On My Radar:

Bullsh*t: 500 Mind-Blowing Lies We Still Believe
by Katie Adams
Castle Point Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Compelling trivia for our age of disinformation

American culture is awash in lies. Despite the fact that we have the truth at our fingertips at all times, Americans still believe lies about everything from health to politics to science to business. Kate Adams's clever trivia book debunks the 500 most common untruths and shows readers why we are all so susceptible to misinformation, and also includes a chapter on facts that are true, but seem like bullsh*t.

Sample Lies:

Left and Right Brain 
There’s no solid division between hemispheres; the left brain can learn “right-brain skills” and vice versa.

Three Wise Men
Nowhere in the Bible does it specify that there were three.

Flush Rotation 
A flushed toilet doesn’t drain the other way in the opposite hemisphere. The Coriolis effect doesn’t apply to water in toilets.

Einstein was a terrible student and failed mathematics.
Albert Einstein actually aced his report cards. His reputation for being a notoriously terrible student? That came from his habit of talking back to his teachers when he felt they were acting too authoritarian.

Sample Facts that Seem Like Bullsh*t:

A day on Venus is longer than a year.

A chicken lived without a head for 18 months.

Human children don't get kneecap bones until they're around three years old.

A mantis shrimp can punch with the force of a 22-caliber bullet.

On My Radar:

The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean

by Philip Caputo

Henry Holt / Macmillan

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In The Longest Road, one of America’s most respected writers takes an epic journey across America, Airstream in tow, and asks everyday Americans what unites and divides a country as endlessly diverse as it is large.

Standing on a wind-scoured island off the Alaskan coast, Philip Caputo marveled that its Inupiat Eskimo schoolchildren pledge allegiance to the same flag as the children of Cuban immigrants in Key West, six thousand miles away. And a question began to take shape: How does the United States, peopled by every race on earth, remain united? Caputo resolved that one day he’d drive from the nation’s southernmost point to the northernmost point reachable by road, talking to everyday Americans about their lives and asking how they would answer his question. 

So it was that in 2011, in an America more divided than in living memory, Caputo, his wife, and their two English setters made their way in a truck and classic trailer (hereafter known as “Fred” and “Ethel”) from Key West, Florida, to Deadhorse, Alaska, covering 16,000 miles. He spoke to everyone from a West Virginia couple saving souls to a Native American shaman and taco entrepreneur. What he found is a story that will entertain and inspire readers as much as it informs them about the state of today’s United States, the glue that holds us all together, and the conflicts that could cause us to pull apart.

Out This Week: American Gypsy

American Gypsy: A Memoir
by Oksana Marafioti
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

A vivid and funny memoir about growing up Gypsy and becoming American
Fifteen-year-old Oksana Marafioti is a Gypsy. This means touring with the family band from the Mongolian deserts to the Siberian tundra. It means getting your hair cut in “the Lioness.” It also means enduring sneering racism from every segment of Soviet society. Her father is determined that his girls lead a better, freer life. In America! Also, he wants to play guitar with B. B. King. And cure cancer with his personal magnetism. All of this he confides to the woman at the American embassy, who inexplicably allows the family entry. Soon they are living on the sketchier side of Hollywood.

What little Oksana and her sister, Roxy, know of the United States they’ve learned from MTV, subcategory George Michael. It doesn’t quite prepare them for the challenges of immigration. Why are the glamorous Kraft Singles individually wrapped? Are the little soaps in the motels really free? How do you protect your nice new boyfriend from your opinionated father, who wants you to marry decently, within the clan?

In this affecting, hilarious memoir, Marafioti cracks open the secretive world of the Roma and brings the absurdities, miscommunications, and unpredictable victories of the immigrant experience to life. With unsentimentally perfect pitch, American Gypsy reveals how Marafioti adjusted to her new life in America, one slice of processed cheese at a time.

On My Radar: Friday Edition

Manthropology: The Science of Why the Modern Male Is Not the Man He Used to Be
by Peter McAllister
St. Martin's / Griffin
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

Featured in The Wall Street Journal and on ABC’s Nightline, Manthropology is an entertaining and surprising look at manliness.

