Alexandra Horowitz joined me at 9am PST to talk about her fascinating book, BEING A DOG: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell.

If you missed Alexandra Horowitz
on today's show, listen here!

Scribner is delighted to announce the publication, on October 4, 2016, of Alexandra Horowitz’s BEING A DOG: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell. In her New York Times bestselling Inside of a Dog (2009), Horowitz revealed the often surprising evolutionary reasons behind why dogs behave the way they do; in BEING A DOG, she explores what dogs know in even greater depth, following their lead to learn about the dog’s spectacular nose and how we mere humans can improve our under-used sense of smell. The result is a revelation about the world that we share.

In BEING A DOG, readers will learn how well a dog can smell versus how well a human can smell. We humans are what Alexandra and her fellow scientists call microsmatic, i.e. “poor smellers,” compared to dogs. We have a mere six million olfactory receptor cells in our noses, whereas dogs have between 200 million and a billion, depending on the breed. Here’s another comparison: Human beings have three receptor genes that allow us to see all the colors of the world. Dogs have some 800 receptor genes just for smell. In theory, they can smell billions of different odors. We therefore have a very difficult time understanding what dogs can do with their noses because most of us can’t even tell if what burnt in the kitchen this morning was the coffee or the toast.

So what, exactly, can dogs smell? Amyl acetate is the chemical that gives bananas their smell. Dogs can smell one drop of the chemical in a trillion drops of water. Dogs smell earthquakes before they happen, and rainstorms miles away. They have been trained to find explosives, land-mines, chemical accelerants, missing people, underwater cadavers, drugs of every type, counterfeit goods, illicit cell phones in prison and imported shark fins in suitcases, dry rot, termites, fire ants, bed bugs, truffles under the ground, and dairy cows in estrous. They smell what you had for breakfast and whether a cat touched your leg yesterday. They can smell cancer, both inside human beings and in lab samples. They can smell their way home, the time that has passed since a flower closed up, and the body under the rubble.

BEING A DOG delves into all of these remarkable abilities and more, revealing a whole world of experiences we miss every day. Horowitz, inspired by her dogs, tries to be a better smeller. She spends days smelling everything her dogs smell. And she volunteers at an olfaction lab at Rockefeller University (sniffing hundreds of bottles of scents per session.) It is not that we humans can’t smell; it’s that we largely don’t. Based on the biological facts alone, the major determining factor in whether we smell an odor or not seems to be just this: whether we bother to try and smell it.

Writing with scientific rigor and her trademark wit, Horowitz changes our perspective on dogs – and smelling – forever. Readers will finish this charming and informative book feeling that they have broken free of human constraints and understood smell as never before; that they have, however fleetingly, been a dog.



Alexandra Horowitz is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know and On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation. She teaches at Barnard College, where she runs the Dog Cognition Lab. She lives with her family and two large, highly sniffy dogs in New York City.

Visit her website: alexandrahorowitz.ne


More praise for BEING A DOG:

“I’m not entirely certain whether Alexandra Horowitz’s BEING A DOG has made me want to buy a dog or morph into one—but I do know that it was magical. Horowitz has crafted an utterly engrossing, witty, finely-observed narrative that will make you look at the power of the nose in a wholly new way.”—Maria Konnikova, author of The Confidence Game and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

MEDIA ALERT 12TH ANNUAL LA FEMME INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL AWARDS CEREMONY HONORING AISHA TYLER, GINA TORRES, WENDIE MALICK, CONNIE STEVENS AND KERRIS DORSEY

WHAT: The 12th Annual La Femme International Film Festival closing ceremony will host a Red Carpet & Awards Ceremony on October 23, 2016. The evening will begin with award nominees, our honorees and celebrities walking the red carpet and culminate in an after party following the ceremony.

This year we will celebrate and honor the accomplishments of Aisha Tyler (The Talk) - Lupe Ontiveros Image Award; Gina Torres (Suits) - Visionary Award; Wendie Malick (Just Shoot Me) - Humanitarian Award; Connie Stevens (Prairie Bones) - Lifetime Achievement Award; and Kerris Dorsey (Ray Donovan) - Rising Star Award.

