Readings Are Fundamental
Going to the Miami Book Fair? You Better Be. Here’s a Hefty Dose of Highlights to Help When You Get There

Will he or won’t he? Is he or is he not? Will he do it with Hillary or will he choose another?

By John Hood

Saturday

A Free Press? Helen Thomas, Myra MacPherson

9:30 a.m., Chapman

She was there for JFK’s too very-brief days, she was there with Nixon in China, and she’s been there through the reign of W, who had her moved to the back row and has allowed her to ask but one question. She served as correspondent and White House bureau chief at UPI for 57 years, and would be there still had not the Moonies taken over the institution (she’s now with King Features). She was the first woman officer of the National Press Club, the first woman member and president of the White House Correspondents Association, and the first woman member of the Gridiron Club. More importantly, she’s never stopped demanding answers from those we elect at the top (or of those who appoint themselves there).

She is Helen Thomas, and she is ferocious.

Like Myra MacPherson’s All Governments Lie (Simon & Schuster), which covers the life of the fabled I.F. Stone, Thomas’ Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public (S&S) is a crusading book. The difference is it’s Thomas who’s the great crusader.

Michael Largo

10 a.m., Room 3315

The longer we live, the more ways we seem to find to die. In Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die (Harper Collins), Michael Largo runs the gamut from Abactio (“the medical term for abortion or labor induced by street drugs, herbal concoctions or homestyle surgery”) through Zoofatalism (yeah, you guessed it – “getting too close to zoo animals or keeping wild animals as pets”). And the next time you find yourself saying “This job is killing me,” think about the fact that out of 29,000 people who say those words, nearly 10,000 really mean it, and then shuffle themselves off to bleaker pastures as a result.

Kurt Andersen & George Kalogerakis

11 a.m., Chapman

There’d be no snark without Spy, which means there’d be no Daily Show, no Colbert Report and definitely no blogosphere as we now know it. Taking to the road to hype Spy: The Funny Years (Miramax), co-founding co-editor Andersen and his deputy Kalogerakis (Graydon Carter apparently has been left at home) give up the goods on one of the greatest magazines America ever produced.

Heidi Julavits, A.M. Homes, Daniel Handler

Noon, Batten

Speaking about Homes’ alarmingly uplifting new novel, This Book Will Save Your Life (Viking), John Waters says, “If Oprah went insane, this might be her favorite book.” And, as always, what John Waters instills cuts deep, to the funny bone.

So too the deep-seat of fairy tales, especially in the world according to Bruno Bettelheim, from whom Believer co-editor Julavits cribs the slant of The Uses of Enchantment (Doubleday), and in which we find the world might just recover from The Effects of Living Backwards.

A recovery that’s all the more likely if longed for along the lines of Snicketeer Handler’s Adverbs (Harper Collins), who shows the way we love now means never having to be a noun.

Jonathan Franzen

1 p.m., Auditorium

With all the Corrections he’s made over the course of his life, one would think Franzen would be well past the awkwardness of adolescence; The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (Farrar Strauss & Giroux) proves that thought would be wrong. Angst doesn’t go away; it just gets more supplely strangled. Perhaps with this book Franzen’ll kill it once and for all.

John Berendt, Jonathan Harr, Erik Larson

1 p.m., Chapman

Who says historical fiction can’t be thrilling? From the Venice of The City of Fallen Angels (The Penguin Press), the Caravaggio of The Lost Painting (Random House), through the Marconi of Thunderstruck (Crown), Berendt, Harr and Larson, respectively, prove history and mystery are not mutually exclusive compellents.

Brad Meltzer, Joseph Kanon, Mark Winegardner

3:30 p.m., Auditorium

Kanon’s period-epic The Good German (Picador) is just minutes away from being a daring major motion picture by Steven Soderbergh, and one gets the impression some similar, er, fate will befall Meltzer’s encoded The Book of Fate ( Warner Books). What becomes of Winegardner’s reworking of Puzo in The Godfather Returns (Random House) is still anyone’s guess, but since it occurs between Mario’s first salvo and Coppola’s trilogy, it might not matter at all.

Barack Obama

6 p.m., Chapman

Will he or won’t he? Is he or is he not? Will he do it with Hillary or will he choose another? Whatever he decides – and he does seem to be the decisive type – we know it’ll be big, we know it’ll be stirful, and we know it’ll somehow involve The Audacity of Hope (Crown). Oh yeah, and we know we can’t wait to see it.

Sunday

Carl Hiaasen

10 a.m., Chapman

In Nature Girl (Knopf), Honey Santana “has a scheme to help rid the world of irresponsibility, indifference, and dinnertime sales calls.” Add grab-bagging developers, polarizing politicians, marauding marketeers and the rest of the shady folk who make dark of The Sunshine State and you’d be describing Hiaasen, one of the last men standing who won’t let the world get away with it.

