Our Authors
Karl Sabbagh
KARL SABBAGH is a writer and television producer with 25 years of experience describing complex events and subjects for a nonspecialist audience. His programs for the BBC and PBS have encompassed physics, medicine, psychology, philosophy, technology, and anthropology. Two of his television projects have been accompanied by best-selling books: The Living Body and Skyscraper. He specialises in non-fiction, with a preponderance of science and medicine, but has also written on architecture, history, fraud and Victorian boys’ problems.
“I like to tell true stories,” he says, “either through reportage on modern topics or digging up and dusting down unusual stories from the past.”
The son of a Palestinian father and an English mother, in 2004 he wrote Palestine: A Personal History, which was partly a search for his ancestors and partly a history of Palestine.
Books by Karl Sabbagh include
Childhood Memory – Oxford University Press 2009
Your Case is Hopeless – John Murray, 2007
Palestine: A Personal History – Atlantic Books, 2006, and Grove Atlantic, 2007
Dr Riemann’s Zeros – Atlantic Books and Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2004
A Rum Affair – Penguin Press and Farrar Straus Giroux (nominated in 2002 for Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize.)
Books by Karl Sabbagh
The Hair of the Dog and other Scientific Surprises
Science is full of surprises: the peculiar peepshow beginnings of baby incubators; the unexpected positive fallout from the H-bomb; the dinosaurs that caused sonic booms; the irrational nature of the number pi; the fifth taste sensation lurking in everyone’s taste buds which nobody knew about (except for the Japanese).
Whilst shedding light on these conundrums, Karl Sabbagh shows that seemingly trivial queries or assumptions lead to a deeper understanding of how science works. Who would have thought that scientists would turn to the hypothesis ‘All swans are white’ to determine the stability of the entire universe? Or that if we choose to spend our hard-earned money on other people it might make us happier than if we spend it on ourselves?
John Murray, November 2009
