T H E S C I E N C E FA C T O R Y A L I TER ARY AGE N CY FO R C UR I O US M I N DS
SP RI N G R IGHTS L I ST LONDON BOOK FA IR 2 015
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The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
CONTENTS ON SUBMISSION SOON Fluent by Marek Kohn 1 How to be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci 2 NEW DEALS The Appointment by Graham Easton 3 Siddhartha’s Brain by James Kingsland 4 Inheritors of the Earth by Chris Thomas 5 Override by Caroline Williams 6 FORTHCOMING TITLES The Man Who Wasn’t There by Anil Ananthaswamy 7 Life’s Greatest Secret by Matthew Cobb 8 Outspoken by Michael Corballis 9 Flavour by Bob Holmes 10 Genuine by Stephen Joseph 11 The Perfect Bet by Adam Kucharski 12 The Great Invention by Ehsan Masood 13 The Naked Surgeon by Samer Nashef 14 Body by Darwin by Jeremy Taylor 15 Restless Creatures by Matt Wilkinson 16 RECENTLY PUBLISHED Who Killed Professor X? by Thodoris Andriopoulos 17 BACKLIST TITLES The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy 18 Atomic by Jim Baggott 19 Farewell to Reality by Jim Baggott 20 The Belief Instinct by Jesse Bering 21 Five Billion Years of Solitude by Lee Billings 22 The Man Who Ran the Moon by Piers Bizony 23 Wetware by Dennis Bray 24 A Piece of the Sun by Daniel Clery 25 The Egg and Sperm Race by Matthew Cobb 26 The Resistance by Matthew Cobb 27 Eleven Days in August by Matthew Cobb 28 From Cells to Civilizations by Enrico Coen 29 Sonic Wonderland by Trevor Cox 30 How to Change Minds about Our Changing Climate by Seth Darling & Douglas Sisterson 31 Starman by Jamie Doran & Piers Bizony 32 The Devil’s Derivatives by Nicholas Dunbar 33 How Intelligence Happens by John Duncan 34 Mindfield by Lone Frank 35
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My Beautiful Genome by Lone Frank 36 Flat Earth by Christine Garwood 37 The Improbability Principle by David Hand 38 Wolves by Simon Ings 39 Heaven’s Bankers by Harris Irfan 40 What Doesn’t Kill Us by Stephen Joseph 41 Empire of the Stars by Arthur I. Miller 42 Deciphering the Cosmic Number by Arthur I. Miller 43 Colliding Worlds by Arthur I. Miller 44 Incoming! by Ted Nield 45 Underlands by Ted Nield 46 Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen 47 The Science of Doctor Who by Paul Parsons 48 Like a Virgin by Aarathi Prasad 49 The End of Plagues by John Rhodes 50 Massive by Ian Sample 51 The Poppy by Nicholas J. Saunders 52 Nature’s Nether Regions by Menno Schilthuizen 53 Doomsday Men by P. D. Smith 54 The Gap by Thomas Suddendorf 55 How to Make a Zombie by Frank Swain 56 The Edge of the Sky by Roberto Trotta 57 Selected by Mark Van Vugt & Anjana Ahuja 58 The Evolutionary World by Geerat J. Vermeij 59 A Portrait of the Brain by Adam Zeman 60 CLIENTS & PROJECTS* 61–65 FOREIGN LANGUAGE CO-AGENTS 66
For further information about translation rights in all titles in this catalogue, please contact Louisa Pritchard at Table 11 or Peter Tallack at Table 12o in the International Rights Centre. Louisa Pritchard mobile: +44 (0)7714 721 787 email: louisa@louisapritchard.co.uk Peter Tallack mobile: +44 (0)7900 826 645 email: peter@sciencefactory.co.uk
* Including world rights sales not detailed in the rights list.
The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
ON SUBMISSION SOON
FLUENT Ways of Living in More Than One Language MAREK KOHN One of the best science writers we have – Andrew Brown, GUARDIAN
Speaking more than one language isn’t unusual. Many if not most people on the planet do it every day. But it is special, because it’s at the heart of what the world is today. A world on the move, a world of interconnections, ever-increasing flows of human beings, information and things: it all demands and depends on fluency in languages. Fluent is a book for everybody who is preoccupied, fascinated or intrigued by the ability to use more than one language, whether that’s because they have it or because they don’t. It is also a book for everybody who wants to understand how languages, through living together, can help people and peoples live together. It begins with a tour of the different ways and circumstances in which people use more than one language, shaping themselves, their families and their wider communities – and even whole nations. Often the choices involved aren’t easy: how do parents raise children in two languages without creating language barriers in their own homes? How do migrants’ children master the languages they need to find jobs without losing the ability to understand their grandparents? It then examines aspects of plural language use, starting inside the brain and exploring what being bilingual feels like: how changing between languages enables people to express different sides of their personalities, to feel different emotions, and to relate to other people in different ways. At its centre is the author’s firsthand reportage from three language ‘hotspots’: Latvia and Estonia, where Russian speakers were left in the minority after the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Singapore, where ethnic Chinese people found themselves in the majority upon the city's expulsion from Malaysia, and have since converged on the Mandarin variety of Chinese; and the inner east London borough of Tower Hamlets, a third of whose residents are British Bangladeshis. Drawing lessons from these zones and others where languages overlap and collide, Kohn reveals how language lies at the heart of the tumultuous processes shaping our compulsively mobile world. He concludes that the patterns of tomorrow could well be very different from the familiar patterns of the past, because of the ways in which modern communication technologies can sustain languages across distance. Technology may get everybody speaking English, he says, but it will keep them speaking other languages as well. And that’s a good thing. For speaking more than one language brings us closer to others, and gives us a clearer view of who we are. MAREK KOHN is an UK-based author and journalist who writes about the implications of scientific ideas for human nature and society. He holds a BSc in neurobiology from the University of Sussex and a PhD from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Brighton. He is the author of seven previous books and has written for many international publications. His first language was Polish.
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ON SUBMISSION SOON
HOW TO BE A STOIC A Handbook on Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI
Whether we are secular or religious, at some point we all find ourselves facing the question of how to live. How should we handle life’s challenges and vicissitudes? How should we conduct ourselves in the world? How should we treat others? And the ultimate question: how do we best prepare for the final test of our character, when we die? When he turned fifty, philosopher and biologist Massimo Pigliucci found himself, like others before him, facing his own mortality and reflecting on the big questions: who am I and what am I doing? A trained scientist, a self-professed moderate atheist and a native of Rome, Pigliucci embraced his cultural roots as well as his experimental nature – he became a Stoic. In How To Be a Stoic, Pigliucci combines his experiment in Stoic living with a brisk and illuminating guide to this timely philosophy. Developed by Zeno of Citium in the early third century BC, Stoicism counts Seneca and Marcus Aurelius among its best known practitioners, but is today associated more with grim endurance than with living a good life. As Pigliucci reveals, however, Stoicism is fundamentally a practical philosophy, with a core practice of meditation, mindfulness and focus on virtue. And although for centuries it was eclipsed by Christian thought in the mainstream, Stoic influences appear in unexpected places: the Serenity Prayer, the underlying principles of cognitive behavioural therapy. Pigliucci finds in Stoicism a rational, science-friendly philosophy that also allows room for a spiritual metaphysics: that is, a practical philosophy eminently open to revision – in stark contrast to so much of the dogma we face today. In practising Stoicism, Pigliucci offers a reconsideration of this ancient philosophy for modern life and reveals why its popularity is now on the rise. In a world fraught with difficult moral issues, Stoicism may be our best path forward for structuring our life, achieving tranquility of mind and maintaining our personal integrity – in other words, for shaping a life well lived. MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York, and was previously a professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University. His books include NONSENSE ON STILTS: How to Tell Science from Bunk (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and ANSWERS FOR ARISTOTLE: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to a More Meaningful Life (Basic Books, 2012). His February 2015 article ‘How to Be a Stoic’ was the most emailed article on The New York Times website the day after it was posted. He lives in New York City. Agent: Tisse Takagi
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NEW DEAL
THE APPOINTMENT What Your Doctor Really Thinks During Your Ten-Minute Consultation DR GRAHAM EASTON There’s little that’s more important than our health – yet very few people have any idea how their doctor makes sense of their health problems. In THE APPOINTMENT, Graham Easton offer the first authentic insight into what goes on in your doctor’s mind during your precious 10-minute consultation. Taking readers on a journey through an entire morning surgery of 15 typical appointments, he reveals the secrets of diagnosis and modern medical management, and the startling complexity of what often seems like a straightforward visit to the doctor. As well as introducing the wide range of problems that doctors invariably tackle between breakfast and lunch, he shows what it feels like to be up against the clock as well as the limits of medical science and the constraints of an overstretched health service. At the heart of his medical detective work are the challenges of ‘connecting’ with patients and getting essential information from them, and the anxiety of managing the mundane while remaining alert to the life-threatening. It’s like a live performance in which a doctor’s thinking is deconstructed in unique detail using trueto-life cases that most people will recognize, from sore throats, coughs and high blood pressure to chest pain, cancer and depression. The author reveals the strategies doctors use to arrive at a diagnosis, and how they are trained to involve the patient in coming up with a plan of action. Each case focuses on a specific issue, explaining, for example, how doctors use chaperones for intimate examinations, how they deal with risk, how they decide on the best investigations and treatments, and how they hunt for ‘red flags’ – signs or symptoms that should ring alarm bells for any doctor, anywhere in the world. DR GRAHAM EASTON is a practising family/primary care doctor (or general practitioner (GP)), fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners and a recognized expert in GP education. He is senior clinical teaching fellow at Imperial College Medical School in London where he trains medical students and junior doctors in general practice. As well as his clinical expertise, he has 20 years’ experience as a communicator of medical ideas to the non-medical public. He was senior producer and presenter in the BBC Science Unit for 10 years, launching and presenting Radio 4’s successful flagship medical programme ‘Case Notes’ and a range of science and medical programmes across Radio 4, 5 and World Service. He is currently a regular guest and occasional presenter on ‘Health Check’, the BBC's global health radio programme. He was an editor at the British Medical Journal for four years and publishes widely in the academic medical literature and for a lay audience, having had his own regular columns on the BBC Health website (‘Surgery Notes’) and in Eve magazine (‘What’s the Evidence?’). He lives in London with his wife and two children. Publisher: Robinson/Little, Brown (UK) (Editor: Andrew McAleer) Delivery: 30 November 2015 Publication: Autumn 2016 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 100,000 words All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (excluding Canada), Japan (Kawadeshobo)
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NEW DEAL
SIDDHARTHA’S BRAIN The Science of Enlightenment JAMES KINGSLAND
The first popular book to reveal how meditation and mindfulness work and why they are key to achieving psychological stability and lasting happiness. Some 25 centuries ago, Siddhartha Gautama, the man who would become known as the Buddha, developed a programme for improving mental wellbeing that has been passed down to us in scripture and through hundreds of generations of monks. The core practice is known as ‘mindfulness’, which means living non-judgmentally in the present moment. Over the past few years there has been a surge of popular interest in the secular form of this ancient practice, with training courses springing up all over the world and even becoming available online. Psychologists and therapists have published studies suggesting that this deceptively simple technique can not only help treat pain, stress, anxiety, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, drug addiction and eating disorders, but also improve everyday concentration and performance. There are even hints that it could enhance the immune system, slow the ageing process and keep dementia at bay. Can meditation really reconfigure our brains to make us sharper, smarter, healthier, happier? In SIDDHARTHA’S BRAIN, James Kingsland reveals that a complete scientific theory of how meditation works – and the key that unlocks a range of afflictions of the human body and mind – is now within our grasp. Research has shown that thousands of hours of meditation by Buddhist monks over many years brings about dramatic changes in the structure and function of their brains, deactivating areas involved in mind-wandering and strengthening those responsible for selfmonitoring and cognitive control. Just eight weeks of mindfulness training leads to subtle changes in the brains of beginners, increasing grey matter concentration in regions involved in learning, memory and the regulation of emotions. Far from being merely a New Age fad, meditation is proving to be a panacea for many of the psychiatric disorders associated with the stresses of our technology-driven modern world. As the author argues, it may provide a fix for an evolutionary flaw in the human psyche that underlies our vulnerability to mental illness: a flaw that was the inevitable consequence of our ancestors’ evolution into socially aware, talking apes. JAMES KINGSLAND is a science and medical journalist with 25 years’ experience working for Nature, New Scientist and the Guardian. For the past five years he has been commissioning editor and contributor for the Guardian’s ‘Notes & Theories’ blog. On his own blog, Plastic Brain, he writes about neuroscience and Buddhist psychology. Publisher: Robinson/Little, Brown (UK)/HarperCollins (US) (Editors: Andrew McAleer, UK/Peter Hubbard, US) Delivery: 31 July 2015 Publication: Spring 2016 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 90,000 words All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Pensamento – Portuguese rights), France (Dunod), Italy (Rizzoli ), Netherlands (AmboAnthos)
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NEW DEAL
INHERITORS OF THE EARTH How Nature is Fighting Back on a Human-dominated Planet CHRIS THOMAS
One of the world’s leading ecologists reveals that, contrary to common assumption, the number of new species in almost every region of the world is growing faster than ever before. It’s accepted wisdom that human beings have irrevocably damaged the natural world. Throughout history we’ve introduced species and infectious diseases to foreign shores; hunted slow-moving (and slower-reproducing) mammals to extinction; and polluted previously pristine tracts of land. Now we are in the midst of the planet’s sixth mass-extinction event – for which we are the main culprit. Yet as distinguished ecologist Chris Thomas argues, this gloomy narrative obscures a more hopeful truth. In INHERITORS OF THE EARTH he tells the remarkable story of how nature is fighting back. He complicates the standard picture of today’s ecological reality, revealing that we are witnessing the first stages of a new mass acceleration of ecological and evolutionary diversity. He shows that urbanization and the mass cultivation of agriculture also created new places for enterprising animals and plants to live. Human modification of ecosystems has stimulated evolutionary change in virtually every population of every living species. Most remarkably, he shows, our actions may well have raised the rate at which new species are formed to the highest level ever in the history of our planet. Drawing on the success stories of diverse species, from the chocolate-coloured comma butterfly in York to the scarlet-beaked, turkey-sized New Zealand takahe, Thomas overturns the accepted story of declining biodiversity on Earth. In so doing, he questions why we are so reluctant to embrace new forms of life, as well as why we see human activities as fundamentally unnatural. Ultimately, he suggests that if life on Earth can recover from the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, it can survive the onslaughts, however violent, of a technological ape. Combining a naturalist’s eye for wildlife with an ecologist’s wide lens, INHERITORS OF THE EARTH offers an authoritative account of the Anthropocene present and future, a challenge to conventional views of almost everything we do that relates to our interaction with the environment, and an illuminating reexamination of the relationship between humanity and the natural world. CHRIS THOMAS is a professor of conservation biology at the University of York, UK. A prolific writer, he has published 210 scientific journal articles, 29 book chapters, edited one academic book, and has written around 20 magazine and other popular articles since 2000. His works have been cited more than 26,000 times, making him one of the world’s most influential ecologists, and his research has been covered on the front pages of the Guardian and Washington Post. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2012, is a long-standing fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, and received Marsh Awards for Climate Change Research in 2011 and for Conservation Biology in 2004 and the prestigious British Ecological Society President’s Medal in 2001. Publisher: Allen Lane/Penguin Press (UK)/PublicAffairs (US) (Editors: Laura Stickney, UK/ Ben Adams, US) Delivery: Autumn 2016 Publication: Spring 2017 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 80,000–90,000 words All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US
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NEW DEAL
OVERRIDE My Quest to Discover the Truth about Brain Training and Rewire My Imperfect Mind CAROLINE WILLIAMS
A personal journey into the heart of neuroscience to find out, once and for all, what, if anything, neuroscience can do for us. A few decades ago, only fitness fanatics went to the gym. Now a twice-weekly visit is the norm for those of us who want to keep our body healthy. A similar revolution is happening in brain training and mental fitness. But there’s a problem: none of us knows exactly what we should be doing. In OVERRIDE, Caroline Williams describes her year-long mission to find out. She investigates how the latest studies are showing that brain games don’t actually do that much to make you smarter, and tries to square that finding with the reality of brain plasticity – that the brain adapts physically as we learn something new. Visiting the labs of top neuroscientists and volunteering herself as a guinea pig in neuroscience studies, she challenges researchers to make lasting improvements to her own brain. She seeks to strengthen her particular weaknesses, such as a limited attention span and a tendency to worry more than is healthy, and then branches out into more mysterious areas such as intelligence, creativity and the perception of time. Trying methods from the ancient art of meditation to high-tech electrical brain stimulation, she finds out from the experts whether anything has actually changed in her brain and reports back on whether life feels any different afterwards. And, crucially, she takes the latest neuroscience out of the laboratory and translates it into practical exercises that the average person can do at home. What, if anything, can neuroscience tell us about how to hack into the basic features of the human brain and make them run more efficiently? Can the powers of brain plasticity really override the brain that genetics and life experience have built? And is there a simple, 20-minute brain workout that anyone can do to change his or her brain for the better? CAROLINE WILLIAMS is a UK-based science writer and broadcaster with over 10 years’ experience in magazine and radio journalism. She earned a BSc in biological sciences from Exeter University and an MSc (Distinction) in science communication from Imperial College London. She has written extensively for New Scientist, and spent five years in-house as a feature editor, contributing to some of the magazine’s top-selling cover stories. Her work has also appeared in the Guardian, BBC Future and BBC Earth and she has provided written materials for organizations such as the Royal Society. As a broadcaster she has produced and presented radio programmes and reports for the BBC, contributing to the science, natural history and children’s radio output. Between 2006 and 2010 she was also the regular co-presenter of the New Scientist podcast. Her website is at www.carolinewilliams.net. Publisher: UK publisher pending Delivery: Spring 2016 Publication: Spring 2017 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 90,000–100,000 words All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (excluding Canada)
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FORTHCOMING TITLE
THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self ANIL ANANTHASWAMY This stunning chronicle of disordered minds and what they teach us about ourselves is both poetic and incisive… a remarkable achievement – Michael Gazzaniga, Professor of Psychology, University of California at Santa Barbara Extraordinary… Ananthaswamy’s remarkable achievement is to make sense of these unhappy individuals’ otherness, while holding on to their human sameness. You’ll come away enlightened and chastened, asking searching questions about who you are – Nicholas Humphrey, University of Cambridge, author of A HISTORY OF THE MIND Combines compelling personal histories with the latest neuroscientific research to reveal how our experience of being a ‘self’ is just another story the brain tells itself to make sense of the world. Like Oliver Sacks, Ananthaswamy brings both erudition and sensitivity to his narrative – Anil Seth, University of Sussex, and editor-in-chief of NEUROSCIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
In the tradition of Oliver Sacks, a tour of the latest neuroscience of schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, ecstatic epilepsy, Cotard’s syndrome, out-of-body experiences, and other disorders – revealing the awesome power of the human sense of self from a master science writer. Anil Ananthaswamy’s extensive in-depth interviews venture into the lives of individuals who offer perspectives that will change how you think about who you are. These individuals all lost some part of what we think of as our self, but they then offer remarkable, sometimes heart-wrenching insights into what remains. One man cut off his own leg. Another became one with the Universe. We are learning about the self at a level of detail that Descartes (‘I think therefore I am’) could never have imagined. Recent research into Alzheimer’s illuminates how memory creates your narrative self by using the same part of your brain for your past as for your future. But wait, those afflicted with Cotard’s syndrome think they are already dead; in a way, they believe that ‘I think therefore I am not’. Who – or what – can say that? Neuroscience has identified specific regions of the brain that, when they misfire, can cause the self to move back and forth between the body and a doppelgänger, or to leave the body entirely. So where in the brain, or mind, or body, is the self actually located? As Ananthaswamy elegantly reports, neuroscientists themselves now see that the elusive sense of self is both everywhere and nowhere in the human brain. ANIL ANANTHASWAMY is an award-winning science journalist and former deputy news editor and current consultant for New Scientist. He is a guest lecturer at UC Santa Cruz’s renowned science writing programme and taught an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. He is a feature editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science’s Front Matter and has written for National Geographic News, Discover, Matter, and the UK’s Times and Independent newspapers. He has been a columnist for PBS NOVA’s ‘The Nature of Reality’ blog. His first book, THE EDGE OF PHYSICS, was voted book of the year in 2010 by Physics World. He lives in Bangalore, India, and Santa Cruz, California. Publisher: Dutton (Penguin US) (Editor: Stephen Morrow) Publication: 4 August 2015 Status: Proofs Length: 320 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Dutton), Germany (Eichborn)
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FORTHCOMING TITLE
