No matter which conference you're attending you can always count on Carol Fitzgerald of the Book Reporter (https://www.bookreporter.com/) to host lively panel discussions and this year's Book Expo was no exception. First time authors were especially powerful in their Q & A sessions with Carol as she dug deeply into issues of racism, poverty, and the downsides of 24/7 social media exposes. No, not everyone is a journalist and sometimes what we see and film is not what's actually happening right in front of our eyes.
Such was the case for Kim Brooks who spoke about her book "Small Animals," in which she describes her life being turned upside down by a stranger who posted a video of her leaving her child in the car while she ran into a drugstore to pick up a prescription.
While admitting it was wrong, objectively, she opined that in today's internet age we as a people are so quick to judge without engaging. She wishes the stranger had just approached her. Instead the police were called, her vehicle was confiscated, her custody of her child was called into question in a series of cascading developments that could have been avoided.
Casey Gerald's memoir, "There Will Be No Miracles Here," will be published in October. Raised in poverty, earning a football scholarship to Yale, Mr. Gerald would seem to be living the American dream when, in fact, it was anything but. His passionate presentation spoke to the systemic racism that underlies every success story as he has examined what it means to get ahead and at what cost to your identity. This one appears to be a must-read.
Another exciting debut is forthcoming from the delightful Weyetu Moore who's written a novel about the founding of Monrovia, Liberia, as seen through the eyes of three disparate characters. "She Would be King" tells the tale of Gbessa, an African refugee left for dead after a snake bite, June, an enslaved woman who escaped a plantation in Virginia, and Norman, a mixed-race child of a British colonizer on Jamaica, as they use their wits and talent to bridge the gap between the various indigenous Liberian tribes and the new African-American settlers seeking a place to call home. Look for this in September.
And for those of you who may be attending the American Library Association conference in New Orleans, do look for editor and all around book expert Sarah Weinman, who will be touting her first non-fiction, true crime book based on the life of Sally Horner, the young woman upon whom Nabokov based his infamous "Lolita." According to Weinman, the famous author never acknowledged how much he knew about the 1949 kidnapping, in Camden, New Jersey, of the eleven-year-old Horner and how it informed his novel. Weinman brings a feminist outrage and an editor's eye to the facts of Horner's case and that of so many other young girls who have disappeared at the hands of pedophiles or rapists, never to be seen again.
Back in New York City this year, Book Expo America billed itself as "reinvented." Hmmm-I'm not quite sure what that means but I know that, for the first time ever, I had to apply to attend. Once accepted, I sent a check for $200 for a one-day pass. Yes folks, that's a lot of money for some free books that could have been downloaded from home onto my Kindle. So, why do we do it? Only those readers passionate about books and authors can understand.
And only Barbara Kingsolver and Trevor Noah could have awakened me at six in the morning so that I could walk to the Javits Center from our hotel room and be sitting toward the front of the stage by 7:30 slurping coffee and orange juice! They were worth the price of admission. Each displayed such brilliance and class, exacerbated by the comparison with the moderator, Nick Offerman, who offered exactly no class. It was way too early in the morning to find anything humorous about Nick and his wife, fellow comedian Megan Mullally, joshing about their spectacular sex life. Unless you're huge fans you can probably pass on this.
However, mark your calendars for October when Kingsolver's latest novel, "Unsheltered," will be released. She told the audience that when something scares her so much that she can't think about anything else, she writes about it. And nothing, we all agreed, can be as scary as what's happening right now. Or can it? Kingsolver sets her book in a dilapidated house in Vineland, New Jersey, during two time periods - under current circumstances and under an equally unsettling epoch, back in the 1870's after the Civil War had divided our nation and Charles Darwin shook up the world of science and education with his new theory of humankind.
I can't wait to jump into this book and will offer it to one of you the minute I'm finished. As Barbara told the audience, "stories will get us through times with no leaders better than leaders will get us through time with no stories." 
Trevor Noah, wisely chosen by John Stewart as replacement host of The Daily Show, has not only grown into the job but has exceeded my wildest expectations. In fact I find Noah to be a much more thoughtful interviewer than John was and deeply knowledgeable about each guest and our country as a whole. Perhaps being an outsider and witnessing the worst that governments can do - read his book about growing up in South Africa as a mixed-race child, "Born a Crime," - he can be more objective about the present state of our nation.
The staff of The Daily Show is attempting the impossible. They are collating all of the tweets that Donald Trump has issued in the first year of his presidency to try to get a handle on what kind of a man he really is. Noah tells us it should be simple, we'll know enough to know he should never have been president! Still, the thought of a computer algorithm able to identify Trump's most used words to form a psychological profile is intriguing. I'll be on the wait list for sure.
The big surprise of the morning was the absolutely delightful historian and Harvard professor Jill Lepore. She is such a dynamo. If I had had someone like that for a history teacher? Oh my, the places I'd have gone! Called "daring and provocative," words that speak to me, "These Truths, a History of the United States," commences with the signing of the constitution and the hypocrisy of its foundation, "that all men are created equal." It ends with the chapter heading "America, Disrupted," and the election of the 45th president.
Attendees at the breakfast only received a sampler of Lepore's book but it will be a great introduction to her theories and her writing style. You'll be hearing more from me about it in the near future. I'm hoping to stay home and read for a few months now. More on the amazing panel discussions I attended and on meeting Andre DuBus III will be coming in a few days. Happy reading!
