Reading Dan Frank, Book Editor and âChampion of the Unexampledâ
Alan Lightman, Janna Levin and others recall the editor who shaped their work and a literary genre. Plus, more reading recommendations in the Friday edition of the Science Times newsletter.
Dan Frank was the invisible guiding hand to a constellation of literary science writers, helping to define and expand the genre. Credit.NASA Goddard
Summer is basically here, and now is the moment to find a book to fall into.
I encourage you to begin with almost any book published by Dan Frank, the editor at Pantheon and Knopf who died earlier this week at age 67. Danâs range of authors was wide, from Cynthia Ozick to Cormac McCarthy, Art Spiegelman to Jill Lepore. But he was known especially for nurturing a certain genre of writing about science and the natural world, with probing, elegant books by Oliver Sacks, James Gleick, Gretel Ehrlich, David Eagleman and many more.