PBS’s Newshour is running a series of reports on autism this week, “Understanding Autism.”

The first episode aired last night and highlighted a book we’ve covered before, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman (Penguin/Avery; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample).

As a result, it rose back up Amazon’s sales rankings to #112.

Tonight, Newshour will feature a just-released title, In A Different Key: The Story of Autism (PRH/Crown; BOT; OverDrive Sample).

It was featured yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered and has risen to #169 on Amazon’s rankings.

Set to write a memoir about her transformation from Bruce to Caitlyn, Jenner announced her co-author will be Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Buzz Bissinger.

Bissinger wrote the book Friday Night Lights, which became both a movie and a TV series.

The memoir is set to be published by Hachette/Grand Central, tentatively in spring of 2017. The New York Times reported the story, earlier today followed by People magazine and several other sources.

Jenner tweeted:

Thrilled to reunite with my friend Buzz Bissinger. Honored that he’s telling my full story. https://t.co/SlNzNau1BF pic.twitter.com/nA59jIl3J6

— Caitlyn Jenner (@Caitlyn_Jenner) January 19, 2016

The surprise winner of two Golden Globes last week, for Best TV Comedy or Musical as well as for Best Actor in the same category, was Amazon’s series, Mozart in the Jungle. Amazon streamed both seasons of the series for free over the weekend, bringing new viewers (and taking the opportunity to offer special discounted subscriptions to Amazon Prime).

Even those familiar with the series may not realize that it is based on the 2005 memoir of the same title by oboist Blair Tindal detailing the highs and lows of her adventures in New York’s classical music world. Subtitled Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music it was a gossiped-about book among fellow musicians. Interviewing the author at the time, Entertainment Weekly, referred to it as a “hoity-toity version of VH1’s Behind the Music.” As the NYT writes this week, that fascination has been revived by the show.

With all this attention, expect to hear soon that Mozart has been renewed for a third season.

Season One trailer:

Season Two trailer:

Poised to  break onto the bestseller lists is Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, (PRH/Random House; BOT; OverDrive Sample).

It begins at the moment the author, a neurosurgeon finally completing over a decade of training, learns that his life, put on hold for so long, might very well end decades sooner than anyone would expect.

On the NYT’s Book Review podcast, Greg Cowles, who oversees the bestseller lists, hints that it is likely to hit the list next week and notes that it has been getting a lot of attention.

Indeed it has.

Janet Maslin, reviewing it for the daily NYT calls it “unmissable” and says:

“Dr. Kalanithi, who died at 37, went on to write a great, indelible book … To paraphrase Abraham Verghese’s introduction, to read this book is to feel that Dr. Kalanithi still lives, with enormous power to influence the lives of others even though he is gone … I guarantee that finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option.”

Entertainment Weekly gives it a A-, remarking that its “unsentimental approach” gives the book its power:

“There’s no redemption here. Kalanithi died before he finished the book, leaving his wife Lucy to write a beautiful but painful epilogue. In the few hundred pages he completed, he chronicles his transition from doctor to patient with an acute clinical eye … Its only fault is that the book, like his life, ends much too early.”

The Washington Post calls it “an emotional investment well worth making” and as we reported earlier, it is an Indie Next pick for January as well. It is also an Amazon Best Book for January, where it is currently holds the #4 spot as the site’s bestselling book list.

Libraries bought it conservatively and as a result holds lists are skyrocketing past a 3:1 ratio with more than one library we checked adding more copies.

Below is a video, posted in The Washington Post, featuring Dr. Kalanithi reflecting on his prognosis (Note: if the video is unavailable below, link to it here, or read Kalanithi’s reflections here).

A new book overturns dieters’ ages-long focus on calories. By an endocrinologist with impressive credentials (he’s a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, among other positions), it debuts on the #3 spot on the 1/24/16 NYT Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous list.

Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently (Hachette/Grand Central Life & Style; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample) tells dieters to re-think their approach.

Rather than a calories in/calories out model, Ludwig says processed carbohydrates and added sugars are the real problem, creating a chemical state in the body that makes gaining weight easy and losing it difficult.

