A picture book that celebrates the joys of math, released  today, is rising on Amazon after Cory Doctorow gave it a rave on Boing Boing. Praising The Boy Who Loved Math by Deborah Heiligman, with illustrations by LeUyen Pham (Roaring Brook) about the eccentric Hungarian math genius, Doctorow says it uses “numbers and mathematics through the text, with lively, fun illustrations of a young Erdős learning about negative numbers, becoming obsessed with prime numbers and leading his high-school chums on a mathematical tour of Budapest.” The ultimate accolade? His five-year-old daughter, “demanded that I read it to her three times in a row,” (spreads are available on the Boing Boing site)

In a piece of scary timing, Brett Martin’s Difficult Men (Penguin Press), which features the now-famous story of James Gandolfini disappearing from the set of The Sopranos (excerpted in GQ magazine this month, where the author is a correspondent, under the headline, “The Night Tony Soprano Disappeared,” it is the source of many  news stories) is scheduled for release next week.

The book, which was covered back in April in the New York Times Media section by  David Carr, is reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in today’s issue. It covers what  Martin claims is “the signature American art form of the first decade of the 21st century,” cable TV series such as Mad Men, Deadwood, and Breaking Bad, all of which characters who are all “difficult men.”

More is coming, including a segment on the upcoming NPR Weekend Edition and a review in the 7/14 issue of the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

The first trailer for the biopic JOBS, starring Ashton Kutcher was just released. Originally scheduled for April, it is now opening on Aug. 16. In addition to Kutcher as Steve Jobs, it stars Dermot Mulroney (as Mike Markkula, who supplied key funding for Apple’s startup), Josh Gad (Steve Wozniak), and Matthew Modine (John Scully).

Even though it’s likely to bring renewed attention to Walter Isaacson’s best selling bio, Steve Jobs (S&S), it is not based on it or any other book. At one time there were two Jobs biopics in development. Sony was working on an adaptation of the book, with Aaron Sorkin writing the script. No news has emerged about that project since Sorkin mentioned it briefly in January. Last week, he told Vanity Fair that he is at work on a Broadway play but made no mention of the film.

Isaacson’s book will be released in paperback on Sept. 9, nearly two years after the hardcover. It featured an image of the older Jobs, the paperback uses a photo of him as a young man, looking so much like Kutcher that some might confuse it for a tie-in.

A photo-story about the wives of the first U.S. astronauts is the perfect nostalgia piece for People magazine and it’s featured in this week issue (adding even more nostalgia, the piece is written by the magazine’s legendary founding editor, Dick Stolley, who was at Life magazine when the wives were featured on the cover. That image is used on the book jacket).

The story is based on The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story by Lily Koppel (Hachette/Grand Central; Hachette Audio and Large Print), which author Curtis Sittenfeld, writing in the Washington Post, calls a “breezy and entertaining book, which — like the women themselves — takes pleasure in both playing up and defying the stereotypes of the time. ” Librarians on EarlyWord‘s GalleyChat called it a great selection for book clubs.

Most libraries are showing heavy holds on light ordering.

The wives, and the book,  were also featured on CBS Sunday Morning last week:

Look familiar? The opening scene of the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, based on the 2007 memoir by Jordan Belfort, may remind you of another film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, based on a novel about a party-throwing Long Island millionaire with a dubious financial background…

…even though it’s set in a different time period.

The Wolf of Wall Street opens on November 15. Tie-ins in trade paperback (RH/Bantam) and audio (RH Audio; read by Bobby Cannavale) will be released in early October. The original trade paperback edition is still available.

For those who want even more, Belfort wrote a followup, Catching the Wolf of Wall Street: More Incredible True Stories of Fortunes, Schemes, Parties, and Prison, which is still available in trade paperback (RH/Bantam).

Holds are heavy in many libraries for 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). It debuts on the 6/23 NYT NF Best Seller list at #12.

USA Today calls it a “suspenseful tale of triumph” about a rowing crew from the University of Washington, whose student body, “drew from rough-hewn loggers, farm boys and girls not only with great physical gifts but the enormous will to make something of themselves at a time when there was little hope, given the double whammy of the Depression and the Dust Bowl.”

The latest title to hit best seller lists as a result of flash sales by eBook retailers is Teresa Rhyne’s cancer memoir, ‏The Dog Lived (and So Will I), (Sourcebooks, Oct., 2012). It debuts on the new USA Today list at #10, after Kindle and Nook editions were discounted from $14.99 to $1.99.

As the top Nonfiction eBook on the list, it is likely to debut at #1 on the upcoming NYT E-Book Nonfiction list.

The book received strong prepub reviews. Libraries own it in both print and eBook editions.

A new documentary about rock ‘n’ roll backup singers, 20 Feet From Stardom features previously “unsung heroes.” One of them, Darlene Love, ended up so far from stardom that she had to clean houses for a living (she eventually won a law suit against Phil Spector for unpaid royalties and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011).

