The Ghost Map is officially out in paperback this week, sporting a great new cover and layout, with quotes from all the very flattering reviews we got last fall. It’s fun when you see that first copy of the paperback, because all those reviews that you read so intensely a year ago have faded in your memory, and suddenly you get to revisit them all as a group. (It’s also fun because the marketing people at your publisher have carefully excised anything that doesn’t sound like a complete rave.) The Riverhead folks have also put together a pretty cool web site for the paperback — with suggested reading links, video interviews with me, review quotes, and a pretty wild little animated film that I can only describe as “Yellow Submarine meets 28 Days Later.” For those of you curious about the macro themes of the book, that first interview clip of me is, I think, the best summary of why those ten days in 1854 are so important to us today. (Other than the summary you get from, you know, actually reading the book.)
The other cool thing we just found out is that Ghost Map has been chosen as one of two finalists for the National Academies of Science 2007 Communications Award. In this case, “finalist” means “runner up” — but the winner was one of my heroes, Eric Kandel, and it’s a great honor just to be mentioned in the same press release with him. (Also winning, in different categories: the sublime Carl Zimmer, who gave me an insane amount of great advice at early stage writing Ghost Map, and the Radio Lab team, with whom I’ve collaborated on a couple of fun shows.)
