On My Radar:

Smokin' Joe: The Life of Joe Frazier
by Mark Kram, Jr.
Ecco Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

History will remember the rivalry of Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali as one for the ages, a trilogy of extraordinary fights that transcended the world of sports and crossed into a sociocultural drama that divided the country.

Joe Frazier was a much more complex figure than just his rivalry with Ali would suggest. In this riveting and nuanced portrayal, acclaimed sports writer Mark Kram, Jr. unlinks Frazier from Ali and for the first time gives a full-bodied accounting of Frazier’s life, a journey that began as the youngest of thirteen children packed in small farm house, encountering the bigotry and oppression of the Jim Crow South, and continued with his voyage north at age fifteen to develop as a fighter in Philadelphia. 

Tracing Frazier’s life through his momentous bouts with the likes of Ali and George Foreman and the developing perception of him as the anti-Ali in the eyes of blue-collar America, Kram follows the boxer through his retirement in 1981, exploring his relationship with his son, the would-be heavyweight Marvis, and his fragmented home life as well as the uneasy place that Ali continued to occupy in his thoughts. 

A propulsive and richly textured narrative that is also a powerful story about race and class in America, Smokin' Joe is unparalleled in its scope, depth, and access and promises to be the definitive biography of a towering American figure whose life was galvanized by conflict and whose mark has proven lasting.

Read and Loved:

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn
Public Affairs Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Cult of the Dead Cow is the tale of the oldest, most respected, and most famous American hacking group of all time. Though until now it has remained mostly anonymous, its members invented the concept of hacktivism, released the top tool for testing password security, and created what was for years the best technique for controlling computers from afar, forcing giant companies to work harder to protect customers. They contributed to the development of Tor, the most important privacy tool on the net, and helped build cyberweapons that advanced US security without injuring anyone. With its origins in the earliest days of the Internet, the cDc is full of oddball characters — activists, artists, even future politicians. Many of these hackers have become top executives and advisors walking the corridors of power in Washington and Silicon Valley. The most famous is former Texas Congressman and current presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, whose time in the cDc set him up to found a tech business, launch an alternative publication in El Paso, and make long-shot bets on unconventional campaigns.

Today, the group and its followers are battling electoral misinformation, making personal data safer, and battling to keep technology a force for good instead of for surveillance and oppression. Cult of the Dead Cow shows how governments, corporations, and criminals came to hold immense power over individuals and how we can fight back against them.

In My TBR Stack:

Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth
by Gordon L. Dillow
Scribner
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

One of these days, warns Gordon Dillow, the Earth will be hit by a comet or asteroid of potentially catastrophic size. The only question is when. In the meantime, we need to get much better at finding objects hurtling our way, and if they’re large enough to penetrate the atmosphere without burning up, figure out what to do about them.

We owe many of science’s most important discoveries to the famed Meteor Crater, a mile-wide dimple on the Colorado Plateau created by an asteroid hit 50,000 years ago. In his masterfully researched Fire in the Sky, Dillow unpacks what the Crater has to tell us. Prior to the early 1900s, the world believed that all craters—on the Earth and Moon—were formed by volcanic activity. Not so. The revelation that Meteor Crater and others like it were formed by impacts with space objects has led to a now accepted theory about what killed off the dinosaurs, and it has opened up a new field of asteroid observation, which has recently brimmed with urgency. Dillow looks at great asteroid hits of the past and spends time with modern-day asteroid hunters and defense planning experts, including America’s first Planetary Defense Officer.

Satellite sensors confirm that a Hiroshima-scale blast occurs in the atmosphere every year, and a smaller, one-kiloton blast every month. While Dillow makes clear that the objects above can be deadly, he consistently inspires awe with his descriptions of their size, makeup, and origins. At once a riveting work of popular science and a warning to not take for granted the space objects hurtling overhead, Fire in the Sky is, above all, a testament to our universe’s celestial wonders.

On My Radar:

Play Hungry: The Making of a Baseball Player
by Pete Rose
Penguin Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Pete Rose was a legend on the field. As baseball’s Hit King, he shattered records that were thought to be unbreakable. And during the 1970s, he was the leader of the Big Red Machine, the Cincinnati Reds team that dominated the game. But he’s also the greatest player who may never enter the Hall of Fame because of his lifetime ban from the sport. Perhaps no other ballplayer’s story is so representative of the triumphs and tragedies of our national pastime. 

