|
Welcome Faux Real, Joseph Henry Press, May 2007 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, published last spring. 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. What draws me to each new subject? Are there patterns to discern among them? Probably so. It would be strange if there weren't; after all, it's the same person who's writing them. But I don't think about it too much. I just like doing this sort of work, so I do it. Faux Real took me to Cincinnati, Maine, Tuscany and Sardinia; to tanneries, vinyl factories, and the New English Fetish Fair; introduced me to the immortal lyrics of the Fabrikoid Yell, and to the creators of Corfam and Ultrasuede. My next book 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. |
|