LIFE’S GREATEST SECRET The Story of the Race to Crack the Genetic Code MATTHEW COBB The logical sequel to Jim Watson's THE DOUBLE HELIX. While Watson and Crick deserve their plaudits for discovering the structure of DNA, that was only part of the story. Beginning to understand how that helix works – how its DNA code is turned into bodies and behaviours – took another 15 years of amazing work by an army of dedicated men and women. These are the unknown heroes of modern genetics, and their tale is the subject of Cobb's fascinating book. Every now and again I had to stop reading because the amazement overload was too great – Jerry Coyne, Professor of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, and author of WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE Writing with flair, charisma and authority, this is Cobb's magnum opus. But more important than that, this is humankind's magnum opus. It is the story of a great human endeavour – a global adventure spanning decades – that unravelled how life really works. No area of science is more fundamental or more important; read about it and be filled with wonder – Daniel M. Davis, author of THE COMPATIBILITY GENE
The dramatic untold story of one of the most important biological discoveries – and what it holds for the future. Everything that you think about genes, about why you look like your parents, about humanity’s place in the natural world, can be traced back to two decades of discovery in the 1940s and 1950s, when biologists were adopting the words and concepts of computing – codes, information, programs. They showed that genes were made of DNA and then realized that the DNA contains a code that instructs organisms how to grow and behave. Yet, amazingly, few people know about this discovery and the shift in our worldview that it brought about – or the names of most of those involved. In LIFE’S GREATEST SECRET, Matthew Cobb provides the first popular account of the discovery and cracking of the genetic code. This great scientific breakthrough has had far-reaching consequences for how we understand ourselves and our place in the natural world. The code forms the most striking proof of Darwin's hypothesis that all organisms are related, holds tremendous promise for improving human well-being and has transformed the way we think about life. Cobb interweaves science, biography and anecdote in a book that mixes remarkable insights, theoretical dead-ends and ingenious experiments with the pace of a thriller. He describes cooperation and competition among some of the twentieth-century's most outstanding and eccentric minds, moves between biology, physics and chemistry, and shows the part played by computing and cybernetics. The story spans the globe, from Cambridge MA to Cambridge UK, New York to Paris, London to Moscow. It is both exhilarating science and a fascinating story about how science is done. MATTHEW COBB is a professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, where his research focuses on the sense of smell, insect behaviour and the history of science. His books include THE EGG AND SPERM RACE: The Seventeenth-century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth, and acclaimed accounts of the French Resistance during the Second World War and the liberation of Paris in 1944 (all published by Simon & Schuster in the UK). Publisher: Profile/BasicBooks (Editor: John Davey, UK) Publication: 11 June 2015 Length: 432 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US
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FORTHCOMING TITLE
OUTSPOKEN The Truth about Language – What It Is and Where It Came From MICHAEL CORBALLIS A brilliant and witty scientist – Steven Pinker
An original and provocative account of the evolution of language that makes us reconsider our place in the world and marvel at an ability we take for granted every day. If there is one thing that separates us from other animals it is language. Even our closest nonhuman relatives, the chimpanzee and bonobo, come nowhere near being able to talk as we humans do. They can’t gossip, tell stories, let us or their mates know what they plan for tomorrow, or explain how to make a tool. The apparent uniqueness of human language has led to the widely held belief that language must have been the result of a big-bang moment, whether a gift from the deity, a fortunate genetic mutation, or a byproduct of simply having a large and complicated brain. In OUTSPOKEN, Michael Corballis shatters this view. Drawing on decades of experience at the forefront of cognitive science, he makes sense of the complexity of human language with the help of just one powerful idea: that language evolved as a gradual process, governed by natural selection. In a fresh and impressive synthesis of psychology, neuroscience, genetics and anthropology, he reveals how we learned first to speak with our hands, not our mouths, and why our advanced language skills depend not on a universal grammar or on the inherent wordiness of our thoughts, but on our ability to imagine the past and future and to understand what others are thinking. Language, in other words, is a device for sharing our thoughts, not thought itself. What’s more, Corballis argues, by understanding the stepwise progression of our capacity to tell stories and converse with others, we can see that the possibility of animals ‘crossing the Rubicon of language’ may not be as farfetched as we had thought. MICHAEL CORBALLIS is one of the world’s leading psychologists. Described by Steven Pinker as a 'brilliant and witty scientist', he is an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Auckland. His previous books include The Lopsided Ape (Oxford University Press, 1991), From Hand to Mouth (Princeton University Press, 2002), The Recursive Mind (Princeton University Press, 2011) and A Very Short Tour of the Mind (Overlook/Duckworth, 2013) Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Editor: Christie Henry) Publication: Spring 2016 Status: Draft manuscript Length: 70,000 words All rights available excluding US & Canada (University of Chicago Press)
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FORTHCOMING TITLE
FLAVOUR A User's Guide to Our Most Neglected Sense BOB HOLMES
Whether you are someone who likes to cook creatively, delve into cutting-edge science or explore the latest ideas about health, diet and nutrition, this book will open your mind – and your palate – to a vast, exciting sensory world. Most of us don't pay much attention to flavour in our day-to-day lives. We might notice that dinner tasted good, but we'd probably struggle to say anything more precise than that. For far too many people, flavour remains a vague, undeveloped experience – elevator music for the palate. In FLAVOUR, Bob Holmes journeys into the surprising science behind our flavour senses. He shows why what we thought we knew about taste is almost certainly wrong, why no two people have exactly the same sense of smell, and how the sense of touch contributes to flavour. He visits the birthplace of flavour in the brain to discover why cake tastes sweetest on a white plate, how wine experts’ eyes can fool their noses, and how even language affects the flavour we find in food. He learns why people like the foods they do, what makes some foods more delicious than others, and how flavour affects our appetite – and, in turn, our health. Moving from the laboratory into the kitchen, he peers over the shoulders of some of the most fascinating food professionals: the food technologists seeking to engineer the perfect snack food or soft drink, the professional chefs looking for new ways to combine flavours into surprising yet delicious dishes, and even the mathematicians searching for the perfect pizza topping and the chemists seeking the ideal pairing of food and wine. He ends by revealing how we can all sharpen our flavour senses, teaching us the skills and techniques that professionals use to name flavours and describe them articulately. BOB HOLMES has been a correspondent for New Scientist magazine for nearly two decades, and has written more than 800 articles for the magazine. He has a PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Arizona and taught for several years in the science-writing programme at the University of California. A member of Slow Food Canada, he has worked with the taste-education programme of his local chapter and is a passionate home cook. He lives with his wife and teenage son in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. FLAVOUR is his first book. Publisher: WH Allen/Random House (UK)/Norton (US) (Editors: Ed Faulkner, UK/John Glusman, US) Delivery: Spring 2015 Publication: Autumn 2016 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 80,000–100,000 words All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Germany (Riemann), Netherlands (Atlas Contact)
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FORTHCOMING TITLE
GENUINE The New Science of Authenticity and the Art of Living a Flourishing Life STEPHEN JOSEPH Praise for WHAT DOESN’T KILL US A book of wisdom... psychology at its best: honest, hopeful, helpful, and based on sound serious research – Robert J. Wicks, Professor, Loyola University Maryland, author of BOUNCE: Living the Resilient Life
A fresh, inspiring and important new perspective on the psychology of being ‘true to yourself’. The hunger for authenticity guides us throughout our lives. People strive for joined-up living, where on the one hand what they say and do reflects what they think and feel, and on the other what they think and feel reflects who they are. In the past few years there has been an explosion of research pointing to authenticity as the key to fulfilment, vitality and well-being. Stephen Joseph has pioneered developments in this new field, drawing on the solid science of positive psychology to develop what has become one of the goldstandard tests for assessing authenticity. His and others’ findings reveal that when people are in relationships in which they feel accepted, understood and valued, they drop their defences. They naturally begin to examine themselves psychologically, accommodate new information and live more authentically. What’s more, the latest studies reveal that it is authenticity that leads to true happiness. Drawing on the wisdom of existential philosophers, the insights and research of psychologists, and case studies from his own and others’ clinical experiences, Joseph shows how authenticity is the foundation of human flourishing – as well as how the new findings relate to debates about the importance of happiness and its measurement in public policy. STEPHEN JOSEPH is professor of psychology, health and social care at the University of Nottingham, UK, where he is the cluster co-ordinator of counselling and psychotherapy training. Previously he was co-director of the Centre for Trauma, Resilience and Growth and an honorary consultant psychologist in psychotherapy. He has published more than two hundred academic papers and seven academic books, and is often asked to comment in the media on topical events relating to his work. He is the author of WHAT DOESN’T KILL US (Little, Brown/Basic, 2012/2011). Publisher: Piatkus/Little, Brown (Editor: Anne Lawrance) Delivery: 1 June 2015 Publication: Spring 2016 Length: 80,000 words All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (excluding Canada), Netherlands (Bruna)
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FORTHCOMING TITLE
THE PERFECT BET How Science is Taking the Luck Out of Gambling ADAM KUCHARSKI
An original and revealing guide to how science is taming chance and transforming gambling. In the past few years, there has been a revolution in the gambling industry. From the statisticians forecasting sports scores to the intelligent algorithms beating human poker players, people are finding new ways to take on casinos and bookmakers. And as methods and technologies improve, these individuals are attempting to do something that has eluded gamblers for centuries: they are using science to hunt for the perfect bet. In THE PERFECT BET, Adam Kucharski brings together ideas from mathematics, psychology, economics and physics to dissect the perfect bet. Who are these people turning hard science into hard cash? How are they managing to beat the house? Where did their approaches come from? And what do these wagers tell us about how we view luck? Covering exploits and ideas from across the globe, he meets teams behind the betting equivalent of hedge funds, and explains how these PhD-level pundits are using methods originally developed for the US nuclear programme to predict sports results. He shows exactly how a group of University of California students in the 1970s famously managed to predict roulette spins with a shoe computer; fearing a casino clampdown, the group never revealed their methods, until mathematicians in Hong Kong solved the 40-year-old mystery in 2012 – the techniques are now being used in real casinos. He reveals why winning at chess depends on luck but – thanks to a discovery in 2007 – victory in checkers does not. And he explains what caused a US stockbroker to lose $400 million in the summer of 2012 and why poker is one of the ultimate challenges for artificial intelligence. We are entering an era where chaos theory blends with psychology, game theory mixes with intelligent bots, and big data compete with traditional statistics and probability. As THE PERFECT BET demonstrates, wagers are our window onto the world of chance and randomness. They show us how to balance risk against reward, and why we value things differently as our circumstances change. They help us unravel how we make decisions and what we can do to control fluke – or avoid it altogether. ADAM KUCHARSKI is a research fellow in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and an award-winning science writer. Born in 1986, he studied at the University of Warwick before completing a PhD in mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He has published papers on topics ranging from evolutionary biology to the social structure of epidemics, and in 2013 was awarded a research fellowship by the UK Medical Research Council to investigate disease emergence in Southeast Asia. Winner of the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, he has contributed popular science articles to the Observer, BBC Focus and Plus Magazine. He lives in London. Publisher: Profile (UK)/BasicBooks (US) (Editor: TJ Kelleher, US) Publication: Autumn 2015 Status: Manuscript Length: 70,000–80,000 words All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Japan (Soshisha), Korea (Business Books), Russia (Sindbad)
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FORTHCOMING TITLE
THE GREAT INVENTION The Story of GDP and the Making and Unmaking of the Modern World EHSAN MASOOD
The biography of one of the twentieth-century's most influential and dangerously addictive ideas, told through the lives of those who invented it. The world’s principal measure of the health of economies is gross domestic product, or GDP: the sum of what all of us spend every day, from the contents of our weekly shopping to large capital spending by businesses. GDP also includes the myriad things that our governments pay for, from libraries and road-line painting to naval dockyards and nuclear weapons. In 2011, America’s GDP was about $14 trillion. Britain’s was a more modest £1.5 trillion. THE GREAT INVENTION reveals how in just a few decades GDP became the world’s most powerful formula: how six algebraic symbols forged in the fires of the 1930s economic crisis helped Europe and America prosper, how the remedy now risks killing the patient it once saved and how this fundamentally flawed metric is creating the illusion of global prosperity and why many world leaders want to be able to ignore it but so far remain powerless to do so. Drawing on interviews, firsthand accounts and previously neglected source materials, THE GREAT INVENTION takes readers on a journey from Capitol Hill in Washington to Whitehall in London, on the trail of theories made in Cambridge, tested in Karachi and designed for global application, and into the minds of unworldly geniuses seduced by the allure of power and the demands of politics. EHSAN MASOOD is a science writer, journalist and broadcaster. Formerly on the editorial staff of Nature and New Scientist, he is currently the editor of Research Fortnight and Research Europe and teaches international science policy at Imperial College London. As well as writing for Prospect magazine, The Times, Guardian and Le Monde, he is a frequent presenter for BBC Radio and the author of SCIENCE AND ISLAM: A History (Icon, 2009) and coauthor of DRY: Life Without Water (Harvard University Press, 2006). Born in 1967, he lives in London. Publisher: To be confirmed Status: Draft manuscript Length: 80,000 words All rights available excluding China (People’s Oriental Publishing & Media Co – simplified Chinese characters)
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FORTHCOMING TITLE
THE NAKED SURGEON The Power and Peril of Transparency in Medicine SAMER NASHEF
How well do those who treat us actually treat us? We are not meant to touch hearts. We all have one; but most of us will never see one. The heart surgeon has that privilege, but for centuries, the heart was out of reach even for surgeons. So when a surgeon nowadays opens up a ribcage and mends a heart, it remains something like a miracle, even if it has to come to seem nearly as normal as plumbing. As with plumbers, the quality of surgeons’ work varies. As with plumbers, surgeons’ opinion of their own prowess and their own attitude to risk is not always entirely reliable. Measurement is key. We’ve had a century of effective evidence-based medicine. We’ve had barely a decade of thorough monitoring of clinical outcomes. Thanks to the groundbreaking risk modelling of pioneering surgeons such as Samer Nashef, we at last know how to judge whether an operation is in a patient’s best interest, which hospital and surgeon would be best for that operation, when it might best be performed and what the exact level of risk is. We have at last made what is important in surgery measurable. But how should surgeons, and their patients, use these newfound insights? Ever since his days as a medical student, Nashef has challenged his profession to be more open and more accurate about outcomes and variabilities in its surgical procedures, for the sake of its patients. In THE NAKED SURGEON he unclothes the profession to demonstrate to his reader (and prospective patient) the paradoxes at the heart of the surgeon’s craft: how anaesthetists seem to make no difference to the outcome of an operation, although surgeons do; why patients operated the day before a surgeon goes on holiday are twice as likely to die than those operated on that surgeon's first day back from holiday; why the unexpected death of a low-risk patient during an operation does not impair a surgeon's performance immediately afterwards; and how one surgeon can appear to be better than another by actually killing more patients. The result is an unprecedented and often controversial insider’s view of medicine that not only explores how doctors and surgeons work and think, but also reveals counterintuitive ideas and eyeopening discoveries that have done more to improve healthcare in the past decade than any new drugs or procedures. SAMER NASHEF qualified as a doctor at the University of Bristol in 1980. He is a consultant cardiac surgeon at Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, and the world’s leading expert on risk and quality in surgical care. He is the creator of EuroSCORE, which calculates the predicted risk of death from heart operations and is the most successful risk model in medicine, used worldwide and credited with saving tens of thousands of lives. The author of more than 200 publications, he has been invited to lecture in more than 30 countries and his research is widely cited. As clinical tutor at the University of Cambridge, he is also a dedicated teacher and public communicator, having appeared in NHS Direct videos, at the Wellcome Foundation and in Channel 4’s ‘The Operation’. He is also a regular compiler of cryptic crosswords for the Guardian and Financial Times under a pseudonym. Publisher: Scribe (Editor: Philip Gwyn Jones) Publication: 4 June 2015 Status: Proofs Length: 240 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (including Canada) 14
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London Book Fair 2015
FORTHCOMING TITLE
BODY BY DARWIN How Evolution Shapes Our Health and Transforms Medicine JEREMY TAYLOR Taylor has accomplished the difficult feat of appealing to the general reader in a book aimed also at medical professionals. Doctors really do need to imbibe Darwinism, not just as the explanation for all life but as a message of direct importance to medicine itself – Richard Dawkins, author of THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH BODY BY DARWIN packages cutting-edge science into seven vivid true stories dramatically describing patients and their doctors discovering evolutionary explanations for diseases. More than just the perfect book club book, it advances the field of evolutionary medicine. I will use it in my classes and give copies to my friends – Randolph M. Nesse, coauthor of WHY WE GET SICK
An authoritative yet accessible account of the renaissance in Darwinian medicine – and the first book to explore the medicine of the future in a coherent way. We think of medical science and doctors as focused on treating conditions – whether it’s a cough or an aching back. But the sicknesses and complaints that cause us to seek medical attention actually have deeper origins than the superficial germs and behaviours we regularly fault. In fact, as Jeremy Taylor shows, we can trace the roots of many medical conditions through our evolutionary history, revealing what has made us susceptible to certain illnesses and ailments over time and how we can use that knowledge to help us treat or prevent problems in the future. In BODY BY DARWIN, Taylor examines the evolutionary origins of some of our most common and serious health issues. To begin, he looks at the hygiene hypothesis, which argues that our obsession with anti-bacterial cleanliness, particularly at a young age, may be making us more vulnerable to autoimmune and allergic diseases. He also discusses diseases of the eye, the medical consequences of bipedalism as they relate to all those aches and pains in our backs and knees, the rise of Alzheimer’s disease, and how cancers become so malignant that they kill us despite the toxic chemotherapy we throw at them. Taylor explains why it helps to think about heart disease in relation to the demands of an ever-growing, dense, muscular pump that requires increasing amounts of nutrients, and he discusses how walking upright and giving birth to ever larger babies led to a problematic compromise in the design of the female spine and pelvis. Throughout, he not only explores the influence of evolution on human form and function, but also integrates science with stories from actual patients and doctors, closely examining the implications for our health. As Taylor shows, evolutionary medicine allows us think about the human body and its adaptations in a completely new and productive way. By exploring how our body’s performance is shaped by its past, BODY BY DARWIN draws powerful connections between our ancient human history and the future of potential medical advances that can harness this knowledge. JEREMY TAYLOR has spent most of his professional life inside the science documentary television industry, with evolutionary biology his first true love. Until 1992 he was a senior producer and director for BBC Television, where he contributed many films to the BBC’s long-running flagship science series ‘Horizon’ (including two landmark programmes presented by Richard Dawkins, ‘Nice Guys Finish First’ and ‘The Blind Watchmaker’). His first book, NOT A CHIMP was published by OUP in 2009. Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Editor: Christie Henry) Publication: October 2015 Status: Proofs Length: 304 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (University of Chicago Press), Germany (Riemann), Japan (Kawadeshobo) 15
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FORTHCOMING TITLE
RESTLESS CREATURES The Story of Life in Ten Movements MATT WILKINSON
A book that opens up an astonishing new perspective: that nothing in life makes sense except in the context of movement. How living things move from place to place is often taken for granted. Yet, not only are the ways in which creatures get about dazzlingly sophisticated, but the need for motility has also shaped the very essence of life on Earth: brains, sex, predation, photosynthesis, the evolution of complexity, the invasion of land and the rise of humanity all arose from improvements in getting from A to B. In RESTLESS CREATURES, the acclaimed biologist and science writer Matt Wilkinson shows how the story of movement offers a uniquely powerful way to explain why life is the way it is. Tracing the evolution of locomotion from the lowliest bacteria to Olympic athletes, he reveals that many of evolution's greatest hits, including almost everything that makes us human from opposable thumbs to the way we think and feel, owe their existence to the evolution of motility. And this in turn rests on surprisingly simple foundations: how life has responded to the physical challenges posed by Newton's laws of motion and other mechanical rules. Along the way we learn why there are no flying monkeys or biological wheels; how dinosaurs started to fly and how headless chickens run around; how juvenile spiders can manage to reach the stratosphere; why the left and right sides of most animals are mirror images; why insects have six legs and humans have five fingers; why the lives of plants are still dominated by movement even though they're rooted to the spot; why it's better to run barefoot; why roller coasters are so much fun; and what life's movement machinery has in common with growing mushrooms and military tanks. MATT WILKINSON is a zoologist and science communicator at the University of Cambridge. His work has been covered in the Telegraph, Metro, New Scientist and Nature and led to many appearances on national radio in the UK and Canada. In 2004 he was a runner-up in the Daily Telegraph/BASF science writer competition, and in 2005 reached second place in the first FameLab competition. Since then he has spoken at several science festivals, science cafes and other public events, and in 2008 and 2009 was invited to Hong Kong, Xi’an and Dongguan by the British Council to give lectures and workshops for the Darwin bicentenary. In 2007 he left full-time research and went to drama school for a year, a move that resulted in the writing of a play about T. H. Huxley that was premiered at the 2009 Darwin Festival in Cambridge. He now teaches biology as a freelance for the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, and is a course director at the university’s Institute of Continuing Education. As well as being an occasional professional actor, he is an experienced audio book narrator, having recorded eight titles since 2010. RESTLESS CREATURES is his first book. Born in 1975, he lives in Cambridge, UK. Publisher: BasicBooks (Editor: TJ Kelleher) Publication: Autumn 2015 Status: Draft manuscript Length: 90,000–100,000 words All rights available excluding World English Language (Basic), Japan (Soshisha), Russia (AST)
