Author Bio - Piper Kerman

This will be our last author bio for awhile (and it's the last of our Memoir books!)  We're now going to be posting reviews monthly, so the usual stuff we do during the week won't happen until the week that we review the book.

And since we're doing a memoir, I don't want to give too much away about Kerman.  She grew up in Boston, into a family of doctors and lawyers.  She had a short stint in prison, for a ten year old crime, which is what our book this week, Orange is the New Black, is about.

She currently will talk to many criminology students and law students, along with serving on the board of the Woman's Prison Association.

Author Bio - Laura Hillenbrand

This week we're reading Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, which is technically a biography, not a memoir, but it was a book that had been only TBR pile for way to long, and this was really the only month that it made any sort of sense.

But on the flip side, that means I can tell you a little more about Hillebrand without spoiling the book.

Hillenbrand has two books to her repertoire, Seabiscuit and Unbroken, both of which have been made into movies.  They've also both been best sellers, so whatever she's doing as a non-fiction writer, she should keep it up because it's obviously working out really well for her.  The two books combined have sold over 10 million copies. (I feel like now is where I insert a statistic of "that's enough to circle the earth ten times!" but I don't actually have such a statistic.  I'm sure someone could figure it out though.)

Hillenbrand was born in Fairfax, VA (which, I want to point out, is pretty much near where I live.  So that's awesome.) and was the youngest of four kids.  She went to college in Ohio, but ended up dropping out due to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, something she still suffers from.

Currently she lives in Washnington, D.C., keeping much of the time to her home due to her condition.

Author Bio: Melissa Plaut

Welcome to May, the month of memoirs and biographies here at Review Me Twice! This month will make the Monday posts a little bit tricky, since telling the story of the author is basically the same as summarizing the books, since that's the idea of memoirs and biographies.

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Our first author of the month is Melissa Plaut, who wrote a book called Hack, about her choice to start driving a yellow cab in New York. And that's just about everything I'm going to tell you, because you'll hear more about her interesting life come Friday when we review the book!

Author Bio: Arthur C Clarke

The author of this week's review book, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is Arthur C. Clarke.

Yeah, that's the guy.

He lived from 1917 to 2008, and wrote science fiction. His most famous work was 2001, which was actually the first of a series (the others were 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey).

His writing helped popularize the ideas of space travel and futurism (he made lots of technology and science based predictions in his writing, as tends to happen in science fiction works set in the future).

Author Bio: Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert (1920-1986) was best known for the Dune series, and we're reading the first book of that series (appropriately titled Dune) this week. That book is the best-selling sci-fi book in history, and is unquestionably one of the classics of sci-fi, so Herbert is kind of a big deal.

He's from Washington, but had a bad home life and ran away to live with family in Salem, Oregon. His first job was at a newspaper. He served in the Navy as a photographer during WWII, then went to University of Washington and did all sorts of writing, but he only took classes that interested him, so he never finished an actual degree.

Dune - along with Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, published a few years before it - helped turn sci-fi into a literary genre. Before that, all you really needed for a successful sci-fi story was a good technological idea; it didn't matter if you wrote a good story alongside it.

I always think it's interesting to see what an author thought of film adaptations of their greatest works, so I'm pleased to share that Herbert was overall pretty happy with the movie Dune (1984). There was also a TV series adaptation in 2000 but that was 14 years after Herbert's death, so I don't know what he might have thought of it. Since his death, Herbert's son Brian has added a few more books to the series using Herbert's old notes.

Author Bio: Robert Bakker

Chances are pretty decent that the first time you heard Robert Bakker's name, it was here:

In this scene of Jurassic Park, Dr. Alan Grant is trying to find a seat in one of the Jeeps without having to sit next to either of the kids, but the boy (Timmy... classic 1990s boy name) is a huge fan of Dr. Grant's work, so he's following him around asking questions about his theories. He references a couple other sources, including "this one book by a guy named Bakker..." Well, that guy is this week's author here on the blog.

