Images of Michael Douglas as  Liberace in the HBO film, Behind the Candelabra, seem to be everywhere; at the Cannes Film Festival where it premiered yesterday, on magazine covers and in reviews (even in BusinessWeek). American audiences will get their first look at the movie on HBO on May 26.

Yesterday, Terry Gross interviewed the director, Steven Soderbergh on NPR’s Fresh Air.He says he had long wanted to do a movie about Liberace, but it wasn’t until a friend recommended the 1988 book Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace, by the pianist’s lover, Scott Thorson (played by Matt Damon) that he was able to go forward. “When I read that book, it sort of solved all my problems. It gave me a specific time period to deal with; there was the arc of the relationship between the two of them to give me a structure. And that’s when things really started to move.”

Tantor Media re-released the out-of-print title recently, with a new afterword by Thorson, as part of the launch of their new book imprint.  Tantor has also released an audio version, narrated by Peter Berkrot (sample here, about the media circus around Liberace’s death of AIDs). An interview with Thorson is featured on Tantor’s web site. He says he hasn’t seen the movie and will see it as everyone else does when it debuts this Sunday on HBO.

Currently at #19 on Amazon sales rankings and rising is an anthology of essays by nurses, I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse, published by the small press, In Fact Books, which also publishes the quarterly magazine, Creative Nonfiction.

It is reviewed in the NYT today by Jane Gross who admits that, as the daughter of a nurse, she is “hardly a disinterested reviewer,” which is a good thing, giving her the ability to connect readers with the stories.

Many libraries own this anthology in modest quantities; Booklist reviewed it, saying, “It’s easy to love these empathetic people, and their beautifully written stories.”

Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art speech to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts’ 2012 graduating class became a viral hit. Released in book form (HarperCollins/Morrow) this week, it is rising on Amazon.

John Green’s speech to the graduating class of Butler University may not be far behind.

Predating both of them is David Foster Wallace’s speech to Kenyon College in 2005, a viral success later released in book form, This Is Water, (Hachette/Little,Brown). Recently, a short film based on the original was posted to YouTube and has been viewed nearly 5 million times in just ten days.

The “raining-on-the-parade” genre may have begun with a speech that wasn’t actually a speech. It was column by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune in 1997 about what she would say if she had been asked to give a commencement address (which she hadn’t). An urban legend grew up that this was actually a speech given by Kurt Vonnegut at an MIT graduation. Vonnegut ruefully said he wished that were true, but it wasn’t. The column ended up being published as a gift book by Andrews and McMeel as Wear Sunscreen (the one piece of advice that Shmich found irrefutable) and re-released in a 10th anniversay edition in 2008. Baz Lurhmann turned it into a music video “Everyone’s Free to Wear Sunscreen.”

Pat Conroy’s beloved novel The Great Santini is based on the author’s troubled relationship with his abusive father.

In October, Conroy will publish a memoir, The Death of Santini, (RH/Nan A. Talese; RH Audio; RH Large Print) which, according to the publisher, describes how the two became closer and that love can “conquer even the meanest of men.”

The long-running 2007 bestseller, Lone Survivor (Hachette/Little, Brown), Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell’s memoir about how he survived a failed 2005 mission to capture a Taliban leader in Afghanistan, has been adapted as a movie that was just scheduled for release on Jan. 10, 2014.

Directed by Peter Berg (Battleship and Friday Night Lights), it stars Mark Wahlberg as Luttrell with Eric Bana, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster as his fellow SEALs.

Interviewed earlier in Wall Street Journal, Berg said that his research included being embedded with the military in Iraq two years ago. He commented that, after the controversy about military cooperation with filmmakers on Zero Dark Thirty and author Chris Kyle on American Sniper, (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2012) that kind of access might not be possible today.

Last month, it was announced that Stephen Spielberg will direct a movie based on the latter, starring Bradley Cooper. Production is expected to begin in early 2014, just as Lone Survivor hits theaters.

In a review that will be appear in the print NYT tomorrow, Dwight Garner writes that Emma Brockes’s account of trying to piece together the mysteries of her mother’s past, She Left Me the Gun (Penguin Press), is “…one of those memoirs that remind you why you liked memoirs in the first place, back before every featherhead in your writers’ group was trying to peddle one. It has the density of a very good novel.”

That quote is only topped by a those from the book itself, such as, “Being an only child is a bit like being Spanish: you have your dinner late, you go to bed late, and, with all the grown-up parties you get dragged to, you wind up eating a lot of hors d’oeuvres.”

Salt Lake City librarian Josh Hanagarne is interviewed in today’s issue of USA Today for his book, The World’s Strongest Librarian,  (Penguin/Gotham. 5/2/13). Both weight lifting and books have helped him deal with his Tourette’s. About being a librarian, he says, “As a breed, we’re the ultimate generalists. I’ll never know everything about anything, but I’ll know something about almost everything and that’s how I like to live.”

Hanagarne announces on his blog that the book has sold out of its first printing.

Below, he describes what libraries mean to him.

Tom Hanks’ next movie role is based on Captain Richard Phillips’ memoir, A Captain’s Duty, about the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the unarmed merchant marine ship he commanded. Phillips became a national hero by courageously leading his crew to safety.