In Play Hungry, Rose tells us the story of how, through hard work and sheer will, he became one of the unlikeliest stars of the game. Guided by the dad he idolized, a local sports hero, Pete learned to play hard and always focus on winning. But even with his dad’s guidance, Pete was cut from his team as a teenager—he wasn’t a natural. Rose was determined, though, and never would be satisfied with anything less than success. His relentless hustle and headfirst style would help him overcome his limitations, leading him to one of the most exciting and brash careers in the history of the sport.

Play Hungry is Pete Rose’s love letter to the game, and an unvarnished story of life on the diamond. One of the icons of a golden age in baseball, he describes just what it was like to hit (or try to hit) a Bob Gibson fastball or a Gaylord Perry spitball, what happened in that infamous collision at home plate during the 1970 All-Star Game, and what it felt like to topple Ty Cobb’s hit record. And he speaks to how he let down his fans, his teammates, and the memory of his dad when he gambled on baseball, breaking the rules of a sport that he loved more than anything else. Told with candor and wry humor—including tales he’s never told before—Rose’s memoir is his final word on the glories and controversies of his life, and, ultimately, a master class in how to succeed when the odds are stacked against you.

In My TBR Stack:

Deep Water Blues
by Fred Waitzkin
Open Road Media
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Charismatic expat Bobby Little built his own funky version of paradise on the remote island of Rum Cay, a place where ambitious sport fishermen docked their yachts for fine French cuisine and crowded the bar to boast of big blue marlin catches while Bobby refilled their cognac on the house. Larger than life, Bobby was really the main attraction: a visionary entrepreneur, expert archer, reef surfer, bush pilot, master chef, seductive conversationalist.

But after tragedy shatters the tranquility of Bobby’s marina, tourists stop visiting and simmering jealousies flare among island residents. And when a cruel, different kind of self-made entrepreneur challenges Bobby for control of the docks, all hell breaks loose. As the cobalt blue Bahamian waters run red with blood, the man who made Rum Cay his home will be lucky if he gets off the island alive . . .

When the Ebb Tide cruises four hundred miles southeast from Fort Lauderdale to Rum Cay, its captain finds the Bahamian island paradise he so fondly remembers drastically altered. Shoal covers the marina entrance, the beaches are deserted, and on shore there is a small cemetery with headstones overturned and bones sticking up through the sand. What happened to Bobby’s paradise?

On My Radar:

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come: One Introvert's Year of Saying Yes
by Jessica Pan
Andrews McMeel
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

What would happen if a shy introvert lived like a gregarious extrovert for one year? If she knowingly and willingly put herself in perilous social situations that she’d normally avoid at all costs? Writer Jessica Pan intends to find out. With the help of various extrovert mentors, Jessica sets up a series of personal challenges (talk to strangers, perform stand-up comedy, host a dinner party, travel alone, make friends on the road, and much, much worse) to explore whether living like an extrovert can teach her lessons that might improve the quality of her life. Chronicling the author’s hilarious and painful year of misadventures, this book explores what happens when one introvert fights her natural tendencies, takes the plunge, and tries (and sometimes fails) to be a little bit braver.

On My Radar:

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou
Alfred A. Knopf
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the one-time multibillion-dollar biotech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes—now the subject of the HBO documentary The Inventor—by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end.

“The story is even crazier than I expected, and I found myself unable to put it down once I started. This book has everything: elaborate scams, corporate intrigue, magazine cover stories, ruined family relationships, and the demise of a company once valued at nearly $10 billion.” —Bill Gates

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

In My TBR Stack:

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of  Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption
by Ben Mezrich
Flatiron Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Ben Mezrich's 2009 bestseller The Accidental Billionaires is the definitive account of Facebook's founding and the basis for the Academy Award–winning film The Social Network. Two of the story's iconic characters are Harvard students Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss: identical twins, Olympic rowers, and foils to Mark Zuckerberg. Bitcoin Billionaires is the story of the brothers’ redemption and revenge in the wake of their epic legal battle with Facebook. 

Planning to start careers as venture capitalists, the brothers quickly discover that no one will take their money after their fight with Zuckerberg. While nursing their wounds in Ibiza, they accidentally run into an eccentric character who tells them about a brand-new idea: cryptocurrency. Immersing themselves in what is then an obscure and sometimes sinister world, they begin to realize “crypto” is, in their own words, "either the next big thing or total bulls--t." There’s nothing left to do but make a bet. 