He actually gets referenced again in The Lost World, since this guy (Dr. Robert Burke) is supposed to be an affectionate caricature of him:

And this is really Bakker:

Bakker has been publishing studies on dinosaurs since 1968. He advised Jurassic Park, published his seminal work (The Dinosaur Heresies) in 1986 (which presented evidence to support his theory that dinosaurs may well have been warm-blooded), and is currently the Curator of Paleontology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

Bakker was born in New Jersey in 1945. He's an ecumenical minister, and doesn't believe that religion and science are mutually exclusive. To him, the Bible is a moral guidance system, not a literal timeline of events, and does not disprove evolution or geologic history.

A friend of mine suggested Bakker's novel Raptor Red when he found out that I'm a big fan of the Jurassic Park trilogy, and that's why I chose it for us to review this week. It's told from the viewpoint of a Utahraptor (which is actually what we think of as Velociraptor, thanks to the Jurassic Park movies... Velociraptor was closer to the size of a big turkey, whereas Utahraptor was the height of a rather tall human).

Author Bio: S L Viehl

That's not actually S L Viehl. Well, she is, but she's actually Sheila Kelly, who writes under a number of different pseudonyms, one for each genre she writes in. S L Viehl is her science-fiction pseudonym, under which she writes the Stardoc series.

Since part of the point of having a pseudonym (or many) is to stay more anonymous than people who publish under their own name, there isn't a lot of publicly available information about her. I know she's American, and I know she has pretty typical hobbies (knitting, for example).

So we'll have to let her writing speak for itself later this week! We'll be reading the first book in the Stardoc series.

Author Bio - Sylvia Nasar

Sylvia Nasar is our author this week, a journalist born in Germany, but whose family immigrated to the US in the 1950s.  She also lived in Turkey for awhile before going to school at Antioch College in Ohio and then getting her Masters at NYU.

In the 1980s, she joined Fortune magazine as a staff writer.  During the 1990s, she was also an economic correspondent for the New York Times.  She became a  John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University, but it has since filed a lawsuit saying that the university has misdirected the funds from the endowment that are supposed to pay her salary.

She is the author of A Beautiful Mind, the biography on the Nobel Prize winning mathematician, John Nash. In 2001, a movie was made based on her novel starring Russell Crowe.  The book was nominated for a Pulitzer in 1998.

Author Bio: Randall Munroe

Randall Munroe's self portrait

Randall Munroe is the creator of the popular webcomic xkcd (no, you don't pronounce that, you spell it). It's simple in that it is typically comprised of stick figures, and complex in that it is usually about advanced sciences.

Personally, my favorite fact about this week's author is that Cassy and I went to the same college as him at the same time as him. One of my roommates dated one of his roommates, so I have that weirdly specific and totally tenuous connection to him. (Actually, when we met him at New York Comic Con last October, he remembered her after we reminded him of that fact, albeit a little vaguely. Either that or he's great at faking memory and very polite.)

He wrote What If? (and was interviewed by Stephen Colbert about it shortly before "The Colbert Report" ended) and it is something very unique. You'll hear more about it when we review it, but he took crazy questions from xkcd readers and answered them with a heaping pile of science, peppered with his style of illustrations. I can't wait to tell you more about it on Friday!

Author Bio - Mary Roach

Reading about Mary Roach's life, I basically just want to be her.  She grew up in New Hampshire, and eventually, she ended up working for the Zoological Society in San Francisco, writing press releases.  It's really what got her interested in the science portion of her life.

From 1996 - 2005 she worked for "The Grotto", a community and project of writers and filmmakers.  It was them who inevitably pushed her to writer her first book, Stiff.

Roach has done everything from travel to Antarctica, to taste test food, to have sex in an MRI machine while researching her books.  Her travels have taken her far and wide, exposing her to all sorts of interesting people and places.  Often, then need volunteers for their studies and Roach is quick to do so.

She says she never set out to write science books, but when she had to cover stories, the science ones were always the most interesting.

Roach is currently living in Oakland, CA with her husband.  She also has two step-daughters.  You can find all of the information you need about her and her books at her website.