His message, perfectly timed for the resolution season, is getting plenty of play in print media, from a piece in the NYT’s “Well” blog, to Forbes, Boston Magazine, Runner’s World, and to a post on NPR’s The Salt.

In what might be one of the easiest ever Crystal Ball calls, we can say the Ruth Wariner’s The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir (Macmillan/Flatiron Books; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample) is headed for best seller lists.

No guessing here. We know because the author announced it herself on her Facebook page.

“Just landed in California and received an unbelievable call from the team at Flatiron Books telling me that The Sound of Gravel is an instant NYT Bestseller. WOW! I can hardly believe it and feel like I might still be daydreaming on the plane right now! Thank you to everyone who has been involved and read my story so far. Thank you for reaching out to say how it has affected you, for recommending it to other readers, and for supporting me in so many ways. I am truly overwhelmed with amazement and gratitude!”

It debuts on the upcoming  NYT Bestseller E-Book List at #13.

Thanks for GalleyChat columnist Robin Beerbower for the alert. She has been an early proponent of Wariner’s  memoir about growing up in a violent polygamous Mormon cult. The book has also received advance media attention.

Pulling out the killer opening line: “I am my mother’s fourth child and my father’s thirty-ninth,” Entertainment Weekly gives it a glowing review and an A grade, saying:

“It’s so wrenching and moving that I lost sleep finishing the book, and then lost even more lying awake ruminating on it—a testament to Wariner’s skill at making painful events from decades ago feel visceral and to her willingness to reopen wounds.”

People has featured the title twice, making it their “Book of the Week” for the Jan 18 issue (which came out last Friday) and earlier featured a long, detailed interview with the author on the Web site, in which they call the memoir “powerful and poignant.”

As we reported earlier, it is a IndieNext pick for January too. Mary Laura Philpott (W), Parnassus Books, Nashville, TN says:

“This is a memoir made extraordinary simply by the fact that the author lived to tell the tale. Wariner grew up in a polygamist cult across the Mexican border, the 39th of her father’s 41 children. Surrounded by crushing poverty and repeated tragedy, little Ruth was taught that girls are born to be used by callous men and an angry God. However, she had just enough contact with her maternal grandparents and the outside world to realize the bizarre practices at home didn’t match up with the rest of civilization. With quiet persistence, she grew into an adolescent and began to consider the possibility of escape. Riveting and reminiscent of Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle.”

Holds are quickly getting out of control with ratios topping 7:1 on modest ordering in some areas. The author lives in Portland, Oregon and holds in the Northwest are particularly heavy.

One of the year’s most unlikely success stories is that of a Broadway musical about one of the Founding Fathers, in rap.

Hamilton: An American Musical hit Broadway in August following its Off-Broadway success. So hot are tickets that it’s even getting coverage in the UK, where it has yet to be staged, The Telegraph reports,

“It’s being billed as a game-changer in Broadway history, the first musical since Rent to bring the kind of popular music people are actually listening to in clubs, on the radio, at home, to the Broadway stage.”

The show album is also breaking records. Playbill reports that it has gone “where no other Broadway score has gone before: #1 on the Billboard chart of rap albums.” This month, it was announced as one of the nominees for a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album.

As Hamilton the man is getting more attention, so is Ron Chernow, the historian and biographer who wrote the National Book Award winning Alexander Hamilton (Penguin, 2004), which is central to the show’s creation. Rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the Broadway musical In the Heights, read it on vacation and instantly saw its potential as a musical. It was a six-year trip to realization with Chernow serving as the show’s historical adviser.

The Wall Street Journal features the author in a Christmas Day article on the show and its effect on the his celebrity. Says Chernow, “I never dreamed that I would be autographing Playbills … [this year has been] a biographer’s wish-fulfillment fantasy” adding, “With any piece of writing, you’re hoping that it will change something, and it seldom does. Between the book and the show, we really changed the perception of Alexander Hamilton.”

As part of a Time special edition, Alexander Hamilton: A Founding Father’s Visionary Genius—and His Tragic Fate, Chernow explains that Hamilton’s reputation is seeing a revival partly because,

“America has grown into the contours of the country of [Hamilton’s] imagination … We have caught up to his prophetic vision.”

Readers are also catching up. Chernow’s biography of Hamilton has been on the NYT Paperback Nonfiction list for the last six weeks, reaching a high of #2 and holds are growing in many libraries we checked.

