Jeffrey Toobin wrote the definitive book about one of the highest profile crime of the 1990’s, The Run of His Life, about O. J. Simpson. The popularity of two recent TV series on the case, one of which is based on that book, demonstrate there is a strong interest in revisiting such stories.

Going back even further in his latest book, Toobin takes a new look at the story of the 1974 kidnapping and arrest of Patty Hearst: American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, (PRH/Doubleday; OverDrive Sample).

Following in the footsteps of Toobin’s O.J. title, Deadline Hollywood reports film rights were acquired prior to publication.

Libraries ordered the book modestly and holds are growing as a result of media attention. In an almost hour long conversation on NPR’s Fresh Air, Toobin talks to an enthralled Terry Gross about the case.

Hearst was the 19-year-old granddaughter of the famous newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst and while her case was a sensation at the time, Toobin found that nothing new had been written about the case in decades and decided to investigate it again.

Placing the story in its time, Toobin calls the period a “toxic, dangerous, scary time in America. … During the early and mid ’70s, there were 1,000 — 1,000!— bombings a year in the United States … [due to] a violent political culture.”

In this environment “the Symbionese Liberation Army, a small, armed revolutionary group with an incoherent ideology and unclear goals” kidnapped Hearst – at a point in her life where she was at “a particularly vulnerable and restless moment in her life … uniquely receptive to new influences.”

Against the standard story line that Hearst was brainwashed or suffering from Stockholm syndrome, Toobin argues that she “responded rationally to the circumstances she was confronted with at each stage of the process” and joined her kidnappers in their crimes.

Under her own power, says Toobin, she committed real harm, “She robbed three banks. She shot up a street in Los Angeles. She helped plant bombs in several places in northern California.”

Toobin says she “had multiple opportunities to escape over a year and a half. She went to the hospital for poison oak and she could’ve told the doctor, ‘Oh by the way, I’m Patty Hearst.’ She was caught in an inaccessible place while hiking and the forest rangers helped her out, and she could’ve said, ‘Oh by the way, I’m Patty Hearst.’ She didn’t escape because she didn’t want to escape.”

She was eventually captured and sent to prison for 7 years, but only served 22 months before President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. President Bill Clinton pardoned her years later. Toobin calls both actions “the purest example of privilege on display that frankly I have ever seen in the criminal justice system.”

In her advanced NYT review, Janet Maslin writes, “As Mr. Toobin sees it, Patty — now Patricia again — was always an adroit opportunist, never a deep thinker, and remained an artful pragmatist under any circumstances.”

The Washington Post calls it “terrific” and “riveting” book, a “lurid crime story with its own toxic mix of race, class, celebrity and sex.”

CBS This Morning featured Toobin yesterday.

Why do some people get car sick? Why do humans exaggerate? Why are some people great at Jeopardy and awful balancing a checkbook?

Terry Gross explores those questions and much more during a Fresh Air interview with Dean Burnett, neuroscientist and author of Idiot Brain: What Your Head Is Really Up To (Norton; OverDrive Sample).

The two talk about how the brain is highly illogical – if it were a computer it would alter the information stored within it to “suit your purposes, to suit your preferences … [its] egotistical … the brain tweaks and adjusts the information it stores to make you look better.”

Burnett also explains what happens with short-term memory: why you can walk into a room and forget why you went there in the first place. He calls it as fleeting as the “foam on your coffee.”

The  fascinating and oddly practical information clearly engages Gross, who applies what Burnett says to her own life.

He offers more tidbits in a Smithsonian interview, where he explains what causes us to feel like we are falling in our sleep only to jerk awake (“It could have something to do with our ancestors sleeping in trees”) and how Tylenol can soothe a broken heart – because the brain actually feels the loss of a romantic partner and acetaminophen effects that part of the brain.

Burnett writes the “Brain Flapping” column for The Guardian. One of its competitors, the Independent, calls his book “a wonderful introduction to neuroscience [that] deserves to be widely read.”

Libraries have bought fairly low but are seeing growing holds.

Rising on Amazon is The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward (S&S/Scribner). The jump coincides with a featured interview on NPR’s All Things Considered yesterday.

