Robert Reich: Svetlana Cvetko, Adam Benforado: Joe Craig, William Bostwick: T. Ford Bostwick
Clockwise from left: Robert Reich, Margret Aldrich, William Bostwick, Maryrose Wood and Adam Benforado.
From The New Yorker’s “Comma Queen” to Madison’s most famous children’s author, this year’s Wisconsin Book Festival features more than 70 book-related events, geared for all ages. Isthmus asked book critics Becky Holmes and Michael Popke to preview some events they’re looking forward to.
Adam Johnson
Central Library, Community Room 301 & 302, Oct. 22, 7:30 pm
Short fiction is well represented at this year’s festival. In addition to Wisconsin’s own Nickolas Butler (Beneath the Bonfire), Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson (The Orphan Master’s Son) will shine the spotlight on Fortune Smiles, his new collection of post-millennial stories that delve deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology and how the political shapes the personal.
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Museum, Oct. 23, 10 am, Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium, Oct. 23, 3:30 pm
Jerry Apps, the 81-year-old historian, naturalist and novelist who splits his time between Madison and Wild Rose, has been part of nearly every Wisconsin Book Festival. This year is no different. He will read from Whispers and Shadows, his collection of succinct and stand-alone autobiographical essays, and also participate in a joint event with the Wisconsin Science Festival to talk about his latest book, Wisconsin Agriculture: A History.
Wesley Chu
Central Library, The Bubbler, Oct. 23, 5:30 pm
Time travel: Where would science fiction be without it? Wesley Chu’s novel Time Salvager lines up all the tropes (tricky gadgets, a toxic abandoned Earth, a damaged loner with a dangerous job) and mixes them into a new cocktail that satisfies our never-ending cravings. Chu’s a funny guy, though, so Time Salvager includes a generous shot of humor to make the whole thing go down with a smile.
David Crabb
Central Library, Community Room 301 & 302, Oct. 23, 9 pm
A former goth kid fills one of the festival’s few nighttime slots. Author, storyteller and performer David Crabb wrote a solo stage version of his life and then adapted it for a memoir called Bad Kid. He will talk about growing up gay in Texas in the ’80s while listening to Taylor Dayne, Rick Astley and Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. And because he’s also a comedian, you know this event will be laugh-out-loud funny.
Ron Legro & Avi Lank
Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery-DeLuca Forum, Oct. 24, 10 am
Two former newspapermen with the long-gone Milwaukee Sentinel, Ron Legro and Avi Lank, have kept busy in recent years documenting the efforts of Frank A. Kovac Jr. — an amateur astronomer who built a two-ton rotating globe planetarium in Wisconsin’s north woods. Located two hours north of Madison, off U.S. Highway 8 between Rhinelander and Crandon, the Kovac Planetarium is the subject of the duo’s inspiring book, The Man Who Painted the Universe.
Kevin Henkes
Central Library, Children’s Room, Oct. 24, 10:30 am
The newest book from Caldecott Medalist Kevin Henkes is aimed at his youngest fans. Waiting is a gentle story about five toy animals who sit on a windowsill and wait. Henkes, a longtime Madison resident, writes for audiences from birth to young adult, and has been writing and illustrating children’s literature since the 1980s. Now his original readers can enjoy his latest work with their own children.
Wayne Wiegand
Central Library, Community Room 301 & 302, Oct. 24, 10:30 am
A library-hosted book festival wouldn’t be complete without an event that celebrates — what else? — libraries. Wayne Wiegand’s just-published book, Part of Our Lives, does exactly that. An author, historian and academic, Wiegand attended the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and UW-Milwaukee, and he taught at UW-Madison’s School of Library and Information Studies from 1987 to 2002. While there, he established what is now called the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture.
Mary Norris
Central Library, Community Room 301 & 302, Oct. 24, noon
Mary Norris has spent more than 35 years copyediting The New Yorker and earning the nickname “Comma Queen.” Between You & Me is a delightful discourse on the most common spelling, punctuation and usage challenges faced by writers. Sassy and smart, Norris turns reading about grammar into entertainment — even explaining when it’s okay to use the f-word in print. She also stars in a series of enlightening videos devoted to the English language.
Another Time and Place: Jennifer Chiaverini and Mary McNear
Central Library, The Bubbler, Oct. 24, noon
Never underestimate the ability of a book to divert, to inspire, to restore. Jennifer Chiaverini, author of the wildly popular Elm Creek Quilt series, has recently begun telling the stories of women during the Civil War. Her latest book is Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule, the story of first lady Julia Grant (wife of Ulysses S. Grant) and her personal slave, known as Madame Jule. Mary McNear’s Butternut Lake books, about small-town life in northern Minnesota, are known for their sweet depictions of second-chance love. Moonlight on Butternut Lake is the third installment in this series. Both authors deliver emotional content in entertaining packages.
Gary Cieradkowski
Wisconsin Historical Museum, Oct. 24, 1:30 pm
Baseball in October — there’s nothing like it. Gary Cieradkowski, an award-winning graphic artist and baseball historian, will step up to the plate and talk about The League of Outsider Baseball, a handsome history of players from obscure corners of the sport, with illustrations that pay homage to the old tobacco baseball cards manufactured in the early 20th century. As a New York Mets fan, Cieradkowski also might have something to say about Major League Baseball’s 2015 postseason.
David Maraniss
Central Library, Community Room 301 & 302, Oct. 24, 1:30 pm
Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story is an intimate and emotional portrait of Detroit in the early 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson called the city “the herald of hope in America” and the U.S. automobile industry was at its height. Author David Maraniss regards this book as the middle volume in a 1960s trilogy, set between his earlier works Rome 1960 and They Marched into Sunlight; fans of Maraniss’ singular approach to nonfiction can dive into these books in any order. Maraniss, a three-time Pulitzer winner, is a Madison native and is best known in these parts for his popular biography of Vince Lombardi.