From the Silk Road to the halls of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bitcoin Billionaires will take us on a wild and surprising ride while illuminating a tantalizing economic future. On November 26, 2017, the Winklevoss brothers became the first bitcoin billionaires. Here’s the story of how they got there—as only Ben Mezrich could tell it.

On My Radar:

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BookSpin Excerpt:

Excerpt from:

The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record
by Jonathan Scott
Bloomsbury Sigma
Hardcover

©Jonathan Scott, 2019   I would like to thank Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.  for facilitating this excerpt publication, with special thanks to Emily Willette.

CHAPTER ONE 

The Naked Pioneers 

‘Ad astra per aspera’ – ‘Through difficulties to the stars’ 

Carl Sagan 

Two space probes called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were sent to the outer planets in the late 1970s to beam back lots of lovely images and data of the gas giants and their moons. Primary mission complete, and with no way of being controlled, the probes were doomed to drift forever in the unimaginable void of interstellar space.

With this gloomy-sounding outcome in mind, NASA decided to do something very optimistic. They would send with them a message, on the very slim chance that they would one day be recovered by some little green chap. The message took the form of a metal record. A record designed to convey something about our origins, our civilisation, our art, through sounds, images and music. CliffsNotes to Earthlings.

To tell the story of this record, its creators and the people who chose that moment to fall in love, we need to begin by backing up a little. You see, Voyager Golden Record is a sequel. It’s the more ambitious, bigger-budget sequel to Pioneer Plaque. Five years before Voyager, the Pioneer probes became the first man-made objects destined to reach interstellar space, to cast off the gravitational cloak of our solar system and head out into it forever. While this was known to everyone involved in the mission, it took an outsider looking in – a writer for Christian Science Monitor – to draw attention to the magnitude of this fact. Pioneer 10 and 11 were to be humankind’s first emissaries to the stars. Here was a first-time opportunity to send a message, a greeting to any intelligent beings who might chance upon them.

Armed with enthusiasm and a deadline of just three weeks, a three-strong team, comprising an artist, an astronomer and an astrophysicist, thrashed out a design for a modest metal plaque, complete with star map and naked human figures. However, one of the strangest aspects of the Pioneer plaques – the first of which was hurled towards Jupiter in March 1972 – was the absence of vulva.

The last-minute sanitising of the female figure, for fear of offending a domestic audience, captures an essence of the environment in which the Pioneer plaques were forged. These are not only messages to some imagined future alien interaction, they are also time capsules, snapshots of when they left Earth. The removal of the vulva is a lens through which we can view America nearly 50 years ago. Despite the swinging sixties, despite mass movements, protests, social reforms and upheavals, despite convention-busting cinema coming out of the American New Wave, America in 1972 remained a conservative environment. NASA was in the glare of the public gaze, at the mercy of popular opinion. It was funded by American tax dollars, and everyone knew it. And to tell the story of the missing vulva, we need to back up just a little bit further.

In 1964 a graduate student working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory2 noticed something
important. His name was Gary Flandro. He had finished school in 1957, just before Sputnik, perfectly timing his arrival at JPL with the start of the space race. The first of the Pioneer missions took place the following year, when a probe designed to achieve moon orbit, failed some 73.6 seconds after launch. A steady stream continued to punch holes in the atmosphere. Some were lost at launch, others failed to reach their desired orbit, others did very well. A personal favourite is Pioneer 5 from March 1960 – a spherical probe sent to measure magnetic forces in the space between the orbits of Earth and Venus – that looks very similar to the intimidating black ball that approaches Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope.

Flandro had been investigating the knotty problem of how an object might be sent further, towards the outer planets. The general consensus at the time was that this was virtually impossible without something called gravity assist. Jupiter held the keys to the outer planets. Without Jupiter’s gravity, any object sent in that direction would eventually fall back to Earth’s orbit. But with Jupiter there, an object could fly past, pick up an enormous boost of energy, and then be hurled out towards Saturn. Then, in theory, it could do the same thing at Saturn, and head off further towards Uranus, Neptune and so on.

