The wildly entertaining and eye-opening biography of J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who invented the concept of "Close Encounters" with alien life, inspired Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster classic science fiction epic film and is the subject of History Channel's Project Blue Book, and made an entire nation want to believe in UFOs.
In June 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold looked out his cockpit window and saw a group of nine silvery crescents weaving between the peaks of the Cascade Mountains at an estimated 1,200 miles an hour. The media, the military, and the scientific community—led by J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer hired by the Air Force—debunked this and many other Unidentified Flying Object sightings reported across the country. But after years of denials, Hynek made a shocking pronouncement: UFOs are real.
Thirty years after his death, Hynek’s agonizing transformation from skepticism to true believer remains one of the great misunderstood stories of science. In this definitive biography, Mark O'Connell reveals for the first time how Hynek’s work both as a celebrated astronomer and as the U. S. Air Force’s go-to UFO expert for nearly twenty years stretched the boundaries of modern science, laid the groundwork for acceptance of the possibility of UFOs, and was the basis of the hit film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. With unprecedented access to Hynek’s personal and professional files, O’Connell smashes conventional wisdom to reveal the intriguing man and scientist beneath the legend. 
Tracing Hynek’s career, O'Connell examines Hynek’s often-ignored work as a professional astronomer to create a complete portrait of a groundbreaking enthusiast who became an American cult icon and transformed the way we see our world and our universe.

The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs

Biographies & Memoirs

O’Connell, Mark

Arts & Literature

Dey Street Books

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping mortality is a breezy romp full of colorful characters.” —New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice) Transhumanism is a movement pushing the limits of our bodies—our capabilities, intelligence, and lifespans—in the hopes that, through technology, we can become something better than ourselves. It has found support among Silicon Valley billionaires and some of the world’s biggest businesses. In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell explores the staggering possibilities and moral quandaries that present themselves when you of think of your body as a device. He visits the world's foremost cryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall death. He discovers an underground collective of biohackers, implanting electronics under their skin to enhance their senses. He meets a team of scientists urgently investigating how to protect mankind from artificial superintelligence. Where is our obsession with technology leading us? What does the rise of AI mean not just for our offices and homes, but for our humanity? Could the technologies we create to help us eventually bring us to harm? Addressing these questions, O'Connell presents a profound, provocative, often laugh-out-loud-funny look at an influential movement. In investigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human.

Computers & Technology

Computer Science

DOUBLEDAY

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

"Harrowing, tender-hearted, and funny as hell" --Jenny Offill "Fascinating...Oddly uplifting"&nbsp;--The Economist "Smart, funny, irreverent, and philosophically rich" --Wall Street Journal By the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine, an absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense--and coming to grips with the future We're alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. Old postwar alliances are crumbling. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt.&nbsp;&nbsp;Everywhere you look there's an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What does it mean to have children--nothing if not an act of hope--in such unsettled times? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on Earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O'Connell is consumed by these questions--and, as the father of two young children himself, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization's collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to those places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited--real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. In doing so, he comes to a resolution, while offering readers a unique window into our contemporary imagination. Both investigative and deeply personal, Notes from an Apocalypse is an affecting, humorous, and surprisingly hopeful meditation on our present moment. With insight, humanity, and wit, O'Connell leaves you to wonder: What if the end of the world isn't the end of the world?

Science & Math

Earth Sciences

A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder

From the award-winning author comes a gripping account of one of the most scandalous murders in modern Irish history, at once a propulsive work of true crime and an act of literary subversion. "Circles the inner life of the murderer Malcolm Macarthur with subtlety and forensic care...Complex and disturbing as well as intriguing and compelling." --Colm Toíbín, author of The Magician and New York Times bestseller Brooklyn Malcolm Macarthur&nbsp;was a well-known Dublin socialite and heir.&nbsp; Suave and urbane, he passed his days mingling with artists and aristocrats, reading philosophy, living a life of the mind. But by 1982, his inheritance had dwindled to almost nothing, a desperate threat to his lifestyle.&nbsp;Macarthur&nbsp;hastily conceived a plan: He would commit bank robbery, of the kind that had become frightfully common in Dublin at the time. But his plan spun swiftly out of control, and he needlessly killed two innocent people. The ensuing manhunt, arrest, and conviction amounted to one of the most infamous political scandals in modern Irish history, contributing to the eventual collapse of a government. Winner of the Wellcome and Rooney Prizes, Mark O'Connell spent&nbsp;countless hours in conversation with Macarthur--interviews that veered from confession to evasion. Through their tense exchanges and O'Connell's independent reporting, a pair of narratives unspools: a riveting account of Macarthur's crimes and a study of the hazy line between truth and invention. We come to see not only the enormity of the murders but the damage that's inflicted when a life is rendered into story. At once propulsive and searching, A Thread of Violence is a hard look at a brutal act, its subterranean origins, and the long shadow it casts. It offers a haunting and insightful examination of the lies we tell ourselves--and the lengths we'll go to preserve them.

