Booksellers and other BEA attendees showed up in full force Thursday morning for what master of ceremonies satirist Jon Stewart derided as a “muffin bucket” breakfast. But despite the early hour and the slim culinary pickings, the packed room of early risers was treated to a full serving of Stewart’s biting wit.
“Adult book breakfast, is that right?” Stewart asked, “Things could get spicy in here.”
Stewart was on fire, drawing laughs with his irreverence. “Garrison Keillor said books were dead,” Stewart said, referring to a recent op-ed written by the other humorist. “I thought, great, I don’t have to get up early tomorrow… I thought Garrison Keillor was dead.”
Stewart, whose last book, America (the Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction, was a bestseller, talked up his next release: Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race (Grand Central, Sept. 21), which he claimed he has yet to finish writing.
“Earth is a summation of the totality of human existence,” he proclaimed, before offering to read a selection from the “Science” chapter. He then proceeded to read silently, laughing to himself intermittently, as the audience roared at his audacity.
Introducing Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, Stewart remarked, “I’m not familiar with her work, but I’ve heard good things.”
Rice was as eloquent as Stewart had been witty, providing the audience with the backstory to her family memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People (Crown, Oct.). Rice explained that she originally intended to write a book about the eight years she spent working inside the Bush administration, but that, as she reflected on how she, who began her life in Birmingham, Ala. during the Jim Crow era, became the first African-American woman to be named Secretary of State, she asked herself, “How did this happen?”
Rice then paid tribute to her parents, explaining that Extraordinary, Ordinary People was about her mother, a teacher, and her father, a Presbyterian minister, and her life with them. “My parents believed in the transforming power of education,” Rice explained, describing how her grandfather, an Alabama sharecropper, was the first in the family to attend college, and was able to secure a scholarship intended for aspiring ministers, not so much because he had a religious calling, but because he wanted a scholarship to continue to afford college.
Stewart’s response to Rice’s touching memories of her family was classic, and probably reflected the opinions of most of the audience as he said, “Don’t. Make. Me. Like. You.”
Next up was John Grisham, introduced by Stewart as an author “who has written 18,000 books,” whose back story to The Confession, which will be released in October really began on Sept. 4, 2004, when Grisham was reading his “favorite section” of the New York Times: the obituaries. After reading the obituary of Ronald Williamson, whose headline ran “Ronald Williamson, age 51, Freed From Death Row, Dies,” Grisham called his agent, and told him, “That’s my next book.” Grisham’s first nonfiction release, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town was published in 2006.
“There are thousands of innocent people in prison,” Grisham declared, informing the crowd of his advocacy work on the behalf of wrongfully imprisoned prison inmates. “They’re all great tragedies, serving 10, 20, 30 years for crimes someone else committed.”
Referring to the plot of The Confession, but not wanting to give too much away before the book’s pub, Grisham disclosed that his latest novel explores murder and injustice from another angle: the perspective of a man who watches from afar as another is prosecuted for a murder he himself committed. “They got the wrong guy. What’s the real guy doing? Where is the real killer?”
Mary Roach, the author of Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (Norton, Aug.) may not be a household name like the other authors speaking at the breakfast, but she was the only one to provide breakfast attendees with an advance reader’s copy of her latest release. She drew laughs from the audience when she related that Publishers Lunch had described the event as featuring “Stewart, Grisham, Rice, and more.”
Roach continued to draw laughs from the crowd during an event that had veered wildly all morning from barbed humor to deadly seriousness, by describing the subject matter of her latest release: simulations of space travel undertaken by NASA and its counterparts in other countries – including the “space waste management” process,” – or toilets in space.
“I’m not interested in the heroics [of space exploration],” she declared, “I’m interested in the things in between, the everyday details.”
Winding up her presentation, Roach thanked booksellers for letting her do what she loves by supporting her research into such quirky subjects as cadavers. She said, “I am not just the happiest woman on earth, but in the entire solar system.”
