The first preview of Miracles from Heaven, a new movie starring Jennifer Garner and Queen Latifah has been just been released

Based on the book Miracles from Heaven: A Little Girl, Her Journey to Heaven, and Her Amazing Story of Healing by Christy Wilson Beam (Hachette; OverDrive Sample), the film is highlighted in a People magazine online spread. It tells the story of a young girl who “survived a 30-ft. fall from a tree and told her parents she had visited heaven – then was inexplicably cured from her terminal digestive disorder.”

The new issue of People magazine, on newsstands this Friday, features the story in full and includes “additional photos from set and more from Jennifer Garner.”

The film’s release date is March 18, 2016. The Sony producing team behind the 2014 movie Heaven Is for Real is also heading this one.

Although the book title sounds like a several  bestsellers, this one did not hit any of the lists and was not reviewed pre-pub. It was written by the girl’s mother, played by Garner in the film, and is her first book.

Two tie-in editions are forthcoming in February.

Miracles from Heaven — Trade pbk. ISBN: 9780316311373
Miracles from Heaven — Mass Mkt. ISBN: 9780316355322

Note: Tie-in cover art is forthcoming

Described as an “instant classic,” Jeannette Walls’ best selling memoir The Glass Castle,(S&S/Scribner), tells the amazing story of a growing up with dysfunctional, sometimes homeless parents. In 2012, it was set to be adapted as a film starring Jennifer Lawrence.

Plans have changed and now Brie Larson is in talks to star, as is Woody Harrelson, reports Deadline. Larson is currently enjoying Oscar buzz for her star role in another book adaptation, Room (she was interviewed about it on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday).

Glass Castle‘s Director Daniel Cretton has worked with her before, on the well-received movie Short Term 12.

Step aside, Thug Kitchen, here’s the real deal.

In an affecting interview on NPR’s The Salt, Gustavo “Goose” Alvarez talks about his new cookbook Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories from Behind Bars (Workman; OverDrive Sample).

Alvarez spent over a decade behind bars and explains that those cheap packs of dehydrated noodles are everything to prisoners seeking some control over their meals, “maybe a guy has a bag of chips — that’s all he has to his name. And this other guy is blessed to have a couple of soups. Well, they get together, they make an interesting meal.”

His book is a mix of recipes and stories. It begins with the basic instructions for cooking the noodles without a pot or open flame. It goes on to offer advice for surviving hard time.

When asked who might use his book, Alvarez replies:

“I know some college kids might attempt to cook some of these. And quite frankly, I’ve had a few of them direct message me and say that they were awesome. They’ll go, ‘Man, these are great. I saved some money. It only cost me a couple dollars.’ Cool. And then I’d like others to read it and be humbled by the stories. And maybe, you know, they’ll have a friend of a friend or a family member — somebody that’s made a mistake and is doing some time. And they can probably share the stories with them, and hope it can teach them something. Maybe learn from my mistakes and others not to make these stupid decisions.”

Can a quirky nonfiction book on cleaning sustain a half-hour comedy show? Deadline  reports that NBC is willing to find out.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo, (Ten Speed Press; Tantor Audio) by Marie Kondo will serve as the inspiration for a new show.

The cult hit racked up long holds lists and sat atop bestseller lists for nearly a year. It is currently holding tight to the #2 spot on the NYT Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous list. So popular is Kondo’s message, she was named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People” of 2015.

Writer Erica Oyama (Burning Love, Schooled) and Greg Malins (Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Will & Grace) will work on the project, which “centers on a young woman in a moment of crisis who attempts to get her messy life in order.” Note to neat freaks, it sounds like the show will be very loosely based on the book, basically just using the title as a launching point.

The group behind the project and is also, as we noted earlier, working on Josh Schwartz’s horror dramedy Horrorstör for Fox TV. It is based on Grady Hendrix’s faux-IKEA catalog/horror story, Horrorstör (Quirk).

Actress and former Scientologist Leah Remini appeared on ABC’s 20/20 on Friday and reaction to her hour-long interview has skyrocketed her memoir Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology (PRH/Ballantine) to #3 on Amazon.

The LA Times calls her conversation with ABC’s Dan Harris, in which Remini dishes the dirt on Scientologist Tom Cruise and his ex-wife, Katie Holmes, “explosive” and reports on the fallout, which was still going strong yesterday as Remini appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America.

Much of the Good Morning America segment covered the Church-based “reprogramming” of Remini due to Church reports filed against her by Cruise and Holmes after they became displeased with her in the run up to their wedding.