Author Bio: Stephen Hawking

I sincerely hope that you have at least a vague idea of who Stephen Hawking is. He's kind of a big deal.

At the most basic, he's a scientist. To be a little more specific, he's a theoretical physicist and a cosmologist. So he's a space scientist. I could list a bunch of scientific things he's discovered or created or sorted out, but are you going to read the whole list? And if you did, would you understand half of it? And if you could understand it, don't you think you probably already know quite a bit about the man who did it all? Yeah, that's what I thought. So let's list a bunch of other accomplishments and fun facts instead...

He has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian honor.

This week's review book, A Brief History of Time, stayed on the British Sunday Times best-seller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. A more timely fact here is that Leonard Nimoy (RIP) found out at the release party for the home video version of Brief History of Time that Hawking wanted to appear on Star Trek, and Nimoy made it happen.

Speaking about his acting, he has done a fair amount of it. He had cartoon appearances on The Simpsons and Futurama, and has appeared in person on Star Trek: TNG and The Big Bang Theory, among many other shows.

If you're curious about that machine that allows him to speak, it is operated by a single cheek muscle. He has a rare form of ALS.

He has co-written (with his daughter Lucy) three children's books, starting with 2007's George's Secret Key to the Universe.

And with that, this great scientist and great many-other-things will kick off our month of scientific non-fiction!

Author Bio - Nora Roberts

This week, our last reading romance novels, we taking on the queen of romance, Nora Roberts.  We're reading the first book in her new trilogy, Dark Witch.

Roberts starting writing when she got snowed in with her three boys when they were young. There was a huge blizzard and not a lot to do, and so she wrote.  She submitted her manuscripts to Harlequin Romance, who rejected about six times.

She was finally accepted by Silhoutte books and became incredibly successful, having her books hit the bestseller list almost every time.  She was recently inducted into the Romance Writing Hall of Fame (who knew there even was such a thing?).

She currently lives in Silver Spring, MD with her family.  She has a website, a twitter and a facebook page.

Author Bio: Karen Marie Moning

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Karen Marie Moning is the author of this week's review book, Darkfever. It's the first book in her second series (the Fever series). Her first series was the Highlander series. She started off writing paranormal romance set in Scotland (this week's book is from that era) and later moved into urban fantasy set in Dublin, Ireland, with a focus on the Fae.

She was born in Ohio and got a degree in Society and Law from Purdue University. She has won the Romance Writers of America RITA award for Best Paranormal Romance and has been nominated for other RITAs, and her books have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list multiple times.

Author Bio - Leslie North

You may be asking what this odd author photo is.  Well, our author this week, Leslie North, is actually a pseudonym.  North doesn't use her real name, or even give it out.  She doesn't appear for things or give out personal information or come out from behind the facade of the name she's created for her novels.

She gives a brief description of her life on her webpage, saying she lives with dogs in Britain, but that contradicts where her Goodreads account says she hails from, so who really knows?

But, like any good author, she does have a Twitter and a Facebook that you can follow.

For our month of Romance novels, we're going to be picking up her book, The Sheikh's Accidental Pregnancy, so stop by on Friday to see what we thought of it.  And check in this week so see some fun topics!

Author Bio: Emily Bronte

It's the month of romance here at Review Me Twice, and we're kicking things off with Wuthering Heights, the only novel written by Emily Bronte, the third oldest of the Bronte siblings.

She was born in 1818 and died in 1848 at the age of 30. When she was 20, she was a teacher for a short time but the stress was too much and she returned home to be a stay-at-home daughter, doing things like cooking and cleaning, but also learning German and piano. She and Charlotte went to a school in Belgium, where they decided to publish some of their work under male pen names (Emily chose Ellis Bell).

She published Wuthering Heights in 1847 in London. Many people believed it to have been written by a man because of its violence and passion. A letter from a publisher indicates that Emily intended to write a sequel, but no evidence of the sequel has ever been found.

