D.G.Wills Books

"Nicholas Karavatos is a poet of great range and clarity. This book is an amazing collectanea of smart sharp political poetry in tandem with astute and tender love lyrics. All of it voiced with an impressive singularity."

Charlie Chaplin. Buster Keaton. The Marx Brothers. Billy Wilder. Woody Allen. The Coen brothers. Where would the American film be without them? And yet, the cinematic genre they all represent -- comedy -- has perennially received short shrift from critics, film buffs, and the Academy Awards. Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy is an attempt to right that wrong. Running the gamut of film history, from City Lights to Knocked Up, Another Fine Mess retells the story of American film from the perspective of its unwanted stepbrother -- the comedy. In 30 chapters, each devoted to a single performer or director, Another Fine Mess retraces the steps of the American comedy film, filling in the gaps and following the connections that link Mae West to Doris Day, or W.C. Fields to Will Ferrell.

Another Fine Mess is an attempt to rectify the legacy of inattention, by studying the American comedy film, not only as a worthy cinematic genre, but as a craft in which the members of the guild are influenced by their predecessors, and in turn, influence their successors. The first book of its kind in more than a generation, Another Fine Mess is an all-expenses-paid tour of the American comedy, encompassing the masterpieces, the box-offices smashes, and all the little-known gems in between.

Saul Austerlitz has been published in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Boston Globe, Slate, Village Voice, The National, San Francisco Chronicle, Spin, Rolling Stone, Paste, and other publications. He is the author of Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes. Money for Nothing is being made into a forthcoming documentary film, for which he has written the script.

Charlie Chan promises to be a landmark work in twentieth-century American racial history. Chronicling the fraught narrative of one of Hollywood's most enduring cinematic detectives, Yunte Huang uncovers the untold story of the real "Charlie Chan," a bullwhip-wielding, five-foot Chinese-American detective whose raids on opium dens and gambling parlors transformed him into a Hawaiian legend. Huang, in fact, has created a historic drama where none was known to exist, brilliantly juxtaposing Chang Apana’s personal story against a larger backdrop of territorial Hawaii, torn apart by virulent racism. As Huang demonstrates, Apana’s bravado and heroism inspired not only E. D. Biggers, a Harvard graduate turned celebrity mystery sleuth, to write six best-selling Charlie Chan novels, but Hollywood to manufacture over forty internationally popular Chan movies starring a wisecracking, grammatically challenged detective with a knack for turning Oriental wisdom into singsong Chinatown blues. Examining hundreds of biographical, literary, and cinematic sources, both in English and in his native Chinese, Huang has created with Charlie Chan a literary tour-de-force that places “the honorable detective” on a larger stage, in the process presenting Asian-American history in a way it has never been told before.

"An ingenious and absorbing book, that provides a convincing new mode for examining the Chinese experience through both Chinese and Western eyes. It will permanently change the way we tell this troubled yet gripping story."—Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China and Return to Dragon Mountain

Yunte Huang came to the U.S. in 1991 after graduating from Peking University with a B.A. in English. He received his Ph.D. from the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo in 1999 and taught as an Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University from 1999-2003. He is the author of Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (2008), CRIBS (2005), Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2002), and Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (1997); the translator into Chinese of Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos; and is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In The Darwinian Tourist, biologist Christopher Wills takes us on a series of adventures--exciting in their own right--that demonstrate how ecology and evolution have interacted to create the world we live in. Some of these adventures, like his SCUBA dives in the incredibly diverse Lembeh Strait in Indonesia or his encounter with a wild wolf cub in western Mongolia, might have been experienced by any reasonably intrepid traveller. Others, like his experience of being hammered by a severe earthquake off the island of Yap while sixty feet down in the ocean, filming manta rays, stand far outside the ordinary. With his own stunning color photographs of the wildlife he discovered on his travels, Wills not only takes us to these far-off places but, more important, draws out the evolutionary stories behind the wildlife and shows how our understanding of the living world can be deepened by a Darwinian perspective. In addition, the book offers an extensive and unusual view of human evolution, examining the entire sweep of our evolutionary story as it has taken place throughout the Old World. The reader comes away with a renewed sense of wonder about the world's astounding diversity, along with a new appreciation of the long evolutionary history that has led to the wonders of the present-day. When we lose a species or an ecosystem, Wills shows us, we also lose many millions of years of history. Published to coincide with the International Year for Biodiversity, The Darwinian Tourist is packed with globe-trotting exploits, brilliant color photography, and eye-opening insights into the evolution of humanity and the natural world.

