Scientific Exploration, Past and Future: New Nonfiction

Ashlee Vance is one of the most prominent writers on technology today. After spending several years reporting on Silicon Valley and technology for the New York Times, Vance went to Bloomberg Businessweek, where he has written dozens of cover and feature stories for the magazine on topics ranging from cyber espionage to DNA sequencing and space exploration. In Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ecco), veteran technology journalist Ashlee Vance provides the first inside look into the extraordinary life and times of Silicon Valley's most audacious entrepreneur. Written with exclusive access to Musk, his family and friends, the book traces the entrepreneur's journey from a rough upbringing in South Africa to the pinnacle of the global business world. Vance spent more than 30 hours in conversation with Musk and interviewed close to 300 people to tell the tumultuous stories of Musk's world-changing companies: PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX and SolarCity, and to characterize a man who has renewed American industry and sparked new levels of innovation while making plenty of enemies along the way.

Eileen Pollack is the author of the novels Breaking and Entering, a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, and Paradise, New York, as well as two collections of short fiction, a book of nonfiction, and two creative nonfiction textbooks. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays and Best American Short Stories. She is a professor at the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. Her latest book is The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club (Beacon Press). In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Pollack set out to find the answer. Based on six years interviewing her former teachers and classmates, as well as dozens of other women who had dropped out before completing their degrees in science or found their careers less rewarding than they had hoped. The Only Woman in the Room shows us the struggles women in the sciences have been hesitant to admit, and provides hope for changing attitudes and behaviors in ways that could bring far more women into fields in which they remain seriously underrepresented.

Margaret Lazarus Dean is the author of The Time It Takes to Fall. She is a recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Tennessee Arts Commission and is an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee.  In Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight (Graywolf Press), winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, Dean bears witness to the end of a golden era in this elegy to the waning days of human spaceflight as we have known it.