National Book Award–winner Ward talks with host Audie Cornish about her new essay collection and how she and her fellow essayists included in the book respond to the current state of race in America. The collection brings James Baldwin’s 1963 seminal book, The Fire Next Time to the present day. Contributors include Edwidge Danticat, Claudia Rankine, Natasha Trethewey, Isabel Wilkerson, and Kevin Young.

Ward says that few of the essays address the future “because this moment can feel so overwhelming” and discusses what it means, “as Claudia Rankine says, to be in a perpetual state of mourning.”

She also talks about the importance of the Presidency of Barack Obama and his statements “that he could be a victim of the kind of senseless, random, state-sanctioned violence that many black Americans have been victim to in the past couple of years … those statements were a revelation … I think it’s really important for us to hear someone in position of power, like the position of power, to say that.”

Reviews and listings are piling up. Bustle includes it on their list of “17 Nonfiction Books Coming in August 2016,” writing “the book explores the progress we’ve made and the work left to be done.”

USA Today is also featuring the collection, giving it 4.5 stars out of 5 and saying, “The perils of walking, driving — indeed living — while black have become tragically apparent in recent months … At a time of such tension, The Fire This Time … might seem too much to bear. But ultimately, the prose and poetry contained in this concise volume … is illuminating and even cathartic.”

Vogue says the book affirms “the power of literature and its capacity for reflection and imagination, to collectively acknowledge the need for a much larger conversation, to understand these split-second actions in present, past, and future tense, the way that stories impel us to do. This is a book that seeks to place the shock of our own times into historical context and, most importantly, to move these times forward.”

Premiering tomorrow night, August 2,  on PBS American Experience is a documentary titled The Boys of ’36, based on the bestseller The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown (Penguin/Viking; Penguin Audio; Thorndike).

A feature film based on the book’s proposal was announced in 2011, with Kenneth Branagh attached to direct. In 2014, a new director was announced, Peter Berg (Lone Survivor), but there’s been no further news since.

Requests are soaring for a memoir that details a key touchstone in the race for President, the feelings of alienation and loss among the white working class, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J. D. Vance (Harper; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample).

Demand is being generated by strong media coverage. The Wall Street Journal writes about it in a feature, The Washington Post printed an excerpt, and David Brooks recommends the book in his NYT‘s column “Revolt of the Masses,” writing “Vance’s family is from Kentucky and Ohio, and his description of the culture he grew up in is essential reading for this moment in history.”

In the WSJ Vance says his memoir seeks to address why he felt “culturally foreign” at Yale Law School and “started out as a quest to answer questions about his own upbringing but developed into a broader conversation about social divisions in the U.S. and feelings of disenfranchisement among the white working class.”

In the excerpted passage in the WP he writes, “economic cynicism brought with it a feeling that the country we believed in could no longer be trusted.”

His solution to a problem that spans multiple states is decidedly local, telling WSJ: “Concretely, I want pastors and church leaders to think about how to build community churches, to keep people engaged, and to worry less about politics and more about how the people in their communities are doing … I want parents to fight and scream less, and to recognize how destructive chaos is to their children’s future.”

His memoir is currently the 4th bestselling book on Amazon and holds have reached 8:1 ratios. A fact that one library patron shares with other readers of WSJ, writing in the comments section: “I tried to obtain Hillbilly Elegy from the library…I’m 95th in line for 12 copies.”

Interest in the subject has already proven high, as White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg (PRH/Viking; Tantor Audio; OverDrive Sample) attests.

There were plenty of famous characters at Comic-Con this weekend, from Gal Gadot the latest actress to play Wonder Woman, to various cosplay incarnations. But a handful of people got to pose questions, via satellite, to the real Edward Snowden, at the end of a private screening of Oliver Stone’s upcoming movie, Snowden. In the movie, he is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. According to reports, the actor bears an uncanny resemblance in voice and mannerisms to the real person he portrays.

Stone, who has never appeared at Comic-Con before, injected a rare note of seriousness into the weekend, speaking during a separate Snowden panel about privacy. He also addressed the hot new game Pokemon Go, warning that it represents a “new level if invasion” into privacy, and that it is part of “survellience capitalism” that will lead totalitarianism (that discussion comes at the end of the panel, beginning at time stamp 41:03 in the video below).

A new trailer for the movie was also released.

Stone’s movie is partially based on Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, to be released as a movie tie-in next month (PRH/Vintage).

Another film about Snowden, titled Citizenfour, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2015.