WHY: The LA Femme Film Festival Awards Ceremony is attended by celebrities, Hollywood insiders, filmmakers and invited guests. Other celebrity guests may include Laurence Fishburne (Black-ish), Joely Fisher (‘Til Death), Dan Lauria (Pitch), Alfre Woodard (12 Years a Slave), Meredith Baxter (Famiy Ties), Robert Patrick (Scorpion), Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica) and many others.

WHEN: Sunday October 23, 2016
Red Carpet (6 pm – 7 pm)
Awards Ceremony at 7 pm WHERE: Los Angeles Theatre Center

514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles, CA 90013

CONTACT: Deborah Gilels 818-758-6509 or Lisa Lyons 818-726-8199

Deni Ellis Béchard, author of Into the Sun, joined me Monday at 9:45am PST

If you missed Deni Ellis Béchard
on today's show, listen here.

Kabul—Ten Years After 9/11: After a car explodes in the city, a Japanese-American journalist discovers that its passengers were acquaintances—three fellow expats who had formed an unlikely love triangle—and becomes convinced that a deeper story lies behind the moment of violence. The investigation that follows takes the journalist from Kabul to Louisiana, Maine, Québec, and Dubai, from love to jealousy to hate—and acutely reveals how the lives of individuals overseas have become inseparable from the larger story of America’s imperial misadventures.


About Deni Ellis Béchard

Deni Ellis Béchard is the author of the novel Vandal Love, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book; Cures for Hunger, a memoir about growing up with his father, who robbed banks; and Of Bonobos and Men, winner of the 2015 Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including the LA Times, Salon, Pacific Standard, and Foreign Policy, and he has reported from India, Iraq, Colombia, Rwanda, the Congo, and Afghanistan.

Marie-Claire Arrieta, PhD and B. Brett Finlay, PhD, authors of "Let Them Eat Dirt - Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World," joined me Monday at 9am PST

If you missed today's show with
Marie-Claire Arrieta, PhD, listen here

If you missed today's show 
with B. Brett Finlay, PhD, listen here

Marie-Claire Arrieta, PhD, trained in the Finlay lab and is now an assistant professor at the University of Calgary in Canada. She has been studying intestinal microbiology and immunology for the past 10 years. Her recent study connecting asthma in very young babies to missing key intestinal bacterial species was deemed a breakthrough in the field and was reported by dozens of news outlets around the world in 2015. Arrieta has been published in leading scientific journals such as Gastroenterology, PNAS, and Science Translational Medicine. She spends her busy days juggling between experiments, science writing, kindergarten pick-ups, and play dates for her two young children.

B. Brett Finlay, PhD, is professor of microbiology at the University of British Columbia and a world leader in how bacterial infections work. He has been studying microbes for over thirty years and has published over four hundred and fifty articles. Also a founder of the biotech companies Inimex, Vedanta, and Microbiome Insights, Brett is Officer of the Order of Canada—the highest Canadian civilian recognition. He lives in Vancouver, BC, with his wife, who is a pediatrician, and has two grown-up kids.

Take a look at what is being researched in his lab.

Peter Himmelman, an award-winning Emmy and Grammy-nominated musician, founder of Big Muse, and author of Let Me Out, joined me Monday at 9:30am pst!

“Fear is one of life’s biggest roadblocks, which is why Peter Himmelman’s book is so important. Let Me Out gets to the heart of how we can keep fear from limiting our potential by tapping into our inner resilience, creativity, and strength. There’s deep wisdom here along with very practical tools for translating our ideas into the real world.”– Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post

If you missed Peter Himmelman on today's show,
listen here!

Whether we’re laid off from a job, growing a family, or moving to a new city, life often requires us to reinvent ourselves or switch paths. Making that successful transition, however, can be challenging due to our fear of failure or our inability to take action. After years of dreaming, training and good fortune, Peter Himmelman became an Emmy- and Grammy-nominated musician, songwriter and performer. But when the music industry hit hard times, he was forced to reinvent himself at age 52. While Himmelman developed exciting ideas of what he wanted to do, he also thought that’s impossible or how unrealistic. It took him two years to actually stop mulling and start doing.