Christopher Wills is Professor of Biological Sciences and member of the Center for Molecular Genetics at the University of California, San Diego. He received the Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1999. His books include the bestselling The Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human Uniqueness , Children of Prometheus: The Accelerating Pace of Human Evolution, and many other books.

Journey through the career of musical giant, milestone guitarist, and recording innovator Les Paul, and marvel at the world of cutting-edge guitar design! The Early Years of the Les Paul Legacy emerged out of author Robb Lawrence's years of research, interviews, extensive vintage archives (including original Les Paul/Mary Ford articles, press photos, music and recordings), and gorgeous original photography. It's all here: the factory pictures, the designers, the electronics; the first experimental Log and Clunker guitars, stories of the various Goldtops, the humbucking pickup evolution, and over 80 pages dedicated to the heralded '50s Sunburst Standard. Exclusive interviews with Les Paul, as well as Michael Bloomfield and Jeff Beck.

Beginning with the collectible late '60s models, The Modern Era of the Les Paul Legacy moves on to the '70s and '80s special-themed instruments - showing all popular artist models, like Jimmy Page, Joe Perry, and Slash, in living color. The holy grail '59 Sunburst and the jaw-dropping Custom Shop creations of the '90s receive their due as achievements that have never, to this day, been surpassed. The book also covers Les Paul's resurgence - the comeback Grammy Award-winning album with Chet Atkins, the start of a weekly gig in a New York City jazz club, and the reconnection with the Gibson family. Since Les Paul's death in August 2009, this will be the first book that covers his entire life, including his last performances at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the memorials in New York, and the burial in his hometown in Wisconsin.

Prominent guitar expert, player and photojournalist Robb Lawrence wrote the original byline for Guitar Magazine's popular 'Rarebird' column on vintage guitars. He began his association with Les Paul in 1972 and has been his West Coast concert tech for many memorable shows. Their association has included work on The Wizard of Waukesha, a 1978 film about Les Paul and the recent 2001 Grammys tribute film.

Robb and his friends will then perform on their vintage Les Paul guitars.

V. S. Ramachandran is at the forefront of his field and has been referred to by Richard Dawkins as the "Marco Polo of neuroscience." Now, in a major new work, Ramachandran sets his sights on the mystery of human uniqueness. Taking us to the frontiers of neurology, he reveals what baffling and extreme case studies can teach us about normal brain function and how it evolved. Synesthesia becomes a window into the brain mechanisms that make some of us more creative than others. And autism—for which Ramachandran opens a new direction for treatment—gives us a glimpse of the aspect of being human that we understand least: self-awareness. Ramachandran tackles the most exciting and controversial topics in neurology with a storyteller's eye for compelling case studies and a researcher's flair for new approaches to age-old questions. Tracing the strange links between neurology and behavior, this book unveils a wealth of clues into the deepest mysteries of the human brain.

V.S. Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Professor with the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute. Ramachandran initially trained as a doctor and subsequently obtained a Ph.D. from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. Ramachandran’s early work was on visual perception but he is best known for his experiments in behavioral neurology which, despite their apparent simplicity, have had a profound impact on the way we think about the brain. In 2005 he was awarded the Henry Dale Medal and elected to an honorary life fellowship by the Royal Instituion of Great Britain. His other honors and awards include fellowships from All Souls College, Oxford, and from Stanford University; the Presidential Lecture Award from the American Academy of Neurology, two honorary doctorates, the annual Ramon Y Cajal award from the International Neuropsychiatry Society, and the Ariens-Kappers medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. In 2003 he gave the annual BBC Reith lectures and was the first physician/psychologist to give the lectures since they were begun by Bertrand Russell in 1949. In 1995 he gave the Decade of the Brain lecture at the 25th annual Silver Jubilee meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Most recently the President of India conferred on him the second highest civilian award and honorific title in India, the Padma Bhushan. He is author of the acclaimed book Phantoms in the Brain that has been translated into nine languages and formed the basis for a two part series on Channel Four TV (UK) and a 1 hour PBS special in USA. Newsweek magazine has named him a member of “The Century Club” – one of the “hundred most prominent people to watch in the next century.”

Roger Bingham is a British scientist, writer, and public television producer. He is co-founder and director of The Science Network and creator of the Beyond Belief conferences. Bingham produced two public television series, Frontiers of the Mind (1988) and The Human Quest (1996), and co-authored two books, Wild Card (1974) and The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self (2002). Bingham is currently a member of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Institute for Neural Computation at UC San Diego.

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