Stephen Colbert featured American Ballet Theater’s Misty Copeland and legendary musician Yo-Yo Ma yesterday on the CBS Late Show, perhaps one of the few times in recent memory a ballet dancer – not to mention a classical cellist – has taken center stage in a world dominated by comics, actors, and celebrities.

Copeland made history when she became the American Ballet Theater’s first black female principal dancer. She has published both an autobiography, Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina, (S&S/Touchstone; Tantor Audio) and a children’s picture book, Firebird, illus. by Christopher Myers, (Penguin/Putnam).

Colbert interviews Copeland before her performance (beginning at time stamp 31:22 in the full video). He spends a lot of time with her and asks thoughtful questions, including how she feels about being a role model.

Bustle says Twitter lit up over her and Ma’s appearance. Below is a highlight.

In contrast the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, appears tomorrow night, discussing his new book The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Norton; Brilliance Audio). In it he presents a history of the 2008 financial collapse through his perspective as the point man for the government’s management of the economy.

Bernanke is in the midst of a big push for his book and Colbert is not his only stop.

He was on CBS Sunday Morning last week and has gotten wide coverage in print media from his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal to coverage in The New York Times. He will appear on FOX, CNN, PBS, and ABC as well.

The early attention is paying off. His book is sitting at Amazon’s #20 spot already and he has yet to get the Colbert bump – if one is in the offing.

CBS This Morning ran a story yesterday on the therapeutic benefits of being outdoors, highlighting nature’s ability to enhance creativity and instill calm.

Reporter Chip Reid interviewed a big proponent of unplugging and getting outside, Zach Klein, Vimeo co-founder and CEO of DIY.org, an online community for kids,  The two talked while wandering his Upstate NY retreat, 55 acres of wild sprinkled with handmade bridges, tree houses, and cabins.

To capture spaces and locales he liked, Klein started a Tumblr blog featuring evocative images of houses in uncluttered landscapes.

The blog led to his new illustrated book Cabin Porn: Inspiration For Your Quiet Place Somewhere (Hachette /Little, Brown; OverDrive Sample). The collection of over 200 images is rising on Amazon and has already broken into its Top 100.

Klein has also been featured in The New York Times.

NPR’s Fresh Air featured Dr. James O’Connell, president of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program on Tuesday, in a discussion about providing medical care for the homeless population.

O’Connell’s new memoir, Stories From the Shadows: Reflections of a Street Doctor, is available to purchase from the organization’s site but is not currently on wholesaler catalogs. For a small non-profit press book it is doing remarkably well. It is already #118 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

O’Connell tells host Terry Gross that he and his colleagues are visiting patients “in their homes, which are often under bridges, down back alleyways [and] on park benches.”

He urges people not to judge his patients and talks about learning to care for the homeless, the horrors they face, and the toll undiagnosed, untreated illness has.

O’Connell shares details of what amounts to Third World illness as the result of a lack of treatment, from a man who lost both feet from auto-amputation due to the end stages of frostbite and the symptoms of AIDS neglected for lack of treatment.

He says “If you are caring for a homeless population, you are really seeing the really both exotic illnesses as well as the end stages of chronic, common illnesses.”

O’Connell offers new insight into an issue that also affects libraries.

It was inevitable that the movie Everest would renew the controversy surrounding the various accounts of the 1996 fatal climb.

As we wrote earlier, there are several books on the disaster. Jon Krakauer wrote the most successful and well-known version, his blockbuster Into Thin Air. He is a character in the Everest film, played by House of Card’s Michael Kelly and is far from happy about how he is represented, telling the L.A. Times, “It’s total bull, anyone who goes to that movie and wants a fact-based account should read Into Thin Air.”

Krakauer’s book is not the basis for this film (it was adapted as a TV movie in 1997, which he also disliked intensely) and no one connected to the script consulted him. He tells the paper that he considers the film a personal affront from director Kormákur and is particularly unhappy with a scene in which he refuses to help in a rescue attempt, “I never had that conversation … I’m not saying I could have, or would have. What I’m saying is, no one came to my tent and asked.”

Krakauer himself has taken criticism for his account of the events. Objecting to his portrayal in Into Thin Air, one of the Russian guides, Anatoli Boukreev wrote his own version, The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest. He is also a character in the movie, played by Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson.

Krakauer is not one of those authors who is unhappy with every film version of his work. He was so pleased with Sean Penn’s adaptation of another of his bestsellers, Into the Wild, that “When [Sean] showed me the rough cut, I wanted to kiss him, I was so happy.”

