Events

Meet The Miami Book Fair 2017 Authors: Part 1

todayNovember 8, 2017 22

Background
share close

This past week, hundreds of authors and tens of thousands of visitors descended upon the Miami Dade College streets for the 2017 Miami Book Fair. Neil Haley of the Total Tutor Network, Neil’s assistant Peter Elvidge and Erik Remmel of the Helium Radio Network interviewed a slew of authors. Stay tuned as the audio will be uploaded to our podcast library shortly!

The 2017 Miami Book Fair Authors

Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Dawson’s published works include Extinction: A Radical HistoryThe Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature, and Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. In Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso) argues that cities are ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion’s share of carbon to the atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels. As much a harrowing study as a call to arms Extreme Cities is a necessary read for anyone concerned with the threat of global warming, and of the cities of the world.

"Maya Jasanoff"Maya Jasanoff is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard. She is the author of the prize-winning Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 and Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, which received the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Non-Fiction and the George Washington Book Prize. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Jasanoff won the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction. Her essays and reviews appear frequently in publications including the New York Times, the Guardian, and the New York Review of Books. In The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (Penguin Press) Jasanoff reveals Conrad as a prophet of globalization. As an immigrant from Poland to England, and through travels from Malaya to Congo to the Caribbean, Conrad navigated an interconnected world and captured it in a literary oeuvre of extraordinary depth. The Dawn Watch embarks on a spell-binding expedition into the dark heart of Conrad’s world—and through it to our own.

"Rivers Solomon"Rivers Solomon graduated from Stanford University with a degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and holds an MFA in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers. Though originally from the United States, she currently lives in Cambridge, England, with her family. In her latest novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts (Akashic), odd-mannered, obsessive, withdrawn, Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She’s used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, as they accuse, she’d be powerful enough to tear down the walls of the brutal ship where she and her ancestors have lived for generations. The lowdeck slums of HSS Matilda, an antiquated space vessel ferrying the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land, is a prison Aster wants desperately to escape.

"Peter Wadhams"Peter Wadhams is Professor of Ocean Physics and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. He has completed over fifty research trips to the arctic. A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic(Oxford University Press) is based on five decades of research and observation, a haunting and unsparing look at the melting ice caps, and what their disappearance will mean. Peter Wadhams has been studying ice first-hand since 1970. His conclusions are stark: the ice caps are melting. There is now the probability that within a few years the North Pole will be ice-free for the first time in 10,000 years, entering what some call the “Artic death spiral.” A sobering but urgent and engaging book, A Farewell to Ice shows us ice’s role on our planet, its history, and the true dimensions of the current global crisis, offering readers concrete advice about what they can do, and what must be done.

"Angela Saini"Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist whose print and broadcast work has appeared on the BBC and in the GuardianNew ScientistWired, the Economist, and Science. A former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, she won the Kavli Science Journalism gold award in 2015. Saini has a master’s in engineering from Oxford University, and is the author of Geek Nation: How Indian Science Is Taking Over the World. Her latest book is Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story (Beacon Press). For hundreds of years, it was common sense: women were the inferior sex. Their bodies were weaker, their minds feebler, their role subservient, and for decades, scientists—most of them male, of course—claimed to find evidence to support this. Saini takes readers on a journey to uncover science’s failure to understand women, and finds that we’re still living with centuries of entrenched exclusion and prejudice. Inferior investigates the gender wars in biology, psychology, and anthropology, and delves into cutting-edge scientific studies to uncover a fascinating new portrait of women’s brains, bodies, and role in human evolution.

"Markus Eriksen"Marcus Eriksen is the cofounder and director of research for the 5 Gyres Institute. A scientist, activist, and inveterate adventurer, Eriksen is drawn to the sea by a desire to right an environmental injustice. With firsthand experience from more than twenty ocean-crossing expeditions, he has written and published research on the impact of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. Junk Raft (Beacon Press) tells the exciting story of Eriksen and his team’s fight to solve this insidious catastrophe. Against long odds and common sense, Eriksen and his co-navigator construct a “junk raft” made of plastic trash and set themselves adrift from Los Angeles to Hawaii, with no motor or support vessel, confronting perilous cyclones, food shortages, and a fast decaying raft. Junk Raft provides concrete, actionable solutions and an empowering message: it’s within our power to change the throw-away culture for the sake of our planet.

Stay tuned for the second part of our Miami Book Fair Author line up blog. Thank you for your attention!

Written by: #HeliumRadio

Rate it

0%