Citizen Cheney -- and Daughter -- Take a Look Back

If you've been watching the formerly reticent ex-vice president on the media circuit as a newly vocal private citizen and wondering, "Where can I hear more?" then you're in luck. Dick Cheney is writing an autobiography. What makes this story really interesting, though, is his choice of a collaborator: his daughter Liz Cheney, whose name has been tossed around as a possible future contender for political office.
Of course, Dick and Liz Cheney are not the only father-daughter team writing a book that addresses the father's legacy. Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter, writer Lucy Hawking, have joined forces to write a wonderful series of children's science books on subjects ranging from black holes to the big bang.

The Hawkings' books, though they address the scientific knowledge Stephen Hawking discovered over his career, are fiction with a solid grounding in theoretical physics -- or "science fact," as Lucy termed them to MSNBC. An autobiography could be trickier terrain.

It will be interesting to see if any of Liz Cheney's stories about her father appear in the book. The process of writing the memoir and deciding which family and which political stories are told could end up being more interesting than the book itself. As Lucy Hawking told MSNBC about working with her father, "We got to spend a lot of time kicking ideas around, so we learned so much about each other."