Since Jon Stewart returned from his time away from The Daily Show to direct a movie, he’s shown greater interest in Hollywood, featuring more actors and director and fewer authors.

But this week, he is back in the groove, with three of his four weekly shows featuring authors.

Monday: The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran, Hooman Majd, (RH/Doubleday, 11/8/13)

Stewart is a bit late to the party on this book, which was featured on NPR after it was published last fall.  He has a natural affinity for the subject; his forthcoming movie, Rosewater, (no release date yet), is based on another book about a family in Iran, Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival by Maziar Bahari, (Random House, 2011).

Tuesday: The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind, Michio Kaku, (RH/Doubleday, 2/25/14)

The media’s favorite physicists  explores the cutting edge of brain research.

Thursday — Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits, Kevin Roose, (Hachette/Grand Central)

The author also appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition last week (see our earlier story ).

If you haven’t yet become inured  to the “greed is good” phenomenon among financial kingpins, give a listen to Kevin Roose on NPR’s Morning Edition as he reveals the dripping distain they exhibit towards outsiders during one of their annual secret society events, which Roose describes as being “like The Wolf of Wall Street meets the Elk Club.”

In his new book, Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits, (Hachette/Grand Central), Roose follows eight people in their first two years on Wall Street. It seems that world has lost its shine. Of the 8 people, only 3 are still in finance and just one of them is happy in the job. Says Roose, “The sex appeal is in Silicon Valley now. That’s where you go if you want to strike it rich. It has the cultural cachet that Wall Street used to have.”

Roose writes for New York magazine, an except of his book is in the current issue.

Libraries are showing holds.

As part of Sunday’s Olympics coverage, NBC debuted a preview of the Universal movie Unbroken (the studio is part of NBC), directed by Angelina Jolie. It is based on Laura Hillenbrand’s long-running best seller, Unbroken (Random House, 2010), still on the NYT hardcover nonfiction list at #11 after 156 weeks.

Looks like the movie will bring new readers to the book; the preview sent the book up to #2 (from #62) on Amazon’s sales rankings.

It will be several months before the movie theatrical opening (set for Christmas Day), but  the Olympics serves as a good tie-in, since the hero of the film, Louis Zamperini (played in the film  by Jack O’Connell) competed in the 1936 Olympics. The real-life Zamperini, now 96, is also featured in the preview, narrated by  Tom Brokaw.

Official Web Site: UnbrokenFilm.com

The former Republican Governor of Florida, Charlie Crist,  is running for that office again, but with a twist. He’s now running as a Democrat.

He made news last week by calling for the end of the embargo against Cuba.

He appears tomorrow night on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report to talk about his book, released last week, The Party’s Over : How the Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became a Democrat, (Penguin/Dutton).

Libraries show growing holds on light ordering for The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (Norton; Brilliance Audio).

The book has been getting attention in the print media, including Thomas Friendman’s column in The New York Times, an Op-Ed in The Washington Post, a piece by the book’s authors in the Financial Times, and a story in the UK’s Telegraph.

The authors appeared on Fareed Zakaria’a CNN show on Sunday.

A new book by Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for the New Yorker, examines mass extinctions, like that of the dinosaurs caused by asteroids, and particularly the one we are going through now, which is caused by us and may lead to our own demise. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, (Macmillan/Holt; S&S Audio), arrives next week.

The author is scheduled to appear on several shows:

2/10 — CBS This Morning

2/10 or 2/11 — NPR All Things Considered

2/11 — The Daily Show with Jon Stewart 

There will also be print coverage in the NYT Science Section, the NYT Book Review, and New York Magazine.

The book grew out of a two-part series that Kolbert published in the New Yorker in December. Her previous book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, (Macmillan/Bloomsbury, 2006) was on climate change.

Fans of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show know how often he has mined the ongoing story of  the man he calls “Toronto’s crack mayor,” Rob Ford.

So naturally, he’ll compare notes tomorrow night with Toronto Star‘s city hall reporter Robyn Doolittle, whose book, Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (Penguin) is being released today.

The book wasn’t reviewed pre-pub, so many U.S. libraries have not ordered it. In Toronto, libraries have been “flooded with requests.” For those who can’t get their hands on it, Toronto Life offers “Seven crazy things we learned from Crazy Town” and the book  has brought strong denials from Doug Ford, the mayor’s brother.

UPDATE — As expected, Stewart had fun with this interview. He even extended it to three parts. Below is part one:

Holds continue to rise on Jennifer Senior’s All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood  (HarperCollins/Ecco; HarperAudio), spurred by the author’s appearance on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report (video below) as well as NPR’s Fresh Air. The book has also jumped from #24 on Amazon’s sales rankings to #4.

Still to come; an interview with the author is scheduled for Feb. 27 on Good Morning America.

Back in 2008, when book trailers were in their infancy, the paperback of Kelly Corrigan’s first book, The Middle Place, soared as a simple video of her reading from it made its way around the Internet.

Corrigan’s third book Glitter and Glue, (RH/Ballantine, out today), comes with another equally affecting video of Corrigan doing a simple reading. Now that  book trailers are often indistinguishable from movie trailers,  with some even including well-known actors, it is particularly refreshing.

The book is now rising on Amazon. The audio version (RH Audio)  is, of course, read by the author.