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RECENTLY PUBLISHED
WHO KILLED PROFESSOR X? THODORIS ANDRIOPOULOS
An ingenious graphic novel with mathematical puzzles. In 1900 the city of Paris hosts one of the most important conferences in the history of mathematics. The main speaker, the renowned Professor X, gives a talk focusing on the power of mathematics to lead us with certainty to the truth. That same evening Professor X is found dead in his hotel. Chief Inspector Gerard takes up the case. When he examines the suspects, all of whom are mathematicians attending the conference, he finds that each of their statements leads to a mathematical problem. Gerard therefore enlists the aid of his mathematician friend, Kurt, and together they set out to discover who killed Professor X. The case will require all their mathematical powers of deduction and the answer will surprise everyone… An ingenious murder mystery, WHO KILLED PROFESSOR X? concludes with brief biographies of the real-life mathematicians featured and solutions to the mathematical problems. The difficulty of the puzzles can adjusted to suit the target audience – and readers without any mathematic knowledge at all can simply enjoy the story while learning about some of mathematics’ most famous names, episodes and theories. THODORIS ANDRIOPOULOS was born in Athens in 1967 and teaches mathematics at Anatolia College in Thessaloniki. He also teaches game theory at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth in Greece. The educational project on which WHO KILLED PROFESSOR X? is based took third prize in the 6th Microsoft European Innovative Teachers Forum in Vienna in 2009. For his work on the project, he also won the Greek Ministry of Education’s ‘Excellence and Innovation in Education’ award, and in January 2010 Microsoft’s German website named him ‘Teacher of the Month’. Besides his passion for mathematics, he is an avid bridge player. He lives in Thessaloniki with his wife and two children. See more at www.youtube.com/watch?v=vATkt9xuA44. Publisher: Springer Publication: November 2014 Length: 176 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Springer), Greece (Ellinoekdotiki), Indonesia (PT Pustaka Alvabet), Japan (Kodansha), Korea (publisher pending)
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BACKLIST TITLE
THE EDGE OF PHYSICS A Journey to Earth’s Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe ANIL ANANTHASWAMY PHYSICS WORLD’s Book of the Year 2010 An accomplished and timely overview of modern cosmology and particle astrophysics – NATURE A remarkable narrative that combines fundamental physics with high adventure – NEW SCIENTIST Stirring, scenic narrative… a wonder-steeped page-turner – SEED A thrilling ride around the globe and around the cosmos – Sean Carroll, California Institute of Technology, author of FROM ETERNITY TO HERE Clean, elegant prose, humming with interest – Robert Macfarlane, author of MOUNTAINS OF THE MIND and THE WILD PLACES A genuinely novel route into the story of modern cosmology… a well written and genuinely accessible tale – Thomas Levenson, author of NEWTON AND THE COUNTERFEITER and EINSTEIN IN BERLIN
An intrepid journalist takes us from desolate deserts to derelict mines to answer some of the most burning questions in physics today. Physics is in crisis. For more than two centuries, our understanding of the laws of nature expanded rapidly. But in the past few decades, we’ve made astonishingly little progress. What will finally break the impasse and get physics back on track? In this timely and original book, the science writer Anil Ananthaswamy sets out in search of the world’s most audacious physics experiments: the telescopes and detectors that promise to shed new light on such things as dark matter, dark energy and the phenomenon of quantum gravity (which string theory tries to explain). He soon finds himself at the ends of the Earth – in cold and remote and sometimes dangerous places. As it turns out, extreme physics requires extreme environments. Reporting from some of the most inhospitable and dramatic research sites on our planet – from the Atacama Desert in Chile, to the Indian Observatory in the Himalayas, to the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica to deep within an abandoned iron mine in Minnesota – Ananthaswamy weaves together stories about the people and places at the heart of this research while beautifully explaining the problems that scientists are trying to solve. In so doing, he provides a unique portrait of the Universe and our quest to understand it. Atmospheric, engaging and illuminating, THE EDGE OF PHYSICS brings cosmology – with all its rarefied concepts – back down to Earth. ANIL ANANTHASWAMY is a consultant editor for New Scientist. He has been with the magazine since 2000, including as a staff writer and deputy news editor, and has also written for National Geographic News, Discover magazine, The Times and Independent and is a columnist for PBS NOVA’s The Nature of Reality blog. He studied electronics, electrical and computer engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and the University of Washington, Seattle, and worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley before studying in the University of California Santa Cruz’s science-writing programme. Now a guest lecturer there, he also teaches science journalism at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. He lives in Bangalore and California. Publisher: Duckworth (UK)/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (US) (Editor: Amanda Cook, US) Publication: 22 April 2010 (UK)/2 March 2010 (US) Length: 336 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Germany (Spektrum), Greece (Travlos), India (Penguin), Italy (Codice), Japan (Kawadeshobo), Korea (Humanist), Poland (Prószyński), Russia (Eksmo) 18
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BACKLIST TITLE
ATOMIC The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb, 1939–1949 JIM BAGGOTT A BOOKLIST Top Ten Sci-Tech Book of 2010 An excellent introduction to a vast and complicated topic... knits together developments on different sides of the Atlantic into a brisk, exciting and comprehensive narrative – Michael Dobbs, THE NEW YORK TIMES While writing my 20th-century histories… I read everything on [the atomic bomb] I could lay my hands on, but I never read such a good, comprehensive account as Jim Baggott’s… Highly recommended – A. N. Wilson, READER’S DIGEST Replete with drama and insight – Martin J. Sherwin, co-author of AMERICAN PROMETHEUS, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography This is a very good book. I particularly like the way Baggott has been able to weave the science, ‘grand-scale’ politics and espionage together into one compelling narrative – Mark Walker, author of GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND THE QUEST FOR NUCLEAR POWER
An epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding; a tale barely believable as fiction, which just happens to be historical fact. Rich in personality, action, confrontation and deception, ATOMIC is the first fully realized popular account of the race between Nazi Germany, Britain, America and the Soviet Union to build atomic weapons. The book draws on declassified material such as MI6’s Farm Hall transcripts, coded Soviet messages cracked by American cryptographers in the Venona project and interpretations by Russian scholars of documents from the Soviet archives. Jim Baggott weaves these threads into a monumental book that spans ten historic years, from the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 to ‘Joe-1’, the first Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949. It includes dramatic episodes such as the sabotage of the Vemork heavy-water plant by Norwegian commandos and the infamous meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, the subject of Michael Frayn’s stage play ‘Copenhagen’. Baggott also tells of how Allied scientists were directly involved in the hunt for their German counterparts in war-torn Europe following D-Day, and brings to light the reactions of captured German scientists on hearing of the Allied success at Hiroshima. Why did physicists persist in developing the atomic bomb, despite the devastation that it could bring? Why, despite having a clear head start, did Hitler’s physicists fail? To what extent did the Soviet atomic programme rely on intelligence gathered by spies such as Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs? Did the Allies really plot to assassinate a key member of the German bomb programme? Did the physicists knowingly inspire the arms race? The book answers these and many other questions. JIM BAGGOTT was born in Southampton, England, in 1957. He graduated in chemistry in 1978 and completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford three years later. He has been studying and writing about the history of physics for some 20 years and has won awards for his scientific research and writing. His books have been widely acclaimed and include A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO REALITY, PERFECT SYMMETRY, BEYOND MEASURE and THE QUANTUM STORY. Publisher: Icon (UK)/Pegasus (US)* (Editor: Simon Flynn, UK) Publication: 5 March 2009 (UK)/13 April 2010 (US) Length: 576 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Israel (Books in the Attic/Miskal), Japan (Sakuhinsha), Russia (Eksmo) *Published in the US as THE FIRST WAR OF PHYSICS: The Secret History of the Atom Bomb 19
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BACKLIST TITLE
FAREWELL TO REALITY How Fairy-Tale Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth JIM BAGGOTT Certain to broaden and intensify the debate over what counts as science – Bryce Christensen, BOOKLIST, starred review A good story, often told, but rarely as gracefully as it is here... In all of this, there’s uncommon respect for the lay reader – David Kordahl, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS In consistently accessible and intelligent prose, Baggott sympathetically captures the frustrations of physicists while laying out a provocative – and very convincing – plea for a reality check in a field that he feels is now too ‘meta’ for its own good – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review His fierce and refreshing polemic does a fine job of helping readers understand some of the knottiest ideas in contemporary physics. This is all the more remarkable as he eschews analogies, arguing that they tend to confuse rather than illuminate the counterintuitive ideas and phenomena he describes – THE ECONOMIST
Stephen Hawking recently remarked, ‘There is no heaven; it’s a fairy story’. But might the same be said of modern theoretical physics? Although we know a lot more about the nature of reality, there is a sense in which we understand less. So far there is no observational or experimental evidence for many of the ideas of modern theoretical physics such as super-symmetric particles, superstrings, the multiverse, the holographic principle or the anthropic cosmological principle. For some of the wilder speculations of theorists such as Hawking there can by definition never be any such evidence. This stuff is not only not true, it is not even science. It is fairy-tale physics: fantastical, bizarre and often outrageous – borderline confidence-trickery, even, claims Jim Baggott. With FAREWELL TO REALITY, Baggott provides a much-needed antidote. Informed, comprehensive and balanced, the book offers lay readers an up-to-date summary of the latest thinking about the nature of physical reality while clearly distinguishing between fact and fantasy. With its engaging portraits of many central figures of modern physics, including Paul Davies, John Barrow, Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Leonard Susskind and other ‘high priests of fairy-tale physics’, it promises to be essential reading for all readers interested in what we do and don’t know about the Universe – and in the future of science itself. JIM BAGGOTT was born in Southampton, England, in 1957. He graduated in chemistry from the University of Manchester in 1978. After completing his doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Oxford, he worked as a postgraduate research fellow at Oxford and at Stanford University in California. He has been studying and writing about science, philosophy and science history for some two decades, and has won awards for both scientific research and science writing. His widely acclaimed books include THE QUANTUM STORY, ATOMIC, A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO REALITY and BEYOND MEASURE. Publisher: Constable (UK)/Pegasus (US) (Editor: Andreas Campomar, UK) Publication: 16 May 2013 (UK)/1 August 2013 (US) Length: 352 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Poland (Proszysnki)
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BACKLIST TITLE
THE BELIEF INSTINCT The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life JESSE BERING One of CHOICE editors’ Outstanding Academic Titles, 2011 – Top 25 Books Named one of the 11 Best Psychology Books of 2011 by THE ATLANTIC Scintillating… with wit and wisdom – Nicholas Humphrey, London School of Economics, author of SEEING RED A triumph – moving, provocative and entertaining – Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology, Yale University, author of HOW PLEASURE WORKS Spellbinding – Daniel M. Wegner, Harvard University, author of THE ILLUSION OF CONSCIOUS WILL Marvelously informative... an uncommonly compelling case for the self-loathing of humanity – NEW REPUBLIC A balanced and considered approach to this often inflammatory topic – NATURE A colourful romp through psychology, philosophy and popular culture – NEW HUMANIST
A startling new take on why we believe in God – and how this belief ensured human survival. God is not merely an idea to be entertained or discarded based on the evidence. Nor is God a cultural invention, an existential Band-Aid or an opiate of the masses. Instead, Jesse Bering argues, belief in God evolved in the human species as an ‘adaptive illusion’. Drawing on groundbreaking research in cognitive science, he unravels the evolutionary mystery of why we grapple for meaning, purpose and destiny in our everyday lives. He argues that the strangely deep-rooted sense that some intentional agent created us as individuals, wants us to behave in particular ways, observes our otherwise private actions and intends to meet us after we die would also have been felt by our ancestors, leading them to behave in ways that favoured their reputations – and thus saved their genes. But in today’s world, these psychological illusions have outlasted their evolutionary purpose, and Bering points out a whole new challenge: escaping them. His own experiments have revealed that the perceived presence of a supernatural being can affect a person’s behaviour – although in this case the being was not God, but the ghost of a dead person. He has also done studies that indicate that religion promotes fitness by encouraging collaboration within groups. A sense of being watched by a god might be useful, he says: it might encourage cheats to detect and police themselves. JESSE BERING was born in 1975. He is a frequent contributor to Scientific American, Slate and Das Magazin. His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, the Guardian and New Republic, and been featured on NPR, the BBC, Playboy Radio, and more. Formerly director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast, and professor at the University of Arkansas, he is the author of the forthcoming WHY IS THE PENIS SHAPED LIKE THAT? (Scientific American/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 3 July 2012) and is currently working on a book on human sexuality and deviance. He lives near Ithaca, New York. His website is at www.jessebering.com. Publisher: Nicholas Brealey (UK)*/Norton (US) (Editor: Angela von der Lippe, US) Publication: 11 November 2010 (UK)/7 February 2011 (US) Length: 288 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Zahar), China (Economic Science Press – simplified Chinese characters), Croatia (Naklada Ljevak), Germany (Piper), Italy (Rizzoli), Japan (Kagaku-Dojin), Korea (Purun Communication), Netherlands (Nieuw Amsterdam), Portugal (Temas e Debates), Spain (Paidós), Taiwan (Apocalypse – traditional Chinese characters) *Published in the UK as THE GOD INSTINCT 21
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BACKLIST TITLE
FIVE BILLION YEARS OF SOLITUDE The Search for Life Among the Stars LEE BILLINGS Winner of the American Institute of Physics 2013 Science Writing Award for Books Graceful… the best book I have read about exoplanets, and one of the few whose language approaches the grandeur of a quest that is practically as old as our genes – Dennis Overbye, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Will leave readers who aren’t rocket scientists slack-jawed – THE NEW YORK TIMES ‘Newly Released’ column A definitive guide to astronomy’s hottest field – THE ECONOMIST This book is sweeping in scope, from the creation of the coal belts in Pennsylvania to the moving details of a single canoe trip across the Canadian wilderness. In these juxtapositions, Billings performs a brilliant sleight of hand... the ending is a poignant reminder that humankind may yet find a way to the stars, but people – the ones we know, the ones we love, the ones we lose – are our entire history and our full universe – WASHINGTON POST In his compelling, wide-ranging survey, Billings steps back to look at this broader picture, largely through richly textured portraits of some of the giants of the field… [an] extraordinary tale of scientific discovery – SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Deftly captures both behind-the-scenes ructions and landmark discoveries in his tour of this multidisciplinary field, its history and its players. The seamlessly interwoven narrative is strong on big personalities – NATURE In this elegant book, Billings writes with energy and brilliance about a big question, possibly the biggest of all: are we all alone in the Universe or are there other forms of life out there somewhere? His portraits of the scientists in pursuit of answers to this timeless question are realized through the sharpest lens – Richard Preston, author of THE HOT ZONE and THE WILD TREES A beautiful, richly detailed study of what it means to be alone – for now – in the Universe – Carl Zimmer, author of A PLANET OF VIRUSES and EVOLUTION
An intimate history of Earth and the quest for life beyond the solar system. Since its formation nearly five billion years ago, our planet has been the sole living world in a vast and silent universe. Now, Earth’s isolation is coming to an end. Over the past two decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of ‘exoplanets’ orbiting other stars, including some that could be similar to our own world. Studying those distant planets for signs of life will be crucial to understanding life’s intricate mysteries right here on Earth. In a firsthand account of this unfolding revolution, Lee Billings draws on interviews with top researchers. He reveals how the search for other Earth-like planets is not only a scientific pursuit, but also a reflection of our culture’s timeless hopes, dreams and fears. This is a compelling story of the pioneers seeking the meaning of life in the infinite depths of space. LEE BILLINGS is a science journalist. His articles on the science and policy behind breakthrough work in astronomy, planetary science, astrophysics and cosmology have appeared in publications such as Nature, New Scientist, Popular Mechanics and Seed magazine. Born in 1981, he lives in New York City. Publisher: Current/Penguin US (Editors: Courtney Young (acquiring editor)/Emily Angell) Publication: 3 October 2013 Length: 304 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Penguin US), Dutch (Lannoo), Korea (Ermamama), Latin America (Planeta Mexico – Spanish), Russia (Piter), Turkey (Alfa Group) 22
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THE MAN WHO RAN THE MOON James E. Webb, NASA and the Secret History of Project Apollo PIERS BIZONY Bizony’s excellent corrective to NASA’s mythologised history takes an unflinching look… A firebrand of a book – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The gripping story of how one man steered NASA through a morass of politics, special interests, profiteering, untested systems, budget restrictions and volatile personalities. In spring 1961, James E Webb, a North Carolina farm boy turned Washington insider, took charge of the grandest exploration project ever known: America’s bid for the Moon. He persuaded John F. Kennedy to support him and gained control of five per cent of the US federal budget. Webb’s NASA controlled half-a-million workers across America as they built new machines, launch pads and control centres. But when a spacecraft caught fire in 1967, killing three astronauts, the press exposed a series of failures and the profiteering of Webb’s business partners. To protect NASA’s future, Webb took the heat for the corruption and deaths and enabled his colleagues to land on the Moon by the end of the decade. America had won the Space Race – but the name of the man who made it possible was wiped from history. THE MAN WHO RAN THE MOON reveals the secret history of Project Apollo and the true cost of Americas victory in space. PIERS BIZONY is a science journalist and space historian who writes for newspapers and magazines such as the Independent, BBC Focus and Wired. His award-winning book on Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ was described as ‘full of sparkling enthusiasm’ by New Scientist and ‘excellent, in every way worthy of Kubrick’s original precision-crafted vision’ by the Evening Standard. His most recent books include ATOM (Icon, 2007), HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN SPACESHIP (Portobello/ Plume, 2008) and ONE GIANT LEAP: Apollo 11 Forty Years On (Aurum, 2009). Publisher: Icon (UK)/Thunder’s Mouth (US) (Editor: John Oakes, US) Publication: 5 October 2006 (UK)/10 May 2006 (US) Length: 242 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US
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WETWARE A Computer in Every Cell DENNIS BRAY Drawing on the similarities between Pac-man and an amoeba and efforts to model the human brain, this absorbing read shows that biologists and engineers have a lot to learn from working together – DISCOVER Bray tackles the question [of how complex behaviour can arise in a simple life form] with remarkable clarity and style in this excellent book... highly recommended – Graham Lawton, NEW SCIENTIST One of the book’s major strengths is Bray’s overall unity of vision; another is the way he marshals a breathtaking diversity of fields to make his case... Whether cells think or not, there is no question that WETWARE will get the reader thinking – Wallace F. Marshall, SCIENCE A beautifully written journey into the mechanics of the world of the cell, and even beyond – Denis Noble, author of THE MUSIC OF LIFE In this timely and illuminating volume, Bray passionately weaves a compelling case for a computational view of life – Martyn Amos, author of GENESIS MACHINES Does an admirable job explaining complex biological phenomena… to non-experts while keeping the attention of people already familiar with these ideas… a highly thought-provoking look at how cells are similar to computers. Or, perhaps more correctly, how computers should try to be like living cells – Laura DeMare, YALE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE
How does a single-cell creature such as an amoeba lead such a sophisticated life? How does it hunt living prey, respond to lights, sounds and smells, and display complex sequences of movements without the benefit of a nervous system? This book offers a startling and original answer. In clear, jargon-free language, Dennis Bray taps the findings of the new discipline of systems biology to show that the internal chemistry of living cells is a form of computation. Cells are built out of molecular circuits that perform logical operations, as electronic devices do, but with unique properties. Bray argues that the computational juice of cells provides the basis of all the distinctive properties of living systems: it allows organisms to embody in their internal structure an image of the world, and this accounts for their adaptability, responsiveness and intelligence. WETWARE offers imaginative, wide-ranging and perceptive criticism of robotics and complexity theory, as well as many entertaining and telling anecdotes. For the general reader, the practising scientist and all others with an interest in the nature of life, the book is an exciting portal to some of biology’s latest discoveries and ideas. DENNIS BRAY is emeritus professor in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. A fellow of the Royal Society, he is co-author of several bestselling and influential texts in molecular and cell biology and is internationally sought after as a lecturer on the interface of cell biology and physics. An enthusiastic advocate of the computational approach to living cells, he was awarded the 2007 European Science Prize in Computational Biology – one of the largest international prizes in science. Publisher: Yale University Press (UK & US) (Editor: Jean Black) Publication: 30 June 2009 (UK)/26 May 2009 (US) Length: 267 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Yale), Japan (Hayakawa), Korea (East Asia)
