Past Work

I Lost It at the Video Store: A Filmmakers' Oral History of a Vanished Era 

2015

Selected by Kirkus Reviews as one of 2015's best indie books.

"This is a book that was waiting to happen, and fortunately it was Tom Roston who wrote it. After we lost it at the movies, a later era of cinephiles lost it at the video store, and this is their story in their words–nostalgic, vivid, and important, because video germinated a new generation of great filmmakers.” –Peter Biskind, author of Down and Dirty Pictures

 In I Lost it at the Video Store, Tom Roston interviews the filmmakers–including John Sayles, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Darren Aronofsky, David O. Russell and Allison Anders–who came of age during the reign of video rentals, and constructs a living, personal narrative of an era of cinema history which, though now gone, continues to shape film culture today. The expanded edition includes a forward by director  Richard Linklater (Boyhood).

The Quantum Prophets: Richard Dawkins, Deepak Chopra and the spooky truth about their battle over God

2014

  Richard Dawkins and Deepak Chopra are two of the most famous Big Thinkers of our time. And yet their deeply acrimonious, decade-long battle over God, human consciousness and "quantum healing" has gone unchronicled until now. Dawkins, a best-selling author and evolutionary biologist who coined the term "meme," has staked his name on the cause of militant atheism. Chopra, a mind-body guru with a global following that has included the likes of Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga, has increasingly set his sites on the scientific status quo. Author Tom Roston seeks to uncover what lies beneath their provocative war of ideas in this intimate story of his search to understand his own spirituality and science's hard questions. He travels from Toronto to California to the Quantock Hills in Somerset, England, to Puebla, Mexico, chasing these two alternately fascinating and infuriating men, wrestling with their ideas, and coming up with his own.

2015

In this wide-ranging, intimate and often hilarious Kindle Singles Interview, actress Lily Tomlin covers all aspects of her extraordinary life and career, turning a drab Manhattan hotel room into a one-woman show with tales of her childhood in Detroit, her early years in New York, and the origins of her classic characters.

2014

From Chautauqua, the historic summer retreat in southwestern New York state, 61-year-old Ken Burns opens up about how he picks his subjects, his true feelings about “the Ken Burns Effect,” his harrowing childhood, and his much-anticipated PBS documentary “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.”