Her death was most likely caused by unsanitary conditions, especially drinking water, and she had lost so much weight by the time of her death, her coffin was reportedly 16 inches wide, and the man who built it claimed to have never made a thinner one for an adult.

On that cheery note, let's look forward to a month full of romance!

Author Bio: Gayle Forman

Alex yesterday mentioned that, when we did this book almost THREE YEARS AGO, we never did an author bio on Gayle Forman, mainly because we hadn't gotten into the schedule that we've gotten into these days.  So, why don't I go ahead and tell you a little about our author this week.

She's the one on the left ;)

Forman actually started her writing career with Seventeen Magazine, then moved on to other magazines like Elle and Cosmopolitan.  It was on a trip around the world with her husband in 2002 to that she started to write her first book, You Can't Get There From Here.  She published her first young adult novel, Sisters in Sanity, in 2007.

But of course, it was her 2009 novel, If I Stay, that really took off, winning a multitude of awards including the NAIBA Book of the Year award.  It was in 2014 that it was released as a movie with Chloe Grace Mortz starring as Mia (see above).

Foreman has also released a three book series, Just One Day, Just One Year, and Just One Night and she had one more book come out today called I Was Here.

She also has a webpage that you can visit, a facebook page, and a twitter.

Remember: Pittacus Lore?

I think one of the best things about our Month of Sequels, is that no year has been left untouched.  We have been doing sequels to some of our very earliest reviews (If I Stay) and some of our incredibly recent ones (Robopocalypse), so I like that our book this week, The Power of Six, kind of falls in the middle.

We read I Am Number Four back in August of 2013.  Our blog was just shy of it's one year anniversary back then.  Pittacus Lore was the author, which is a pseudonym for two authors, actually, James Frey and Jobie Hughes, all of which Alex told us back then. 

Remember: Daniel Wilson?

In September of 2014 (so really, not all that long ago), we review Robopocalypse.  And, both Alex and I ADORED it.  It was World War Z with Robots.  Considering Alex has a distaste for Robots, it was kind of a big deal that she loved it as much as she did.

This week, we're reviewing the sequel to it, Robogenesis, which is kind of a big deal for one big reason.  Of all the books that we're reviewing this week, this one is probably the fastest turn around for its sequel.  We only reviewed the book back in September.  So there has only been about a four month gap in between when we read Robopocalypse and now Robogenesis (as opposed to later this month when we read Where She Went.  If I Stay was the SECOND book we ever read on the blog, making it the longest gap of all our sequels, about three years.)

Author Bio: Janet Dailey

Janet Dailey was a romance author who wrote several series and dozens of single-title romance novels before she passed away last December. This week, we'll be reading A Cowboy Under My Christmas Tree because sometimes I tell Cassy a title as a joke and we wind up deciding to read the book after all.

Dailey became an author when she told her husband she could write better romance novels than what she was reading, and he challenged her to do so. She became the first American author for Harlequin. They actually turned Nora Roberts away because they already had an American author in Dailey. Another fun fact about Roberts and Dailey: in 1997, Roberts accused Dailey of plagiarizing her work, which Dailey admitted and said was caused by a psychological disorder. Dailey's books in question were pulled from print and the issue was settled out of court.

The Guinness Book of World Records recognized her achievement of setting a novel in every state in America.

Author Bio: John Waters

I find it fascinating the many different ways people can be introduced to celebrities and pop culture phenomena. For example, as much as I adore Monty Python today, the first thing I ever saw Eric Idle in was Casper (you know, the one with Bill Pullman and Christina Ricci). So I find it amusing that the first time I was made aware of John Waters, someone who has done so much, was the fifteenth episode of the eighth season of "The Simpsons," "Homer's Phobia."

If you haven't seen it, go watch it. It's a classic.

But John Waters is a writer, director, actor, voice actor, plus... a writer! And this week, we're reading his most recent book, Carsick. He decided to hitchhike across America and write a book about it, and it promises to be very interesting and funny, like most things he does.

This is one of those instances where I can't go into much detail without going into all the detail, so check out a list of John Waters' great works at IMDB and another list at Wikipedia.