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A PIECE OF THE SUN The Quest for Fusion Energy DANIEL CLERY Clery demonstrates good scientific taste in picking what to report and in adding details that give his story substance – David H. Crandall, PHYSICS TODAY A solid no-nonsense primer for those interested in fusion’s history – SCIENCE NEWS An essential book for anyone interested in fusion or who is involved in the politics of how we generate our electricity – Brian Clegg, PopularScience.co.uk Dan Clery beautifully captures the excitement and frustrations of the quest for fusion energy – Steve Cowley, Director, Culham Centre for Fusion Energy Explains cutting-edge science with remarkable lucidity... A timely perspective on truly urgent science – Bryce Christensen, BOOKLIST A surprisingly sprightly tour d’horizon of the pursuit of fusion energy... Clery negotiates the hard science with aplomb... A compelling case for continued, even increased, fusion research – KIRKUS REVIEWS
New realms of chemistry and physics. Nuclear tests without nukes. Power generation on a gigantic scale... Nuclear fusion is what powers our sun and other stars. If perfected, controlled fusion should generate a hundred times more energy than is used to spark the nuclear reactions. It’s not only powerful but clean and green as well: it doesn’t produce long-lasting nuclear waste, and it’s potentially carbon free. And although fossil fuels, such as oil and coal, and nuclear fission fuels, such as uranium, are limited resources, there’s enough nuclear fusion fuel around us to power the Earth longer than the lifetime of the Sun. In A PIECE OF THE SUN, Daniel Clery recounts the epic tale of how fusion works, its history and its promise for the future. It’s a story of science, politics, diplomacy and historical serendipity, peopled by the legions of scientists who have spent their whole careers in pursuit of burning plasma. We are now entering a decade where it’s imperative that we make fusion happen, he says. Scientists and engineers are closer than ever to triggering nuclear fusion in a controlled setting and confirming that fusion energy is real. With nations collaborating on massive scientific facilities, the main strands of fusion research are beginning to get noticed: as well as Europe’s programme, which has produced the best fusion reactor so far, there is the US effort and also newcomers in the East – Japan, China, South Korea and India. If, in the next few years, their giant machines make the expected breakthrough in achieving ignition, fusion will be catapulted onto front pages across the globe. A PIECE OF THE SUN aims to be the first book to tell the whole story for people wanting to read more. DANIEL CLERY is a graduate in theoretical physics who has for more than 20 years worked as a writer and editor on some of the world’s top science magazines, including Physics World, New Scientist and Science. Appointed as Science’s news editor in Europe in 1993, he has covered many of the big science news stories of the past two decades, and has become one of the magazine’s foremost writers on energy research, addressing topics including fission and fusion energy, wind and solar power and tidal barrages. Publisher: Duckworth (UK)/Overlook (US) (Editor: Jon Jackson) Publication: 27 June 2013 Length: 320 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, China (Shanghai Century Publishing Co. Ltd) 25
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THE EGG AND SPERM RACE The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth MATTHEW COBB A fascinating subject, full of arresting material and personalities – Lisa Jardine, SUNDAY TIMES Lively… You can almost smell the formaldehyde on the page – FINANCIAL TIMES It is a story as relevant today as it was in its own time, and Matthew Cobb tells it with great scholarship and tremendous panache – Tim Birkhead, author of PROMISCUITY and THE RED CANARY A ripping yarn – MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS
Where do we come from? Where do animals come from? For thousands of years we had no idea how living things were created – great thinkers such as Aristotle and Hippocrates had attempted to explain what became know as the problem of ‘generation’, but none of them had the tools or the insight to solve the mystery. The result was a wealth of weird and wonderful ideals about the components necessary to create new life – blood, ‘vapours’, invisible particles in the air. It was widely accepted that animals could sometimes produce different species, for example; the notion that two sheep can only ever make another sheep is a surprisingly modern idea. THE EGG AND SPERM RACE is the story of the exciting, largely forgotten decade during the seventeenth century when a group of young men – Jan Swammerdam, the son of a Protestant apothecary, Nils Stensen (also known as Steno), a Danish anatomist who first discovered the human tear duct, Reinier de Graaf, the attractive and brilliant son of a rich and successful Catholic architect, and Antoni Leeuwenhoek, a self-taught draper – dared to challenge thousands of years of orthodox thinking about where life comes from. By meticulous experimentation, dissection and observation with the newly invented microscope, they showed that like breeds like, that all animals come from an egg, that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation and that there are millions of tiny wriggling ‘eels’ in semen. But their ultimate inability to fully understand the evidence that was in front of them led to a fatal mistake. As a result, the final leap in describing the process of reproduction – which would ultimately give birth to the science of genetics – took nearly two centuries for humanity to achieve. Including previously untranslated documents, THE EGG AND SPERM RACE interweaves the personal stories of these scientists against a backdrop of the Dutch ‘golden age’. It is a riveting account of the audacious men who swept away old certainties and provided the foundation for much of our current understanding of the living world. MATTHEW COBB is professor of zoology and associate dean for social responsibility at the University of Manchester. He is also a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, and has translated five books on popular science and science history from French into English. Publisher: Simon & Schuster (UK)/Bloomsbury (US)* (Editors: Andrew Gordon, UK/Gillian Blake, US) Publication: 3 April 2006 (UK)/8 August 2006 (US) Length: 332 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Netherlands (Bezige Bij), Turkey (Everest) *Published in the US as GENERATION
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THE RESISTANCE The French Fight Against the Nazis MATTHEW COBB Winner of the Franco-British Society’s Enid McLeod Book Prize 2009 Thrilling narration… a soundly sourced history that gallops by with the verve of a great historical novel – BBC HISTORY magazine Cobb comes perhaps closer than any other historian to explaining why the Resistance matters – SPECTATOR A fabulous book, painstakingly researched, even-handed and dripping with poignancy… A good book about the Resistance has long been overdue – HERALD Impeccably sourced… A fine piece of work, illustrated with excellent photographs… a successful tribute to extraordinary men and women – THE SUNDAY TIMES
An exciting, tragic and perceptive account of one of the most striking events of the twentieth century – and how one of the most powerful modern myths came to be forged. The French resistance to Nazi occupation during the Second World War was a struggle in which ordinary people fought for their liberty, despite terrible odds and horrifying repression. Hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and women carried out an armed struggle against the Nazis, producing underground anti-fascist publications and supplying the Allies with vital intelligence. Based on hundreds of French eye-witness accounts and including recently released archival material, THE RESISTANCE begins with the catastrophic Fall of France in 1940, and shatters the myth of a unified Resistance created by General de Gaulle. In fact, De Gaulle never understood the Resistance, and sought to use, dominate and channel it to his own ends. Brave men and women set up organizations, only to be betrayed or hunted down by the Nazis, and to die in front of the firing squad or in the concentration camps. Eventually, through the determination of Frenchman Jean Moulin, the Resistance was unified. But without the sacrifice of British Special Operations Executive agents and RAF pilots flying into makeshift airstrips on moonlit nights, there would have been no radio contact with London, little money and fewer arms. In 1943, thousands of young men took to the hills (the maquis) to avoid being sent to work in Nazi Germany. The question of who would control these men – de Gaulle, the Allies or the Resistance – took on a crucial importance after D-Day, when hundreds of thousands of Resistance fighters harassed the retreating Nazi forces and helped two million Allied troops liberate France. Liberation threatened to transform itself into Revolution – the outcome that both De Gaulle and the Allies feared most, and did their utmost to prevent. Victorious, De Gaulle was able to neuter the Resistance, turning its revolutionary force into part of the establishment. Over the next half-century, the true story of the Resistance got blurred and distorted, its heroes and conflicts forgotten as the movement became a myth. MATTHEW COBB is a professor of zoology and an associate dean at the University of Manchester. He has translated five books from French into English, and spent most of his adult life as a researcher in Paris, before returning to the UK in 2002. Author of THE EGG AND SPERM RACE (Simon & Schuster/Bloomsbury, 2006), he is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and Journal of Experimental Biology. Publisher: Simon & Schuster (UK & US) (Editor: Mike Jones) Publication: 1 June 2009 Length: 416 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Simon & Schuster UK)
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ELEVEN DAYS IN AUGUST The Liberation of Paris in 1944 MATTHEW COBB The final days of the German occupation of the French capital are vividly captured in this fine account of death and deliverance – Max Hastings If you’re a Francophile, or interested in WW2, or both, ELEVEN DAYS IN AUGUST is unmissable: gripping, moving, definitive – TOM HOLLAND The fullest account imaginable of the Battle for Paris. Cobb’s narrative... hurtles along, illuminated by blazing details. Admirable... epic – NEW STATESMAN
The story of a momentous point in twentieth-century history – a history that still lives in the streets. In August 1944, in a tiny Belgian village, 12-year-old Henri Baiverlin looked on in amazement as his father heard of the liberation of Paris: ‘He just sat there, tears streaming down his face, saying over and over again, Paris is a beautiful city, a great city.’ All over the world, reactions were the same. From Manchester to New York, from Quebec to London, bells were rung, people rejoiced, tears were shed and hope sprang anew. As the British government publication Cadran put it: ‘All the war news fades when faced with the liberation of Paris. For the whole world, Paris is a symbol of civilization and of liberty: the first echo of victory could be heard in the bells of Notre Dame... By liberating themselves, the Parisians showed the world that the soul of a people is invincible, stronger than the most powerful war machine.’ The liberation of Paris was a momentous point in twentieth-century history, yet it is now largely forgotten outside France. ELEVEN DAYS IN AUGUST is a pulsating hour-by-hour reconstruction of these tumultuous events that shaped both the end of the Second World War and the whole future of France, told with the pace of a thriller. Full of the atmosphere and spirit of the French capital, it shows how, in 11 dramatic days, people lived, fought and died in the most beautiful city in the world. As well as describing the drama, it examines the conflicting national and international interests that played out in the bloody street fighting. The tense, heart-wrenching story is told from conflicting points of view, using eyewitness and diary accounts and unpublished archive material from ordinary Parisians, Resistance fighters, the Free French, the Allied High Command, Allied and French spies, the German High Command, rank-and-file German soldiers and French collaborators. Each of these groups of people experienced these August days in very different ways, praying for different outcomes, fighting for different futures. Hundreds of civilians and soldiers died, some leaving their names on fading plaques on Parisian buildings, but most are now forgotten by history. This book brings their stories back to life, capturing the emotion, the excitement and the terror of insurrection and fighting, and revealing the history that lives in the streets. MATTHEW COBB is a professor of zoology and an associate dean at the University of Manchester. He has translated five books from French into English, and spent most of his adult life as a researcher in Paris, before returning to the UK in 2002. Author of THE EGG AND SPERM RACE (Simon & Schuster/Bloomsbury, 2006) and THE RESISTANCE (Simon and Schuster, 2009), he is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and Journal of Experimental Biology. Publisher: Simon & Schuster (UK & US) (Editor: Mike Jones) Publication: 11 April 2013 Length: 544 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Simon & Schuster UK)
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FROM CELLS TO CIVILIZATIONS The Principles of Change that Shape Life ENRICO COEN Shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books Has tremendous scope and ambition. It challenges your thinking of how evolution works. It is unbelievably alive in parts and we could feel our brains growing as we read – Judging Panel, Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books Clearly written… intriguing, thought-provoking – LIBRARY JOURNAL Packed with fascinating facts – NEW SCIENTIST The ideas are subtle, possibly significant, and slightly unsettling. What more could a reader wish for? – NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS Ambitious and stimulating – TruthDig.com His clever ideas and engaging and creative writing style suggest that he would make a fascinating dinner companion. I loved this book – Charalambos P. Kyriacou, TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION Charming, clever and thought-provoking – Stephen C. Stearns, Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University Valuable to both general readers and specialists. Its breadth is unmatched – Michael Corballis, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Auckland
The first unified account of how life transforms itself – from the production of bacteria to the emergence of complex civilizations. What are the connections between evolving microbes, an egg that develops into an infant and a child who learns to walk and talk? In CELLS TO CIVILIZATIONS, the award-winning scientist Enrico Coen synthesizes the growth of living systems and creative processes and reveals that the four great life transformations – evolution, development, learning and human culture – while typically understood separately, actually all revolve around shared core principles and manifest the same fundamental recipe. Coen blends provocative discussion, the latest scientific research and colourful examples to demonstrate the links between these critical stages in the history of life. Coen tells a story rich with genes, embryos, neurons and fascinating discoveries. He examines the development of the zebra, the adaptations of seaweed, the cave paintings of Lascaux and the formulations of Alan Turing. He explores how dogs make predictions, how weeds tell the time of day and how our brains distinguish a Modigliani from a Rembrandt. Locating commonalities in important findings, Coen gives readers a deeper understanding of key transformations and provides a bold portrait for how science both frames and is framed by human culture. A compelling investigation into the relationships between our biological past and cultural progress, CELLS TO CIVILIZATIONS presents a remarkable story of living change. ENRICO COEN is a plant biologist at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK. His work is regularly published in top scientific journals such as Science, Nature and Cell. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1998 and foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2001. He was also awarded the EMBO Medal in 1996, the Science for Art Prize in 1996, the Linnean Gold Medal in 1997 and the Royal Society Darwin Medal in 2004. He is the author of a popular book on the principles of development, THE ART OF GENES (Oxford University Press, 1999). Publisher: Princeton University Press (UK & US) (Editor: Alison Kalett) Publication: 27 May 2012 Length: 322 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Princeton University Press), Germany (Hanser), Korea (Chung-A Publishing Co.), Spain (Critica) 29
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SONIC WONDERLAND A Scientific Odyssey of Sound TREVOR COX This is acoustician Trevor Cox’s fun but thoroughly detailed tour through some of the world’s aural gems. Sounds like music to our ears – NEW SCIENTIST Cox’s enthusiasm for his specialty is contagious. I’ll now be keeping my ears wide open – WASHINGTON POST Turns up the volume on… sonic oddities – NPR A must read for musicians, producers, sound engineers and nerds of all kinds – BBC 6 Music A David Attenborough of the acoustic realm, whose knowledge is unimpeachable yet worn lightly, whose language is vivid yet without indulgence – OBSERVER Captivating… Reading this revelatory book, it is impossible not to be converted to his cause. He syringes his readers’ ears and the effect is delightful – SUNDAY TIMES If there’s one man who could give you an informed account of one-hand clapping, it’s Trevor Cox. Fascinating… Thought-provoking – THE TIMES This small encyclopedia of strange sounds reveals how much art there is in the act of listening. Reading it made my ears more mindful – Adam Gopnik
A celebration of the science of sound, by a top researcher and broadcaster who has studied why people hate the noise of fingernails scraping on a chalkboard, constructed the world’s largest whoopee cushion and disproved the old saying that a duck’s quack produces no echo. Creaking glaciers, whispering galleries, stalactite organs, musical roads, squeaking beaches, groaning waterwheels, frogs that croak in Mexican waves, Mayan pyramids that produce echoes that chirp like a bird – these are just a sample of the impressive, strange and surprising sounds that the acoustic engineer Trevor Cox has tracked down in his search for the ‘sonic wonders of the world’. In SONIC WONDERLAND, he uses his experiences of visiting sewers, caves, tidal bores, burial mounds, sand dunes, concert halls and more to explore how sound is made and altered by the environment, how our body hears, perceives and reacts to peculiar sounds and how sounds and acoustics have inspired musicians, artists and writers. Ranging across a dizzying array of realms including literature, classical music, history, archaeology, psychology, neuroscience, geology, physics, biology and ecology, the book is an original and compelling tour of the world’s most amazing acoustic phenomena and the sometimes even stranger people behind them – and a passionate plea for a deeper appreciation of and respect for our shared sonic landscapes. TREVOR COX was born in 1967. He is professor of acoustic engineering at Salford University and former president of the Institute of Acoustics. For 15 years, he has been communicating science to the public, ranging from work with schools, through shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall, to media stories about duck quacks. He has presented 15 science documentaries for BBC radio including ‘Save Our Sounds’ (which won a Sony Radio Academy Award), appeared frequently on television and written for New Scientist. Publisher: Bodley Head/Random House (UK)/Norton (US)* (Editors: Kay Peddle, UK/Tom Mayer, US) Publication: February 2014 (US)/9 January 2014 (UK) Length: 304 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, China (New World), Germany (Springer), Italy (Dedalo), Japan (Hakuyosha), Taiwan (Marco Polo) *Published in the US as THE SOUND BOOK: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World 30
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HOW TO CHANGE MINDS ABOUT OUR CHANGING CLIMATE SETH DARLING & DOUG SISTERSON Let science do the talking the next time someone tries to tell you… • the climate isn’t changing • global warming is actually a good thing • climate change is natural, not man-made and other arguments it’s time to end for good
Credible, convincing, and eminently comprehensible… takes on and methodically refutes the oft-heard myths put forth by those who question climate change… should be on everyone’s reading list! – Tom Skilling, Chief Meteorologist, WGN-TV Everyone – including climate skeptics! – ought to read this book. With wit and verve, it explains why every arguments in the climate skeptics’ handbook is – to put it politely – wrong – Elizabeth Kolbert, author of THE SIXTH EXTINCTION This is the most important conversation you can have – the birds and the bees for a whole planet – Bill McKibben, author of EARTH
An essential climate-debate handbook that puts the irrefutable science supporting human-caused climate change at your fingertips. Have you heard that global warming is simply the result of natural cycles? Or that scientists are split on whether humans are affecting the climate? More important, do you have a firm grasp of the science that emphatically refutes these claims? The evidence exists, and it’s long been decisive, but do you know your science well enough to have it at the ready the next time you’ve been put on the spot by a climate-change sceptic? At last, this is the handbook to end the debate – here to prepare you with not only science’s strongest arguments but also the best ways to deploy them to change sceptics’ minds. Seth Darling and Doug Sisterson, leading energy-and-climate researchers and science communicators, dismantle all the most pernicious misconceptions with easy-to-understand explanations so that, once and for all, we can agree that climate change is a real and significant threat to our well-being, and then start to do something about it. SETH DARLING is a scientist in the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory and a fellow at the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. DOUG SISTERSON is a senior manager at Argonne National Laboratory for the US Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility. He received the University of Chicago Pinnacle of Education Award in 2012. Publisher: The Experiment (Editor: Nicholas Cizek) Publication: 29 July 2014 Length: 224 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (The Experiment)
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STARMAN The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin JAMIE DORAN & PIERS BIZONY Takes us breakneck speed through Gagarin’s strange trajectory… Without books like these to shelter it, history is eroded by propaganda and real heroes fall victim to spin – NEW SCIENTIST A riveting account of Gagarin’s life... STARMAN brilliantly captures the atmosphere of the time – EUROPEAN Skilfully achieves two distinct objectives: the uncovering of much of the mystery around one of mankind’s finest periods, and a full and respectful acknowledgement that its many great heroes, both sung and unsung, were, first and foremost, human beings – MOSCOW TIMES Worth writing and definitely worth reading – DAILY TELEGRAPH A fascinating – yet chilling – look at bureaucracy gone wrong – AMAZON.CO.UK
New edition to mark the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s historic space flight. On April 12 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and venture into space. An icon of the twentieth century, he also became a danger to himself and a threat to the Soviet state. At the age of 34, he was killed in a plane crash. Based on KGB files, restricted documents from Russian space authorities, and interviews with his friends and colleagues, this biography of the Russian cosmonaut reveals a man in turmoil: torn apart by powerful political pressures, fighting a losing battle against alcoholism and rebelling against the cruelties of a corrupt totalitarian regime. This reissued edition of STARMAN includes a new afterword that reflects on Gagarin’s legacy and celebrates the importance of his momentous expedition. JAMIE DORAN is an Irish/Scottish independent documentary filmmaker and former BBC producer. In conjunction with Piers Bizony, he directed and produced for BBC Television the 1998 biographical film about Gagarin, which was shown in more than 60 countries worldwide. PIERS BIZONY is a science journalist and space historian who writes for newspapers and magazines such as the Independent, BBC Focus and Wired. His award-winning book on Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ was described as ‘full of sparkling enthusiasm’ by New Scientist and ‘excellent, in every way worthy of Kubrick’s original precision-crafted vision’ by the Evening Standard. His most recent books include THE MAN WHO RAN THE MOON (Icon/Thunder’s Mouth, 2006), ATOM (Icon, 2007), HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN SPACESHIP (Portobello/Plume, 2008) and ONE GIANT LEAP: Apollo 11 Forty Years On (Aurum, 2009). Publisher: Bloomsbury (UK & US) (Editor: Nick Humphrey, UK) Publication: 4 April 2011 Length: 248 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, China (China Youth Press – simplified Chinese characters), Japan (Kawadeshobo), Lithuania (De Libris), Poland (Prószyński), Russia (Azbooka Atticus)