Editors Note: GalleyChatter Robin Beerbower is off this month and we’re grateful to one of our go-to readers advisors, Jennifer Dayton of Darien (CT) Public Library for rounding up the titles from the most recent GalleyChat.

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It may be summertime and the living may be easy, but GalleyChatters are relentless in their quest for the next great thing. During the most recent chat, women’s history was a strong theme on the non-fiction side, balanced by serious escape reading on the fiction side.

We hope you will be inspired to download and read the eGalleys of the titles highlighted here.  If you love them as much as we do, be sure to consider nominating them for LibraryReads. We’ve noted in red the deadlines for those titles still eligible for nomination.

For a list of all 138 titles mentioned during the chat, check here.

Non-Fiction

Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation (Macmillan/St. Martin’s, Oct.; LibraryReads deadline: Aug. 20) by Anne Sebba takes a long hard look at a piece of history that is often looked at through the rosy haze of time. Anbolyn Potter of Chandler (Ariz.) Public Library, says, “ In Les Parisiennes, Anne Sebba examines what life was like for Parisian women under Nazi occupation during WWII. Using stories gleaned from interviews and primary sources, she documents the everyday hardships and life-changing tragedies suffered by these resilient women. Women from all walks of life were forced to adapt to food shortages, the disappearance of family members, and potential capture or unwanted attention from German soldiers. How they chose to respond to these challenges often determined the fate of generations. Sebba’s lavish use of detail and her graceful, sympathetic writing add to this book’s powerful depiction of an era that still fascinates us today.”

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (HarperCollins/Morrow, Sept. 6)  by Margot Lee Shetterly is the compelling story of the African-American women who were the secret backbone of NASA in its infancy.  Vicki Nesting of St. Charles Parish Library, Destrehan, La., says, that it’s  “a fascinating book about black female mathematicians (or ‘computers’) who worked for the space program back in the 50s and 60s. A movie based on the book is scheduled for release in January, starring Octavia Spenser, Janelle Monae and Taraji P. Henson.”

I am an evangelist for Victoria:  The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire  (PRH/Random House, Nov. 29; LibraryReads deadline: Sept. 20)  by Julia Baird. This is a totally engrossing look at a woman who we all think we know: staid, button-upped, humor-less. With newly found scholarship  (yeah Librarians!), we learn that this woman who was a mere 18 years old when she ascended the throne was in fact a passionate leader who loved as fiercely as she ruled. I think that this wonderfully readable book may just become the new standard in Victoria bios.

Fiction

There was lots of excitement for The Golden Age (Europa, Aug. 16) by Joan London.  Janet Lockhart, Collection Development Librarian, Wake County, N.C.,  sums it up, “Young Frank Gold and his family escaped from WWII Europe to Australia, only for him to fall victim to polio. He is sent to recover at The Golden Age, a children’s hospital in 1950s Australia, where he meets and falls in love with Elsa, to the consternation of the adults.  A moving story of displacement and recovery with wonderfully drawn characters and setting.”

Robin Beerbower, GalleyChat Wrangler Extraordinaire, was not alone in her love for The Bookshop on the Corner (HarperCollins/Morrow, Sept. 20)  by Jenny Colgan and while she does have some reservations, her enthusiasm shines through. “I loved this book about a librarian getting laid off from her readers’ advisory job and opening a ‘bookshop-on-wheels’ in Scotland. A tad predictable but so what?  It was a fun journey.”

Perennial GalleyChat favorite Carl Hiassen’s forthcoming book is Razor Girl (PRH/Knopf, Sept. 6).  While he needs no “help” from us, it is clear that there is a reason he is a favorite go-to pick for readers advisors.  Abbey Stroop, of Herrick District Library, Holland, Mich., says, “All of the best things about Carl Hiaasen are on full display in his new book Razor Girl: crazy plot twists mixed with quirky characters ranging from the mob to a Duck Dynasty-esque reality TV star. Andrew Yancy, from Sick Puppy, is back, still working Roach Patrol and trying to get his detective badge back when he gets involved with Merry Mansfield, a woman hired by the New York mob to create convenient traffic crashes. Sexy hilarity ensues alongside clumsy extortion plots the way only Hiaasen can manage.”

