I’ve lately been drawn to write what I call “human scale history”, nonfiction narratives that feature forgotten or neglected figures from the past—people whose stories deserve to be reclaimed as part of our cultural heritage. Given the under-documented nature of such subjects, the work necessarily goes slowly. But it’s more than worthwhile.

My latest book is Every Living Thing: The Great And Deadly Race to Know All Life, an exploration of the men and women who shaped–and are continuing to shape–our relationship to our planet. Sharing the page with some famous figures (Linnaeus, Voltaire, Jefferson, etc) are a number of extraordinary individuals you’ve likely never heard of, but may be glad to meet. 

My previous book was A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler. A biography of the solitary blind adventurer James Holman (1786-1857), it was a bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also an impetus for the Holman Prize, awarded annually by Lighthouse for the Blind.

I’m a child of the counterculture—my youth was fairly nomadic, split between California, Hawaii, and the back seat of a Volkswagen bus. I left high school at fourteen, kicking around as a day laborer, dishwasher and late-night disc jockey before studying at the University of California, Santa Cruz. That’s near Silicon Valley, so I taught myself to program, wandered into an engineering job at Apple, then left to write books on technology. After several of those, I launched an early Internet company. (That was a ride, but I was glad to get back to writing books.) You can read more about my techno days here.

I live in Northern California. I’m extremely left-handed. I play the upright bass in the alt-folk band Frances8. My partner is the journalist and essayist Julia Scott, who does things like slather herself with bacteria, and report from the inside of an iron lung. Life is many things, but boring isn’t one of them