Titled Captain Phillips, it is directed by Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bourne Supremecy), and is coming to theaters on Oct 11.

Official Site: CaptainPhillipsMovie.com

The book was heavily covered in the media when it came was first published in 2010 (see the real Captain Phillips on Dateline and on The Daily Show). A tie-in will be published on Sept. 24 (Hyperion).

Last night, the James Beard Foundation declared Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America, Maricel Presilla (W. W. Norton) the Cookbook of the Year. It has already won acclaim, appearing on several 2012 cookbooks lists (see our downloadable spreadsheet, 2012 — Best Cookbooks) and winning the IACP Award for Best General Cookbook.

Conversely, the book that had been named  IACP’s Cookbook of the Year, was a Beard category winner, for International, Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, (Ten Speed Press).

Marcus Samuelsson’s Yes, Chef: A Memoir, (Random House; RH Audio) won for Writing And Literature. It had also won the IACP’s award for a similar category, Literary Food Writing.

Inducted into the Cookbook Hall of Fame was Anne Willan, author of many titles on French cooking, including La Varenne Pratique (RH/Crown, 1989). Her next book is coming in August, One Soufflé at a Time: A Memoir of Food and France (Macmillan/St. Martin’s).

Unexpectedly, the winner in the Reference and Scholarship category is also available in audio; The Art Of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration Of Essential Concepts And Processes From Around The World, Sandor Ellix Katz, (Chelsea Green Publishing; audio, from Tantor– MP3 Audio Sample).

Following the jump, the full list of winners; click here to download our spreadsheet with ordering information, James Beard Cookbook Award Winners, 2012.

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Steven Spielberg announced in January that he had abandoned plans to adapt Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse (RH/Doubleday; BOT), which had been set for release next year, starring Chris Hemsworth, Anne Hathaway and Ben Whishaw.

Yesterday, he cleared up speculation about what he will turn to next and announced plans to direct an adaptation of American Sniper (HarperCollins/Morrow), the best selling memoir by Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who was killed on a Texas shooting range in February.

Bradley Cooper, who bought the rights to the book a year ago, will star.

Before he died, Kyle had a second book int the works, Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms, (HarperCollins/Morrow; HarperAudio). It is being released, as planned, in early June.

The new edition of the often-attacked “bible” of American psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders known as  D.S.M., is about to be released and, predictably, it is being preceded by controversy.

The NYT ’s Dwight Garner examines two books that lead the alarm, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg, (Penguin/Blue Rider; Tantor Audio, 5/13) and Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life by Allen Frances, (HarperCollins/Morrow, 5/14) saying, they are “unalike yet deeply alike, as if they were vastly dissimilar Rube Goldberg devices that each ultimately drop the same antacid tablet into the same glass of water.”

Both, he says, are “repetitive and overlong,” and would have made better magazine articles, but, “Mr. Greenberg is a fresher, funnier writer. He paces the psychiatric stage as if he were part George Carlin, part Gregory House.”

The Zookeeper’s Wife, (Norton, 2007) by  Diane Ackerman it the true story about the director of the Warsaw Zoo during WWII, who, with his wife, managed to rescue over 300 Jews from the Nazis. Film rights were signed in 2011.

There’s been no news since, but now the adaptation is moving forward, with actress Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty) signed to star and Niki Caro to direct, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The next project from the creator of the hit cable series Weeds, Jenji Kohan, is an original series for Netflix, Orange Is the New Black, adapted from Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir (Norton). Netflix just announced that all thirteen episodes will be released on July 11.

Netflix recently began developing their own programs, in an effort to attract and retain subscribers. The first two, House Of Cards (February) and Hemlock Grove (April) were also based on books.

Actress Taylor Schilling stars as Piper, who was incarcerated for 13 months in the Danbury Federal Prison in Connecticut. A Smith college graduate, just beginning her career, she seemed an unlikely candidate for prison, until a ten-year-old drug trafficking charge caught up with her.

At the time of publication, USA Today said the book “transcends the memoir genre’s usual self-centeredness to explore how human beings can always surprise you. You’d expect bad behavior in prison. But it’s the moments of joy, friendship and kindness that the author experienced that make Orange so moving and lovely.”

The next season of the popular British series, Downton Abbey is currently in production. The series’ first black actor has just joined the cast. Gary Carr will play jazz singer Jack Ross, reports the UK’s Independent. A slide show of the other new additions, gives hints about the upcoming story lines (there’s at least one new love interest for Lady Mary).

Among the returning cast members are audience favorites, Shirley MacLaine and Maggie Smith. However, Siobhan Finneran, who played the conniving lady’s maid O’Brien, will not be back.

The author of the best selling Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (RH/Broadway; Tantor Media), Countess Fiona Carnarvon, is publishing a new book about Highclere Castle this fall, featuring Lady Almina’s successor, Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey (RH/Broadway).

Lady Carnarvon, her home and her previous book were featured on CBS Sunday Morning earlier this year.

Diane Sawyer’s heavily promoted interview with Amanda Knox aired on ABC’s Nightline last night.

The full interview is available here. Knox’s book, Waiting to Be Heard, (Harper; HarperLuxe, HarperAudio), released yesterday, rose to #11 on Amazon’s sales rankings as a result.

Entertainment Weekly reviewed it, giving it a “B.”