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THE DEVIL’S DERIVATIVES The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street… and Are Ready to Do It Again NICHOLAS DUNBAR We highly recommend reading this most serious account. The book is light years ahead of the lurid bestsellers on the crisis – Marc Roche, LE MONDE Well written and will grab the interest of financial professionals before the first time they have to turn a page – REUTERS A triumphant romp through a decade of financial mismanagement. A must-read – THE NATIONAL An intriguing and original analysis of the problems that Wall Street has been spreading to the world – MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW Nicholas Dunbar follows the first rule of good journalism: talk to everybody… As this book makes clear, the dark side of financial innovation is just getting darker – Frank Partnoy, University of San Diego School of Law A compelling book… Dunbar is a fine writer who combines a deep knowledge of finance with a great knack for storytelling – Edward Chancellor, author of CRUNCH TIME FOR CREDIT and DEVIL TAKE THE HINDMOST A bold book written by a hard-nosed journalist with a stiff backbone… At last, a book on the subject that shows true grit – Jules Kroll, founder of Kroll Inc., and chairman and cofounder of K2 Global Consulting
A compelling narrative about what went wrong with our financial system – and who’s to blame. From an award-winning journalist who has been covering the industry for more than a decade, THE DEVIL’S DERIVATIVES charts the untold story of modern financial innovation: how investment banks invented new financial products, how investors across the world were wooed into buying them, how regulators were seduced by the political rewards of easy credit and how speculators made a killing from the near-meltdown of the financial system. Nicholas Dunbar demystifies the revolution that briefly gave finance the same intellectual respectability as theoretical physics. He explains how bankers worldwide created a secret trilliondollar machine that delivered cheap mortgages to the masses and riches beyond dreams to the financial innovators. Fundamental to this saga is how ‘the people who hated to lose’ were persuaded to accept risk by ‘the people who loved to win’. Why did people come to trust and respect arcane financial tools? With whom were the bankers competing to assemble the basic components into increasingly intricate machines? How did this process achieve its own unstoppable momentum – ending in collapse, bailouts and a public outcry against the giants of finance? Provocative and intriguing, THE DEVIL’S DERIVATIVES sheds much-needed light on the forces that fuelled the most brutal economic downturn since the Great Depression. NICHOLAS DUNBAR was born in 1965. A columnist for the authoritative financial commentary website breakingviews.com, he is a former editor of Risk magazine and author of INVENTING MONEY (Wiley, 1999). In 2007, he won the State Street award for institutional financial journalism. He lives in London. His website is at www.nickdunbar.hitrefresh.co.uk. Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (UK & US) (Editor: Jacqueline Murphy) Publication: 12 July 2011 Length: 320 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Harvard Business Review Press), China (China Citic – simplified Chinese characters), Italy (EGEA), Japan (Kobunsha), Taiwan (Wealth Press – traditional Chinese characters)
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HOW INTELLIGENCE HAPPENS JOHN DUNCAN A wonderfully compact summary of brain architecture and function – WALL STREET JOURNAL Like getting into a gripping novel… The book is an invigorating read – SACRAMENTO BOOK REVIEW An elegant book… engaging and easily comprehensible without being simplistic – Wendy Johnson, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION A highly personal and fascinating account – Michael I. Posner, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Oregon A comprehensive account… offering a unique perspective and hypothesis – Earl K. Miller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology A timely, original and highly readable contribution – Nancy Kanwisher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology The experimental findings… are unexpected and arresting… rewarding for the lay reader – Charles F. Stevens, PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE BIOLOGY
From the 2012 winner of the prestigious Heineken Prize for Cognition Science, a firsthand account of his search for the biological basis of intelligence. Understanding how brains build intelligence is among the most fascinating challenges of modern science. How does the biological brain, a collection of billions of cells, enable us to do things no other species can do? John Duncan has spent 30 years studying the human brain, and in this book he tells the story of his hunt for the basic principles of human intelligence, behaviour and thought. Using results from classical studies of intelligence testing, from attempts to build computers that think, from studies of how minds change after brain damage, from modern discoveries of brain imaging and from groundbreaking recent research, Duncan synthesizes often difficult-to-understand information into a book that will appeal to scientific and popular readers alike. He explains how brains break down problems into useful, solvable parts, then assemble these parts into the complex mental processes of human thought and action. At the heart of the book is the quest for the seat of intelligence: the cerebral source of general intelligence. The author and his colleagues have identified just one brain region that seems to be at the core of IQ: a zone in the frontal lobes, just above the outer edges of the eyebrows. The region is important for planning and solving novel tasks, keeping many things in mind at once and screening out irrelevant information – and is revealing itself as a hitherto unknown window into human nature. Moving from the foundations of psychology, artificial intelligence and neuroscience to the latest scientific thinking, HOW INTELLIGENCE HAPPENS is for all those curious to understand what we mean by intelligence, how and why it happens and what this can tell us about ourselves. JOHN DUNCAN is assistant director of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge, honorary professor of cognitive neuroscience at the universities of Cambridge and Bangor, visiting professor at the University of Oxford, and fellow of the Royal Society and the British Academy. His work has been covered in the media worldwide, including the BBC, ABC News, The New York Times, Washington Post, Science and New Scientist. HOW INTELLIGENCE HAPPENS is his first book for a popular audience. For more details see www.howintelligencehappens.com. Publisher: Yale University Press (UK & US) (Editor: Jean Black) Publication: 26 October 2010 Length: 244 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Yale University Press), Japan (Hayakawa), Russia (Hippo/Kariera) 34
The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
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MINDFIELD How Brain Science is Changing Our World LONE FRANK A fascinating exploration of the most intriguing brain experiments so far this century… Her hesitant participation in experiments… along with brutally honest descriptions of the experts add a welcome dose of humour – NEW SCIENTIST Think that you know yourself? Think again. The coming neurorevolution will destroy your certainties – but maybe set you free. Arm yourself. Read this book – Armand Leroi, Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology, Imperial College London, author of MUTANTS Riveting. Lone Frank has selected the most intriguing issues currently engaging scientists and philosophers, and presented them in a way that will engage anyone who possesses the organ she writes about – Rita Carter, author of MAPPING THE MIND and MULTIPLICITY Does a great job of exploring the impending neurorevolution and sometimes scary consequences of neuro-technology – Susan Blackmore, BBC FOCUS
A comprehensive survey of the frontiers of modern neuroscience, interlacing fascinating accounts of the latest findings with witty irreverent interviews with leading researchers in their laboratories. From religious experience, moral sense and personal choice to subliminal advertising, lie-detection and self-control, the brain has become the focal point for all questions about human nature. Modern neuroscience is now going to the heart of what it means to be human, and beginning to have important social and political repercussions, forcing us to think afresh about who we really are, why we behave as we do and where we are going. MINDFIELD is the first book to document this coming age of ‘neurocentrism’. In it the award-winning science writer Lone Frank surveys how brain researchers are dissecting everything that makes us human and anchoring all sorts of phenomena we have previously considered incorporeal in soggy biology. She explores the influences these neuroscientific findings are having on society, reveals how this in turn is changing the structure and function of our brains, and speculates on what this cognitive revolution means for us all. LONE FRANK was born in 1966. She has a PhD in neurobiology and worked as a research scientist in the US biotech industry before becoming a journalist in 1997. Today she is an award-winning science writer and broadcaster based in Copenhagen. As well as writing for Denmark’s leading newspaper Weekendavisen, she contributes to Science, Nature and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Widely sought after as a speaker on science and society, she has been invited to talk at Harvard Medical School, the Library of Congress, the 2009 NeuroLeadership Summit in Los Angeles, London’s Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, TEDx Istanbul and the Sydney Writer’s Festival. She has also appeared on US National Public Radio’s ‘The Leonard Lopate Show’, ‘To The Best of Our Knowledge’ and ‘Radio Lab’ as well as Globosat television. She has written several bestselling books in Danish. MINDFIELD is the first to appear in English. Publisher: Oneworld (UK & US)* (Editor: Marsha Filion) Publication: 1 April 2009 Length: 320 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Oneworld), Denmark (Gyldendal), Netherlands (Maven), Norway (Spartacus), Sweden (Fri Tanke) *Reissued in paperback in June 2011 as THE NEUROTOURIST: Postcards from the Edge of Brain Science
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MY BEAUTIFUL GENOME Exposing Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time LONE FRANK Shortlisted for the 2012 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books Shortlisted for the 2013 Society of Biology General Book Award An excellent look into the postgenomic world – FINANCIAL TIMES A pin-sharp, lively memoir-cum-investigation... Frank’s discoveries make for some truly tingling moments... Absorbing – MAIL ON SUNDAY Covers some of the most interesting controversies in biology today… an enthralling read – NEW SCIENTIST I haven’t seen Lone Frank’s entire genome, but it’s obvious from the first page of MY BEAUTIFUL GENOME that she’s got the SKFF2 gene (Sharp as a Knife and Friggin’ Funny, Too). No decoding needed here: I love this book – Mary Roach, author of STIFF and PACKING FOR MARS Provocative, wryly humorous, illuminating, deeply personal – Frank Ryan, author of VIROLUTION
What can modern genetics tell us about our past, present and future? Is our destiny written in our genes? And if so, how can we read them? Genomics has hit a tipping point. Today a full genome sequence laying out your six billion DNA building blocks will set you back $10,000 and can be completed in a few months. Companies are now on the march towards reducing the costs to under $1,000. Walgreens, America’s largest drugstore chain, has begun to offer genetic tests to the masses. Within the next decade, all newborns will have their genome mapped and deciphered as a matter of routine. In MY BEAUTIFUL GENOME, the internationally acclaimed science writer Lone Frank adopts the mantle of an intrepid consumer to look at how this revolution is changing the way in which we view ourselves and live our lives. The possibilities of early detection and prevention of disease are tantalizing, she points out, as are the prospects for personalized drug treatment. Even characteristics such as personality and temperament are being redefined as subtle variations in our chromosomes. From ancestry tracing and genome sequencing to breast-cancer scanning and personality profiling, Frank describes not only the science and the scientists behind the testing but also how it feels to be at the receiving end of all this genetic information – as both consumer and research subject. Drawing on candid interviews and commentary and adding just a touch of self help, she aims to provide the first truly popular account of what this shiny new science means for the average punter. Laconic, witty and irreverent, MY BEAUTIFUL GENOME is set to be the essential sightseer’s guide to our newly revealed genetic terrain. LONE FRANK was born in 1966. She has a PhD in neurobiology and worked as a research scientist in the US biotech industry before becoming a journalist in 1997. Today she is an award-winning science writer and TV presenter based in Copenhagen. As well as writing for Denmark’s leading newspaper Weekendavisen, she contributes to such publications as Scientific American, Science and Nature. Her previous book was MINDFIELD, which was published by Oneworld in 2009 (republished in paperback in 2011 as THE NEUROTOURIST: Postcards from the Edge of Brain Science). Publisher: Oneworld (UK & US) (Editor: Robin Dennis) Publication: 1 September 2011 (UK)/16 October 2011 (US) Length: 320 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Oneworld), China (Shanghai Scientific and Technological Education Publishing House), Denmark (Gyldendal), Germany (Hanser), Netherlands (Maven), Norway (Danor), Russia (Marco Polo), Sweden (Fri Tanke) 36
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FLAT EARTH The History of an Infamous Idea CHRISTINE GARWOOD An energetic, all-inclusive and amusing account of man’s impressive capacity for self-delusion. Every creationist should read it – Steve Jones, author of THE LANGUAGE OF THE GENES Quirky and highly entertaining… elicits plentiful laughter and astonishment – SUNDAY TIMES Highly entertaining and often hilarious – SUNDAY TELEGRAPH Impressive research – NEW SCIENTIST A glorious romp around the world of Flat Earthism –DAILY EXPRESS Wonderful . . . dispassionate and understanding – FINANCIAL TIMES A wonderfully rich archive of tracts and correspondence – FORTEAN TIMES
Social and intellectual history at its best – and strangest. Contrary to popular belief, fostered in countless school classrooms the world over, Christopher Columbus did not discover that the world was round. The idea of the world as a sphere had been widely accepted in scientific, philosophical and even religious circles from as early as the fourth century BC. Yet, bizarrely, it was not until the supposedly more rational nineteenth century that the notion that the world might actually be flat really took hold. Even more bizarrely, it persists to this day, despite Apollo missions and widely publicized pictures of the decidedly spherical Earth from space. Meticulously researched and compellingly readable, Christine Garwood provides the first definitive account of this infamous idea. She explodes the myths surrounding Columbus and the battles between science and religion, explores the wilder shores of flat-Earth belief and establishes, without doubt, that the world is most emphatically not flat. From Samuel ‘Parallax’ Rowbotham and his slick advocacy of Zetetic – or free-thinking – astronomy to Darwin’s friend and collaborator Alfred Russel Wallace, and his wager with the flat-Earther John Hampden; from Lady Blount’s earnest pamphleteering in the flat-Earth’s cause to Wilbur Glenn Voliva’s belief that there was no such thing as gravity; from the English Flat Earth Society’s campaign against the Apollo missions to the work of sister organizations in America and Canada, FLAT EARTH is a remarkable study of strange obsessions and sometimes stranger individuals. CHRISTINE GARWOOD has a BA in history and a PhD in the history of science. She was formerly a research fellow at the Open University, where she was principal archivist of the Wallace Project. The author of several articles on Alfred Russel Wallace and on Victorian and Edwardian science and society more generally, she now works as a freelance heritage consultant and a lecturer in history at the University of Hertfordshire. Publisher: Macmillan (UK)/Thomas Dunne (US) (Editor: Georgina Morley, UK) Publication: 20 April 2007 (UK)/5 August 2008 (US) Length: 436 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Greece (Travlos)
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THE IMPROBABILITY PRINCIPLE How To Guarantee Winning the Lottery, Why Lightning Does Strike Twice and Why Other Incredibly Unlikely Things Keep Happening DAVID HAND An enlightening book – Jennifer Ouellette, THE NEW YORK TIMES Very engaging… should be, in all probability, required reading for us all – John A. Adams, WASHINGTON POST An ingenious introduction to probability that mixes counterintuitive anecdotes with easily digestible doses of statistics… Hand offers much food for thought – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Lively and lucid… an intensely useful (as well as a remarkably entertaining) book… It can transform the way you read the newspaper, that’s for sure – SALON Enlightening and entertaining… an erudite but utterly unpretentious guide… ably and assuredly demystifies an ordinarily intimidating subject – KIRKUS REVIEWS In my experience, it is very rare to find a book that is both erudite and entertaining. Yet THE IMPROBABILITY PRINCIPLE is such a book. Surely this cannot be due to chance alone! – Hal R. Varian, chief economist, Google, and Emeritus Professor, University of California, Berkeley An elegant, astoundingly clear and enjoyable combination of subtle statistical thinking and real-world events – Andrew Dilnot, coauthor of THE NUMBERS GAME
A penetrating look at why extraordinarily rare events happen so often – at why, in the words of the British mathematician J. E. Littlewood, we should expect to experience miracles 'at the rate of a about one a month'. At first glance, it sounds like a contradiction or paradox. If things are incredibly unlikely, how can they happen often, and why should we expect them to happen? Now, in a highly original work of synthesis aimed squarely at the general public, the eminent statistician David Hand answers these questions by weaving together various strands of probability into a unified explanation that he calls the improbability principle. It is a book that will appeal not only to those who love stories about startling coincidences and extraordinarily rare events, but also to those who are interested in how a single bold idea links areas as diverse as gambling, the weather, airline disasters, creative writing and the origin of life and even the Universe. It's a book that will change your perspective on how the world works – and tell you what the Bible code and Shakespeare have in common, how to win the lottery, why Apple's song shuffling was made less random to seem more random, and why lightning does strike twice. DAVID HAND is an emeritus professor of mathematics and senior research investigator at Imperial College London, a former president of the Royal Statistical Society and chief scientific advisor to Winton Capital Management, Europe’s most successful algorithmic trading hedge fund. He is the author of seven books including STATISTICS: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008), coauthor or editor/coeditor of several academic titles, has published some 300 scientific papers and written pieces for publications ranging from Mathematics Today to the Guardian. Publisher: Transworld (UK)/Scientific American/Farrar, Straus & Giroux (US) (Editors: Doug Young, UK/Amanda Moon, US) Publication: 27/11 February 2014 Length: 352 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Companhia das Letras), China (Publishing House of Electronics Industry-Beijing Media Electronic Information), Germany (Beck), Italy (Rizzoli), Japan (Hayakawa), Korea (Gilbut), Netherlands (AmboAnthos), Poland (Foksal), Russia (AST), Taiwan (Locus), Turkey (April) 38
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WOLVES SIMON INGS Ings has managed to create a convincing present that is, at the same time, as saturated with the comfy patina of the 1970s as Instagram and as prescient as any futurologist – now that Ballard is gone – is likely to get – Toby Litt, GUARDIAN Ings’s return to full-throttle SF is a cause for celebration. His gift for edgy slipstream fiction makes comparisons with both J. G. Ballard and William Gibson apposite. Bleak, brutal and uncompromising – Jonathan Wright, SFX One of the key books of next year… a serious, ambitious and discomforting novel – Christopher Priest
A defining novel about augmented reality by one of the UK’s leading novelists. At school, Connie and Micky were best friends. Together they cooked up all the ways the world could end. Years later, Michel imagines apocalypses for a living, and lives inside fantasies of the Fall. Conrad works in advertising, spinning aspirational dreams out of imaginary light. Their reunion promises to reveal who killed Conrad’s mother. It’s also going to make them a lot of money, wreck Michel’s marriage and maybe – just maybe – bring about the collapse of Western civilization. Based on research in the booming field of augmented reality, WOLVES is a surreal whodunnit about what happens when unhappy men get their hands on powerful media. Part crime novel, part comingof-age tale and part intellectual thriller, it should appeal to readers of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and Michel Faber’s Under the Skin – an informed, atmospheric cutting-edge tale of the near future. Augmented reality is an appropriate and timely topic for Simon Ings because he was recently appointed the inaugural editor of Arc, a new science fiction magazine from the New Scientist stable. He was also among the first UK writers to report on the technology, interviewing in the 1990s one of its pioneers for the UK edition of Wired. Now, Ings claims, augmented reality’s time has come – you can hear him talking with Nick Harkaway and others about its role in the digital future on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’ (http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/stw/stw_20120507-1030a.mp3). SIMON INGS is a novelist and science writer living in London. He was educated at King’s College London and Birkbeck College, London. He has written a number of novels, the most recent of which are THE WEIGHT OF NUMBERS (Atlantic, 2006) and DEAD WATER (Corvus/Atlantic, 2010), short prose and articles for national newspapers. His first nonfiction book, THE EYE: A Natural History (Bloomsbury, 2007), delved into the science of vision, exploring the chemistry, physics and biology of the eye. He is now working on a history of Soviet science under Stalin (due from Faber in 2014). Publisher: Gollancz (Editor: Simon Spanton) Publication: Spring 2014 Length: 304 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Gollancz)
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HEAVEN’S BANKERS Inside the Hidden World of Islamic Finance HARRIS IRFAN One of Grant Thornton’s 10 Best Business Books of 2014 His message ought to be recited by bankers of every creed – WALL STREET JOURNAL Weaves together personal anecdotes with explanations of some of the crucial aspects of the subject – and its controversies… a superb introduction to a fascinating subject – LOS ANGELES TIMES Irfan tells the story of high jinks and deceitful behaviour with great relish…. The debate between scholars attacking and defending Islamic finance is particularly illuminating – INDEPENDENT Irfan uses his own professional and personal experiences to weave together an accessible and interesting story – TELEGRAPH
The first book aimed at a general audience to tell the story of the development of the Islamic finance industry from the perspective of someone deeply embedded in it. Islamic finance today is a trillion-dollar industry. It is fast becoming the main way in which large projects get funded globally (such as buildings, aircraft, shipping) and many financial analysts expect Islamic banking assets worldwide to double within five years. This is because the system is seen as equitable to all parties and has built-in transparency – so it’s much in demand despite today’s gloomy global economic climate. Harris Irfan has been at the centre of this world for around 15 years. Here he provides an authoritative yet entertaining account of how a system of finance invented in the seventh-century Middle East is fast taking over the world of modern banking. Drawing on his firsthand relationships with some of the world’s leading bankers, scholars and lawyers, he provides a warts-and-all description of the industry, debunks some myths about Islamic finance and asks whether today’s Islamic finance industry is true to the fundamental principles of a faith committed to social justice. Was for example the recent Islamic bond issued by Goldman Sachs to fund its conventional trading activities a legitimate use of Islamic investors’ funds or a cynical exercise in preying on people’s religious insecurities by offering a conventional, interest-bearing bond by another name? In issuing fatwas, or edicts, on Sharia-compliant financial products, were the religious scholars complicit in this alleged subterfuge or were they duped by the bankers of Goldman Sachs? Has the industry forgotten its basic premise of ethical finance and learnt instead how to replicate the excesses of the conventional banking industry? Irfan is in an ideal position to explain to the non-expert reader the mechanics of the most complex and innovative financial products. With his strong yet informed opinions about the ethical practices and direction of the industry, this is a book that should appeal not only to all those fascinated by the business and finance worlds but also to readers with a more general interest in moral philosophy, politics and religion. HARRIS IRFAN is one of the world’s leading Islamic finance bankers. He is the founder and managing partner of Cordoba Capital, an independent Islamic finance advisory firm, and was formerly global head of Islamic finance at the Barclays Group. Before working at Barclays, he was a cofounder of Deutsche Bank’s world-leading Islamic finance team. He has represented various institutions to media organizations such as the BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, Reuters and the Financial Times. Publisher: Constable/Overlook (UK) (Editor: Andreas Campomar, UK) Publication: 19 June 2014 Length: 352 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Korea (Cheomnetworks) 40
