Book News
Physicist Hawking’s latest.
Bantam Dell has announced that it will publish a new book by physicist Stephen Hawking about “the ultimate mysteries of the universe.” Titled “The Grand Design,” the book is expected to be published in early September. The book will be co-written by physicist Leonard Mlodinow, author of “The Drunkard’s Walk.”
Hawking has written several books and hit the best-seller lists with “A Brief History of Time.” He published his last book in 2001, titled “The Universe in a Nutshell.”
According to the publisher, “According to Hawking, we are very close to an understanding not just of the workings of our universe, but of its very beginnings.”
Drawing on 40 years of his own research and a recent series of astronomical observations and theoretical breakthroughs, Hawking and Mlodinow will examine the evidence of a “unified theory,” a single theory that can describe and explain all the forces of nature.
First Lines
The Taken, by Inger Ash Wolfe
What always broke his heart was the way they dressed themselves. Divorcees in wedding gowns slumped behind the wheel in their garages; stockbrokers in Armani hanging from basement joists; the jilted plunging from rooftops drenched in cologne or perfume, as if to say their wrecked bodies still had more to offer in death than anyone had ever known in life.
This one wore a pair of black jeans over Blundstone boots, a faded green T-shirt, and a black wool sweater. A thin leather cord served as a necklace from which a silver lamb hung, her only piece of jewelery apart from a gold hoop edged with a curlique design, like a Sufi sun, dangling from one ear. He pictured someone giving her that lamb and wondered what had been meant by it. That she was innocent? that she needed protection? Obviously, it hadn’t been enough.
They’d pulled her up onto the grass, and the discoloured lakewater drained from inside her pantlegs, a thin, greyish trickle that ran down between the green stalks. He couldn’t help thinking that the roots of the grass would gratefully take in this water, insensate to its origin, because it had been a dry summer and grass was oblivious to what came from it or what returned to it.
The photographer was taking pictures. The girl would never know. Her story was only just beginning to be told. You lived your life making choices that you thought would become the plot of your life as you wanted to live it, but the fact was, someone else always wrote the end. It was no mystery people hated movies where the protagonist died: who needs that kind of realism?
Nonfiction BestSellers
1. Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh
2. Sh*t My Dad Says, by Justin Halpern
3. Women Food and God, by Geneen Roth
4. Medium Raw, by Anthony Bourdain
5. Spoken From the Heart, by Laura Bush
6. The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
7. War, by Sebastian Junger
8. Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, by Chelsea Handler
9. Change Your Brain, Change Your Body, by Daniel G. Amen
10. Conquer the Chaos, by Clate Mask and Scott Martineau
Publishers Weekly
