Michael Sims, Author . Viking $24.95 (342p) ISBN 978-0-670-03224-2
Sims's scattered thoughts while lying flat on his back, recovering from surgery on a dislocated cervical disc, were the origins of this delightful tour of our various body parts, from head to toe. It focuses on the outer body, and there's...
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Michael Sims, Author . Viking $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-670-06328-4
What could be more poetic than the bare facts of the cosmos?” asks Sims (Adam's Navel
), an acclaimed science writer with a flair for giving reality the luster of myth. Here he takes a single day and guides readers through the history of...
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Michael Sims. Walker, $24 (256p) ISBN 978-0-8027-7754-6
In this spry biography of Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985), Sims (Apollo's Fire) immerses himself in White's oeuvre and channels his lucid prose style. Juxtaposing details from White's essays and letters with his own research and sprinkling the text...
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Edited by Michael Sims. Walker, $20 (608p) ISBN 978-0-8027-7918-2
Sims (Dracula’s Guest) has pulled together an exceptionally intelligent and varied anthology of Victorian crime fiction, starting with a detective story that predated Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by four years, William E. Burton’s “The...
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Michael Sims. Bloomsbury, $26 (384p) ISBN 978-1-62040-195-8
In this uneven biography of Henry David Thoreau, Sims (The Story of Charlotte's Web) succeeds in his ambition "to find Henry" rather than "admire the marble bust of an icon," though the portrait that emerges is far from flattering. Focusing...
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Edited by Michael Sims. Bloomsbury, $17 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-62040-805-6
The mournful, moralizing, and malevolent dead lurk in the gaslit streets, ancestral estates, and tortured psyches of this solid but unremarkable reprint anthology, which will appeal more to newcomers than to “connoisseurs.” Selections explore the...
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Michael Sims. Bloomsbury, $27 (256p) ISBN 978-1-63286-039-2
Sims (The Story of Charlotte’s Web) presents a concise and well-written account of the factors—both internal and external—that led to Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 publication of “A Study in Scarlet,” the first Sherlock Holmes story. Readers unfamiliar...
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Edited by Michael Sims. Bloomsbury, $22 trade paper (400p) ISBN 978-1-63286-041-5
In a prefatory note, Sims credits Jules Verne for having “woke[n] up our attention to the real world by animating it with fantastic stories,” but he could just as easily be talking about the 18 other authors whose work appears in this thoughtfully...
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