Small Admissions  (S&S/Atria, Dec. 27; LibraryReads deadline: Nov. 20) by Amy Poeppel is a debut novel for which Beth Mills of New Rochelle (N.Y.) Public Library, gave a serious shout-out. “When twenty-something Kate, devastated at being dumped by her Parisian boyfriend, finally starts getting her life together she finds herself launched into the high-pressure world of a NYC private school admissions office. Hyper parents, over-privileged kids, eccentric relatives and well-meaning friends–some of whom are harboring explosive secrets–keep the story moving briskly and provide more than a few laughs along the way.”

Please join us on Aug. 2 at 4:00 ET with virtual happy hour at 3:30 for our next Chat!  See you all then!

Rose Byrne (Damages) will play Rebecca Skloot, starring opposite Oprah Winfrey in HBO Films production of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, reports Deadline Hollywood.

As we noted earlier,  Oprah will play Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter and the character through whom the story is told.

Skloot is the author of the bestselling nonfiction account and her character in the book forms what Deadline calls “a close bond” with the character Oprah plays.

George C. Wolfe (Angels In America) wrote the adaptation and will direct, also reports Deadline. With these critical roles filled, the film is moving closer to full production.

Lobster rolls with no lobster, tuna that is not tuna, olive oil that has only a passing relationship to olives are the subject of a book arriving today that has been rising quickly on Amazon’s sales rankings, Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do about It by Larry Olmsted (Workman/Algonquin; OverDrive Sample).

The rise coincides with strong media attention across a variety of outlets including the New York Post, Town and Country, Forbes, Outside, and several NPR programs including The Leonard Lopate Show, The Diane Rehm Show, and All Things Considered.

Outside says Olmsted shows “readers how to navigate an increasingly complex food system” unveiling the ugly, and harmful, truth about the unregulated food scene, which he calls in his book “a massive industry of bait and switch.”

Kobe beef, for instance, which sells for astronomical prices in the US comes from a breed of cow that lives and is slaughtered in a specific area of Japan and that is fed a diet produced in that same region. A Kobe beef steak sells for triple digits in the US. The rub? Kobe beef is not allowed to be imported into the US by the USDA.

Even worse, as Olmsted reveals in Town and Country, fakes may contain ingredients few would knowingly choose to consume. Such as truffle oil, “The most common source of ‘natural truffle’ flavor in the oil” he says, “is a chemically altered form of formaldehyde.”

The Marshall Project (named in honor of Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) has released a core list of titles on criminal justice.

Not only is the list useful for collection building, the leading title, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander (Perseus/PGW/Legato/The New Press; OverDrive Sample), soared on Amazon, rising to #6 in an impressive leap from #90.

Other titles on the list rose as well.

Between the World and Me: Notes on the First 150 Years in America, Ta-Nehisi Coates (PRH/Spiegel & Grau; BOT; OverDrive Sample), moved up to #8, jumping from #47.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson (PRH/Spiegel & Grau; BOT; OverDrive Sample) gained as well, bumping up to #95, from #137).

The full list of ten titles is available online, along with a longer list of titles the topic.

Rising on Amazon, moving from #734 to #12, is Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, Maia Szalavitz (Macmillan /St. Martin’s Press; OverDrive Sample).

The leap to just outside the top 10 coincides with a long interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. Host Terry Gross talks for over 30 minutes with the author, a former addict who became a journalist.

Szalavitz’s book offers a new way to think about addition and treat its sufferers. Part of the conversation centered on the limitations and problems with 12-step programs. Szalavitz says:

“The only treatment in medicine that involves prayer, restitution and confession is for addiction [which] makes people think that addiction is a sin, rather than a medical problem … we need to get the 12 steps out of professional treatment and put them where they belong — as self-help.”

Caught with 2.5 kilos of cocaine at age 20, Szalavitz also talks about not going to prison, and why:

“being white and being female and being a person who was at an Ivy League school and being privileged in many other ways had an enormous amount to do with … why I was not incarcerated and why I’m not in prison now. I think our laws are completely and utterly racist. They were founded in racism, and they are enforced in a thoroughly biased manner.”

Holds are spiking at several libraries we checked.

Amid mixed to downright terrible reviews, and questions about whether it’s possible to make a non-racist version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, the latest incarnation, The Legend of Tarzan is bringing new attention to a fascinating real-life character, 19th C black human rights advocate, George Washington Williams. Played by Samuel L. Jackson in the movie, which opens on Friday, he travels with Tarzan to Africa.