History

Europe

Baby boomers' expectations for their marriages are often unrealistic. When their relationship comes up short on romance and sex, but seems long on disagreements and strife, many boomers choose to leave. THE MARRIAGE BENEFIT is less a book about how to make our relationships better than it is about how our relationships can make us better if we just work on our expectations and improve communications. Harvard Medical School clinical instructor and psychotherapist O'Connell offers a peek behind the door of a marriage therapist, where readers can see that their problems are not unique. Through wonderfully revealing anecdotes of couples with problems many of us face: long-held bitterness, diminished sexuality, the scars of infidelity, and the search for authentic meaning, O'Connell shows how by respecting each other's individuality, looking for "real" sex, and learning how to play with each other again, we can reap the benefits of the long-term emotional investment we've made.

The Marriage Benefit: The Surprising Rewards of Staying Together

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Grand Central Life & Style

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
NPR • Esquire • The Guardian • Washington Independent Review of Books\n"Harrowing, tender-hearted, and funny as hell." —Jenny Offill 
"Smart, funny, irreverent, and philosophically rich." —Wall Street Journal\nBy the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine, an absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with the future\nWe’re alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt. Everywhere you look there’s an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on earth is anybody doing about it? 
Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell is consumed by these questions—and, as the father of two young children, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization’s collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. What emerges is an absorbing, funny, and deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with what’s ahead.

Self-Help

Anchor

Vintage

An examination of the nature of masculinity offers guidance to fathers on how to be more satisfied in their parent-child relationships, sharing a host of examples that cover such topics as discipline, staying emotionally connected, and disagreeing with a spouse's parenting choices. 50,000 first printing.

The Good Father: On Men, Masculinity, and Life in the Family

Scribner

As Ready Player One and Stranger Things prove the retro might of VHS era cinema, Watching Skies: Star Wars, Spielberg and Us is a universal and affectionate tale about the pop cultural remembrances stuck in all our R2 unit’s memory systems. Like many a British kid in an ‘80s world of VCRs, Reagan and Atari, Mark O’Connell wanted to be one of the mop-haired kids on the Star Wars toy commercials. Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman, and of course Star Wars weren’t just changing cinema—they were making lasting highways into our childhoods, toy boxes, and video stores like never before. In this energetic and insightful memoir-through-cinema, O’Connell flies a gilded X-Wing through a universe of bedroom remakes of Return of the Jedi, close encounters with Christopher Reeve, sticker album swaps, a honeymoon on Amity Island, and the trauma of losing an entire Star Wars figure collection. A unique study on how a rich galaxy of movies continue shaping big and vital cinema to this day, Watching Skies is for all Star Wars kids—whatever their era. It is about how George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, a shark, two motherships, some gremlins, Ghostbusters, and a man of steel jumped a whole generation to hyperspace* (*action figures not included).

Watching Skies: Star Wars, Spielberg and Us

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

The History Press

In a fascinating collection of over 1600 signs and symbols. this book is structured thematically, so that related symbols are complemented and contrasted, giving a unique guide to their cross-cultural element.

Illustrated Encyclopedia of Signs and Symbols: Identification, Analysis and Interpretation of the Visual Codes and the Subconscious Language that Shapes and Describes our Thoughts and Emotions

Reference

Airey, Raje

Encyclopedias & Subject Guides

Lorenz Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by O’Connell, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by O’Connell, Mark

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by O’Connell, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder

The Marriage Benefit: The Surprising Rewards of Staying Together

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder

The Good Father: On Men, Masculinity, and Life in the Family

Watching Skies: Star Wars, Spielberg and Us

Illustrated Encyclopedia of Signs and Symbols: Identification, Analysis and Interpretation of the Visual Codes and the Subconscious Language that Shapes and Describes our Thoughts and Emotions