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WHAT DOESN’T KILL US The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth STEPHEN JOSEPH Sounds a hopeful note. Suffering need not destroy – Terry Waite CBE A thorough and common-sense look at the psychology of survival – NATURE Informative and thoughtful – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Accessible for all readers… Well worth the time to read, digest, and utilize in one’s daily life – NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS A sure-to-be-controversial, provocative challenge to prevailing wisdom on how to deal with stress – KIRKUS REVIEWS A compelling, honest and hopeful argument in favour of Nietzsche’s dictum – Jennifer O’Connell, SUNDAY BUSINESS POST (Ireland) Fascinating… should appeal to anyone interested in the human condition – Richard Bentall, Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Liverpool Insightful and entertaining… An invaluable guide – Elaine Fox, Professor of Psychology, University of Essex A book of wisdom... psychology at its best: honest, hopeful, helpful, and based on sound serious research – Robert J. Wicks, Professor, Loyola University Maryland, author of BOUNCE: Living the Resilient Life Literate and compelling – John Harvey, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Iowa Beautifully written – Mick Cooper, Professor of Counselling, University of Strathclyde Convincingly challenging, highly enlightening and compulsively readable – Elaine Iljon Foreman, author of FLY AWAY FEAR: Overcoming Your Fear of Flying
What would you do if life as you knew it were to fall apart? And how would you recover? Surprisingly, psychologists studying the effects of trauma have discovered it can benefit us in remarkable ways... For the past 20 years, the pioneering psychologist Stephen Joseph has worked with survivors of trauma. His studies have yielded a startling discovery: that a wide range of traumatic events – from illness, divorce, separation, assault and bereavement to accidents, natural disasters and terrorism – can act as catalysts for positive change. Boldly challenging the conventional wisdom about trauma and its aftermath, Joseph demonstrates that rather than ruining one’s life, a traumatic event can actually improve it. Drawing on the wisdom of ancient philosophers, the insights of evolutionary biologists and the optimism of positive psychologists, WHAT DOESN’T KILL US reveals how all of us can navigate change and adversity – traumatic or otherwise – to find new meaning, purpose and direction in life. STEPHEN JOSEPH is a professor of psychology, health and social care at the University of Nottingham, UK, where he is the cluster co-ordinator of counselling and psychotherapy training. He has published more than two hundred academic papers, numerous chapters and nine academic books, and often comments in the media on topical events relating to his work.. Publisher: Piatkus/Little, Brown (UK)/BasicBooks (US) (Editors: Anne Lawrance, UK/Lara Heimert, US) Publication: 2 February 2012 (UK)/1 November 2011 (US) Length: 288 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, China (Cheers Publishing Company – simplified Chinese characters), Germany (Springer Spektrum), Japan (Chikuma Shobo), Korea (Hakjisa), Netherlands (Archipel), Russia (Hippo/Kariera) 41
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EMPIRE OF THE STARS Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes ARTHUR I. MILLER Shortlisted for the 2006 Aventis Prize for Science Books Remarkable… a story that needed to be told – Sir Roger Penrose A fascinating book – SIr Martin Rees, SUNDAY TIMES Fascinating… a quite brilliant account… based on meticulous and thoughtful research – Graham Farmelo, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
Ever since the evocative term was coined in 1967, black holes have assumed an almost mystical appeal for the public. This is the first book to tell the story of their discovery – a remarkable tale of friendship, rivalry and betrayal. In August 1930, the 20-year-old Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Chandra) calculated that certain stars could end their lives by collapsing indefinitely to a point of infinite density. But Sir Arthur Eddington, the grand-old man of British astronomy, ridiculed the idea at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1935. Chandra abandoned his work and emigrated to the US. Although his discovery was eventually recognized with a Nobel Prize in 1983, the episode damaged Chandra professionally and personally and set back astrophysics for 40 years. EMPIRE OF THE STARS teases out the major implications of this infamous event, setting it against the backdrop of the turbulent growth of astrophysics. As such, it also follows the rise of the two great theories of twentieth-century science – relativity and quantum mechanics – which meet head on in black holes. In the ensuing clash of personalities, epochs and nationalities, the book reveals the deep-seated psychological and philosophical prejudices at work in the acceptance and rejection of new scientific ideas: prejudices that create resistance to the idea of black holes even today. ARTHUR I. MILLER is emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including EINSTEIN, PICASSO (BasicBooks, 2001). An experienced broadcaster, lecturer and biographer, he is particularly interested in the relationship between science and creativity and noted for writing engagingly about complex social and intellectual dramas, weaving the personal with the scientific to produce page-turners that read like novels. His most recent book is DECIPHERING THE COSMIC NUMBER (Norton, 2009). His website is at www.arthurimiller.com. Publisher: Little, Brown (UK)/Houghton Mifflin (US) (Editors: Tim Whiting, UK/Amanda Cook, US) Publication: 17 March 2005 (UK)/25 April 2005 (US) Length: 400 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, France (Jean-Claude Lattes), Germany (DVA), Greece (Travlos), Italy (Codice), Japan (Soshisha), Korea (Prunsoop), Poland (Albatros), Russia (Azbooka Atticus)
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DECIPHERING THE COSMIC NUMBER The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung ARTHUR I. MILLER Arthur I. Miller is a master at capturing the intersection of creativity and intelligence – Walter Isaacson, President and CEO, Aspen Institute, author of EINSTEIN Gives you a sense of how scientists’ minds work: by leaps of intuition that are quite as irrational and excitable as any poet’s or psychologist’s – Sam Leith, DAILY MAIL A fascinating and unlikely story… brisk and accessible – Gino Segrè, Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, author of FAUST IN COPENHAGEN [Miller] writes in the smooth and engaging voice of an experienced teacher, conveying an infectious sense of wonder – Sophia Carroll, BOOKSLUT.COM
The story of the bizarre friendship between two equally brilliant yet very different men who together ventured into the ‘no-man’s land between physics and psychology’. This is the story of two mavericks: Wolfgang Pauli, the eminent physicist who – unlike his peers – was fascinated by the inner reaches of his own psyche and not afraid to dabble in the occult; and Carl Jung, the famous psychoanalyst who was sure that science held answers to some of the questions that tormented him. Both made enormous and lasting contributions to their fields. But in their many conversations over dinner and wine at Jung’s Gothic mansion on the shores of Lake Zurich, they went much further, striking sparks off each other as they explored the peculiar middle ground between their two subjects. Jung spent many hours analysing the dream imagery of Pauli, for the great scientist’s unconventional and wild life had brought him to the brink of a mental breakdown. Pauli was obsessed by how he had made his greatest discovery, feeling that he had tapped into something beyond physics – archetypal numbers that hinted at a deeper meaning to the Universe. In recounting this extraordinary meeting of minds, the historian of science Arthur I. Miller encompasses many of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, as well as taking readers back to the roots of modern science, steeped as they are in mysticism and ancient history. He explores how physicists discover fundamental concepts, probes the relationship between mathematics, the mind and the real world, and reveals how one man’s discoveries pushed him beyond the assumptions of scientific rationalism into what Jung described as ‘the no-man’s land between Physics and the Psychology of the Unconscious… the most fascinating yet the darkest hunting ground of our times’. ARTHUR I. MILLER is emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London. He is the author of several acclaimed books including EINSTEIN, PICASSO (BasicBooks, 2001) and EMPIRE OF THE STARS (Little, Brown/Houghton Mifflin, 2005; shortlisted for the 2006 Aventis Prize for Science Books). An experienced broadcaster, lecturer and biographer, he is particularly interested in the relationship between science and creativity, and noted for writing engagingly about complex social and intellectual dramas, weaving the personal with the scientific to produce page-turners that read like novels. His website is at www.arthurimiller.com. Publisher: Norton (US & UK)* (Editor: Angela von der Lippe) Publication: 27 April 2009 (US)/5 June 2009 (UK) Length: 368 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Norton), Germany (DVA), Greece (Travlos), Italy (RCS), Japan (Soshisha) *Published in paperback as 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession 43
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COLLIDING WORLDS How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art ARTHUR I. MILLER This is a book specially for people who go to Tate Modern and can’t get the hang of it – Paul Johnson, SPECTATOR An encyclopedic survey…. Miller’s grasp of the scene is impressive –Jascha Hoffman, THE NEW YORK TIMES Arthur I. Miller understands the intersection of art and science better than anyone writing today. In COLLIDING WORLDS, he brilliantly helps us expand our definitions of art and science while encouraging us to appreciate how both involve an intuitive feel for the beauty of the unseen – Walter Isaacson, author of EINSTEIN and STEVE JOBS Modern discoveries reveal an extraordinary range of concepts and images – from the subnuclear world, via robots and computers, to the cosmos. These have nourished the creativity of artists. Arthur Miller has the rare intellectual range to address this theme – and that’s what he’s done in this fine book – Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal Miller eloquently chronicles the story of artsci in brief vignettes of the lives and works of the individuals working at the intersections of these disciplines – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review
In the tradition of Alex Ross’s THE REST IS NOISE, an acknowledged authority on creativity in art and science and a distinguished biographer and historian of science tells the parallel stories of modern art and science. In recent decades, an exciting new art movement has emerged in which artists illuminate the latest advances in science. Some of their provocative creations – a live rabbit implanted with the fluorescent gene of a jellyfish, a gigantic glass-and-chrome sculpture of the Big Bang itself – can be seen in traditional art museums and magazines, while others are being made by leading designers at Pixar, Google’s Creative Lab and the MIT Media Lab. The author of several celebrated books on popular science and creativity, Arthur I. Miller takes readers on a wild journey to explore this new frontier. From the movement’s origins a century ago – when Einstein shaped Cubism and X rays affected fine photography – to the latest discoveries of biotechnology, cosmology and quantum physics, Miller shows how today’s artists and designers are producing work at the cutting edge of science. ARTHUR I. MILLER is emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London. He has published many critically acclaimed books, including EINSTEIN, PICASSO, EMPIRE OF THE STARS and DECIPHERING THE COSMIC NUMBER, and writes for publications such as New Scientist and The New York Times. An experienced broadcaster, lecturer and biographer, he is particularly interested in the relationship between science and creativity and noted for writing engagingly about complex social and intellectual dramas, weaving the personal with the scientific to produce page-turners that read like novels. His website is at www.arthurimiller.com. Publisher: Norton (UK & US) (Editors: Angela von der Lippe (acquiring editor)/Matt Weiland) Publication: 16 June 2014 Length: 352 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Norton), Greece (Travlos), Korea (Munhakdongne)
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London Book Fair 2015
BACKLIST TITLE
INCOMING! Or: Why We Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Meteorite TED NIELD Opens a window on the night sky and the marvels that streak across it – GUARDIAN Fascinating… rich in detail, informative and entertaining – NATURE It is hard not to be engaged by this richly explored and expertly explained subject – FINANCIAL TIMES A scrupulously researched and cleverly assembled gem – Simon Winchester, author of THE MAP THAT CHANGED THE WORLD and ATLANTIC A fascinating account – Richard Fortey, author of LIFE, THE EARTH and SURVIVORS Nobody writes better on matters geological than Ted Nield… a scientific page-turner of the best kind, rich with personal insights and anecdote – John Gribbin, author of IN SEARCH OF SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT A witty and lively account not just of the perils of asteroids but also of their many mysteries. An entertaining story, delightfully told – Gabrielle Walker, author of SNOWBALL EARTH, THE HOT TOPIC and AN OCEAN OF AIR
An introduction to the science and history of the falling sky that challenges the orthodox view that meteorite strikes are always bad news for life on Earth. Astonishing new research suggests that 470 million years ago, a stupendous collision in the Asteroid Belt (whose debris is still falling today) bombarded the Earth with meteorites of all sizes. A revolutionary idea is emerging that the resulting ecological disturbance may have been responsible for the single greatest increase in biological diversity since the origin of complex life – the previously unexplained Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event. Introducing a wealth of extraordinary new research and the fascinating characters behind it, Ted Nield challenges the orthodox view that meteorite strikes are always bad news for life on Earth. He argues that one of the most widely known scientific theories – that dinosaurs were wiped out by a strike 65 million years ago – isn’t the whole picture, and that the causes of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction (of which the dinosaurs’ demise was a part) were much more varied and complex. Meteorites have been the stuff of legend throughout human history, interpreted as omens of doom or objects of power. But only in the eighteenth century, when the study of falling space debris became a science, were meteorites used to unlock the mysteries of our universe. INCOMING! traces the history of meteorites from the first recorded strike to the video recordings made routinely today, showing how our interpretations have varied according to the age in which the meteorites fell, and how meteorite impacts were given fresh urgency with the advent of the atom bomb. TED NIELD holds a doctorate in geology and works for the Geological Society of London as editor of the monthly magazine Geoscientist. A former chair of the Association of British Science Writers, he is a fellow of the Geological Society and a member of the Meteoritical Society. His first book, SUPERCONTINENT, was published in 2007 (Granta/Harvard University Press). He lives in London. Publisher: Granta (UK)/Lyons Press (US)* (Editor: Bella Lacey, UK) Publication: 6 January 2011/18 October 2011 Length: 272 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US *Published in the US as THE FALLEN SKY
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The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
BACKLIST TITLE
UNDERLANDS A Personal Journey Through Britain’s Lost Landscape TED NIELD Geology is a noble instrument of inquiry and conviction…. In the hands of Ted Nield it edges its way towards art – Jan Morris, LITERARY REVIEW A poetic remembrance of forgotten time and lost perspectives – Iain Finlayson, THE TIMES Brilliantly explores [how] much of the character and history of our country is written in the rocks – Richard Fortey, author of LIFE and THE EARTH This is an entirely novel, and powerfully illuminating, look at the world literally below our feet and in front of our eyes. Read it and your vision will improve – Bill McKibben, author of THE END OF NATURE and OIL AND HONEY
An acclaimed geology writer reflects on the man-made holes, scars and spoil-heaps that litter our environment while seeking to restore our respect for the planet’s past and its accumulated wealth. Journeying across the British Isles, the geologist and science writer Ted Nield unearths the myriad ways in which the rocks beneath our feet shape our lives. At one time, our roads, our buildings, our gravestones and our monuments were all built from rock mined locally, our cities powered by coal from Welsh mines, and our lamps lit with paraffin from Scottish shale. Today our mines are gone, our buildings are no longer local, and the flow of stone now travels from East to West. Nield journeys across Britain’s buried landscape – from the small Welsh village of his ancestors to Swansea, Aberdeen, Surrey and Dorset – unearthing the ties between stone and place and what their loss might mean for us today. TED NIELD holds a doctorate in geology and works for the Geological Society of London as editor of the monthly magazine Geoscientist. A former chair of the Association of British Science Writers, he is a fellow of the Geological Society and a member of the Meteoritical Society. His previous books are SUPERCONTINENT (Granta/Harvard University Press, 2007) and INCOMING! (Granta/Lyons, 2011). He lives in London. Publisher: Granta (Editor: Bella Lacey) Publication: 1 May 2014 Length: 288 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Granta)
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The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
BACKLIST TITLE
REINVENTING DISCOVERY The New Era of Networked Science MICHAEL NIELSEN FINANCIAL TIMES nonfiction favourite in science 2011 BOSTON GLOBE’s best book on science 2011 A thought-provoking call to arms… will frame serious discussion and inspire wild, disruptive ideas for the next decade – Chris Lintott, NATURE Captivating and enlightening – Jonathan Bodnar, LIBRARY JOURNAL A survey, an analysis, a how-to, and a harbinger of greater things to come – Robert Schaefer, NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS Nuanced, intelligent descriptions… Highly recommended! – Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media The most compelling manifesto yet for the transformative power of networked science – James Wilsdon, FINANCIAL TIMES Timely and important – Jack Stilgoe, GUARDIAN The best synthesis I’ve seen of this new kind of science... a delightfully written, thought-provoking book – Carl Zimmer, author of A PLANET OF VIRUSES and THE TANGLED BANK: An Introduction to Evolution This is the book on how networks will drive a revolution in scientific discovery; definitely recommended – Tyler Cowen, author of THE GREAT STAGNATION An unparalleled account of how new tools for collaboration are transforming scientific practice – Clay Shirky, author of HERE COMES EVERYBODY and COGNITIVE SURPLUS
Science, but not as we know it... We are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about something much more fundamental: how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world. Science is being done harder, faster and smarter. In REINVENTING DISCOVERY, Michael Nielsen tells the exciting story of an unprecedented new era of networked science. We learn, for example, how mathematicians in the Polymath Project are spontaneously coming together to collaborate online, tackling and rapidly demolishing previously unsolved problems. We learn how 250,000 amateur astronomers are working together in a project called Galaxy Zoo to understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and how they are making astonishing discoveries, including an entirely new kind of galaxy. These efforts are just a small part of the larger story told in this book – the story of how scientists are using the internet to dramatically expand our problem-solving ability and increase our combined brainpower. MICHAEL NIELSEN is one of the pioneers of quantum computing. Born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1974, he is an essayist, speaker and advocate of open science. He lives in Toronto, Canada. His blog is at www.michaelnielsen.org/blog. Publisher: Princeton University Press (UK & US) (Editor: Ingrid Gnerlich) Publication: 21 October 2011 Length: 280 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Princeton University Press), China (W E Time DigiTech), Italy (Einaudi), Japan (Kinokuniya), Lithuania (Eugrimas), Russia (AST)
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The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
BACKLIST TITLE
THE SCIENCE OF DOCTOR WHO PAUL PARSONS Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke There should be a copy in the glove compartment of every Tardis – Colin Baker, the sixth Doctor Snappy, lively, journalistic… imaginative too – NATURE As instructive as it is entertaining – Sir Patrick Moore, THE TIMES
Have you ever wondered if a sonic screwdriver could really work? How Cybermen make little Cybermen? Or where the toilets are on the Tardis? ‘Doctor Who’ arrived on British television screens in 1963. Since then, across light-years and through millennia, the journeys of the Time Lord have shown us alien worlds, strange life-forms, futuristic technology and mind-bending cosmic phenomenon. Viewers cowered terrified of Daleks, were amazed with the wonders of time travel and sped through black holes into other universes and new dimensions. The breadth and imagination of the Doctor’s adventures have made the show one of science fiction’s truly monumental success stories. Paul Parsons explains the scientific reality behind the fiction in this highly acclaimed unofficial guide. PAUL PARSONS is the former editor of the monthly science and technology magazine BBC Focus, and has contributed popular science articles to publications ranging from the Daily Telegraph to FHM. He holds a DPhil in cosmology and is a lifelong worshipper of ‘Doctor Who’. His most recent books are SCIENCE 1001: Absolutely Everything that Matters in Science, HOW TO DESTROY THE UNIVERSE: And 34 Other Really Interesting Uses of Physics and SCIENCE: In 100 Key Breakthroughs, (Quercus, 2010/2011). As well as writing, he works as a trading solutions analyst at Ladbrokes. Publisher: Icon (UK)/Johns Hopkins University Press (US) (Editor: Simon Flynn, UK) Publication: 30 March 2006 (UK)/5 May 2010 (US) Length: 342 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US
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The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
BACKLIST TITLE
LIKE A VIRGIN How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex AARATHI PRASAD The female equivalent of Brain Cox... Entertaining and provocative – Stylist.co.uk, Hottest Debuts of 2012 Thoroughly fascinating and feisty – SUNDAY TIMES As much fun as you’ll ever have thinking about sex without working up a sweat – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Thought-provoking stuff, accessibly written – BOOKSELLER A fascinating book – MATT RIDLEY, author of THE RATIONAL OPTIMIST In the future, girls will do it for themselves, boys – those who are left – will just be toys. Cheer or weep, but read this book – ARMAND LEROI, Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology, Imperial College London A scintillating cocktail... a fascinating, topical and hugely readable investigation – METRO Prasad’s humorous and anecdote-laden approach sweeps the reader along – BBC FOCUS
Now that we have the competent hand of science in our lives, will girls still need men? Sexual evolution is a slippery business. Like all mammals, we humans seem to have been left no choice in the matter: even though it is costly, inefficient and dangerous, if we want to reproduce we simply have to have sex. Yet most human cultures tell the tale of a maiden who gives birth untouched by a man; and in the wild there are plenty of creatures – such as turkeys, komodo dragons, sharks and the ‘Jesus Christ’ lizard (which walks on water, too) – that take various approaches to reproducing without sex. In LIKE A VIRGIN, Aarathi Prasad looks at reproduction without sex in animals and explores why evolution hasn’t made it an option for humans – yet. In doing so, she provides a novel survey of the mysteries of evolutionary biology, sex and reproduction – past, present and future. It’s a remarkable story that ranges across Greek mythology, natural history, agriculture, conservation and medicine; takes in some of the most exciting areas of developmental genetics and molecular biology that other popular science books largely ignore; and is packed full of a cast of amazing characters, be they obscure animals or eccentric scientists such as the respected geneticist Dr Helen Spurway who in the UK in the 1950s unwittingly sparked a nationwide search for a virgin mother. There is now a plethora of strategies being developed that could keep our species going in a world of embellished sex: the creation of artificial eggs and sperm from bone marrow, labs-on-chips on which eggs are fertilized, silicone wombs (where fetuses can spend their full nine months) and even research on reproduction in space. What’s more, we are finally starting to understand what genetic modifications are needed to allow the creation of women who could have babies without having sex. AARATHI PRASAD is a biologist and science writer. She has appeared on TV and radio programmes, including as presenter of Channel 4’s controversial ‘Is It Better to Be Mixed Race?’ and ‘Brave New World with Stephen Hawking’, as well as BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Quest for Virgin Birth’, and written for Wired, the Guardian, and many other publications. Previously a cancer genetics researcher at Imperial College London, she subsequently moved into the worlds of science communication and policy, in areas including passage of the human-animal chimaera stem-cell bill in the UK Parliament. A single mother, she lives in London. Her website is at www.aarathiprasad.com. Publisher: Oneworld (UK & US) (Editor: Robin Dennis) Publication: 16 August 2012 Length: 276 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Oneworld), Arabic (Arab Scientific), Bulgaria (ROI Communication), Italy (Bollati Boringhieri), Japan (East Press), Netherlands (De Bezige Bij) 49