After a strong box office at IMAX theaters, Everest slipped when it opened last week in regular theaters. Reviews have not been stellar. The L.A. Times even encouraged viewers to turn to other films instead: “documentaries like Meru and The Summit will take you higher than Everest, world-class visuals and all.”

The NYT says the movie “never seems to get anywhere, taking up space and time without managing to be especially memorable or imposing,” while The Telegraph ventures it is a “pulverising tale of real-life tragedy on the mountain [that] never quite hits the heights.”

Palliative care nurse (and former English professor) Theresa Brown talked with Terry Gross yesterday on NPR, discussing her new book tracing the fates of four patients over 12 hours in a cancer ward.

The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives (Workman/Algonquin) is a moving and riveting medical account of struggle, hope, fear, and the daily demands of nursing.

Holds are heavy in some libraries and the book is on the verge of breaking into Amazon’s top 100.

Brown previously worked in a hospital’s oncology unit but now spends her time in home-based hospice care. Her first book, Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between (Harper) was highly regarded and has been adopted as a textbook in nursing schools.

Brown and Gross discuss the challenges of nursing, the stress of time and work pressures that cost patients the care they need, the desire for honesty in diagnosis, and the experience of home care.

Describing the major developments in breast cancer diagnosis and treatment over recent years, Dr. Elisa Port, a surgeon who specializes in the disease, talked to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air this week.

Her book, The New Generation Breast Cancer Book: How to Navigate Your Diagnosis and Treatment Options-and Remain Optimistic-in an Age of Information Overload (RH/Ballantine; OverDrive Sample) is getting widespread attention from sources as diverse as InStyle magazine and Woman’s Day and is likely to get more as Breast Cancer Awareness Month begins in October.

Port discusses new treatments, drugs, and care routines for those diagnosed with the disease as well as some of the current hot topic issues such as genetic testing and 3-D mammograms.

She tells Gross she wrote the book due to the amazing change in access to information for patients:

Thirty years ago no one even used the words “breast cancer” in public. Twenty years ago you couldn’t even find an advertisement with the word “breast” in it, and you flash forward to times like today, where there’s absolutely no shortage of information out there and the problem no longer is lack of information, it’s actually too much information.  [Patients] were coming [into my office] inundated, defeated, completely perplexed by all the information out there and how to navigate it, whether it was emails from friends, whether it was websites they needed to read. I thought there was a need for a new type of book, a new generation of book for a new generation — the age of information overload.

A book on an unglamorous subject, how to make use of items that might ordinarily go right into the garbage, like sour milk, is rising on Amazon sales rankings. 

The ideas behind Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook: A Guide to Eating Well and Saving Money By Wasting Less Food by Dana Gunders (Chronicle Books; OverDrive Sample) got a big boast from the PBS News Hour‘s occasional series “Food Glorious Food” which featured a Michelin star chef who is making “garbage to plate” palatable. NPR.org posted the video on their food site, The Salt.referring to Gunders’s book for those who want apply the principles at home.

Claiming that “The typical American family tosses out about $1,500 of food yearly. All this wasted food is the largest component of solid waste in our landfills, and when it rots, it emits methane — a potent greenhouse gas linked to climate change, ” author Gunders is out to change that with a handbook that offers readers easy methods to keep food longer and to use it all.

Libraries that own the book show holds ratios of  3:1.

Based on the memoir by 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes, Truth And Duty: The Press, The President, And The Privilege Of Power,  the movie Truth tells the story of the news team reporting on allegations that then President George Bush had avoided military service. It was later proved that the story was based on faulty documents. Those involved were fired and CBS News anchor Dan Rather stepped down.

The movie stars Robert Redford as Rather and Cate Blanchett as Mapes. The trailer was just released for the movie that opens in a limited number of theaters on Oct. 16, followed by a wider release.

Rather himself endorsed the movie earlier this month at the Toronto Film Festival.

Tie-in:

Truth : The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power
Mary Mapes

Macmillan/St. Martin’s Griffin
Trade pbk; October 13, 2015

USA Today bestows one of its rare negative reviews on the just-released Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard (Macmillan/Henry Holt; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample), calling it a “misfire for franchise.”

Reviewer Ray Locker points out that, although it is part of O’Reilly’s Killing series no one is actually killed in this one and points to Del Quentin Wilber’s Rawhide Down as a more detailed account of the assassination attempt.

Locker says that Killing Reagan:

… deals more with Reagan’s gradual descent into dementia … the authors contend, contrary to the claims by Reagan loyalists, that Reagan exhibited signs of the illness during his presidency … [they] delve into his extramarital affairs in Hollywood, indifferent parenting, disputes with his second wife, Nancy, and the multiple instances in which Reagan appeared to be not quite there.