While not actually a tie-in, the trade paperback edition now features the logo from the show on the cover.

The Wall Street Journal posted a video with clips from the show.

Before it moved to Broadway, CBS Sunday Morning featured a story on Hamilton, Chernow, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

More is coming, including road show versions, a likely Tony Award, and a book about the musical.

Hamilton: The Revolution, Lin-Manuel Miranda with Jeremy McCarter, (Hachette/Grand Central Publishing; Hachette Audio and Blackstone Audio). Playbill, quoting a release, reports,

“The book will be designed to look like an object from Hamilton’s era and will include photos and artifacts in addition to interviews, essays and sidebars to accompany the central narrative of Hamilton’s life story and how and why Miranda crafted that life into the stunning stage work over the course of six years.”

Chernow told The Wall Street Journal he is currently working on a biography of Ulysses S. Grant, which the paper says, he is writing “faster than usual, energized by the impact of 2015.”

A new book on parenting (or the lack of it) is rising on Amazon’s sales rankings after CBS This Morning featured The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups by Leonard Sax (Perseus/Basic Books; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Dr. Sax, who has worked as a family physician for more than 20 years, blames parents, media of all sorts, and cell phones for much of the failure to raise respectful, healthy, and happy kids.

In his CBS interview he says kids used to be told to eat their vegetables but are now begged to eat three bites just three bites of broccoli before getting dessert. He also cites the explosion of kids on medication for behavioral reasons in the U.S., 90 times the number in Italy.

In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Sax continues his call to re-vamp parenting and says parents should:

“Require respectful behavior at all times. It’s OK to disagree. It’s never OK to be disrespectful. Prioritize the family. The family meal at home is more important than piling on after-school extracurricular activities. Instead of boosting self-esteem, teach humility. Fight the cultural imperative to be ‘awesome.’ ”

Keying in the season, he suggests New Year’s as a good time to start parenting afresh, going cold turkey and telling kids flat out that things will be different from now on.

Amazon’s sales rankings show that readers are getting ready for New Year’s resolutions. New books on weight loss and regaining focus in a distracting world are doing well as are long-time favorites, such as StrengthsFinder and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Even the NYT Book Review is getting into the act, featuring self-help in the upcoming issue. The cover feature, “You, New and Improved,” offers reviews of Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges by Amy Cuddy and Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes, titles we have covered in earlier “Titles to Know and Recommend” posts (here and here).

Just in time for Sunday’s debut of the final season of Downton Abbey in the U.S., a new biography of one of the show’s favorite stars, Maggie Smith by Michael Coveney (Macmillan/St. Martin’s; Macmillan Audio) is published today.

Like it’s subject, says the Washington Post review, it reveals little about her personal life, but much about her acting career, pointing readers to some of her lesser-known, but “superb” films like A Private Function (1984), the “heartbreaking” The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987) and her monologue, Bed Among the Lentils for the 1988 BBC TV series Talking Heads. Quite different from her role on Downton Abbey, it shares its dry humor.

Actress Jessica Chastain, currently working in Prague on the film version of The Zookeeper’s Wife (Norton, 2007), reveals just how male-dominated the movie business is.

In an essay in The Hollywood Reporter‘s special “Women in Entertainment” issue, Chastain notes that, although women make up only 20% of the crew of The Zookeeper’s Wife, that’s “way more” than any film she’s ever worked on.

“There are female producers (Diane Levin, Kim Zubick and Katie McNeill), a female screenwriter (Angela Workman), a female novelist (Diane Ackerman), a female protagonist and a female director. I’ve never seen a female camera operator like Rachael Levine on one of my films. And I’ve never, ever seen a female stunt coordinator like Antje ‘Angie’ Rau..”

As a result, she says, “You don’t feel a hierarchy; you don’t have anyone feeling like they are being left out or bullied or humiliated.”

The Zookeeper’s Wife is the true story of the valiant couple who rescued 300 Jews from the Nazis by hiding them in the bombed Warsaw Zoo (see the NYT review of the book here). The shoot wrapped at the end of last month. The movie is expected in theaters some time on 2016,

At one point, Johnny Depp was in talks to play famous magician Harry Houdini in a film based on the 2007 biography, The Secret Life of Harry Houdine.