Adam Benforado
Central Library, Community Room 301 & 302, Oct. 24, 3 pm
In his first book, Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice, Drexel University criminal law professor Adam Benforado reveals how existing legal structures in the United States fail victims and society as a whole. He cites flawed assumptions about how law enforcement assesses risk, why criminals commit crimes and how eyewitness memories work.
The Limits of Truth
Central Library, The Bubbler, Oct. 24, 4:30 pm
Where do fiction and nonfiction intersect? That’s one of the frustrating questions that “nonfiction” writers Matthew Gavin Frank and University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire assistant English professor B.J. Hollars will attempt to answer while discussing their own work. Frank’s The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America’s Food mashes personal and cultural history, and Hollars admits he made up 25% of the drowning incidents chronicled in Dispatches from the Drownings: Reporting the Fiction of Nonfiction.
Evan Thomas
Central Library, Community Room 301 & 302, Oct. 24, 4:30 pm
Former Newsweek editor-at-large Evan Thomas interviewed 35 one-time aides of Richard Nixon and ploughed through recently released tapes and archival material to present a new examination of our country’s most infamous president in Being Nixon: A Man Divided. Fellow historian and bestselling author David Maraniss will interview Thomas in what promises to be a lively and relevant discussion.
Matthew Thomas
Central Library, The Bubbler, Oct. 24, 6 pm
We Are Not Ourselves, Matthew Thomas’ epic 640-page debut novel about life, love and loss among the middle class of 20th-century America, became an instant bestseller in 2014 and landed on many year-end best-of lists — even drawing comparisons to The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen’s acclaimed turn-of-the-millennium novel.
Mark A. Smith
Central Library, Community Room 301 & 302, Oct. 24, 6 pm
Mark Smith’s new book, Secular Faith: How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics, published 10 days before his Wisconsin Book Festival appearance, couldn’t be timelier. By charting the political development of five contentious issues in American history — slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion and women’s rights — he argues that U.S. Christians today have more in common morally and politically with atheists than with their Christian predecessors in previous centuries.
Robert Reich
Central Library, Community Room 301 & 302, Saturday, Oct. 24, 7:30 pm
Political economist, professor and perennial TV talking head Robert Reich’s new book, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, lays out the ways capitalism no longer serves the middle class as it did during the decades after World War II. Ever a populist, Reich argues that government has allowed a small minority of the very rich to set the rules and stack the deck in their favor; he reminds us that as citizens, we must identify who the government is for, then set policies that reflect that goal.
William Bostwick
Central Library, The Bubbler, Oct. 24, 8 pm
What would the Wisconsin Book Festival be without an appearance by an author who writes about beer? This year’s distinguished guest is William Bostwick, beer critic for The Wall Street Journal, whose 2014 book, The Brewer’s Tale, traces the history of beer back to Babylonian times and is now available in paperback. Bostwick doesn’t make as many references to Wisconsin as you’d think, but he does write about Milwaukee and the beers that made it famous.
Margret Aldrich
Central Library, The Bubbler, Oct. 25, 11 am
In August, Madison became the first “City of Distinction” to be recognized by the global Little Free Libraries movement, which embraced the “Take a Book/Leave a Book” phenomenon when it was begun by two Wisconsin men in 2010. Author Margret Aldrich, a former Utne editor who built her own Little Free Library in front of her Minneapolis bungalow, has written a charming book on the topic, The Little Free Library Book.
Andrew Maraniss
Central Library, Community Room 301, Oct. 25, 12:30 pm
Andrew Maraniss, son of renowned Vince Lombardi biographer and fellow Wisconsin Book Festival presenter David Maraniss, scored big with Strong Inside, the sports-meets-civil-rights story of Vanderbilt University student Perry Wallace, the Southeastern Conference’s first African American basketball player. The book debuted on two New York Times bestseller lists and stayed there for months in 2014. “My love of sports and my love of writing came from my dad,” Maraniss told Isthmus in June.
Maryrose Wood
Central Library, Children’s Section, Oct. 25, 1:30 pm
The Unmapped Sea is the fifth installment in Maryrose Wood’s series The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place. Comparisons to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events immediately come to mind; however, Wood’s books offer a fresh take on a tried-and-true formula that combines whimsy with suspense. Found running wild in the forests around Ashton Place, the children — along with their plucky governess Miss Lumley — solve mysteries and learn manners in Victorian England. In The Unmapped Sea, they explore the wolfish curse on their family. Aimed at the older elementary school audience, these books are also read-aloud pleasures for younger children.
Turning Inward
Central Library, Community Room 301 & 302, Oct. 25, 2 pm
Switching genres for authors who’ve already enjoyed success in another writing style can be tricky — especially when that new style takes the form of an intimate memoir. Biographer Blake Bailey turns his eye on his own life and family in The Splendid Things We Planned. Similarly, novelist Kate Christensen chronicles her culinary discoveries upon relocating to Maine in How to Cook a Moose. Bailey and Christensen will jointly discuss their motivations for choosing to write their memoirs.
Sarah Vowell
Central Library, Community Room 301 & 302, Oct. 30, 7 pm
In Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, Sarah Vowell uses her quirky voice to entertain us with tales from those parts of history that bored us in high school: presidential assassinations, the Pilgrims and now, the Marquis de Lafayette. According to Vowell, Lafayette was motivated to help George Washington defeat the British by his love of glory, his belief in the enlightenment and by a deep desire to get away from his in-laws. Vowell, a former contributing editor at This American Life and frequent guest on The Daily Show, combines humor and scholarship to delightful effect in her latest book.
