Schreiber, Mark
Mark Schreiber
Schreiber graduated high school at age fifteen and set aside the opportunity to go to college to write full time. He did not find a publisher for his first six novels.
In 2000 Schreiber met Olga Sidorova, a Russian solo trapezist currently starring in Cirque du Soleil’s Saltimbanco. He decided to write an unofficial book about her and other members in the cast, including Olympian Elena Grosheva, Alya Titarenko and Jesko von den Steinen.
In 2006 Schreiber was diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia, an extremely rare and often fatal bone marrow failure disease. He was treated by Jarek Maciejewski, a leading researcher on the disease at the Cleveland Clinic and has since become active in fundraising and getting attention for rare diseases. He published a My Turn essay in Newsweek in January, 2008.
When Schreiber met her in March, 2002, she inspired his own global odyssey, following the European tour of Saltimbanco., assisting her after knee surgery at the Cirque's training studio in Montreal, even helping a pair of contortionists apartment hunt in Las Vegas. Dreams of the Solo Trapeze: Offstage with the Cirque du Soleil, is not one book but many: non-fiction novel, biography, cultural history, travel narrative, and love story. Its aim is to discover and pay tribute to these magnificent artists in a manner that reflects the Cirque's own spontaneity, originality and daring.
Do you know what a quark is? Or the difference between DNA and genes? Can you name the strongest force in the universe? Actually it's called the "strong force," which shows that sometimes science can be easy.
It was easy when I was a child, before I ever entered a classroom. I learned about dinosaurs by reading picture books and building plastic models of their skeletons. Those long-forgotten pursuits, sparked by my more recent friendship with a theoretical physicist, inspired me to bridge the normally separate disciplines of physics, chemistry, and biology without chapters, histories, formulas, or complicated diagrams.
How to Build an Elephant empowers readers with a basic conceptual framework of the most important forces and structures in our world.