Monday may have marked the beginning of Becky Anderson’s term as president of the American Booksellers Association, but Thursday’s BookExpo America breakfast gave her the twin honor of receiving the award as the 19th annual winner of the Publishers Weekly Bookstore of the Year. “We’ve always said that books are better on drugs,” said Anderson, referring to the fact that the six-generation Anderson’s Book Shop in Naperville, Ill., grew out of the family’s pharmacy. “Our store is really about family. . . . As family, I know we all will survive and thrive.” PW Rep of the Year John Eklund, a long-time bookseller turned sales rep for Harvard, MIT, and Yale University Presses, showed his appreciation to booksellers for his award. “On behalf of all the nerdy, different kids, thank you for being there and staying there,” he said.
Following the presentation, the attention moved to not the food, but the authors. To wake up any booksellers whose eyes may have begun closing after a late night, emcee Jim Lehrer showed a very funny video with talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. “Isn’t writing hard? There are so many words,” she said. Her talk also poked fun at the titles of some books--Scouting for Boys (“it’s got a map of Fire Island inside”), What Do Bunnies Do All Day? (“it’s got a happy ending”), and Exploring Uranus (“how much is there to explore”)--before promoting her well-titled book Seriously...I'm Kidding due out this fall from Grand Central.
Lehrer, who served double duty, then spoke about his upcoming book, Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates, from Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain (Random House, Sept.), which takes its name from George H.W. Bush’s description of what it’s like to be in a presidential debate. Among the debates Lehrer discussed was the one that killed Michael Dukakis’s presidential aspirations, when he was asked about whether he would favor irrevocable death penalty if his wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered and he gave a long technical discussio of the death penalty; and the 27-minute stand-off when the audio feed went dead during a Carter-Ford debate and the two presidential candidates stood facing straight ahead until the problem was fixed. Then to prove his bus bona fides as a former Trailways employee and author of the novel White Widow about a bus driver in Texas, Lehrer gave a wake up call: “All on onboard.”
Film critic Roger Ebert, author of the memoir Life Itself (Grand Central, Sept.), and his wife, Chaz, were the first to heed the call. The couple read a selection from the book about his talk show appearances, with an assist from Ebert’s computerized voice, Alex. In one anecdote, Ebert described how he and his partner, Gene Siskel, appeared on a late night talk show in the 1980s during the holiday season. When he was asked his least favorite holiday movie, he answered “!Three Amigos!,” even though the film’s star, Chevy Chase, was sitting alongside him promoting the movie. “Like the victims of some curse in a fairytale, we had to tell the truth,” said Ebert.
The truth, or the truth about the silences in life, served as a starting point for Irish writer Anne Enright’s new novel, The Forgotten Waltz Norton, Oct.).She became a writer, she explained, because “in Dublin you go home and write a book. It was an arranged marriage. I don’t know if I made a decision.” After spending a year on the road talking about her Booker Prize-winning novel, The Gathering, she wanted to write a novel for the readers she met. In addition, she said, “For the formative years of my writing life I didn’t see a family man in literature or how a man loved. This unspoken, this very taboo thing is part of the underground in this book.” As for choosing to write about adultery, she said, “I thought it would be more fun. It’s not a fluffy book; it’s a bit pink.”
Pink has little to do with Erik Larson’s latest book, In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (Crown, May), or Itgob, as it is known in house, which has already gone into six printings. He chose to write about William E. Dodd, America’s ambassador to Nazi Germany, and his family, said Larson, because it’s a period people think they know a lot about, but they don’t. Larson described the search for a new topic after completing his last book, Thunderstruck, as “the dark time of no ideas.” To come up with a concept he did what he tells his students to do, “read promiscuously.” “I was a third of the way through William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, when I realized these were people he had met at a point where you don’t know how things would turn out.”
Larson also used his talk to give a shout-out to librarians. “I’m a tremendous fan of libraries. I think of myself as the Indiana Jones of libraries, rappelling down to 900 levels of the Dewey Decimal system,” he said. Although in a choice between a night with Kate Blanchet or being locked in the Library of Congress overnight, he chose Blanchet, no contest.
And with one last “All onboard, and don’t forget your baggage,” from Lehrer, breakfast ended.