The negative review aside, The National Geographic Channel and Ridely Scott’s Scott Free Productions are partnering once again on the TV adaptation.

According to Variety, “The Scott Free-produced versions of the three previous books in the series — Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy and Killing Jesus — were the network’s three most-watched programs in history. Both “Kennedy” and “Jesus” received Emmy nominations for outstanding TV movie.”

Get ready for another film version of a book about financial shenanigans. Following in the footsteps of  The Wolf of Wall Street  is a  film adaptation of  Michael Lewis’s best seller The Big Short, (Norton, 2011). It was just announced that it will be released on Christmas Day, after opening in a limited number of theaters
on Dec. 11.

Because of the sudden announcement and the timing, Deadline is calling it a “Surprise Oscar Entry” saying  it “adds another film to what is shaping up to be the most competitive year-end movie market in recent memory.”

The trailer for the film that stars Brad Pitt, Steve Carrell, Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling was released today.

More financial skullduggery is on its way, with two TV adaptations of books about Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff.

Recently released was a first look at Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer in HBO’s The Wizard of Lies. Based on the  book of the same title by Diana Henriques (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Griffin; Tantor Audio) with additional material from Truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family by Laurie Sandell (Hachette/Little Brown), it is directed by Barry Levinson. It is expected to air in 2016.

ABC recently wrapped production on Madoff a limited series starring Richard Dreyfuss in the title role with Blythe Danner as his wife, Ruth Madoff. It is also expected to debut next year.

Set to appear on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert tonight, Donald Trump may announce that he has a new book coming on Oct. 27, on the heels of his update of Time to Get Tough: Making America Great Again (Regnery Publishing).

Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of S&S that also publishes works by Karl Rove, Glenn Beck and Lynne Cheney, will release the as yet untitled book (S&S/Threshold Editions; 240 pages; ISBN 9781501137969; October 2015; $26.00).

Quoting from a statement by S&S, Vanity Fair reports the book will:

“… outline how a crippled America could be restored to greatness [and] explore Trump’s view on key issues including the economy, big CEO salaries and taxes, healthcare, education, national security, and social issues. Of particular interest will be his vision for complete immigration reform, beginning with securing the borders and putting American workers first.”

Included in the same statement is Trump’s own take on his newest offering:

“I am excited to announce that work on my new bestseller is almost done and I’ll have a new book out from Threshold Editions and Simon & Schuster later this year. Not since The Art of the Deal have I had this much fun writing a book.”

The Washington Post’s nonfiction critic, Carlos Lozada, earlier offered a round-up of some of Trump’s other bestsellers, experienced via a massive binge-reading session.

From our previous story on Lozada’s reactions, he “encountered a world where bragging is breathing and insulting is talking, where repetition and contradiction come standard, where vengefulness and insecurity erupt at random.” He doubts Trump would be satisfied if he actually became President, quoting him on what makes him happy, “The same assets that excite me in the chase, often, once they are acquired, leave me bored … For me, you see, the important thing is the getting, not the having.”

Nadia Bolz-Weber’s third book, Accidental Saints: Finding God in all the Wrong People (RH/Convergent Books; Random House Audio), just hit the NYT Bestseller list and is getting widespread attention, with holds rising as a result.

Bolz-Weber spoke with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air last week, giving a sense of both her book and her approach, saying “Some churches might have a hard time welcoming junkies and drag queens; we’re fine with that.”

The Atlantic and The Huffington Post have also posted features with Huff Post saying Bolz-Weber is:

“… one of the most important Christian voices around — not because she has come up with some catchy, easy new way to do faith, but because when she talks about the destructive power of sin, as well as redemption and grace, she knows of what she speaks.”

Like her memoir’s title, Bolz-Weber is an accidental pastor. She found her path in the Lutheran church only after working as a standup comic with a heavy drinking problem. Her book is inviting, profane, and big hearted.

Holds are exceeding a 3:1 ratio in many libraries we checked. Some libraries have yet to place orders.

Add this to your podcast playlist. Slate‘s Audio Book Club convenes this month to discuss Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (RH/Spiegel & Grau; OverDrive Sample).

Written as letter to his teenage son about racism in America, it continues to draw attention and debate. One of the ten selections on this year’s NBA Nonfiction longlist, it is also once again holding the #1 spot on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list (it hit the list at #1 during its first week on sale and stayed there for three weeks before dipping to the #2 spot for five weeks).

Jamelle Bouie (Slate’s chief political correspondent), Meghan O’Rourke (Slate’s cultural critic), and Katy Waldman (Slate’s “Words” correspondent) engage in a conversation on what they all agree is a searing and demanding experience that forces readers to struggle with Coates’s multiple indictments.