While working on trajectories, Flandro realised something mind-blowing: that by the late 1970s all the outer planets would be on the same side of the Sun. This alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune could enable a single craft to visit all four outer planets by using gravity assists in what would be dubbed the ‘Grand Tour’. This wasn’t quite a single one-time option – there were various possible iterations and trajectories – but such an advantageous planetary arrangement would not occur again for another 175 years. Flandro had uncovered a chance to explore a number of planets in one go, at a fraction of the cost. Suddenly NASA had been given the mother of all deadlines.

*** 

To plan for a planetary Grand Tour, NASA needed Pioneers 10 and 11 to dip their toes in the waters of the outer solar system, to see if such an endeavour was even possible. The idea to include a message with the Pioneers came relatively late in the day. Eric Burgess, an English freelancer, had been writing about space missions since 1957. He’s the one who held up his hand in class and pointed out to the world that NASA was about to throw something further than anything had ever been thrown. And during conversations with writers Richard Hoagland and Don Bane the idea for attaching some kind of physical message to the craft was forged. Burgess was unsure about pitching direct to NASA, so instead he approached Carl Sagan, whose eyes lit up.

Sagan was already a well-known astronomer, with a growing public profile, but he was not yet the household name he would become. He was a coal-face scientist, with acknowledged achievements, enthusiasms and specialisations under his belt. He would study the greenhouse effect on Venus, seasonal dust patterns on Mars, the environment of Saturn’s moon Titan. He would play a medal-winning role in NASA’s Mariner 9 mission, and contribute to the Viking, Voyager and Galileo missions.

On My Radar:

A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father

by David Maraniss
Simon and Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Elliott Maraniss, David’s father, a WWII veteran who had commanded an all-black company in the Pacific, was spied on by the FBI, named as a communist by an informant, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, fired from his newspaper job, and blacklisted for five years. Yet he never lost faith in America and emerged on the other side with his family and optimism intact.

In a sweeping drama that moves from the Depression and Spanish Civil War to the HUAC hearings and end of the McCarthy era, Maraniss weaves his father’s story through the lives of his inquisitors and defenders as they struggle with the vital twentieth-century issues of race, fascism, communism, and first amendment freedoms. A Good American Family powerfully evokes the political dysfunctions of the 1950s while underscoring what it really means to be an American. It is an unsparing yet moving tribute from a brilliant writer to his father and the family he protected in dangerous times.

On My Radar:

Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide
by Tony Horwitz
Penguin Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extraordinary journey, as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times.

For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name “Yeoman,” the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. His vivid dispatches about the lives and beliefs of Southerners were revelatory for readers of his day, and Yeoman’s remarkable trek also reshaped the American landscape, as Olmsted sought to reform his own society by creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. The result: Central Park and Olmsted’s career as America’s first and foremost landscape architect.

Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country? In search of answers, and his own adventures, Horwitz follows Olmsted’s tracks and often his mode of transport (including muleback): through Appalachia, down the Mississippi River, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican borderland. Venturing far off beaten paths, Horwitz uncovers bracing vestiges and strange new mutations of the Cotton Kingdom. Horwitz’s intrepid and often hilarious journey through an outsized American landscape is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author’s own classic, Confederates in the Attic.

On My Radar:

Comedy Sex God
by Pete Holmes
Harper Wave
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Pete Holmes is a sold-out-every-night stand-up comedian with two HBO specials and the host of the hugely successful podcast You Made It Weird, and he was the creator-star of the hit HBO show Crashing. But it wasn’t always roses for Pete. Growing up, Pete was raised an evangelical Christian, but his religion taught him that being “bad”—smoking, drinking, having doubts or premarital sex—would get him sent to an eternity in hell. So, terrified of the God he loved, Pete devoted his life to being “good,” even marrying his first girlfriend at the age of twenty-two only to discover a few years later he was being cheated on. Thanks for nothing, God.

Pete’s failed attempt at a picture-perfect life forced him to reexamine his beliefs, but neither atheism, nor Christianity, nor copious bottles of Yellow Tail led him to enlightenment. Pete longed for a model of faith that served him and his newfound uncertainties about the universe, so he embarked on a soul-seeking journey that continues to this day. Through encounters with mind-altering substances, honing his craft in front of thousands of his comedy fans, and spending time with savants like Ram Dass, Pete forged a new life—both spiritually and personally.

Beautifully written and often completely hilarious—imagine Dass’s Be Here Now if penned by one of the funniest people alive—Comedy Sex God reveals a man at the top of his game and a seeker in search of the deeper meanings of life, love, and comedy.