Rising on Amazon’s sales rankings (currently at #24) is All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior (HarperCollins/Ecco), which was featured on the cover of Sunday’s NYT Book Review.

Reviewer Andrew Solomon, whose most recent book Far From the Tree, is also about parenthood, says this “trenchant and engrossing” book inspired him “to think differently about my own experience as a parent.”

When Senior published an essay, also called All Joy and No Fun in New York magazine in 2010, it caused a furor (which may have been generated by the subtitle,”Why parents hate parenting”). So far, reactions to the book have been positive and remarkably personal; Slate’s reviewer even comed close to saying it made her rethink her own decision to not have children.

Senior has several media appearances coming up — NPR’s Fresh Air on Tuesday, Comedy Central’s Colbert Report tonight and ABC’s Good Morning America, scheduled to Feb. 27.

Library holds are heavy where ordering is light.

“For fans of  Downton Abbey” has become one of the most used phrases in promotional copy. As the NYT Book Review asks,

Is it possible nowadays for otherwise intelligent Americans to reflect on England without thinking first of Downton Abbey? To put it another way: Can beleaguered American publishers expect to sell any English author without promising — however absurdly — a tie-in with Julian Fellowes’s opulent confection?

That’s the opening line for the review of the original trade paperback, The Secret Rooms, (Penguin; Thorndike) which goes on to say, “in the case of Catherine Bailey’s stylish new book about one of England’s grandest dynasties, the link proves apt.”

The book, a December LibraryReads pick, was also also featured in the Daily Candy (although with the British cover), which, of course,  made the requisite reference, “If you add a dash of the macabre and a hefty serving of intrigue to Downton Abbey, you get Catherine Bailey’s latest, a true story about a creepy castle and a duke whose private space was sealed in 1940 and reopened only in 1999.”

We hear it will appear at #20 on the upcoming NYT Paperback Nonfiction best seller list.

The woman who created a storm with her 2011 book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,  is making headlines again with a new book co-written with her husband,  Jed Rubenfeld,  The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America (Penguin; Penguin Audio; Feb. 3).

The book has already received advance attention, including a segment on the Jan. 6 Today Show. The New York Post ran a review with a headline meant to amp-up the controversy, “Tiger Mom: Some Cultural Groups Are Superior.” On the other hand, New York magazine says this book is not nearly as proactive as  the previous one, calling it a “much blander, more conventional, and less sensational read, with more than a hundred pages of end notes; a detached, third-person, school-report style.”

Coming this Sunday, the New York Times magazine features a story about the couple (who also published an op-ed page last  Sunday, “What Drives Success“), noting that they claim to be appalled by the response to Tiger Mother, thus making their choice of subject for their new book, “either cynical or oblivious, or some uncanny combination of the two.”

Holds  currently are in line with cautious ordering in many libraries and are heavy where orders are low.

Robert Gates’s media blitz, from the Colbert Report to CBS Sunday Morning, for his book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, (RH/Knopf) has had the desired effect. The book debuts at #1 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list. in its first week on sale.

Gates, who served as Defense secretary for both Presidents Bush and Obama. is sharply critical of many in government (an L.A. Times Op-Ed said, “Duty will go down as one of the most ill-tempered memoirs ever written by a former Cabinet secretary.”)

When a book is hotly anticipated by a  wide range of sources, our ears prick up. Walter Kirn’s Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, (Norton/Liveright; March 3) is highlighted by  Library Journal‘s Barbara Hoffert in her extensive Midwinter 2014 Galley and Signing Guide. It is also one of USA Today‘s “10 Books Should You Read This Winter” and The Hollywood Reporter‘s “2014 Book Preview” as well as the more literary-inclined The Millions’ “Great 2014 Book Preview.”

The story of the con man who passed himself off as a member of the Rockefeller family has fascinated many. Mark Seal’s book, The Man in a Rockefeller Suit is in development for a movie by Walter Selles (The Motorcycle Diaries), and was the inspiration for the well-received novel, Schroder by Amity Gaige. Countless articles have also been written about him, including one last year in the New Yorker by Kirn himself, who was friends with the man he knew as “Clark Rockefeller” for fifteen years.

If you’re going to Midwinter, check for it at the Norton booth (#748). If not, you can request eARC’s through Edelweiss or print copies from the library marketing folks at Norton.

Two upcoming films are each based on best selling memoirs about hiking, but their settings and tone are miles apart.

Robert Redford notes, in this week’s The Hollywood Reporter cover story, that shooting will begin in March on the long-gestating adaptation of Bill Bryson’s memoir, A Walk in the Woods, (RH/Broadway; RH Audio, 1998). About the author’s quixotic attempts to hike the Appalachian Trail with his old pal Katz, a man even more ill-prepared for the adventure than he is, it stars Redford as Bryson and Nick Nolte as Katz (in a role originally planned for Redford’s late friend Paul Newman). Larry Charles. who wrote for Seinfeld and directed Borat as well as episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, is set to direct.

Different Coast, Different Tone

Shooting has just wrapped on Wild, based on Cheryl Strayed’s memoir (RH/Knopf; RH Audio; Thorndike; 2012) about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in an effort to resolve some deep personal issues, including drug use. Set to arrive in theaters later this year, Reese Witherspoon is both star and producer.The film is directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, whose Dallas Buyers Club received multiple Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.