The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
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THE END OF PLAGUES The Global Battle Against Infectious Disease JOHN RHODES Engaging and expansive – HISTORY TODAY Engaging and accessible... offers valuable, nuanced information to readers interested in public health policies and individual health decisions – LIBRARY JOURNAL A wonderful account of the end of smallpox and the man who deserves full credit for devising one of the safest and most effective means of prevention – KIRKUS REVIEWS Fascinating… well worth a read for anyone interested in the history of medicine – LSE REVIEW OF BOOKS A fascinating book – COSMOS, Australia’s premier science magazine An optimistic history of vaccinations and their underlying science… especially impressive given the difficulty of making immunology accessible to the lay reader – TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION Should be read by politicians and the general public to gain an understanding of the challenges of overcoming infectious diseases – NATURE MEDICINE
An eminent immunologist vividly chronicles the discovery of vaccination, the tortuous path leading to the eradication of smallpox, the challenge of aids, the dawn of a new war on parasitic diseases such as malaria, and the imminent defeat of polio. One of the greatest stories in science is about to reach a dramatic climax. Yet this is a story that until now has never been told. In the next few years, the World Health Organization and its partners will announce the global eradication of polio, the second human disease to be eliminated from the world. Two mysteries are intimately entwined throughout this remarkable story: the true nature of ‘germs’ and how the body fights them – the nature offers immunity. Spanning more than three centuries, THE END OF PLAGUES weaves together the discovery of vaccination, the birth and growth of immunology, and the global eradication of infectious disease into a single compelling narrative. From Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination in 1796, to the early nineteenth-century foundling voyages in which chains of orphans, vaccinated one by one, were sent to colonies around the globe, to the development of polio vaccines by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin in the first half of the twentieth century and the stockpiling of smallpox as a biological weapon in the Cold War, THE END OF PLAGUES describes how vaccination grew to be one of the most effective medical measures of all time, the personalities bound up in this monumental achievement, and what the future holds for the control of infectious disease. It is a tempestuous story of science, politics, economics and big business, peppered with crises, cliffhangers and sudden shifts of fortune, with jealousy, intrigue and conflict taking centre stage. It is a story that affects the lives of all of us – one in which we are all intimately involved, as individuals and as global citizens. JOHN RHODES was educated at University College London and has held research fellowships at the US National Institutes of Health and the University of Cambridge before joining the Wellcome Foundation in London. From 2001 to 2007 he was director of strategy in immunology at GlaxoSmithKline, promoting international research on vaccines and immunotherapy. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, has served on UK government international vaccine missions and published numerous articles in leading journals such as Nature, Science and the Lancet. Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (UK & US) (Editors: Luba Ostashevsky (acquiring editor)/Elisabeth Dyssegaard) Publication: 24 September 2013 Length: 256 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Palgrave Macmillan) 50
The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
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MASSIVE The Hunt for the God Particle IAN SAMPLE With a new final chapter reporting on the announcement of the discovery of a Higgs-like particle at CERN on 4 July 2012 Shortlisted for the 2011 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books Shows a keen eye for the personal equation, even while narrating large swatches of physics history… Sample’s exciting, easy-to-read narrative captures the collaboration, and competition, among the theorists – WALL STREET JOURNAL A lively account… fine reportage… makes clear the sheer achievement of the scientists who have built the LHC – Graham Farmelo, GUARDIAN A fast-moving narrative… a great scientific adventure – Frank Close, BBC FOCUS A compelling work of popular science, full of mind-boggling ideas and a real sense of the excitement of scientific discovery – GUARDIAN Wondering what all the hype over the Higgs boson is about? Look no further… A hundred anecdotes bring the towering figures of particle physics and their key discoveries to life – NEW SCIENTIST When the Higgs boson is discovered, it will be front page news, and this is the book that sets the stage. Ian Sample mixes cutting-edge science with behind-the-scenes stories to paint a compelling picture of one of modern science’s greatest quests – Sean Carroll, author of FROM ETERNITY TO HERE
The most up-to-date and readable account so far of the greatest race science has ever seen. In the early 1960s, three groups of physicists, working independently in different countries, stumbled on an idea that would change physics and fuel the imagination of scientists for decades. That idea was the ‘God particle’, or Higgs boson. To find this elementary particle would be to finally understand the origins of mass – the last building block of life itself. Weaving together the personal stories and intense rivalries of the teams of scientists searching for the particle, MASSIVE is a tale of grand ambition, transatlantic competition, clashing egos and occasionally spectacular failures. From the giant particle colliders built to further the scientists’ quest to the political fallout of budget blowouts and debates about whether the search might destroy the Universe, it is an epic story of imagination, personal ambition, subatomic exploration and global significance. Drawing on his unprecedented access to Peter Higgs, the scientist after whom the particle is named, the award-winning science writer Ian Sample chronicles the science, culture and politics behind the multinational and multibillion-dollar quest to solve the mystery of mass. Until now, the story of the search has never been told. But with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research near Geneva, we may be on the cusp of discovering the God particle and with it the very origin of mass. Whichever way you look at it, this story is massive. IAN SAMPLE has a PhD in biomedical science from Queen Mary, University of London. A science correspondent at the Guardian, he has won several journalism prizes, including two from the Association of British Science Writers, which named him investigative journalist of the year in 2005. He joined the Guardian in 2003 after four years as a reporter, feature writer and news editor at New Scientist. Born in Oxfordshire in 1970, he now lives in London. His website is at www.iansample.com. Publisher: Virgin (UK)/BasicBooks (US) (Editors: Ed Faulkner, UK/Lara Heimert, US) Publication: 17 June 2010 (UK)/2 November 2010 (US) Length: 320 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Greece (Travlos), Israel (Books in the Attic), Italy (Il Saggiatore), Japan (Kodansha), Poland (Prószyński), Russia (Azbooka Atticus), Turkey (Arkadas) 51
The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
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THE POPPY A Cultural History from Ancient Egypt to Flanders Fields to Afghanastan NICHOLAS J. SAUNDERS Saunders movingly presents the poppy in its beauty, its tragedy and its healing power as a potent symbol every year in our national and global remembrance of loss – SAGA
Our most renowned archaeologist of the First World War unravels the tangled history of the beloved, iconic flower. In the aftermath of the horrific trench warfare of the First World War, the poppy – sprouting across the killing fields of France and Belgium, then immortalized in John McCrae’s moving poem – became a worldwide icon. Yet the poppy has a longer history, as the telltale sign of human cultivation of the land, of the ravages of war and of the desire to escape the earthly realm through inspired Romantic opium dreams or the grim reality of morphine drips. This is a story spanning three thousand years, from the ancient Egyptian fights over prized medicinal potions to the addicted veterans returning home from the American Civil War, from the British political machinations during the Opium Wars with China to the struggle to end Afghanistan’s tribal narcotics trade. Through it all, there stands the transformative poppy. Nicholas J. Saunders brings us the definitive history of this ever-enduring but humble flower of the fields, a story that is at turns tragic, eye-opening and, most essentially, life-affirming – a gift to us all. NICHOLAS J. SAUNDERS is honorary reader in material culture in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. He is the world’s leading authority on the anthropology and archaeology of the First World War. His exhibition of trench art was the centrepiece of the ‘In Flanders Fields’ Museum in Ypres, Belgium. The author of more than twenty books and dozens of academic monographs (including ALEXANDER’S TOMB (BasicBooks, 2007)), he has appeared in numerous documentaries for the BBC and National Geographic. Publisher: Oneworld (Editor: Robin Dennis) Publication: 17 October 2013 Length: 320 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
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The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
BACKLIST TITLE
NATURE’S NETHER REGIONS What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds and Beasts Tell Us About Evolution, Biodiversity and Ourselves MENNO SCHILTHUIZEN From the very first page, Menno Schilthuizen makes us both laugh and think about the bewildering genital variation in the animal kingdom…. An exhilarating and most informative read! – Frans de Waal, author of THE BONOBO AND THE ATHEIST A remarkable book... succeeds in finding exactly the right tone…. Schilthuizen’s entertaining work reminds us not to take ‘the mechanics of sexual intercourse’ for granted – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY A provocative voyage on the ‘vast ocean of sexual function beyond the quiet backwater that we humans find ourselves in’ – KIRKUS REVIEWS Schilthuizen balances the silly and the serious [and] tours some of nature's weirdest inventions – SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN A deep dive into the science of genitals, one that comes interspersed with a selection of the finest, and most scientifically-accurate, sex jokes – Lex Berko, VICE’S MOTHERBOARD A closer look between the legs (or, in the case of the Australian velvet worm, on the head) to explore what the sex lives of various creatures can teach us about reproduction, diversity and human sexuality…. I actually missed my stop on the train this morning because I was engrossed in the chapter about duck sex – Lindsay Abrams, SALON
A popular account of the biology of genitalia, illustrating their remarkable variation in size, shape and skills and what this eye-opening sexual cornucopia reveals about animal behaviour. The penis has been reinvented more often than the wheel, and some of the reinventions are pretty quirky: for example, a typical damselfly penis has a balloon – an inflatable bulb – and two horns at the tip, plus long bristles down the sides. This great diversity in sexual organs illustrates one of the few rules of biology: that if species are very similar in appearance, but there is only one good way to tell them apart, that difference is almost invariably in the shape of the genitalia. In the past two decades biologists have discovered that genitals – as tools for passing on genes to future generations – are at the forefront of evolution. Now Menno Schilthuizen describes this revolutionary work and the important new perspectives it opens up on evolution, development and behaviour. He shows us how the amazing diversity of form and function in female and male genitalia – including human ones – is the result of the unexpected twists of evolution; why, in sex more than anything else, humans are the newbies where outlandish shapes and bizarre behaviours are concerned; and what this eye-popping sexual cornucopia reveals about human nature. MENNO SCHILTHUIZEN was born in 1965 and is an evolutionary biologist based at the Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity ‘Naturalist’ in Leiden. The institution has a public museum visited by 300,000 people annually and a 37-million-specimen collection (the fifth largest in the world). In addition to his research science (which concentrates on the evolution of land snails and beetles), he has written regularly for New Scientist, Natural History, Science and ScienceNOW, as well as for Dutch and Malaysian national newspapers. His homepage is at science.naturalis.nl/schilthuizen. Publisher: Viking/Penguin US (Editors: Wendy Wolf/Melanie Tortoroli) Publication: 1 May 2014 Length: 256 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Penguin US), China (Shanghai Guo Yue Cultural and Creative Co. Ltd), France (Flammarion), Germany (DTV), Italy (Bollati Boringhieri/Mauri Spagnol), Japan (Hayakawa), Netherlands (Atlas Contact)
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The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
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DOOMSDAY MEN The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon P. D. SMITH Smith’s dynamic, riveting narrative reveals details of people, places and events that are rarely covered in textbooks, bringing to life not just scientists like Robert Oppenheimer and Leo Szilard but the horrors of chemical and atomic warfare… Captivating and thoroughly referenced, this chronicle should interest a wide audience, from science and history buffs to armchair politicos – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Important – John Gribbin, LITERARY REVIEW Readable and entertaining – Tibor Fischer, DAILY TELEGRAPH
The riveting, untold story of the doomsday bomb – the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. In 1950, the Hungarian-born scientist Leo Szilard made a dramatic announcement on American radio: science was on the verge of creating a doomsday bomb. For the first time in history, mankind realized that he had within his grasp a truly God-like power, the ability to destroy life itself. The shockwave from this statement reverberated across the following decade and beyond. If detonated, Szilard’s doomsday device – a huge cobalt-clad H-bomb – would pollute the atmosphere with radioactivity and end all life on Earth. The scientific creators of such apocalyptic weapons had transformed the laws of nature into instruments of mass destruction and for many people in the Cold War there was little to distinguish real scientists from that ‘fictional master of megadeath’, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. Indeed, as P. D. Smith’s chilling account shows, the dream of the superweapon begins in popular culture. This is a story that cannot be told without the iconic films and fictions that portray our deadly fascination with superweapons, from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds to Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Weaving together biography, science and art, DOOMSDAY MEN creates a compelling history of physics in the twentieth century, focusing on the long-lasting search for ever-more destructive weapons, from the development of chemical warfare in First World War Germany through the arms race of the Cold War. As it forcefully shows, the culture that grew up in the shadow of this frightening weapon has helped shape all our contemporary anxieties about science, technology and the future. P. D. SMITH is an independent researcher and writer. He is the author of a short biography of Einstein, and an academic study of science in German literature, both of which were very well received. He has taught at University College London where he is an honorary research fellow in the Department of Science and Technology Studies; writes a biweekly piece for the Guardian in the books section, as well as reviewing for other national publications such as The Times, Independent and Times Literary Supplement; and is a guest contributor to the influential website 3quarksdaily.com. He lives in Winchester, England, and his website is at www.peterdsmith.com. Publisher: Allen Lane (UK)/St Martin’s Press (US) (Editor: John Turney, UK) Publication: 31 May/10 December 2007 Length: 576 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Companhia das Letras)
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The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
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THE GAP The Science Of What Separates Us From Other Animals THOMAS SUDDENDORF Beautifully written, well researched and thought provoking – Jane Goodall A rewarding, thought-provoking journey… Suddendorf cuts an entertaining swath through a thicket of research studies on primate cognition… consistently interesting and informative but at times delightfully playful… a welcome addition to the growing literature explaining science to the intelligent layperson – WALL STREET JOURNAL Suddendorf is a skilful guide through ‘the gap’ between animal and human minds. He describes clever animal experiments and observational work with lucidity – BBC FOCUS A compelling synthesis of the current literature on human evolution and comparative psychology to address the big questions of our species’ uniqueness – TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION Admirably clear and cogent… a fine introduction… deserves a wide audience – FINANCIAL TIMES Suddendorf brilliantly fills in the gap with telling detail and acute analysis – THE TIMES (UK) Fascinating… enjoyable… would make a marvellous gift – NATURE This is a thought-provoking book that gives new meaning to the phrase ‘know thyself’ – NEW SCIENTIST
The definitive account of what we do and what we don’t know about the differences between animal and human minds. It has been said that every psychologist must at some point fill in the following sentence: ‘The human being is the only animal that _____.’ Yet despite the many claims for human uniqueness, there is seemingly little consensus about what sets our minds apart from those of other animals. In THE GAP, Thomas Suddendorf puts the record straight by providing the first complete account of exactly what makes human minds different from any others, and how this difference arose. Drawing on two decades of research on apes, children and human evolution, he surveys all the main areas often cited as uniquely human (language, intelligence, morality, culture, ‘theory of mind’ and ‘mental time travel’); proposes that just two innovations account for why our minds appear so distinct in all these areas – our open-ended ability to imagine and reflect on different situations and our insatiable drive to link our minds together; and argues that this gap is becoming wider not just because we are becoming smarter but also because we are making ourselves appear more special by reducing the capacities of our closest living relatives – by causing their extinction. Weaving together the latest findings in animal behaviour, child development, anthropology, psychology, physiology, genetics, neuroscience and more, THE GAP is an original, provocative and authoritative book that will change the way we think about our place in nature. It is essential reading for anyone interested in what we really are, where we come from and where we are going – and our continuing relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom. THOMAS SUDDENDORF was born in 1967 in Germany and is a full professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia. His 1997 paper on mental time travel is one of the most cited articles in psychology. Publisher: BasicBooks (UK & US) (Editors: Tisse Takagi/T. J. Kelleher) Publication: 28 November 2013 Length: 352 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Basic), China (Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House), Germany (Berlin), Japan (Hakuyosha), Spain (Ediciones Destino) 55
The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2015
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HOW TO MAKE A ZOMBIE The Real Life (and Death) Science of Reanimation and Mind Control FRANK SWAIN A NEW STATESMAN Summer Reading Pick Swain serves up a ghoulish treat… Packed full of bizarre research and jaw-dropping tales, his book succeeds in being simultaneously entertaining, informative and slightly unnerving – Alex Boese, bestselling author of ELEPHANTS ON ACID and ELECTRIFIED SHEEP Delightfully macabre… Swain has pulled off a masterful feat in this broad-ranging and fascinating book. Braiiiins! – Lewis Dartnell, Research Fellow, University of Leicester, and author of LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE Gripping... reads like a nonfiction version of a Stephen King novel – you’ll stay up all night reading it with goose bumps and the lights on – Michael Shermer, NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author of THE BELIEVING BRAIN and SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN columnist
Quite apart from being surrounded by zombies, are we zombies ourselves? From commonplace zombie animals in your back garden to the military’s manipulation of human minds, HOW TO MAKE A ZOMBIE explores our hundred-year scientific quest to control the bodies and minds of fellow humans. It is packed full of previously untold stories from the most incredible annals of scientific literature: animals brought back to life; unsuspecting citizens dosed with zombifying drugs by secret agents; Soviet experiments in which organs are kept alive when separated from the body; microbes that can cause insanity; parasites that can manipulate their hosts in startling ways, forcing unnatural behaviours, sex changes and suicide; the burgeoning black market in cadavers; how to design the perfect plague; and how, despite our supposed intelligence, we all remain extraordinarily susceptible to manipulation. In the book, the acclaimed science writer Frank Swain plots a course into the highly unsettling territory where human mind control is orchestrated from within by tiny pathogens, and worse still, by nothing at all – where the architecture of both the brain and the world around it interferes with rational thought. In this way it ties together disparate subjects from the trypanosome parasites of South America to interrogation techniques in Iraq, from psychologists reducing crime through urban design in Manchester to doctors treating schizophrenia with antibiotics in Ethiopia. It reveals the advances in medicine and technology that are making Hollywood fiction a reality. And it deals with the questions raised by these advances: When is someone truly dead? What is the legal status of someone who has died but lives on? And if parasites can bend minds, encouraging impulsive or even violent behaviour, then could those infected be acquitted in a court of law? Entertaining, eye-opening and mind-bending in its own right, HOW TO MAKE A ZOMBIE not only reminds us that we can be taken over by other organisms, but also points out that such a thing might have already happened without our knowledge. Perhaps what we consider our own identity is a chorus of voices, only one of which is human... FRANK SWAIN was born in 1982. He is the founder of SciencePunk, the popular SEED ScienceBlogs site devoted to the weird and wonderful fringes of science. A regular contributor to media including Wired and the Guardian, he has a history of climbing buildings, managing burlesque shows, and generally being a force for good – and the scientific method. Publisher: Oneworld (UK & US) (Editor: Robin Dennis) Publication: 6 June 2013 Status: Edited manuscript Length: 256 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Oneworld), Germany (btb/Random House), Japan (Intershift), Netherlands (Paradigma), Sweden (Fri Tanke) 56
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THE EDGE OF THE SKY All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is ROBERTO TROTTA A poetic primer on the universe… one part children’s book for grownups, one part imaginative exercise in economical yet lyrical language, and wholly wonderful – Maria Popova, BRAIN PICKINGS A simplified but by no means simplistic introduction to modern cosmology and physics…. An entertaining exercise… for those student-people who like to ponder the All-There-Is while testing the always-inadequate limits of language – KIRKUS REVIEWS The spare writing is elegant, even poetic. Literary experiments tend either to work or to flail with awkwardness; in Trotta’s hands, this beautifully written book… soars – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review A surprisingly clear, and often poetic, primer on such complicated topics as the big bang, dark energy and the possibility of multiverses – SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Inventive, enjoyable and thought-provoking – NATURE
