Mary Roach is the best-selling author of STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, SPOOK: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and BONK: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Her forthcoming book is PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic, New Scientist, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine. She has appeared on numerous national interview programs, has lectured widely, and was selected to give a TED Talk in Jan. 2009.
In this podcast episode, Mary tells us about the lengths she had to go to while researching Packing for Mars, and explains the lengths certain carbonated beverage makers went to during the race to be the first cola in space.
Roach will be sitting on the BEA 2010 Adult Author Breakfast panel on Thursday, May 27 at 8:00AM. She will be joined by Condoleezza Rice, author of Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family; and John Grisham. Jon Stewart, author (along with the writers of The Daily Show) of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race will be the Master of Ceremonies.
Mitali Bose Perkins was born in Kolkata (Calcutta), India. Her name means “friendly” in Bangla, and she had to try and live up to it because the Bose family moved so often – they lived in India, Ghana, Cameroon, London, New York City, and Mexico City before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area when she was in middle school. Mitali studied political science at Stanford University and public policy at U.C. Berkeley, surviving academia thanks to a steady diet of kids’ books from public libraries and bookstores, and went on to teach middle school, high school, and college students. She lived in India, Bangladesh, Thailand, and California with her husband and twin sons before the Perkins family moved to Newton, Massachusetts, where they live now.
William Gibson has spent the bulk of his career creating vivid, intensely detailed fictional futures that reflect, with uncanny precision, the rapidly shifting realities of contemporary life. This tendency was evident in his first novel, Neuromancer, which works both as an ingeniously constructed cyber thriller and as a meditation on the impact of information technology on every aspect of human society. When, in 2003, Gibson abandoned science fiction to produce an inventive novel called Pattern Recognition, it came as no real surprise. In his way, Gibson has always written about the here and now. With that book, he began a remarkable exploration of post-9/11 America that continued, with undiminished vigor, in Spook Country. 
Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School. He regularly writes for the Atlantic Monthly and Slate, and is the author of numerous books, including God is Not Great, a #1 New York Times bestseller. He was named one of the “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” by Foreign Policy and Britain’s Prospect. From 1982-2002, he wrote a column called the “Minority Report” for The Nation. He has also been Washington editor and columnist for Harper’s magazine, American columnist and correspondent for the Spectator, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, Sunday Today, and the Sunday Correspondent. As foreign correspondent and travel writer, he has written from more than sixty countries on all five continents.
Cory Doctorow is an activist, teacher, public speaker, and technology expert. A New York Times bestselling author, he is also co-editor of 
Newbery Award-winning author Richard Peck has written thirty middle grade and YA novels and become one of America’s most highly respected children’s book writers. He is the first children’s book author ever to have received a National Humanities Medal, and has also received two Edgar Allan Poe Awards, the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement, the ALAN Award, and the Medallion from the University of Southern Mississippi. Peck’s new book Three Quarters Dead is an eerie YA ghost story inspired by a real-life fatal teen car accident.
