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.
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My neighbors have stopped making eye contact. I don’t blame them. I’d do the same if I suspected that I was living next to a lunatic. Little do they know that it is quite the opposite. I’m mostly sane; I’m just living Irishly.
This year, my world, like most, has sucked. The pandemic hit as did the subsequent economic crisis. My family’s small businesses were rocked. My kids’ lives were disrupted which caused first their tears, then ours.
My country began a painful reckoning over racial injustice. This summer, my friend was killed. And then, two months later, a devastating forest fire destroyed hundreds of homes in my community, took a life, and rained down ash on the survivors in what felt like the end of days.