Imagine a short book presenting the latest discoveries and outstanding mysteries in modern cosmology — but written using only the most common thousand words in English, based on ten million works of contemporary fiction... THE EDGE OF THE SKY does just that (the only exceptions being names of people). From the Big Bang to planets in other solar systems, from dark matter to dark energy, from the destiny of the Universe to its fundamental reality, from the work of Hubble to Einstein, it explores the most important cosmological ideas through the eyes of a fictional female scientist hunting for dark matter with one of the biggest telescopes on Earth. Written by an acclaimed astrophysicist, THE EDGE OF THE SKY shows that it is possible to explain complex, abstract ideas using only common words that everybody can understand. At the same time, with its necessarily metaphorical, almost poetic style, the book can be enjoyed by novices and experts alike, with readers stimulated to interpret the figurative language, which ranges from the whimsical to the profound. Thus ‘the Universe’ becomes ‘the All-there-is’, a ‘telescope’ becomes ‘BigSeer’, ‘particle collisions’ become ‘matter drops hugging', and so on. Because of its simple building blocks, the book can be understood on a literal level by anyone, but it requires readers to make a conscious imaginative effort to decrypt the symbolism at a deeper level. Scientific detail and technical jargon take a back seat, while the evocative imagery is brought to the fore to illuminate the science in the simplest yet most accurate way possible. The result is a surprising, entertaining and entrancing little book for all – a unique blend of literary experimentation and science popularization that brings science back to the human scale and offers a startling new perspective on the Universe and our place in it. ROBERTO TROTTA is a senior lecturer in astrophysics at Imperial College London. An experienced science communicator, he has given hundreds of public lectures, published dozens of articles in national magazines and appeared several times on radio and television. He also works as a scientific consultant for museums, writers, filmmakers, architects and artists, providing the help and support they need to make their artistic creations scientifically sound. In collaboration with artists and architects, he has created artwork that has been exhibited in prominent international venues, including the Venice Biennale. His outreach work has been recognized by several awards, including the Lord Kelvin Award of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He is 36 years old and lives in London. For further information see www.robertotrotta.com Publisher: BasicBooks (US & UK) (Editor: T. J. Kelleher) Publication: 23 September 2014 Length: 144 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Basic), Germany (Beck), Korea (Kyobo Book Centre) 57
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SELECTED Why Some People Lead, Why Others Follow and Why It Matters MARK VAN VUGT & ANJANA AHUJA The book’s practical suggestions are worth taking seriously – NATURE A really novel book on one of the most important human topics of our time… well written, innovative and fun! – Cary L. Cooper, Distinguished Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health, Lancaster University Management School An intriguing and subtle account of the clash that results when old instincts meet new conditions – Matt Ridley, author of THE RATIONAL OPTIMIST A fascinating and eminently readable book, full of information you will want to share and arguments you will want to debate – Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive, Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce The authors appear to be blazing a new trail… NATURALLY SELECTED comes closer than any previous leadership theory to [providing] an ‘integrative theory of leadership’ – POLITICS AND THE LIFE SCIENCES
We are all leaders or followers – or both – and we can recognize leadership in almost every area of life. But what makes a good, bad or even outstanding leader? Fusing psychology, business, history and current affairs, SELECTED examines how and why leadership has evolved over tens of thousands of years, and presents a compelling new hypothesis: that the slow pace of evolution means there is a mismatch between modern leadership and the kind of leadership that our Stone Age brains are still wired for. Combining academic authority with journalistic style, and full of fascinating examples spanning politics, commerce, sport and culture, the authors explain why taller political candidates usually win, why middle managers are so disliked and why we don’t like working for huge companies. This extraordinary book explores how the psychology of leadership affects us all – and what we can do about it. MARK VAN VUGT is professor of social and organizational psychology at the VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands. A leading authority on the evolutionary origins of leadership, he has worked with major figures in evolutionary science, including David Buss, David Sloan Wilson, Robert Hogan and Robin Dunbar. His research has been reported all over the world in both print and broadcast media. He has been featured in The Times and New Scientist, and talked about his work on BBC Radio 4 and CNN and ABC television. He regularly gives lectures to research departments and business schools in both the UK and the US. ANJANA AHUJA worked for 16 years at The Times, where she was a feature writer and science columnist. She has a PhD in space physics from Imperial College London. She has been an advisor to the Royal Society, the British Science Association and the British Council. She has also written for Elle, Science in Parliament and the Oldie, and is a columnist for Prospect. She makes regular radio and television appearances as a science commentator. Now a freelance writer, she lives in London. Publisher: Profile (UK)/HarperCollins (US)* (Editor: Daniel Crew, UK) Publication: 26 August 2010 (UK)/18 January 2011 (US) Length: 272 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Pensamento – Portuguese), Canada (Random House), Indonesia (KPG), Indonesia (Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia), Japan (Hayakawa), Korea (Wooongjin Think Big Co.), Netherlands (Bruna), Russia (Hippo/Kariera), Turkey (Everest Yayinlari) *Published in the US as NATURALLY SELECTED: The Evolutionary Science of Leadership 58
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THE EVOLUTIONARY WORLD How Adaptation Explains Everything from Seashells to Civilization GEERAT J. VERMEIJ Superb writing… first-rate science… wonderful… This fabulous book deserves widespread attention by specialists and lay readers alike – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review From why grass evolved to why insects do not inhabit the sea, Vermeij answers questions most of us have forgotten even to ask – Matt Ridley, author of GENOME A bold, brash, and magisterial account… sure to stir the pot... a compelling story to read, to debate and to enlighten – Neil Shubin, author of YOUR INNER FISH A wonderfully rich and wise book… Vermeij is also a refreshingly original thinker. His insights… are striking and thought-provoking. An illuminating book – Nick Lane, author of LIFE ASCENDING [Vermeij’s] naturalistic bent is coupled with literary flair – DALLAS MORNING NEWS A transcendent view of evolution as adaptation – KIRKUS REVIEWS An absorbing joy to read – BOOKLIST
One of the master naturalists of our time celebrates the explanatory power of evolution. Evolution has outgrown its original home in biology and geology. It is a concept that organizes, explains and predicts a multitude of unconnected facts and phenomena. Adaptation plays a part in the development not only of new species but of human civilization, too. By understanding how evolutionary theory applies to areas such as our economic system, our preparation for catastrophes and even the development of communities, we can learn not just how these systems work but also what challenges lie ahead. Blind since the age of three, Geerat J. Vermeij has become renowned for his unique ability to recognize details in the natural world that other scientists would never have noticed. In this book, he presents a new argument for evolution’s broader importance. He explores similarities between genomes and languages, the contrasting natural economies of islands and continents, the emergence and importance of human values, the long-range effects of global warming and the perils of monopoly. He also shows that the lessons of evolution have implications for education, our system of laws and economic growth. THE EVOLUTIONARY WORLD makes a fascinating argument about the broad-reaching influence and importance of evolution. It offers a way for us to understand and work with evolution’s principles so that we can devise better solutions for our own lives, society and the environment around us. GEERAT J. VERMEIJ is distinguished professor of geology at the University of California at Davis. Born in the Netherlands, he came to the US with his family in 1955. He has received the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences and was honoured as a MacArthur Fellow. He has published more than two hundred scientific papers and five books and served as editor of Evolution and Paleobiology, the top journals in their fields. He also has a world-class collection of shells and is an intrepid field naturalist and explorer. Publisher: Thomas Dunne/St Martin’s Press (UK & US) (Editor: Peter Joseph) Publication: 23 November 2010 Length: 336 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Thomas Dunne), China (Zhe Jiang University Press – simplified Chinese characters), Israel (Books in the Attic), Netherlands (Nieuw Amsterdam)
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A PORTRAIT OF THE BRAIN ADAM ZEMAN A remarkable achievement... neurology has found a fine advocate – LANCET A book which, like the brain itself, is artfully arranged… Zeman’s portrait of the brain is more even than a portrait of Man: it is a portrait of the world he perceives too – THE ECONOMIST A fascinating tale about what we do know about the brain, and what happens when it goes wrong… Zeman comes across as a lucid explainer of scientific complexity, but also as a humane practitioner – FINANCIAL TIMES An erudite discourse on brain components… The science is clear, and the stories of patients are suspenseful and gripping – NATURE Zeman’s enthusiasm for neurology and his fascination with the workings of the nervous system come across clearly – BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL
One of the best short introductions to the human brain, written by a clinical psychologist with expertise in neuroscience and philosophy. In this compelling book, the neurologist Adam Zeman tells the stories of patients with a variety of neurological disorders, some familiar (epilepsy, chronic fatigue, stroke, memory loss) and others relatively mysterious (narcolepsy, chronic déjà vu, compulsive fidgeting, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease). Chapter by chapter, he reveals the various levels of the brain, from the atom to the mind, and explores what happens when workings at each level go awry – be they its genes, proteins, neuronal networks or lobes. He requires of his readers no special knowledge of medicine or science, yet he takes us to the very frontiers of current scientific knowledge and elucidates the workings of the brain in astonishing detail. A PORTRAIT OF THE BRAIN weaves together fascinating case histories, clear accounts of concepts and discoveries in neuroscience, and an intimate view of the suspense, excitement, fun and angst that colour a neurologist’s days. Zeman also considers what the brain’s behaviour and misbehaviour can tell us about the human self as physical system, living creature and conscious mind. In a final chapter, he reflects on the place of the mind in nature. On every page he both entertains and informs, and readers will find themselves pondering the enigmas of brain and mind long after closing the covers of this elegant and erudite volume. ADAM ZEMAN is professor of cognitive and behavioural neurology, Peninsula Medical School, Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry, Exeter, UK. He is the author of CONSCIOUSNESS: A User’s Guide (Yale University Press, 2003). Publisher: Yale University Press (UK & US) (Editor: Heather McCallum) Publication: 5 February 2007 Length: 246 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Yale University Press), Korea (Chiho), Spain (Ediciones de Intervición Cultural)
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SCIENCE FACTORY CLIENTS & PROJECTS Asterisks indicate world rights sales not detailed in the rights list. For further information please contact the publishers directly. WEL rights, world English language rights ANJANA AHUJA Science Writer and Journalist, UK SELECTED (Profile/HarperCollins – in US as NATURALLY SELECTED) ANIL ANANTHASWAMY Science Writer; Consultant, New Scientist, US/India THE EDGE OF PHYSICS (Duckworth/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE (Dutton/Penguin US) – WEL THODORIS ANDRIOPOULOS Mathematics Teacher, Anatolia College Thessaloniki; Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth, Greece WHO KILLED PROFESSOR X? (Springer, UK & US) – WEL JIM BAGGOTT Science Writer, UK ATOMIC (Icon/Pegasus – in US as THE FIRST WAR OF PHYSICS) FAREWELL TO REALITY (Constable/Pegasus) DAVID BAINBRIDGE Zoologist; Director of Studies in Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge, UK *TEENAGERS (Portobello) *MIDDLE-AGE (Portobello) CURVOLOGY (Portobello/Overlook) – translation rights, Portobello JESSE BERING Psychologist, Science Writer and Columnist, US THE BELIEF INSTINCT (Nicholas Brealey – in UK as THE GOD INSTINCT/Norton) *WHY IS THE PENIS SHAPED LIKE THAT? (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus & Giroux) *PERV: The Surprising Science of Sexual Deviance (Scientific American/FSG) LEE BILLINGS Science Writer, US FIVE BILLION YEARS OF SOLITUDE (Current/Penguin US) – WEL PIERS BIZONY Science Writer and Space Historian, UK THE MAN WHO RAN THE MOON (Icon/Thunder’s Mouth) *ATOM (Icon) – world rights, Icon *HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN SPACESHIP (Portobello/Plume) *THE SCIENCE GUIDE (Quercus) – world rights, Quercus *THE SEARCH FOR ALIENS: A Rough Guide to Life on Other Worlds (Rough Guides/Penguin UK) STARMAN (with Jamie Doran) – 50th anniversary edition (Bloomsbury, UK & US) DANIEL BOR Psychologist and Science Writer; Visiting Scientist, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, UK; Research Scientist, Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, UK *RAVENOUS FOR WISDOM (BasicBooks, UK & US) DENNIS BRAY Biologist/Fellow of the Royal Society; Emeritus Professor, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge, UK WETWARE (Yale University Press, UK & US) DANIEL CLERY European News Editor, Science, UK A PIECE OF THE SUN (Duckworth/Overlook)
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MATTHEW COBB Biologist, Historian, Writer; Professor of Zoology and Associate Dean for Social Responsibility, University of Manchester, UK THE EGG AND SPERM RACE (Simon & Schuster/Bloomsbury – in US as GENERATION) THE RESISTANCE (Simon & Schuster) ELEVEN DAYS IN AUGUST (Simon & Schuster) LIFE’S GREATEST SECRET: The Story of the Race to Crack the Genetic Code (Profile/BasicBooks) ENRICO COEN Plant Biologist/Fellow of the Royal Society; Department of Cell & Developmental Biology, John Innes Centre, UK FROM CELLS TO CIVILIZATIONS (Princeton University Press, UK & US) MICHAEL C. CORBALLIS Psychologist; Professor of Psychology, University of Auckland, New Zealand *THE RECURSIVE MIND (Princeton University Press, UK & US) OUTSPOKEN (University of Chicago Press) – WEL TREVOR COX Acoustic Engineer and Science Broadcaster; Former President of the Institute of Acoustics; Professor of Acoustic Engineering, Salford University, UK SONIC WONDERLAND (Bodley Head/Norton) SETH DARLING Climate and Energy Researcher, Center for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne National Laboratory; Fellow, Institute for Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago, US HOW TO CHANGE MINDS ABOUT OUR CHANGING CLIMATE (The Experiment) – WEL NICHOLAS DUNBAR Finance Editor and Journalist, UK THE DEVIL’S DERIVATIVES (Harvard Business School Press, UK & US) JOHN DUNCAN Psychologist/Fellow of the Royal Society; Assistant Director, MRC Cognition and Brain Science Unit, University of Cambridge, UK HOW INTELLIGENCE HAPPENS (Yale University Press, UK & US) GRAHAM EASTON General Practitioner, Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners, and Senior Clinical Teaching Fellow at Imperial College Medical School, London, UK THE APPOINTMENT (Robinson/Little, Brown (UK)) RICHARD ELWES Popular Mathematics Writer; Visiting Fellow, University of Leeds, UK *MATHEMATICS 1001 (Quercus) *HOW TO BUILD A BRAIN (Quercus) *MATHS HANDBOOK (Quercus) *MATHS IN 100 KEY DISCOVERIES (Quercus) *50 MORE MATHS IDEAS YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW (Quercus) GEORGINA FERRY Science Writer and Biographer, UK ROUGH MAGIC: Shakespeare’s World of Science (Bloomsbury UK) – WEL LONE FRANK Science Writer and Broadcaster, Denmark MINDFIELD (Oneworld, UK & US – republished in 2011 as THE NEUROTOURIST) MY BEAUTIFUL GENOME (Oneworld, UK & US) MARIANNE FREIBERGER Maths Writer; Editor of Plus Magazine, UK *NUMERICON (Quercus) CHRISTINE GARWOOD Freelance Heritage Consultant; Lecturer, University of Hertfordshire, UK FLAT EARTH (Macmillan/Thomas Dunne)
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DAVID HAND Statistician/Former President of the Royal Statistical Society; Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Senior Research Investigator, Imperial College London; Chief Scientific Advisor, Winton Capital Management, UK THE IMPROBABILITY PRINCIPLE (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, US; Transworld, UK) BOB HOLMES Science Writer and New Scientist Correspondent, Canada FLAVOUR (WH Allen/Random House (UK)/Norton (US)) SIMON INGS Science Writer and Novelist, UK *THE WEIGHT OF NUMBERS (Atlantic/Grove Atlantic) – world rights, Atlantic *THE EYE (Bloomsbury/Norton) – world rights, Bloomsbury *DEAD WATER (Atlantic) *RUSSIAN DOLLS (Faber) WOLVES (Gollancz) – WEL HARRIS IRFAN Founder and Managing Partner, Cordoba Capital; Former Global Head of Islamic Finance, Barclays Group; Cofounder of Deutsche Bank’s Islamic Finance Team, Dubai HEAVEN’S BANKERS (Constable/Overlook) STEPHEN JOSEPH Psychologist and Psychiatrist; Professor of Psychology, Health and Social Care, University of Nottingham, UK, WHAT DOESN’T KILL US (Little, Brown/BasicBooks) GENUINE (Piatkus/Little, Brown (UK)) JAMES KINGSLAND Science and Medical Journalist, UK SIDDHARTHA’S BRAIN (Robinson/Little, Brown (UK)/HarperCollins (US)) ADAM KUCHARSKI Science Writer; Mathematics and Epidemiology Researcher, Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK THE PERFECT BET (Profile/BasicBooks) EHSAN MASOOD Science Writer, Journalist and Broadcaster; Editor, Research Fortnight and Research Europe; Former Editor on Nature and New Scientist; Former Director of Communications, LEAD International, UK *SCIENCE AND ISLAM (Icon) THE GREAT INVENTION: GDP and the Making and Unmaking of the Modern World (publisher to be confirmed) ARTHUR I. MILLER Historian of Science; Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, University College London, UK EMPIRE OF THE STARS (Little, Brown/Houghton Mifflin) DECIPHERING THE COSMIC NUMBER (Norton, US & UK) COLLIDING WORLDS: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Art and Science (Norton, US & UK) MARK MIODOWNIK Materials Scientist and Science Communicator/Presenter; Professor of Materials and Society, and Director of the Institute of Making, University College London, UK *STUFF MATTERS (Viking/Penguin (UK)/Harcourt Houghton Mifflin (US)) – word rights, Penguin UK SAMER NASHEF Consultant Cardiac Surgeon, Papworth Hospital, Cambridge; Clinical Tutor, University of Cambridge, UK THE NAKED SURGEON (Scribe) TED NIELD Geology Writer; Editor, Geoscientist magazine, and Science and Communications Officer, Geological Society of London, UK INCOMING! (Granta/Lyons Press – in US as THE FALLING SKY) UNDERLANDS (Granta) – WEL MICHAEL NIELSEN Physicist, Innovator, Science Writer, Canada REINVENTING DISCOVERY: How Online Tools Are Transforming Science (Princeton University Press, UK & US) 63
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PAUL PARSONS Science Writer; Trading Solutions Analyst, Ladbrokes; Former Editor, BBC Focus, UK THE SCIENCE OF DOCTOR WHO (Icon/Johns Hopkins University Press) *SCIENCE 1001 (Quercus) *HOW TO DESTROY THE UNIVERSE: And 34 Other Really Interesting Uses of Physics (Quercus) *SCIENCE: In 100 Key Breakthroughs (Quercus) *THE ROUGH GUIDE TO SURVIVING THE END OF THE WORLD (Rough Guides/Penguin UK) *THE PERIODIC TABLE (Quercus) *3-MINUTE STEPHEN HAWKING (Ivy Press) AARATHI PRASAD Biology Writer, Advisor, Science Communication and Natural Resources, British Council, UK LIKE A VIRGIN (Oneworld, UK & US) *INDIAN MEDICINE (Profile) JOHN RHODES Biologist and Science Historian; Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists; Former Director of Strategy in Immunology, GlaxoSmithKline, UK THE END OF PLAGUES (Palgrave Macmillan, UK & US) ANGELA SAINI Science Writer and Broadcaster, UK *GEEK NATION: A Journey Through the New India (Hodder) IAN SAMPLE Science Correspondent, Guardian, UK MASSIVE (Virgin/BasicBooks) – WEL rights, Virgin NICHOLAS J. SAUNDERS Archaeologist; Honorary Reader in Material Culture, Department of Anthropology, University College London, UK *ALEXANDER’S TOMB (BasicBooks) THE POPPY (Oneworld, UK) MENNO SCHILTHUIZEN Evolutionary Biologist, Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity (’Naturalist’), Leiden, Netherlands NATURE’S NETHER REGIONS (Viking/Penguin UK & US) DOUG SISTERSON Senior Manager, Argonne National Laboratory for the US Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility, US HOW TO CHANGE MINDS ABOUT OUR CHANGING CLIMATE (The Experiment) – WEL P. D. SMITH Independent Researcher and Writer; Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London, UK DOOMSDAY MEN (Allen Lane/Penguin Press (UK)/St Martin’s (US)) *CITY (Bloomsbury, UK & US) – world rights, Bloomsbury UK *WATCHING THE DETECTIVES (Bloomsbury, UK & US) – world rights, Bloomsbury UK TOM STAFFORD Psychologist; Lecture in Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK *THE ROUGH GUIDE BOOK OF BRAIN TRAINING (Rough Guides/Penguin UK) IAN STEWART Mathematician; Popular Science and Science Fiction Writer; Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Digital Media Fellow, University of Warwick, UK *LETTERS TO A YOUNG MATHEMATICIAN (BasicBooks, UK & US) *WHY BEAUTY IS TRUTH (Basic, UK & US) *TAMING THE INFINITE (Quercus) *PROFESSOR STEWART’S CABINET OF MATHEMATICAL CURIOSITIES (Profile/Basic) – world rights, Profile *PROFESSOR STEWART’S HOARD OF MATHEMATICAL TREASURES (Profile/Basic) – world rights, Profile *PROFESSOR STEWART’S CASEBOOK OF MATHEMATICAL MYSTERIES (Profile/Basic) – world rights, Profile *THE MATHEMATICS OF LIFE (Profile/Basic) – world rights, Profile *THE GREAT MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS (Profile/Basic) – world rights, Profile *SEVENTEEN EQUATIONS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD (Profile/Basic) – world rights, Profile *INCREDIBLE NUMBERS (App for iPad) (Touch Press/Profile) *CALCULATING THE COSMOS (Profile/Basic) – world rights, Profile 64
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* TRAILBLAZERS (Profile/Basic) – world rights, Profile THOMAS SUDDENDORF Psychologist; School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Australia THE GAP (BasicBooks, UK & US) – WEL FRANK SWAIN Science Writer, Speaker and Blogger, UK HOW TO MAKE A ZOMBIE (Oneworld, UK & US) JEREMY TAYLOR Science Writer and Science Documentary Filmmaker, UK *NOT A CHIMP (Oxford University Press, UK & US) BODY BY DARWIN (Chicago University Press) – WEL CHRIS THOMAS Fellow of the Royal Society; Professor of Conservation Biology, University of York, UK INHERITORS OF THE EARTH (Allen Lane/Penguin Press (UK)/PublicAffairs (US)) RACHEL THOMAS Maths Writer; Editor of Plus Magazine, UK *NUMERICON (Quercus) ROBERTO TROTTA Science Communicator; Senior Lecture in Astrophysics, Imperial College London, UK THE EDGE OF THE SKY (BasicBooks, UK & US) MARK VAN VUGT Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology, VU University Vugt Amsterdam, Netherlands SELECTED (Profile/HarperCollins) GEERAT J. VERMEIJ Biologist; Distinguished Professor of Geology, Department of Geology, University of California at Davis, US THE EVOLUTIONARY WORLD (Thomas Dunne/St Martin’s, UK & US) MATT WILKINSON Zoologist and Science Communicator, University of Cambridge, UK RESTLESS CREATURES (BasicBooks) – WEL CAROLINE WILLIAMS Science Writer and Broadcaster, UK OVERRIDE (publisher to be confirmed) ADAM ZEMAN Neurologist; Professor of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology, Peninsula Medical School, Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry, Exeter, UK A PORTRAIT OF THE BRAIN (Yale University Press, UK & US)
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SCIENCE FACTORY FOREIGN LANGUAGE CO-AGENTS JAPAN Hamish Macaskill: hamish@eaj.co.jp Junzo Sawa: junzo_sawa@eaj.co.jp Tsutomu Yawata: tsutomu_yawata@eaj.co.jp The English Agency (Japan) Sakuragi Building 3F 6-7-3 Minami Aoyama Minato-ku Tokyo 107-0062 JAPAN tel: +81 3 3406 5385 fax: +81 3 3406 5387
KOREA Duran Kim: duran@durankim.com Duran Kim Agency 2F Taeyang Building 263 Hyoryeong-ro, Seocho-gu Seoul 137-876 KOREA tel: +822 583 5724 fax: +822 584 5724
REST OF THE WORLD Louisa Pritchard: louisa@louisapritchard.co.uk Louisa Pritchard Associates Flat 5 81 Battersea Church Road London SW11 3LY UNITED KINGDOM skype: + 44 (0)20 7193 7145 mobile: +44 (0)7714 721 787
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