Available Now: THE SECRET LIVES OF SPORTS FANS by Eric Simons

What happens in your brain when you watch sports? Why do so many people return to something that so often leaves them heartbroken, angry, and even violent? The Secret Lives of Sports Fans by Eric Simons, out this month from Overlook, turns to neuroscience, psychology, endocrinology, evolutionary biology — and one sensitive man in an Oakland Raiders gorilla suit — in a search for the roots of a universal passion.

In The Secret Lives of Sports Fans, journalist Eric Simons poses a very simple question that millions of people have asked themselves at some point in their lives: “Why am I a sports fan – and why do I have this apparently irrational passion for something that the rational part of me says is ridiculous. And why does watching my favorite team make me hyperemotional?”

From surging testosterone to firing neurons, the science suggests that sports fans cede emotional control to our reflexes. And yet, critically, we retain a remarkable ability to influence and even control, the way those reflexes work. To explain that strange dance in the brain, Simons explores research on relationships, love, addiction and groups, concluding with a close look at what evolutionary theories can teach us about how and why people act tribally, and why culture matters.

Eric Simons recently lent his expertise to The Wall Street Journal to write about why March Madness in particular captures the hearts and minds of sports fans. Quoted in The Washington Post, he unpackaged one of the tournament’s more memorable moments, in which sports fans across the country temporarily forgot about their individual loyalties after a traumatic incident involving Louisville sophomore Kevin Ware’s ankle:

“Sometimes, you have an event that makes people realize that there’s something more important than the tribe, than the colors we wear. The story of sports fans that is really underappreciated is that we do shut off our red colors and our blue colors.”

Simons has also recently investigated his own sports addictions through interviews with SF Weekly and Smithsonian Magazine, and lent some helpful advice to baseball fans via The Boston Globe in preparation for the 2013 season.

 “An intriguing ride through ‘all the wondrous quirks and oddities in human nature.’” – Kirkus Reviews

“Adroitly mixing research with feature reporting, Simons unveils some intriguing discoveries … Simon’s affable writing style—and his great eagerness to profile actual people, including himself—infuses the data with heart and soul.” – Publishers Weekly

“A fascinating glimpse into why sports culture is what it is. Sports fans will find this a powerful tool for self-examination.” – Booklist 

Eric Simons's DARWIN SLEPT HERE in San Diego Union-Tribune

Scott La Fee of the San Diego Union-Tribune surveys the recent books on the life of times of Charles Darwin, including Overlook's Darwin Slept Here: Discovery, Adventure, and Swimming Iguanas in Charles Darwin's South America: "Charles Darwin was a prolific and diverse thinker, writing 25 treatises on subjects ranging from volcanic islands and barnacles to orchids and earthworms. Far more books, though, have been written about him. Like other great minds of science, from Newton to Einstein, Darwin has been the regular subject of scholarship and biography, especially this year, the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th of "On the Origin of Species. . . Young and unemployed, Eric Simons decided to follow Darwin's example, retracing the Englishman's 19thcentury travels through South America. He re-explores the histories, legends and people that Darwin first wrote about, providing a fresh perspective about how much life has - and hasn't - changed."

Celebrate DARWIN DAY with Eric Simon's DARWIN SLEPT HERE: Discovery, Adventure, and Swimming Iguanas in Charles Darwin's South America

Today is Darwin Day, a global celebration of science and the birthday anniversary of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and events are being held all across the world. Overlook is celebrating Darwin Day with the publication of Darwin Slept Here, by Eric Simons, a vivid portrait of the scientist as a young man while he traveled through South America in the 1830s.

Eric Simons, author of DARWIN SLEPT HERE, Profiled in San Francisco Chronicle

Eric Simons, author Darwin Slept Here, is profiled in today's San Francisco Chronicle: "When Eric Simons grew tired of larking about on a glacier in Tierra del Fuego, it was snowing hard, so he found a shop with books in English, bought a copy of "The Voyage of the Beagle" by Charles Darwin and read the naturalist's charming prose. Simons, 24 then and 28 now, was hooked. He'd had a rigorous grounding in biology from his Castro Valley high school teacher and in evolution from his undergraduate days as a science major at UC Santa Barbara. He'd served a stint writing for a couple of small Bay Area newspapers, but now he was footloose and adventure-hungry at the bottom of the world, where Darwin - seasick aboard the Beagle - had once sojourned briefly. The result of that chance and chilly encounter with history was a quick flight home, a decision to retrace at least some of the naturalist's path, and a twice-over-deeply self-study of Darwin's seminal "On the Origin of Species," plus all the other Darwin writings Simons could lay his hands on. Then came the footsteps: "I wanted to capture his adventures," Simons says. "I wanted to share his experiences and feel the same feelings he must have had because everything in the Beagle book told me Darwin was so joyful, whether he was saddling up with gauchos in Patagonia, or climbing a mountain in Chile, or kicking his heels in the air while he was lying down with a herd of inquisitive camel-like guanacos in a field near Buenos Aires." Simons graduated from UC Berkeley's journalism school last year and his first book is just out. It's called Darwin Slept Here, subtitled "Discovery, Adventure, and Swimming Iguanas in Charles Darwin's South America," published by Overlook Press."

National Geographic Traveler Picks THE REPUBLIC OF VENGEANCE and DARWIN SLEPT HERE as "New Books to Transport Readers"

National Geographic Traveler includes two new Overlook titles in their March round-up of "New Books that Transport Us:" Darwin Slept Here, Eric Simons's travelogue retracing Darwin's steps through South America, published in time to mark the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and The Republic of Vengeance, Paul Water's historical novel set in third-century B.C. Greece.

DARWIN SLEPT HERE Reviewed in Outside Magazine

Darwin Slept Here: Discovery, Adventure, and Swimming Iguanas in Charles Darwin's South America, by Eric Simons, is reviewed in the new issue of Outside: "February marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and, naturally, he publication of a slew of new books about him. But while most--like the fine, brainy Banquet at Delmonico’s, by Barry Werth—portray the naturalist as an earnest, white-bearded thinker, journalist Eric Simons celebrates a refreshingly different Darwin: a twenty-something traveler fond of hurling iguanas into the sea and charging up any tall peak he could find. With copies of The Voyage of the Beagle in hand, Simons headed for South America, retracing parts of his famous 1831 trip and doing what Darwin did when he wasn’t studying finches: riding with Argentinean gauchos, hunting rheas and ogling senoritas. “There’s a danger in labeling someone as a genius; it makes them inaccessible,” Simons writes. “But Darwin the person—well, he was a lot like us.”