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Welcome to our books of the month for April. This month we're featuring Where's My Jetpack? by Daniel H. Wilson, Speed of Light by Javier Cercas, and Uturns by Bruce Grierson
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 WHERE'S MY JETPACK? A GUIDE TO THE AMAZING SCIENCE FICTION FUTURE THAT NEVER ARRIVED
by Daniel H. Wilson
Roboticist and creator of the runaway success How to Survive a Robot Uprising, which the New York Times called “hilariously deadpan,” reveals the secrets and science behind the greatest inventions we never got. It’s the twenty-first century and let’s be honest—things are a little disappointing. Despite every World’s Fair prediction, every futuristic ride at Disneyland, and the advertisements on the last page of every comic book, we are not living the future we were promised. By now, life was supposed to be a fully automated, atomic-powered, germ-free Utopia, a place where a grown man could wear a velvet spandex unitard and not be laughed at. Where are the ray guns, the flying cars, and the hoverboards that we expected? What happened to our promised moon colonies? Our servant robots?
In Where’s My Jetpack?, roboticist Daniel H. Wilson takes a hilarious look at the future we always imagined for ourselves. He exposes technology, spotlights existing prototypes, and reveals drawing-board plans. You will learn which technologies are already available, who made them, and where to find them. If the technology is not public, you will learn how to build, buy, or steal it. And if doesn’t yet exist, you will learn what stands in the way of making it real. With thirty entries spanning everything from teleportation to self-contained skyscraper cities, and superbly illustrated by Richard Horne (101 Things to Do Before You Die), Where’s My Jetpack? is an endlessly entertaining, one-of-a-kind look at the world that we always wanted.
About the Author
Daniel H. Wilson, Ph.D, has a degree in Robotics from Carnegie-Mellon. He is the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Buy Where's My Jetpack? here. |
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 THE SPEED OF LIGHT
By Javier Cercas
The prize-winning author of the international bestseller Soldiers of Salamis turns his attention to the legacy of the Vietnam War and the price of success.
Javier Cercas’ third and most ambitious novel has already been heralded in Spain as “daring,” “magnificent, complex, and intense,” and “a master class in invention and truth.”As a young writer, the novel’s protagonist—perhaps an apocryphal version of Cercas himself—accepts a post at a Midwestern university and soon he is in the United States, living a simple life, working and writing. It will be years before he understands that his burgeoning friendship with the Vietnam vet Rodney Falk, a strange and solitary man, will reshape his life, or that he will become obsessed with Rodney’s mysterious past.
Why does Rodney shun the world? Why does he accept and befriend the narrator? And what really happened at the mysterious ‘My Khe’ incident? Many years pass with these questions unanswered; the two friends drift apart. But as the narrator’s literary career takes off, his personal life collapses. Suddenly, impossibly, the novelist finds that Rodney’s fate and his own are linked, and the story spirals towards its fascinating, surreal conclusion. Twisting together his own regrets with those of America, Cercas weaves the profound and personal story of a ghostly past.
About the Author
Javier Cercas is the author of Soldiers of Salamis (Spain, 2001, Bloomsbury, 2003), The Tenant & The Motive (Spain 2000, 2003, Bloomsbury UK, 2005) El Vientre de la ballena (The Belly of the Whale, 1997) and Relatos Reales (True Tales, 2000). He has taught at the University of Illinois and since 1989 has been a lecturer in Spanish literature at the University of Gerona.
Buy Speed of Light here. |
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 U-TURN
By Bruce Grierson
What if you woke up one morning and realized you were living the wrong life? Po Bronson meets Malcolm Gladwell in this fascinating look at the science and psychology behind major midlife U-turns.
Every day, in almost every field, someone perceives themselves to be on the wrong side of a psychic divide. The “second brain” in their gut tells them their life must change. And in many cases, people make the change as quickly as they discover the need for it. Under the right circumstances, any one of us could be ready for a major U-turn in the direction of our lives.
Drawing on over three hundred stories of U-turners, and using a variety of approaches—scientific, philosophical, literary, and psychological—Bruce Grierson answers the burning questions we all have about what it would take to change our lives. When do U-turns happen? Who do they happen to? And are you better off if you make one?
Grierson cites famous U-turners such as Gandhi and Gauguin, as well as introducing us to a host of other courageous people who have risked everything to answer life’s wake-up call: people who change political parties and careers, people who give up their jobs as doctors to become poets, men who become women, professional athletes who quit to spend more time with their families, mothers who quit their families to pursue careers, people who suddenly become revolutionaries for a cause they didn’t care about the day before. In chapters that address everything from the neuroscience behind epiphanies to the possibility of “forcing” a U-turn, Grierson brilliantly describes and elucidates this powerful, mysterious phenomenon, and in doing so illuminates all or our continual struggles with life choices and identity.
Buy U-Turn here.
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