About Doug Fine

After being raised on Dominoes Pizza and Brady Bunch re-runs, Doug Fine’s method of journalistic investigation was to strap on a backpack and travel to five continents; to the nooks where the world’s monied media venues weren’t sending their people.

As a young freelancer, Fine reported in this manner for the Washington Post, Salon, U.S. News and World Report, Sierra, Wired, Outside, National Public Radio, and other venues from little-visited jungle war zones like Burma, Rwanda, Laos, Guatemala and Tajikistan. He became a world-class adventure writer and investigative journalist, writing culturally-insightful and funny dispatches. One of these, about democracy efforts in Burma, was read into the U.S. Congressional Record.

During this time, his 20s, Fine recognized that he lived on an actual planet, and that he felt most alive while in wild ecosystems. Following this impulse in contradiction to all the suburban values with which he was raised (which can be summarized as, “if you’re not going to be a doctor, you can at least be a lawyer”), he moved to extreme rural Alaska to see if a former suburbanite could survive. Happiness and self-awareness were the goals. This resulted in his award-nominated first book, Not Really An Alaskan Mountain Man, which is now in its third printing.

Realizing that living in sync with his ecosystem is indeed where his own inspiration and personal happiness reside, Fine for his second book decided to embark on a “Hypocrisy Reduction Project,” to see if he could truly live a sustainable lifestyle, rather than borrowing from Babylon to live in an ecological Zion. He moved to a beautifully-obscure valley in Southern New Mexico to write Farewell, My Subaru, to quite simply see if a Digital Age Human can live without Petroleum but without giving up any of his Digital Age Comforts. His conclusion? He can, once he figures out how to keep the coyotes from eating his chickens, his solar panels from electrocuting him, and his vegetable oil truck exhaust from giving him a bad case of the munchies (it smells like Kung Pao chicken).

Be sure to visit your local branch and check out a copy of Farewell, My Subaru and mark your calendar for Doug Fine's visit to the Main Library on February 6.

About Jon Krakauer

Born in 1954, writer and journalist Jon Krakauer grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, where his father introduced him to mountain climbing at the age of eight.

He reached the summit of Mt. Everest while on assignment for Outside magazine in May 1996, but during his descent, a storm engulfed the peak, taking the lives of four fellow climbers. His subsequent book about the experience, Into Thin Air (1997), became a national bestseller.

Best known for writing stories about lives conducted at the outer limits of nature and society, Krakauer is also the bestselling author of Into the Wild (1996), Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (2003), and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009).

About Geraldine Brooks

Before turning her attention to writing novels, Geraldine Brooks was an award-winning foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, covering the crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. According to her website, while in Nigeria on assignment, she was arrested, thrown in jail, and accused of being a spy. While there, "she began to consider a midlife career change." (Who could blame her?) In 2001, her first novel, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, was published. Five years later, March, a retelling of Little Women from the perspective of Mr. March, was published and won the Pulitzer Prize.

If you're interested in learning more about Geraldine Brooks, I'd like to direct your attention to a couple of interesting links on her website. The first is an essay on "The Writing Life," and the second is a profile of her that appeared in the Washington Post.

I hope I have the opportunity to meet her someday. She's had a fascinating life and I've thoroughly enjoyed all three of her novels.

About Garth Stein

Garth Stein was born in Los Angeles and later moved to Seattle where he now resides with his wife, three children and his faithful companion Comet. According to his website the cover of his book displays a picture of his dog. Garth Stein has written two other books, Raven Stole the Moon and How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets. He has also produced and directed short films and documentaries. He is also a novice race car driver which makes this fictitious story credibly real.
Go to Garth's website and check out his credits, you can even submit your own "Enzo" snapshot.

About David Guterson

David Guterson was born in Seattle in 1956. He received his Master's Degree from the University of Washington and after graduation, he moved to Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, where he taught English at the local high school and began writing for Sports Illustrated and Harper's Magazine.

Guterson is the author of a number of books and short stories, but he is probably best known for his 1994 novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, which won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award. Check out an interview with David Guterson here, then be sure to visit your local branch to check out a copy of The Other.

Steve Lopez Visit

We're absolutely thrilled about the fact that Steve Lopez is going to be visiting Cincinnati next week to support On the Same Page. Even if you haven't had a chance to read yet The Soloist yet, we hope you'll be able to make one of his booktalks! Here's where he's going to be:

Sunday, February 8
2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Main Library
Book talk and signing, musical performances by the College Conservatory of Music, and an information fair with community organizations serving people who have mental illnesses or are homeless. Bring your musical instruments to donate to CCM's LINKS (Lonely Instruments for Needy Kids) program. Panera Bread will provide the refreshments.

Sunday, February 8
6:00 p.m.
Joseph Beth Booksellers
Book signing

Monday, February 9
7:00 p.m.
265 Tangeman University Center, University of Cincinnati
Book talk and signing.

About Steve Lopez

Steve Lopez is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where he first wrote the series of enormously popular articles about Nathaniel Anthony Ayers on which The Soloist is based. He has also written for Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Oakland Tribune.

His work has won the H. L. Mencken Writing Award, the Ernie Pyle Human Interest Award, the National Headliner Award for Column Writing the Sigma Delta Chi Magazine Reporting Award, the Society of Professional Journalists Award, and the Quill Journalism Award. Third and Indiana was a selection of the New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age and a finalist for the Dashiell Hammett Award.

Lopez is the author of three novels, Third and Indiana, The Sunday Macaroni Club, and In the Clear , and a journalism collection, Land of Giants: Where No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

If you'd like to learn more about Steve Lopez, check out his website. And take a few minutes to listen to the interview with him that aired on National Public Radio on April 22, 2008. In it talks about the evolution of his friendship with Nathaniel Ayers.

About Bill Bryson

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Bill Bryson is how much he makes me laugh. I’ll be reading a passage in one of his books and start laughing so uncontrollably that my stomach hurts. Once this happened sitting next to my friend on a plane to New York City while reading A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. The second time was sitting on the couch next to my husband reading our January Featured Book of the Month, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. My friend’s reaction (as well as my husband’s) was that I was pretty weird. But if you haven’t read Bill Bryson before, you just don’t understand.

According to the author's website, Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. (Or as he humorously writes in his first travel book, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America: “I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to"). A backpacking expedition in 1973 brought him to England where he met his wife and decided to live. He wrote for the English newspapers The Times and The Independent for many years, and supplemented his income by writing travel articles. He lived with his family in North Yorkshire before moving to Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1995 with his wife and four children before returning again to England in 2003, where they currently reside.

Although he is best known for his travel writing (A Walk in the Woods, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, etc.), he has also written engaging books about his other interests: the English language (Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words, The Mother Tongue, Made in America, Shakespeare: The World as Stage) and science (A Short History of Nearly Everything).

Be sure to listen to his hilarious 2006 NPR interview about his childhood and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, or read my very own Turning the Page blog about A Walk in the Woods.