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Ian McKellen: A Biography
Garry O’Connor. St. Martin’s, $29.99 (352p)
ISBN 978-1-250-22388-3
Novelist and biographer O’Connor
(The Vagabond Lover) explores the life and
work of British actor Ian McKellen, a
longtime friend, in this engaging but
thin biography. Starting with McKellen’s
Lancashire boyhood, where he lost his
mother at age 12, O’Connor recounts
McKellen’s early years through his
Cambridge education, to his London
stage debut in 1964, which was marred
by tragedy when McKellen’s father died
in a car crash on the drive home after
seeing him perform. O’Connor then
charts McKellen’s upward trajectory in
theater—peaks that included his 1976
Royal Shakespeare Company pairing
with Judi Dench in Macbeth and Tony-
winning role as Salieri in Amadeus’s
1980 Broadway premiere—and his reti-
cence about revealing his sexuality
before, in the late 1980s, he embraced
LGBTQ advocacy in response to the
AIDS crisis and homophobic British
laws. O’Connor’s account—which closes
with the stratospheric fame McKellen
achieved in the X-Men and Lord of the
Rings films—benefits from his insider
access, but is hampered by an uncertain
tone—sometimes conversational, some-
times formal—and sometimes faulty
chronology (as when O’Connor seem-
ingly has McKellen meeting “President
Reagan” in 1992). A mostly enter-
taining introduction to the pre-Gandalf
McKellen, this book never quite manages
its goal of showing “this complicated and
complex man in all shades and colours.”
(Nov.)Imagination: The Science of Your
Mind’s Greatest Power
Jim Davies. Pegasus, $28.95 (400p) ISBN 978-
1-64313-203-7
Davies (Riveted), a professor at Carleton
University’s Institute of Cognitive
Science, explains what imagination is and
how it works in this spirited overview of
one of neuroscience’s most complex
topics. The imagination is challenging to
study, Davies explains, because “you can’t
always know (let alone control) what
people are or are not doing in their heads.”
To acquaint readers with the field, he
introduces various recent concepts, suchseven years later, she reached out to him on
social media. Dorgan uses the harrowing
details of Tamara’s life story—which
includes sexual abuse, homelessness,
untreated PTSD, and attempted suicide—
to put a human face on the plight of
indigenous Americans in general. Among
many shocking statistics, he notes that
the federal government allocates less
healthcare funding per Native person
than per incarcerated person. On a more
positive note, Dorgan profiles young
Native American leaders, such as Mariah
Gladstone, whose Indigikitchen project
promotes traditional foodways as a means
to improving Native Americans’ health.
Dorgan’s plea for change serves as an
informative and moving introduction to a
great injustice. (Nov.)★ Handprints on Hubble:
An Astronaut’s Story of Invention
Kathryn D. Sullivan. MIT, $26.95 (296p)
ISBN 978-0-262-04318-2
Sullivan, the first female astronaut to
do a space walk, debuts with an accessible
and fascinating memoir of her experiences
as a pioneering scientist, highlighted by
her work on the Hubble space telescope.
Beginning with joining NASA in 1978,
as part of the first new batch of astronauts
in nine years, she takes readers through a
career arc that culminated in joining the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration as under-secretary of
commerce for oceans and atmosphere. She
focuses on her time at NASA, where she
was part of a team responsible for the
maintenance and repairs of Hubble, and
involved in its launch. As Sullivan
describes, with just the right amount of
detail, painstaking preparations were
required before Hubble launched—and
even afterwards, a minuscule error
imperiled the multibillion-dollar project,
requiring an in-space repair mission.
Sullivan is the perfect narrator to explain
the underpinnings of the ambitious project
and why it proved worthwhile—namely,
that the images it captured greatly
expanded humanity’s understanding of
the birth of stars, the rate of the universe’s
expansion, and other cosmic phenomena.
Sullivan’s fine volume shines a light on
the nuts-and-bolts tasks that make
extraordinary endeavors possible. (Nov.)donates to cancer research for every head-
band it sells, provides a delightful guide
to making one’s dreams come true. “I’m
not going to tell you to put on a happy
face and skip down the street high-fiving
everyone who walks by,” she promises in
her opener.
Instead, she
offers strategies
for embracing
optimism—
where one can
see and under-
stand the bad,
but still believe
there can be
good—and
learning to feel
comfortable with its twin qualities of fear
and possibility. Ekstrom, great-niece of
Bernie Madoff, developed this attitude
after her family lost all of its money to the
disgraced financier. After interning at
Disney World and Make-a-Wish, Ekstrom
noticed many girls with cancer wearing
headbands instead of wigs and hats, and
founded her company from her dorm
room at North Carolina State University.
She shares the ideas that propelled her:
letting the wonder be bigger than the
limits, documenting and celebrating
“the wins,” having self-confidence, and
getting motivated “just for today” every
day. Ekstrom’s winding life story and
uplifting message of betting on oneself in
all situations will appeal to readers at any
stage of their life or career. (Nov.)
The Girl in the Photograph: The
True Story of a Native American
Child, Lost and Found in America
Byron L. Dorgan. St. Martin’s/Dunne, $27.99
(208p) ISBN 978-1-250-17364-5
In this poignant account, former senator
Dorgan connects the tale of an abused girl
on the Standing Rock Reservation in North
Dakota to the larger story of the U.S.
government’s mistreatment of Native
Americans. Dorgan first encountered
five-year-old Tamara (no last name is
given) in 1990, when her photograph
appeared in a Bismarck Tribune story about
the beating she endured in a reservation
foster home. The next weekend, Dorgan
writes, he traveled from Washington,
D.C., to Standing Rock to meet Tamara.
But he soon lost track of her. Twenty-