New Releases by Robert Kanigel

Celebrated essayist, biographer, and non-fiction book writer Robert Kanigel presents a memoir of his meandering, serendipitous path from engineer to writer. Kanigel invites the reader back in time for a journey rich with a sense of time and place, beginning with his childhood as the son of Jewish parents in Brooklyn. He attends Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then moves to Baltimore and begins working at an ammunition lab. The Vietnam War lurks as a shadow just offstage, coloring his need for work and various engineering jobs he takes. He pursues a string of romances, all ending in heartbreak, until he meets Maura, a firebrand of a woman pursuing her Ph. D. in biology, who beckons him to Europe, where he spends several lonely months as an anglophone in Paris. Spared the military draft by a high lottery number, he returns to Baltimore with Maura, finally quits his engineering job, and becomes a writer, "not," Kanigel says, "because I decided to become a writer, but because I began to write." His first writing job, a series of essays for a local paper he proposed on a whim, spirals into a prestigious career. Kanigel is not the hero of his own story, but his sometimes self-deprecating honesty makes for a deeply moving tale of a young man who, in his words, "muddled" his way into writing.

From the acclaimed biographer of Jane Jacobs and Srinivasa Ramanujan comes the first full life and work of arguably the most influential classical scholar of the twentieth century, who overturned long-entrenched notions of ancient epic poetry and enlarged the very idea of literature. In this literary detective story, Robert Kanigel gives us a long overdue portrait of an Oakland druggist''s son who became known as the "Darwin of Homeric studies." So thoroughly did Milman Parry change our thinking about the origins of Homer''s Iliad and Odyssey that scholars today refer to a "before" Parry and an "after." Kanigel describes the "before," when centuries of readers, all the way up until Parry''s trailblazing work in the 1930''s, assumed that the Homeric epics were "written" texts, the way we think of most literature; and the "after" that we now live in, where we take it for granted that they are the result of a long and winding oral tradition. Parry made it his life''s work to develop and prove this revolutionary theory, and Kanigel brilliantly tells his remarkable story--cut short by Parry''s mysterious death by gunshot wound at the age of thirty-three. From UC Berkeley to the Sorbonne to Harvard to Yugoslavia--where he traveled to prove his idea definitively by studying its traditional singers of heroic poetry--we follow Parry on his idiosyncratic journey, observing just how his early notions blossomed into a full-fledged theory. Kanigel gives us an intimate portrait of Parry''s marriage to Marian Thanhouser and their struggles as young parents in Paris, and explores the mystery surrounding Parry''s tragic death at the Palms Hotel in Los Angeles. Tracing Parry''s legacy to the modern day, Kanigel explores how what began as a way to understand the Homeric epics became the new field of "oral theory," which today illuminates everything from Beowulf to jazz improvisation, from the Old Testament to hip-hop.

The first major biography of the irrepressible woman who changed the way we view and live in cities, and whose influence is felt to this day. Jane Jacobs was a phenomenal woman who wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged in thousands of impassioned debates—all of which she won. Robert Kanigel''s revelatory portrait of Jacobs, based on new sources and interviews, brings to life the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the mother who raised three children; the journalist who honed her skills at Architectural Forum and Fortune before writing her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities; and the activist who helped lead a successful protest against Robert Moses’s proposed expressway through her beloved Greenwich Village.

A biography of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The book gives a detailed account of his upbringing in India, his mathematical achievements, and his mathematical collaboration with English mathematician G. H. Hardy. The book also reviews the life of Hardy and the academic culture of Cambridge University during the early twentieth century.

On an Irish Island tells the remarkable story of a remote outpost nearly untouched by time in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the adventurous men and women who visited and were inspired by it. In a love letter to a vanished way of life, Robert Kanigel brings to life this wildly beautiful island, notable for the vivid communal life of its residents and the unadulterated Irish they spoke well into the twentieth century. With the Irish language rapidly disappearing, Great Blasket became a magnet for scholars, linguists, and writers during the Gaelic renaissance. As we follow these visitors—among them John Millington Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World—we are captivated both by the tiny group of islanders who kept an entire country’s past alive and by their complex relationships with those who brought the island’s story to the larger world.

What makes genuine leather genuine? What makes real things real? In an age of virtual reality, veneers, synthetics, plastics, fakes, and knockoffs, it''s hard to know. Over the centuries, men and women have devoted enormous energy to making fake things seem real. As early as the fourteenth century, fabric was treated with special oils to make it resemble leather. In the 1870s came Leatherette, a new bookbinding material. The twentieth century gave us Fabrikoid, Naugahyde, Corfam, and Ultrasuede. Each claims to transcend leather''s limitations, to do better than nature itself—or at least to convince consumers that it does. Perhaps more than any other natural material, leather stands for the authentic and the genuine. Its animal roots etched in its pores and in the swirls of its grain, leather serves as cultural shorthand for the virtues of the real over the synthetic, the original over the copy, the luxurious over the shoddy and second-rate. From formica, vinyl siding, and particle board to cubic zirconium, knockoff designer bags, and genetically altered foods, inspired fakes of every description fly the polyester pennant of a brave new man-made world. Each represents a journey of scientific, technical, and entrepreneurial innovation. Faux Real explores this borderland of the almost-real, the ersatz, and the fake, illuminating a centuries-old culture war between the authentic and the imitative.

The story of the Mediterranean city and its long history of tourism.

The definitive biography of the first "efficiency expert."

Explores the "genealogy of scientific relationships"--How scientists are connected as mentors and students. In particular, Kanigel profiles one "dynasty" of four scientific achievers, beginning with Steve Brodie, who is known as the father of drug metabolism. One of these scientists received a Nobel prize, and all four received nominations.