Williams actually did travel to the Congo in 1890 (but did not encounter the fictional Tarzan). Appalled by what he saw there, he tried to shame King Leopold of Belgium in a long open letter about the horrors the Congolese were suffering under Belgian rule (more on Williams from MoviePilot).

Both Jackson and director David Yates tell Variety that Williams deserves a film of his own. Unfortunately, however, this movie may not make the best case for it. The LA Times writes, “Part comic relief, part valued ally, Williams is an altogether puzzling script component, and Jackson’s habit of sounding like he just stepped out of Pulp Fiction does not help things.”

For more about Williams and this period, two backlist titles are available:

George Washington Williams: A Biography, written by the Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient John Hope Franklin (Duke UP, 1998)

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild (HMH/Mariner; OverDrive Sample)

An award-winning best seller, it was the basis for a 2006 documentary.

PBS Newshour just launched Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars, Nathalia Holt (Hachette/Little, Brown; OverDrive Sample) into book sales orbit, helping it soar on Amazon from a sales rank of #6,540 to 146.

The dramatic move is due to a segment of the show’s special summer reading series that offers author interviews conducted at book shows around the country. The Newshour‘s Jeffrey Brown sat down with Holt at the Los Angeles Book Festival and the pair talked about women in science during the early years of the space program and today.

Holt says that in the early days of the Jet Propulsion Lab a group of women called “computers” figured out the calculations of the space program, doing math with pencil and paper and some very bulky calculators.

Once computers were introduced, these women became the first programmers.

Her book traces their history and accomplishments and recounts how both NASA and JPL overlooked their achievements as time went by. Case in point, none were invited to the 2008 gala held to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Explorer 1 (America’s first satellite), an oversight that is particularly galling since one of the Rocket Girls, Barbara Paulson, figured out the trajectory on the night Explorer 1 launched, working in the control room. Holt says “when the first American satellite is a success, its because of her. She is the one that found out it’s actually in orbit.”

Holt also talks about how 2016 is a “desperate time for women in technology,” largely due to a lack of role models. In 1984, she says “37 percent of bachelor’s degrees in computer sciences were awarded to women. And today that number is 18 percent.” While female astronauts are doing astoundingly well, making up half of the current class at NASA, female engineers are seeing their lowest numbers in decades.

Holt hopes reading the stories of the pioneering Rocket Girls and learning what they achieved and overcame, will help change that.

UPDATE: Reversing his decision, Gay Talese now says that he does not disavow the book and that he will promote it. First reported by Roger  Friedman in Show Biz 411, the story has been picked up by many other publications, including the New York Times.

Author Gay Talese has elected to disavow his latest book, The Voyeur’s Motel, (Grove Press) set for publication on July 12 because of “credibility issues,” reports the Washington Post.

Based on journals kept by Gerald Foos, a Colorado motel owner who spied on his guests for years, movie rights to the book had been acquired by DreamWorks, with Sam Mendes attached to directing. An extract of the book was published as a story in the New Yorker in April.

Unfortunately, Talese was unaware that Foos did not own the motel for the entire period he claimed, a fact the Washington Post uncovered. When informed about the discovery, Talese responded to the Post, “I should not have believed a word [Foos] said,” adding, “I’m not going to promote this book. How dare I promote it when its credibility is down the toilet?”

It appears the book will still be published. Grove CEO Morgan Entrain notes that most of the events in the book took place before Foos sold the motel, but, says the Post, “the company would consider appending an author’s note or footnotes in subsequent printings to account for errors or missing information.”

A trailer has just been released for the movie Sully, based on Highest Duty by Chesley Sullenberger (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2009), a memoir by the man who piloted an airplane to safety on New York’s Hudson River after its engines were disabled by a bird strike.

Directed by Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks is in the lead role, with Laura Linney as his wife. The movie will be released on Sept. 9.

Tie-in:

Sully : My Search for What Really Matters
Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger, III, Jeffrey Zaslow
HarperCollins/Morrow,  August 30, 2016
Trade Paperback
Mass Market

Soon after, Hanks stars in Inferno, based on the book by Dan Brown. It opens Oct. 28th.

Several tie-ins are being released, see our list of upcoming movie tie-ins.