Love is scheduled to appear on several shows this week to promote the film, including The Late Show with David Letterman, Good Morning America and The Today Show. Her 1998 memoir, My Name Is Love, was released last week in trade paperback (HarperCollins/Morrow). Booklist called it “wonderfully informative, with a scintillating soupcon of salaciousnes” and PW said Love’s “sardonic observations border on the hilarious.”

Love appears in the documentary’s trailer.

John Oliver began his stint as host of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night, replacing Stewart, who is on hiatus from the show to direct a movie.

The film is based on one of the many books Stewart has featured on the show, Maziar Bahari’s memoir, Then They Came for Me, (Random House, 2011), about the author’s imprisonment in Iran. The film, titled Rosewater after the nickname of one of Bahari’s captors, stars Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, whose previous credits include playing Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries.

Below is Stewart’s 2011 interview with Bahari, in which he announces that they are working on the film.

The Daily Show – Exclusive – Maziar Bahari Extended Interview Pt. 1

Below, Stewart gives more background on the project as he signs off for the summer:

Scientific studies indicate that “when it comes to sex, monogamy may be more of a problem for women than men,” Daniel Bergner told Stephen Colbert on his show last night. The author of What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (HarperCollins/Ecco) noted that the generally accepted view of women as naturally monogamous has been promulgated because it is “convenient and comforting to men.”

Colbert’s reactions proved Bergner’s point.

The book is rising on Amazon’s sales rankings. Library holds are also growing.

Fairyland, the title of journalist Alysia Abbott‘s memoir, is an ironic comment on her childhood; she was raised in San Francisco in the 1970’s by her gay father, sometimes sharing an apartment with drag queens. Interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday, she expressed sympathy for her father, juggling the exhilaration of the newly liberated gay lifestyle in San Francisco while raising a young daughter.

The book is now rising on Amazon’s sales rankings (currently at #127, up  from #2,311

We’ve seen Amazon discounts affect best seller lists before, but never this dramatically. The number one title on the 6/2 NYT Nonfiction E-Book Only best seller list (also #7 on the Combined list) is The Eighty-Dollar Champion, by Elizabeth Letts (Random House). Published in hardcover August, 2011, it was on that list for 2 weeks, hitting a high of #10. After it was released in e-book last year, it appeared on list for 4 weeks.

The sales jump is likely due to Amazon, which recently discounted the e-book edition to $1.99.

Images of Michael Douglas as  Liberace in the HBO film, Behind the Candelabra, seem to be everywhere; at the Cannes Film Festival where it premiered yesterday, on magazine covers and in reviews (even in BusinessWeek). American audiences will get their first look at the movie on HBO on May 26.

Yesterday, Terry Gross interviewed the director, Steven Soderbergh on NPR’s Fresh Air. He says he had long wanted to do a movie about Liberace, but it wasn’t until a friend recommended the 1988 book Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace, by the pianist’s lover, Scott Thorson (played by Matt Damon) that he was able to go forward. “When I read that book, it sort of solved all my problems. It gave me a specific time period to deal with; there was the arc of the relationship between the two of them to give me a structure. And that’s when things really started to move.”

Tantor Media re-released the out-of-print title recently, with a new afterword by Thorson, as part of the launch of their new book imprint.  Tantor has also released an audio version, narrated by Peter Berkrot (sample here, about the media circus around Liberace’s death of AIDs). An interview with Thorson is featured on Tantor’s web site. He says he hasn’t seen the movie and will see it as everyone else does when it debuts this Sunday on HBO.

Currently at #19 on Amazon sales rankings and rising is an anthology of essays by nurses, I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse, published by the small press, In Fact Books, which also publishes the quarterly magazine, Creative Nonfiction.

It is reviewed in the NYT today by Jane Gross who admits that, as the daughter of a nurse, she is “hardly a disinterested reviewer,” which is a good thing, giving her the ability to connect readers with the stories.

Many libraries own this anthology in modest quantities; Booklist reviewed it, saying, “It’s easy to love these empathetic people, and their beautifully written stories.”

Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art speech to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts’ 2012 graduating class became a viral hit. Released in book form (HarperCollins/Morrow) this week, it is rising on Amazon.

John Green’s speech to the graduating class of Butler University may not be far behind.

Predating both of them is David Foster Wallace’s speech to Kenyon College in 2005, a viral success later released in book form, This Is Water, (Hachette/Little,Brown). Recently, a short film based on the original was posted to YouTube and has been viewed nearly 5 million times in just ten days.

The “raining-on-the-parade” genre may have begun with a speech that wasn’t actually a speech. It was column by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune in 1997 about what she would say if she had been asked to give a commencement address (which she hadn’t). An urban legend grew up that this was actually a speech given by Kurt Vonnegut at an MIT graduation. Vonnegut ruefully said he wished that were true, but it wasn’t. The column ended up being published as a gift book by Andrews and McMeel as Wear Sunscreen (the one piece of advice that Shmich found irrefutable) and re-released in a 10th anniversay edition in 2008. Baz Lurhmann turned it into a music video “Everyone’s Free to Wear Sunscreen.”