Remini is also featured on the cover of the Nov. 16 issue of People magazine (on newsstands this Friday) and is scheduled  for an interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN.

We featured Portlandia star and Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein’s new memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir (Penguin/Riverhead Books; Penguin Audio and BOT) on last week’s look ahead.

Since then Brownstein has captured reader interest in back-to-back appearances on NPR’s Fresh Air and the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

On the strength of both performances her story has risen to #26 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Perhaps some of the attention is due to her quirky set-piece for Colbert where she sings a somber song:

As we reported on Friday, former ABC News reporter and award-winning journalist Ted Koppel is receiving media attention for his investigation into the potential of a massive cyber attack on the nation’s power grid.

Koppel appeared yesterday on CBS This Morning promoting his book, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath (PRH/Crown; BOT Audio).

He was on yesterday evening PBS’s News Hour as well.

Koppel accuses the Federal government of having no plan in place to cope with the fallout and calls such an assault inevitable, quoting Centcom Commander General Lloyd Austin as saying, “It’s not a question of if, it’s just a question of when.”

Koppel reports that the Russians and Chinese already have the capacity to conduct an attack and that individual groups, such as ISIS, can hire the expertise and run an operation with equipment that can be bought off the shelf.

The book rose to #8 on Amazon sales rankings after yesterday’s appearances.

Moving up the Amazon sales charts with holds growing in many libraries is Stacy Schiff’s newest history.

The jump in holds and interest is likely due to Schiff’s appearance on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday. She discussed the events of the Salem witch trials and described the courtroom testimony as sounding like “a low grade acid trip.”

Witches: Salem, 1692 (Hachette/Little, Brown; Little, Brown Audio; OverDrive Sample) offers a detailed account of the hysteria and fear that swept through Salem town and Salem village, highlighting the key figures of the trial and describing the unfolding terror and its aftermath.

Likely to increase demand, it is the November Costco pick with Pennie Clark Ianniciello saying Schiff, “trains her skills on this dark period and shines a light on it as no one has.”

The NYT Sunday Review was posted online today and will be in the upcoming print issue.

In her review Jane Kamensky, Pforzheimer Foundation director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America and a professor of history at Harvard, reads like an academic’s discomfort with history written for a non-academic audience:

“Schiff’s glib, compendious and often maddening account of the events of that fateful year, does a great deal to punch up the story, but little to explore and still less to understand its significance. An acclaimed biographer of subjects as diverse as Cleopatra and Véra Nabokov, Schiff here broadens her lens, like an artist turning from portraits to teeming allegories: Rembrandt taking up the work of Bosch. But a crowded canvas does not a probing history make, as The Witches powerfully demonstrates.”

Kamensky softens the blow by pointing out just how vividly and well Schiff writes history: “Schiff sets scenes brilliantly … The book crackles with sonic detail… Schiff is what the Germans call a Menschenkenner: a knower of human nature, and her book is a tightly plotted character study.”

Two bird specialists, each of whom has recently published a book, talked with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday.

Wildlife photographer Gerrit Vyn has been photographing birds and recording their calls for years. After contributing images to many other books, he has now released his own title, The Living Bird: 100 Years of Listening to Nature (Mountaineers Books). It includes over 250 photographs by Vyn as well as essays by noted birders and naturalists.

Scott Weidensaul, who contributed pieces for Vyn’s book, has also published his own book, Peterson Reference Guide to Owls of North America and the Caribbean (HMH). Following the pattern of other Peterson reference guides, it includes an exhaustive catalog with detailed descriptions of the owls, habitat, and behavior.

Both men communicate their fascination with birds, including the “tremendous of diversity of calls that owls make,” with samples that capture the feeling of being near the birds.

Yesterday was a three-book extravaganza for CBS’s venerable Sunday Morning magazine show.

The Dogist by Elias Weiss Friedman (Workman/Artisan) was featured in a charming and smile-inducing report, sending the book racing up the Amazon sales charts where it is currently occupying the #62 spot.

The book is based on Friedman’s blog and Instagram accounts of the same name, which have done for dogs what Humans of New York and The Sartorialist have done for people and fashion. In the process Friedman has gathered over a million followers.

CBS posted a photo gallery in addition to the video segment.

Also featured were Erica Jong, whose new book Fear of Dying (Macmillan/St. Martin’s; Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample) rose to #148 on the Amazon chart as a result, and singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, for his new memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (PRH/Blue Rider Press; Penguin Audio; OverDrive Sample) who comes to CBS fresh off of his appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last week.

