New York Times Magazine (which was downloaded over 1 million times in the first week alone), this will be a fascinating scientific exploration of the insect world that reveals, through extensive research with amateurs and entomologists in the field, the alarming diminishment of insect life across the globe in the era of climate change. The author plans to travel to different countries and environments, including Europe and Latin America, to explore the causes and urgent consequences of life on Earth without insects.

Brooke Jarvis is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, and has written for The New Yorker, Wired, The California Sunday Magazine, GQ, Harper’s, and others. She also teaches feature writing at NYU’s American Journalism Online Master’s Program and mentors young science journalists through The Open Notebook and the Northwest Science Writers Association. Jarvis’ stories have been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing (Houghton-Mifflin); The Best American Travel Writing (Mariner Books); Love and Ruin: Tales of Obsession, Danger and Heartbreak from The Atavist Magazine (Norton); and New Stories We Tell: True Tales by America’s Next Generation of Great Women Journalists (The Sager Group).

ALMOST BROWN de Charlotte Gill

An award-winning writer retraces her dysfunctional, biracial, globe-trotting family’s journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a multicultural household.

ALMOST BROWN: A Memoir
by Charlotte Gill
Crown, June 2023

Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960’s London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union, a revolutionary act, results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey from the United Kingdom to Canada and to the United States in elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness—a dream that eventually tears them apart.
ALMOST BROWN is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving parents of two different races and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. Eventually, her parents drift apart because they just aren’t compatible. But as she finds herself distancing from her father too—why is she embarrassed to walk down the street with him and not her mom?—she doesn’t know if it’s because of his personality or his race. As a mixed-race child, was this her own unconscious bias favoring one parent over the other in the racial tug-of-war that plagues our society? ALMOST BROWN looks for answers to questions shared by many mixed-race people: What are you? What does it mean to be a person of color when the concept is a societal invention and really only applies halfway if you are half white? And how does your relationship with your parents change as you change and grow older?
In a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming story, Gill examines the brilliant messiness of ancestry, “diversity,” and the idea of “race,” a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about ethnicity today.

Charlotte Gill is a bestselling and award-winning writer of fiction and narrative nonfiction. Ladykiller, her first book, was the recipient of the Danuta Gleed Award for short fiction. Eating Dirt, a tree-planting memoir, was a #1 national bestseller in Canada. Her work has appeared in Vogue and Hazlitt. Gill teaches writing in the MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College and is the Rogers Communications Chair of Literary Journalism at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She lives in British Columbia, Canada.

OUTLIVE de Peter Attia & Bill Gifford

Visionary thinker and renowned longevity physician Peter Attia reimagines medicine and redefines aging through his innovative science-based strategies to maximize longevity.

OUTLIVE:
The Science and Art of Longevity
by Peter Attia, MD & Bill Gifford
Crown, May 2023

To Peter Attia, longevity does not mean merely living longer. He sees longevity as the opportunity to live better for longer. But, accomplishing this requires a complete change in the way we think about and approach health and wellness. Attia proposes an exciting, new vision of Western medicine that reframes our thinking and our actions.
Attia’s goal is to shift the mindset we currently have in medicine that focuses on solving the health issue once it arises to assessing the risks and customizing treatment before they actually occur. He calls this Medicine 3.0, a new way of thinking about chronic diseases, their treatment, and how to maintain long-term health. Most books and physicians are interested in improving your lifespan (how long you live), but Peter’s focus is on improving healthspan (the quality of your life). In OUTLIVE, Attia shows readers exactly how to do this through nutritional interventions, exercise physiology, sleep physiology, emotional and mental health strategies, and pharmacology.
Dr. Attia is a sought-after speaker, is well-connected with big names like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Tim Ferriss, among others, and his podcast, The Drive, averages 150K downloads/episode and 1M monthly downloads. He will also be featured in the forthcoming Limitless with Chris Hemsworth, a series on longevity from National Geographic.

Peter Attia, MD is a physician focusing on the applied science of longevity. He trained for five years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in general surgery. He is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of the fasting app Zero. He is also on the editorial board for the journal, Aging. And has a podcast called The Drive. He is the expert that the “big names” of the world get their medical information from.