Anthropologist Peter McAllister set out to prove once and for all that man today is the best man who has ever lived. But to his disappointment, in nearly every category he examined modern man was beaten by his ancestors.

Manthropology, then, is a look at male achievement—and underachievement. It kicks off in Ice Age France, where McAllister proves how a Neanderthal woman could beat even today’s strongest strongman at arm wrestling. He looks at medieval Slavic poets who could take 50 Cent to school in a rap battle. And he takes readers to the jungles of Africa, where Aka Pygmy men have taken fatherhood to such extremes that they even grow breasts to suckle their children.

For the modern man, the results aren’t always pretty. But Manthropology is unfailingly smart and entertaining.

How Does Modern Man Stack Up?

Ultimate Fighters routinely end up on a blood-soaked canvas. But what would a match in the Octagon look like next to the bouts of Ancient Greece: a battleground or a playground? [Page 77]

A modern army goes into battle with state-of-the-art technology. But could they have beaten Nero’s legions, who marched fifty miles a day for six straight days—each soldier carrying a hundred-pound pack? [Page 99]

Wilt Chamberlain is known for scoring on the court and off. He claimed to have had as many as 20,000 sexual encounters. But that’s nothing compared to the 32 million people today all descended from just one conqueror. [Page 248]

On My Radar: Thursday Edition

Groove Interrupted: Loss, Renewal, and the Music of New Orleans
by Keith Spera
Picador / Macmillan

Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

The recent history of New Orleans is fraught with tragedy and triumph. Both are reflected in the city’s vibrant, idiosyncratic music community. In Keith Spera’s intimately reported Groove Interrupted, Aaron Neville returns to New Orleans for the first time after Hurricane Katrina to bury his wife. Fats Domino improbably rambles around Manhattan to promote a post-Katrina tribute CD. Alex Chilton lives anonymously in a battered cottage in the Treme neighborhood. Platinum-selling rapper Mystikal rekindles his career after six years in prison. Jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard struggles to translate Katrina into music. The spotlight also shines on Allen Toussaint, Pete Fountain, Gatemouth Brown, the Rebirth Brass Band, Phil Anselmo, Juvenile, Jeremy Davenport and the 2006 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. With heartache, hope, humor and resolve, each of these contemporary narratives stands on its own. Together, they convey that the funky, syncopated spirit of New Orleans music is unbreakable, in spite of Katrina’s interruption.

On My Radar: Wednesday Edition

Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right
by Thomas Frank

Henry Holt / MacMillan
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

From the bestselling author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, a wonderfully insightful and sardonic look at why the worst economy since the 1930s has brought about the revival of conservatism.

Economic catastrophe usually brings social protest and demands for change—or at least it's supposed to. But when Thomas Frank set out in 2009 to look for expressions of American discontent, all he could find were loud demands that the economic system be made even harsher on the recession's victims and that society's traditional winners receive even grander prizes. The American Right, which had seemed moribund after the election of 2008, was strangely reinvigorated by the arrival of hard times. The Tea Party movement demanded not that we question the failed system but that we reaffirm our commitment to it. Republicans in Congress embarked on a bold strategy of total opposition to the liberal state. And TV phenom Glenn Beck demonstrated the commercial potential of heroic paranoia and the purest libertarian economics.

In Pity the Billionaire, Frank, the great chronicler of American paradox, examines the peculiar mechanism by which dire economic circumstances have delivered wildly unexpected political results. Using firsthand reporting, a deep knowledge of the American Right, and a wicked sense of humor, he gives us the first full diagnosis of the cultural malady that has transformed collapse into profit, reconceived the Founding Fathers as heroes from an Ayn Rand novel, and enlisted the powerless in a fan club for the prosperous. The understanding Frank reaches is at once startling, original, and profound.

