Lonely Planet the Kindness of Strangers

Dave Eggers was born on March 12th, 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts. His family moved to Lake Forest, Illinois when he was a child. Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, until his parents' deaths in 1991 and 1992. The loss left him responsible for his eight-year-old brother and later became the inspiration for his highly acclaimed memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius". Published in 2000, the memoir was nominated for a nonfiction Pulitzer the following year. Eggers edits the popular "The Best American Nonrequired Reading" published annually. In 1998, he founded the independent publishing house, McSweeney's which publishes a variety of magazines and literary journals. Eggers has also opened several nonprofit writing centers for high school students across the United States. Eggers has written several novels and his title, A Hologram for the King, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. His most recent work of fiction, entitled The Circle, was published in 2013. His recent nonfiction books are The Monk of Mokha (January 2018) and What Can a Citizen Do? (Illustrated by Shawn Harris)(September 2018). Simon Winchester was born in London, England on September 28, 1944. He read geology at St. Catherine's College, Oxford. After graduation in 1966, he joined a Canadian mining company and worked as field geologist in Uganda. The following year he decided to become a journalist. His first reporting job was for The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1969, he joined The Guardian and was named Britain's Journalist of the Year in 1971. He also worked for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times before becoming a freelancer. He is the author of numerous books including In Holy Terror, The River at the Center of the World, The Alice Behind Wonderland, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and.Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. In 2006, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to journalism and literature.