Joshua Foer's writing has appeared
in National Geographic, Esquire, Slate, Outside, the New York Times and other publications. He is the co-founder of
the Atlas Obscura, a guide to the world's
curious places. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of
Remembering Everything (Penguin Press,
March 3, 2011) is his first book
On your nightstand now:
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. I never used to read biographies. But every year I get older, I enjoy them more and more. By the time I'm an old man, I expect to read nothing else.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Anything and everything by David Macaulay.
Your top five authors:
Each for very different reasons: Italo Calvino, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, Cynthia Ozick, Jared Diamond.
Book you've faked reading:
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I suspect I'm not alone in that.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World by Paul Collins.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Secret Museum of Mankind, on title alone. It turned out to be my best used bookstore find of all time. The book, which was published in the 1930s, is nothing more than a collection of titillating black-and-white photographs of the world's "primitive" peoples doing "primitive" things.
Book that changed your life:
Three: Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene; Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea; and Stephen Jay Gould's Ever Since Darwin. I read them back-to-back-to-back in high school, and decided that I wanted to become an armchair evolutionary biologist. In college, I majored in evolutionary biology, but discovered that I didn't have the discipline or temperament to be a real scientist. That's how I ended up writing about science instead of doing it.
Favorite line from a book:
I fear it may be a terrible cop-out to say this, but it's true: everything that springs immediately to mind is either Shakespeare or the Bible.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Odyssey.