On My Radar (Wednesday Edition)

And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life
by Charles J. Shields
Henry Holt & Company / Macmillan

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

The first authoritative biography of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a writer who changed the conversation of American literature

In 2006, Charles Shields reached out to Kurt Vonnegut in a letter, asking for his endorsement for a planned biography. The first response was no ("A most respectful demurring by me for the excellent writer Charles J. Shields, who offered to be my biographer"). Unwilling to take no for an answer, propelled by a passion for his subject, and already deep into his research, Shields wrote again and this time, to his delight, the answer came back: "O.K." For the next year—a year that ended up being Vonnegut's last—Shields had access to Vonnegut and his letters.

And So It Goes is the culmination of five years of research and writing—the first-ever biography of the life of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut resonates with readers of all generations from the baby boomers who grew up with him to high-school and college students who are discovering his work for the first time. Vonnegut's concise collection of personal essays, Man Without a Country, published in 2006, spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 300,000 copies to date. The twenty-first century has seen interest in and scholarship about Vonnegut's works grow even stronger, and this is the first book to examine in full the life of one of the most influential iconoclasts of his time.

On My Radar (Thursday Edition)

"On My Radar" is a preview of new release non-fiction; it is not a review. In most cases I do not own the book, but would love to review it.

American Anthrax: Fear, Crime and the Investigation of the Nation's Deadliest Bioterror Attack
by Jeanne Guillemin

Times Books / Macmillan
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

From Jeanne Guillemin, one of the world's leading experts on anthrax and bioterrorism, the definitive account of the anthrax investigation.

It was the most complex case in FBI history. In what became a seven-year investigation that began shortly after 9/11—with America reeling from the terror attacks of al Qaeda—virulent anthrax spores sent through the mail killed Bob Stevens, a Florida tabloid photo editor. His death and, days later, the discovery in New York and Washington, D.C. of letters filled with anthrax sent shock waves through the nation. Federal agencies were blindsided by the attacks, which eventually killed five people. Taken off guard, the FBI struggled to combine on-the-ground criminal investigation with progress in advanced bioforensic analyses of the letters' contents.

While the criminal eluded justice, disinformation swirled around the letters, erroneously linking them to Iraq's WMD threat and foreign bioterrorism. Without oversight, billions were lavished on biomedical defenses against anthrax and other exotic diseases. Worst of all, faith in federal justice faltered.

American Anthrax is a gripping tale of terror, intrigue, madness, and cover-up.

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Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates, from Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain
by Jim Lehrer
Random House
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

“In his quiet but intense way, Jim Lehrer earns the trust of the major political players of our time,” notes Barbara Walters. “He explains and exposes their hopes and dreams, their strengths and failures as they try to put their best foot forward.”

From the man widely hailed as “the Dean of Moderators” comes a lively and revealing book that pulls back the curtain on more than forty years of televised political debate in America. A veteran newsman who has presided over eleven presidential and vice-presidential debates, Jim Lehrer gives readers a ringside seat for some of the epic political battles of our time, shedding light on all of the critical turning points and rhetorical faux pas that helped determine the outcome of America’s presidential elections—and with them the course of history. Drawing on his own experiences as “the man in the middle seat,” in-depth interviews with the candidates and his fellow moderators, and transcripts of key exchanges, Lehrer isolates and illuminates what he calls the “Major Moments” and “killer questions” that defined the debates, from Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain.

Oftentimes these moments involve the candidates themselves and are seared into our collective political memory. Michael Dukakis stumbles badly over a question about the death penalty. Dan Quayle compares himself to John F. Kennedy once too often. Barack Obama and John McCain barely make eye contact over the course of a ninety-minute discussion. At other times, the debate moderators themselves become part of the story—and Lehrer is there to give us a backstage look at the drama. Peter Jennings suggests surprising the candidates by suspending the carefully negotiated rules minutes before the 1988 presidential debate—to the consternation of his fellow panelists. Lehrer himself weathers a firestorm of criticism over his performance as moderator of the 2000 Bush-Gore debate. And then there are the excruciating moments when audio lines go dead and TelePrompTers stay dark just seconds before going on the air live in front of a worldwide television audience of millions.

Asked to sum up his experience as a participant in high-level televised debates, President George H. W. Bush memorably likened them to an evening in “tension city.” In Jim Lehrer’s absorbing insider account, we find out that truer words were never spoken.