Weekend News Super Quiz: Book Awards, Celebrations, History-Making

While Liman’s film looks to follow the first book pretty closely, Todd is just about to turn 13 in the first novel, and Holland is 24. Chaos Walking is due for US release on January 22, 2021.

Watch the trailer:

• Get the Chaos Walking Trilogy in digital and print.

Former President Barack Obama’s book, A Promised Land, sold nearly 890,000 copies in the U.S. and Canada in its first 24 hours – putting it on track to be the best-selling presidential memoir in modern history. The only book by a former White House resident to come close to the early pace of A Promised Land is the memoir by Obama’s wife, Michelle Obama, whose book Becoming, sold 725,000 copies in North America its first day and has topped 10 million worldwide since its release in 2018. 

• Get Barack Obama’s A Promised Land in digital, audio, or print.
• Audible Plus: Listen all you want. Thousands of Audible Originals, audiobooks, and 

That’s right. 30 Years after The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air debuted, the actors returned for a reunion special on HBO Max on Nov. 19, 2020. Watch Will Smith’s emotional trailer.

Pfizer and Moderna both announced promising results for their vaccines. The one by Pfizer needs a temperature of minus 70 degrees Celsius, which is colder than winter in Antarctica. Moderna’s vaccine requires minus 20 Celsius, more like a regular freezer. If the FDA approves the vaccines, these will be the first mRNA-based medicines to reach the market. The mRNA molecules need low temperatures to stay stable.

That’s right. Joe Biden celebrated his 78th birthday on Friday, Nov. 20, 2020. That makes him the oldest president to ever serve at the White House. Hopefully, it also makes him the wisest.

• Listen to Conversations with Joe on Amazon Audible.
• Audible Plus: Listen to thousands of Audible Originals, audiobooks, and podcasts. Start your free trial now.

That’s right. Harry Styles is the first male in the 127 years of Vogue history to star on the cover of the US edition of Vogue. For the ground-breaking occasion, on the 2020 December Issue, he chose to wear a ball gown and a custom Gucci jacket.

Exactly. NASA’s first full-fledged mission delivering a crew into orbit on a privately-owned spacecraft took on the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule named Resilience. “SpaceX, this is Resilience. Excellent job. Right down the center,” Crew Dragon commander Mike Hopkins said after docking at the International Space Station, Monday, Nov. 17, 2020. 

That’s right. The Crew Dragon is one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX space shuttles. SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday, Nov. 15, 2020, on the first full-fledged taxi flight for NASA by a private company. It kicks off what NASA hopes will be a long series of crew rotations between the U.S. and the space station, after years of delay. 

• Watch NASA & SpaceX: Journey to the Future

That’s right. Michael J. Fox was 24 when he first starred in Back to the Future. 

Bonus Fact:

In Fox’s latest book, No Time Like the Future, he writes about retiring from his acting career a second time because of his health issues.

True. Scottish writer Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for fiction Thursday, Nov. 19, 2020, for Shuggie Bain, a novel about a boy’s turbulent coming of age in 1980s Glasgow. Stuart, 44, won the prestigious award for his first published novel. Before becoming a published writer,  Stuart had a career in fashion design, including works for Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and the Banana Republic.

• Check out Shuggie Bain by 2020 Booker Award winner Douglas Stuart. 
• Audible Plus: Listen to thousands of Audible Originals, audiobooks, and podcasts. Start your free trial now.