Robert Durst is the subject of books, films, and documentaries, perhaps most famously HBO’s The Jinx in which he seems to confess to multiple murders, saying to himself while wearing a microphone, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

Add another book to the list. Author Jeanine Pirro, a former district attorney involved in one of the Durst murder cases, featured in The Jinx, is publishing a new title, He Killed Them All: Robert Durst and My Quest for Justice (S&S/Gallery Books; S&S Audio). According to the publisher summary, Pirro reveals “stunning, previously unknown secrets about the crimes.”

The book is creating its own controversy. The New York Times reports that Pirro’s former collaborator on the project has filed suit against her, accusing Pirro of knowingly stretching the truth and aggrandizing her role in the matter. The lawsuit further claims that her editor at S&S told her not to “allow ‘concerns about facts’ to impede her from turning in drafts of the book.” Pirro’s agent has scoffed at the charges and S&S disputes the claims.

Holds are slight thus far but that will change if media attention continues.

Anticipation is building for Leah Remini’s upcoming tell-all about her experiences with the Church of Scientology, Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology (RH/Ballantine). Best known for her role as Carrie Heffernan on the CBS show King of Queens, and currently the star of TLC’s reality show, It’s All Relative, Remini left the Church after being a member for 30 years.

Lawrence Wright wrote a best selling account of the Church in 2013, Going Clear, the basis for this year’s award-winning HBO documentary of the same name, but Remini, who Vanity Fair describing her as “a well-connected Hollywood player” predicts she will have juicer stories, “until either Katie Holmes or Nicole Kidman [both women were married to Tom Cruise, who is deeply involved in the church] put pen to paper, this sounds like the closest we’ll get to exploring the Hollywood side of Scientology.”

People and Redbook have reported on the upcoming book, as have the tabloids. ABC’s 20/20 will do an hour-long interview with Remini on October 30, before the book’s release the following Tuesday. She will also be featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, as well as dozens of other shows. Even Rachel Ray and Dr. Oz will get in on the action.

Holds are starting to grow at libraries we checked.

Nixon is in the news again, most recently as the cover story on yesterday’s CBS Sunday Morning.

Reporter David Martin interviewed both Nixon’s Deputy Assistant to the President, Alexander Butterfield, the man who told the world about the White House taping system, and Bob Woodward, who along with Carl Bernstein, exposed Nixon’s crimes.

Woodward’s new book, The Last of the President’s Men (S&S; S&S Audio), is based on interviews with Butterfield and 20 boxes of papers (some of them classified as top secret) he carried out of the White House. The book details Butterfield’s role, outlines the political era of Nixon, and offers a candid view of Nixon himself.

Much of the CBS Sunday Morning report centers on Nixon’s handling of the Vietnam War – bombing even as he internally raged against its ineffectiveness and his determination to discredit witnesses of the My Lai massacre.

It also addresses what Woodward calls “a subversion of what the job of the presidency is.” For example, Nixon had the CIA, FBI, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities all look into a civil servant who had two pictures of President Kennedy in her office – an offense Nixon obsessed over and called an “infestation.”

While orders and holds are light at libraries we checked, Woodward’s book is currently #60 and rising on Amazon’s sales rankings.

The author of the book featured on the left, presidential candidate Donald Trump, says the cover photo is of such “a nasty-looking guy” that he decided to use the title Crippled America, (S&S/Threshold; S&S Audio, Oct. 27) rather than his campaign motto, “Make America Great Again.”

He also said, during a campaign stop in Iowa yesterday, that he was surprised that “the Rolls Royce” of publishers, Simon and Schuster would go for such a “nasty title.”

And we expected him to be a fan of one of one of S&S’s other titles, Fuck Yeah Menswear.

  
Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarussian journalist and oral historian, won the Nobel Prize in Literature today for what the Swedish Academy describes as  “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

The New York Times reports Alexievich is “best known for giving voice to women and men who had lived through World War II, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that lasted from 1979 to 1989, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.” She is the 14th woman to win the prize.

Breaking recent precedent, Alexievich is a nonfiction writer, not a novelist or poet. However, Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, quoted in the NYT‘, says she has created “a history of emotions — a history of the soul, if you wish.”

Of her books in English translations, two are currently available, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (Norton; 9780393336863; 1992) and  Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster  (hardcover, Dalkey Archive Press; trade pbk Macmillan/Picador, 2006), which won the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Her website lists a few other titles translated in English, likely to soon be released in the U.S.

Proving the bookies right for the first time in years, Alexievich was the odds on favorite to win the prize, beating out Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Banville who were all rumored to be in the running as well.