Another film based on a different book that features Houdini may make it to the screen first. STX Entertainment has acquired film rights to David Jaher’s first book, The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World (PRH/Crown; BOT; OverDrive Sample).

About Houdini’s showdowns with a famous Boston medium of the time, it got a glowing review from NPR calling it “spellbinding” and saying that “Jaher writes with a novelist’s panache,” has a wonderful “poetic sympathy and journalistic distance,” and “exhibits a what-the-hell candor that makes [the book] a page-turner.” The Wall Street Journal was also enthusiastic.

Echoing the reviewers’ assessments, the president of STX says in a press release quoted by The Hollywood Reporter, “Quite a few producers and studios were pursuing rights to this book for very good reason … this is a spellbinding and exciting true story.”

Over a year after its initial publication, many libraries still have very long holds queues for Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (RH/Ten Speed Press) and those that have managed to work through the reserve list are still seeing copies rotate off the shelf in heavy circulation.

As we reported earlier, now comes the next book in the series, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up (Ten Speed Press; RH Large Print; OverDrive Sample).

This version, according to EW (which gave it a C in their brief review), is “mainly a rehash,” but that is unlikely to matter to Kondo’s fan base.

The new book offers illustrations of how drawers, closets, and cabinets should look after tidying as well as step-by-step folding guides for various articles of clothing – each reason enough to get fans buzzing.

If you lost circ. on the first edition by buying low, this is a chance to get a head start on the new one.

Oprah Winfrey, who has made the career of many a memoirist, is set to finally come through on the promise of writing a memoir of her own.

Joining with Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan, Winfrey is to pen The Life You Want, an inspirational memoir due out in January 2017 (no cover or ISBN yet).

According to her site, the book “reveals never-before told stories from Oprah’s experience and shines a light on how they can inform your life.”

Deadline Hollywood reports the memoir deal netted Winfrey an eight-figure payday.

It will follow Winfrey’s 2014 What I Know for Sure, a collection of her O magazine columns also published by Flatiron.

The memoir is not the only deal Winfrey has struck with the company.

She is also starting her own imprint and plans to hand-select several nonfiction titles each year.

In a press release quoted by The Hollywood Reporter, Bob Miller, president and publisher of Flatiron Books, said,

“We’re … thrilled to give a home to Oprah’s imprint titles. We all know how extraordinary Oprah’s instincts are when it comes to choosing books, instincts borne of her lifelong love of reading and the power of the written word.”

While these days it takes more than a nod from Oprah to make a book a sensation, her endorsements continues to spur sales, making hers an imprint to watch.

Laura Linney is in talks to star in an adaptation of The Dinner by Dutch author Herman Koch (RH/Hogarth), reports Deadline.

It was once reported that Cate Blanchett would direct, but it that chair will now be occupied by Oren Moverman.

A hit in Europe, the novel arrived in the U.S. in 2013 to predictions that it would be the next Gone Girl. Although it didn’t achieve that level, it sold well and was on the NYT Hardcover Fiction list for seven weeks, reaching a high of #7.

Linney has completed work on another book adaptation, Sully, based on Highest Duty by Chesley Sullenberger (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2009), who piloted an airplane to safety after its engines were  disabled by a bird strike.

Directed by Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks will play Sully and Linney his wife. It is set for release some time in 2016.

Will Tina Fey be able to find cinematic humor in the war in Afghanistan? At least one person thinks so, declaring on Jezebel that Fey’s upcoming movte Whiskey Tango Foxtrot “could be the first to succeed where other studio films have flopped.”

Noting that “The whole project is legitimized by the fact that it’s based on” Kim Barker’s “darkly funny” memoir The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the reporter cautions, “I am still wary, since Hollywood is capable of making smart, nuanced stories into broadly offensive blockbusters, but hopeful—if any Af-Pak war comedy has a chance at success, it’s certainly this one.”

Once titled Fun House, now changed to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, itmarrives in theaters on March 4.

The first trailer was released today.

Tiei-n:
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (The Taliban Shuffle MTI): Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Kimberly Barker, )RH/Anchor, 2/23/16)