Having made a living in the trenches of the creative world for the last thirty-five years, first as a musician and now as a top speaker and consultant on creativity and leadership for businesses around the world through his company Big Muse, Peter Himmelman knows first-hand both the pitfalls and triumphs of what goes into turning endless pondering into actual innovative achievement. In his forthcoming release LET ME OUT: Unlock Your Creative Mind and Bring Your Ideas to Life, he combines proven cognitive methods with his own unique artistic techniques to unite and convert left and right-brained thinking into action. Readers learn new ways to:


Reduce fear as a means to becoming more creative;


Create with purpose, whether it's an ad campaign, a song, or a new business;


Communicate more effectively and on a deeper level;


Complete worthwhile projects that have stayed in the "bits and pieces" phase forever


LET ME OUT tackles the fact that our greatest barrier to entry is often ourselves. For those who think starting a new path is unrealistic, this book provides practical tools and insights to make our creative goals take shape in the real world.


Peter Himmelman is an award-winning, Emmy and Grammy-nominated musician and the founder of Big Muse, a company that teaches creative thinking, leadership skills, and deeper levels of communication in all facets of life – from personal to professional. As Big Muse has grown in popularity over the last four years, Peter has come to share his program with thousands of individuals, including academic institutions like The Wharton School, UCLA, and The Ross School of Business, and international brands such as McDonald’s, Adobe, and Gap Inc. He has an Advanced Management Certificate from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Learn more at http://www.bigmuse.com/ and http://www.peterhimmelman.com/ home.php.

PAUL BRINKLEY-ROGERS, Pulitzer-prize winning war correspondent and author of PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS, joined me Monday at 9am PST!

PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS, Pulitzer-prize winning war correspondent PAUL BRINKLEY-ROGERS is a gorgeous and evocative memoir that has captured the hearts and minds of our staff and the booksellers who have received an early glimpse of his pages recounting a haunting love affair with a mysterious older Japanese woman in the summer of 1959.

If you missed Paul Brinkley-Rogers on today's show, listen here!

“Please enjoy…the most romantic memoir you’re likely to read in a lifetime.”
—ELIN HILDERBRAND, New York Times bestselling author of HERE’S TO US


“A searing final love letter.”—DAILY EXPRESS (UK)


“A moving memoir exploring the last imprint of his first love.”—THE LADY (UK)


“[A] haunting memoir.”—DAILY MAIL (UK)

At age 75, Paul began writing PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS after discovering his long-lost love’s letters tucked inside a book by a British poet he had not opened in years. When he reread her passionate epistles—which are also featured verbatim in his memoir—he set out to recapture this singular time and place, his coming-of-age as a 19-year-old sailor aboard the USS Shangri-La, and to pay tribute to Kaji Yukiko, the incredible woman who continues to influence his life long after they parted more than half a century ago.

Paul and Yukiko met by chance in the Japanese seaport of Yokosuka. Picking him out of a crowd because he was carrying a book, she shared her astonishing knowledge of literature, music, film, and poetry with him and encouraged—even demanded—that he use the talent she saw in him to become the writer he is today. Through Yukiko, he discovered a shared passion for the arts and learned many heartbreaking truths about post-war Japan. He also learned what it takes to love without regret.

Theirs was not a quiet love story. When a member of the yakuza, Japan’s brutal crime syndicate, attempted to kidnap Yukiko, Paul realized that there was much more to her—and to Japan in the devastating wake of World War II—than he saw at first glance. Through the searing letters that Yukiko wrote to him and his vivid telling of a history made all the more powerful by the passage of time, PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS reaches across decades and continents, inviting readers to reclaim and celebrate the lifelong loves that never really end.

PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS has quickly become an in-house favorite and is all the more personal to us because the beautiful image on the cover is a photo of the mother of Tara Parsons, Touchstone’s Editor-in-Chief (and the book’s editor). The photo of Parsons’ mother dressed in a formal kimono was taken in Japan during the same time period in which PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS is set.

Paul Brinkley-Rogers is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and veteran war correspondent. For many years he worked in Asia as a staff member of Newsweek, covering the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, the death of Chairman Mao, and Japan's economic miracle. He also reported from Latin America for The Miami Herald, sharing the Pulitzer Prize with a reporting team in 2001 for coverage of the Elian Gonzalez custody battle. He is the author of Please Enjoy Your Happiness, a memoir. Now retired, he lives in Arizona.

Thanks to Moneeka Sawyer for having me on her show Bliss Bits! Loved talking about "Get the FUNK Out!"

Author Moneeka Sawyer invited me on her show, "Bliss Bits" today! I shared my insights on how to Get the FUNK Out, what inspired me to start my show at KUCI 88.9fm, and lots more!

Click this link to listen!