Tagged: Nonfiction

(Please note: This interview originally aired earlier this year.) Today on ST, we speak with the bestselling author of "Just My Type" and other works of wide-ranging, culturally- or historically-driven nonfiction, Simon Garfield. His new book, "On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks," is just out. It's a detailed yet accessible survey of the age-old relationship between man and map, if you will, a study of why we as human beings are (and always have been) so fixated upon mapping things.

Today on ST, we speak with the bestselling author of "Just My Type" and other works of wide-ranging, culturally- or historically-driven nonfiction, Simon Garfield. His new book, "On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks," is just out. It's a detailed yet accessible survey of the age-old relationship between man and map, if you will, a study of why we as human beings are (and always have been) so fixated upon mapping things. Cartography, after all, seems to be as defining a characteristic for us (as a species) as, say, language or creativity or play.

On today's program, which first aired last fall, we hear from the longtime New Yorker Magazine writer and bestselling author Ian Frazier, whose latest book (now in paperback) is "Travels in Siberia," which the San Francisco Chronicle has called "a masterpiece of nonfiction writing --- tragic, bizarre, and funny." Further, as one critic of this book has noted in The New York Times Book Review: "['Travels in Siberia' is] an uproarious, sometimes dark yarn filled with dubious meals, broken-down vehicles, abandoned slave-labor camps, and ubiquitous statues of Lenin --- 'On the Road' meets 'The