The Great Blasket Island, setting for my next book
I live and work in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm a professor at MIT. And I write books, sometimes on quirky topics, like leather and its inspired imitators; that's the subject of my most recent book, Faux Real, first published in 2007 and due out in a new paperback edition this fall.
I've also written about the French Riviera; the Indian mathematician Ramanujan; the first efficiency expert, Frederick Winslow Taylor; and about mentor relationships among elite scientists.
Before I started writing books in the mid-1980s, I wrote magazine articles, essays, and reviews, hundreds of them. But once I started with books I couldn't get enough of them -- loved those great big projects that took me into new intellectual and physical worlds and demanded my best energies for the three or four years it took to research and write them.
Faux Real took me to Cincinnati, Maine, Tuscany and Sardinia; to tanneries, vinyl factories, and the New England Fetish Fair; introduced me to the immortal lyrics of the Fabrikoid Yell, and to the creators of Corfam and Ultrasuede.
My next book, whose working title is The Land of the Young, takes me to a small island off the west coast of Ireland, the Great Blasket, setting for a story of love and friendship, literature and language, in the early years of the twentieth century.