Describing the book as a mix of memoir, polemic, and literary essay that evokes Richard Wright and James Baldwin, the three panelists struggle themselves to come to grips with Coates’s essential message, his slippery take on hope and the iffy possibility for justice.

They praise the book’s lyrical, literary power, agree that it is forcefully animated and rigorously demanding, and call it a book without answers that they each recommend to readers.

The Audio Book Club will take on Andy Weir’s The Martian (RH/Crown) in October. NASA is a fan, claiming the book has already “saved the entire the entire space program.” It is currently #1 on the NYT Paperback Trade Fiction Best Sellers list after 46 weeks.

The film version debuts Oct. 2, starring Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain.

In case you haven’t heard, Pope Francis will make his first visit to the US next week, arriving in Washington, DC on September 22, followed by tours of NYC and Philadelphia.

In anticipation, yesterday’s NPR Fresh Air featured Paul Vallely, who wrote Pope Francis: The Struggle For The Soul Of Catholicism (Bloomsbury; OverDrive Sample; 2013), discussing the changes the Pope as made within the Church.

Published to coincide with the visit, National Geographic released Pope Francis and the New Vatican by David Yoder last month. Filled with 140 “never-before-seen” photographs, the publisher says the photographer got them by being “embedded with the Pope inside the Vatican for 6 months.”

For those planning displays, last year Publishers Weekly offered a rundown of the big new and forthcoming books on the Pope, including the “highest-profile book in the Francis lineup,” Garry Wills’s The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis (Penguin/Viking; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample; March, 2015).

Including best sellers by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sally Mann as well as titles that have received less attention, The National Book Awards longlist for Nonfiction was released today. The judging panel includes Paul Holdengräber host of the popular interview series, Live from the New York Public Library.

The shortlist will be announced October 15. The winners will be announced on Nov. 18.

The fourth and final 2015 NBA longlist, for fiction, will be released tomorrow morning.

The 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction Longlist

Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History (RH/Crown; 4/21/15)

Starred by LJ and Booklist, this look at a common natural phenomenon was reviewed in many publications, including the NYT Sunday Book Review

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (RH/Spiegel & Grau; 7/14/15)

The most widely covered by the media of the books on the list, the author appeared on many shows, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

It is currently #2 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list after eight weeks (it was #1 for three weeks)

Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (Yale University Press; 2/24/15)

A look at how everyday Americans mourned Lincoln and how his assassination continues to affect the culture. It was reviewed, not particularly enthusiastically, in the NYT Sunday Book Review and the Wall Street Journal

Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (Hachette/Little, Brown; 5/12/15)

An Indie Next pick, this memoir by the renowned photographer was starred by PW and Booklist and reviewed widely. In the daily NYT, Dwight Garner called it “weird, intense and uncommonly beautiful.” It appeared on several best seller lists, hitting a high of #9 on the NYT list.

Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness (S&S/Atria; S&S Audio; 5/15/15)

After reading this, you are unlikely to ever order grilled octopus again. It was reviewed appreciatively in the Seattle Times. The Wall Street Journal took a dimmer view of it.

Susanna Moore, Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii (Macmillan/ FSG; 9/1/15)

More well known for her novels, Moore has written two previous books on Hawaii. In the NYT Sunday Book Review Jan Morris called it “an astonishingly learned summation of the Hawaiian meaning, elegantly written, often delightfully entertaining and ultimately sad.”

Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays (RH/Dial Press; Tantor Audio; 3/3/15)

By the author of The Telling Room, which received a great deal of attention in 2013, this follow-up has drawn less attention, only reviewed prepub by PW and Kirkus, which said, “carefully curated selection of features demonstrates the breadth of the author’s peculiar, personal style of storytelling.”

Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran (Macmillan/Holt; 4/2/15)

Reviewed by the Washington Post, which calls it, “an unusual book, simultaneously an exploration of faith and of Islam as it is lived by those who know it most intimately.”

Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light: A Memoir (RH/ Knopf, 4/25/15; Recorded Books)

The author won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Life on Mars.

The NYT Sunday Book Review clearly appreciated this coming-of-age memoir by the African-American poet, but that review offers no quotable lines. Carol Memmott in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, provides one, “Ordinary Light is as poetic as Life on Mars. Smith’s spare yet beautiful prose transforms her story into a shining example of how one person’s shared memories can brighten everyone’s world.”

Michael White, Travels in Vermeer: A Memoir (Persea Books, dist. by Norton; 3/5/15)

The one paperback on the list, the only consumer review it received was from Shelf Awareness for Readers, which called it an “unusual and riveting memoir” in which White, reeling from a divorce, goes to Amsterdam and becomes entranced with Vermeer.