Neal Gabler

11 a.m., Batten

Yeah we all know Walt was a product of Hollywood, but as his World threatens to engulf Lake Okeechobee, he’s got a lot of Florida in him as well. Or did, anyway, before he hit the Clubhouse in the sky. Gabler’s Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf) shows how, sometimes even why, but what we really wanna know is — Why Us?

Nonviolence: A Discussion With Tom Hayden, Mark Kurlansky and Chris Hedges

11 a.m., Chapman

Former Freedom Rider and perennial gadfly Tom Hayden has not once stopped trying to stop all that is wrong with the world, be it the poor (The Atlantic’s Nicholas Lemann says he helped create “the blueprint for the Great Society”) or war (he continues to doggedly lobby Congress for an exit from Iraq). Hell, even the Dalai Lama gives the good guy his coveted seal of approval.

Here Hayden’s joined by wily ex-war correspondent Chris Hedges, as well as big book author Mark Kurlansky, whose Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea (Modern Library) spurs this very noble chat.

Richard Fantina

11 a.m., Room 3315

PC types and their old-fashioned counterparts might not dig reading Richard Fantina’s essay “Hemingway’s Masochism, Sodomy, and the Dominant Woman,” then again, they just might wanna dig in anyway. Hell, maybe they’ll even chill out, and learn to dig life a little. ’Cause no matter how much cooler academic types wish to prevail, history knows Hemingway ran hot, hotter and – from Fantina’s first-rate angling – hottest in the sack, with the woman on top.

Or was she?

Jay McInerney, Danny Meyer

Noon, Batten

What happens when Brat Packers grow up? Well, if they’re anything like McInerney, they slip Sideways into The Good Life, and change their perspective on imbibings. In A Hedonist in the Cellar, a collection of House and Garden essays, Jay gets wise to the ways of wine. Here über restaurateur Danny Meyer (Union Square Café, Gramercy Tavern, Shake Shack, The Modern) will be Setting the Table (Knopf), so we’ll too get wise to the way wine should be served.

Mary Gordon, Deborah Eisenberg, John Dufresne

12:30 p.m., Auditorium

If it is true, as surely it must be, that we are the stories we tell ourselves, we leave a lot to be desired. Good thing there are desiring minds such as these to show the telling. Pearl-like Gordon collects a slew of such tells in The Stories of… (Pantheon), while Eisenbeg’s Twilight of the Superheroes (Farrar Strauss & Giroux) rips ’em up and spills all over again. Odd man in: Dufresne. Must be ’cause Johnny Too Bad (Norton) is such a good fucking story.

The Art of Biography

Christopher Hitchens, Francine Prose, Edmund Morris; James Atlas, moderator

12:30 p.m., Chapman

Great lives live alike. Or do they? With surly-smart Hitchens on Jefferson, brightly-lit Prose on Caravaggio, and the redoubtable Morris on Beethoven, we can be sure that however these lives lived, they’re lives to be examined with great grace and utter keen. Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series founding editor Atlas should be just the cat to keep the conversation lively.

Jennifer Rubell, Amy Scheibe

3 p.m., Room 3313-14

Hipster hotelier and all-around most host, Rubell has always been about making social swings “personal, unconventional and decidedly hands-on.” In Real Life Entertaining (Morrow), Miami’s sometimes-own arbiter adds a dash of pragmatism to the mix and – voila! – out come the makings of a whole new dish. Now, if only Amy Scheibe can answer for us the question What Do You Do All Day? (St. Martin’s).

Doris Kearns Goodwin

3:30 p.m., Chapman

Good rumor has it that no less a big wig than Spielberg has his eyes prized on Pulitzer-winning Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster), and we’re guessing it’s probably not because it’s just another book about America’s greatest tall boy. Tragedy, triumph and sidestepping subterfuge – sound like a movie to you?

The Paris Review: A Conversation

Christopher Hitchens and Philip Gourevich

5 p.m., Auditorium

Just because Plimpton and Styron are gone, and Matthiessen long ago gave up his interest to become perhaps the only bestselling author who also happens to be a Buddhist priest, doesn’t mean The Paris Review won’t continue to reverberate throughout the literary landscape. Hell, with the likes of Bellow and Parker and Hemingway and Didion echoing from Volume 1 of the Interviews (Picador), how could it possibly not?

Miami Book Fair International readings continue through Sunday, Nov. 19 at Miami-Dade College’s Wolfson Campus, 300 NE Second Ave., Miami. Admission is free.

The accompanying street fair takes place from Friday to Sunday. For more information call 305-237-3258 or visit www.miamibookfair.com.

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