November 2, 2007
Your Deluxe Guide to the Texas Book Festival: Part Two
Keep in mind that seating and space is limited at most of these events. Arrive early and often!
Saturday
10:00 - 10:45 Kristin Gore (Senate Chamber)
What is it like to write comedy for Saturday Night Live, Futurama, pen two novels and have a Nobel Peace Prize winner for a dad? We don’t know. Go ask Kristin Gore. Her writing isn’t as self-serving as Lynne Cheney’s or as poorly written as Jenna Bush’s.
1:30 - 2:15 Rick Riordan (Family Life Center (1300 Lavaca)
Dumbledore is out and Harry is out of adventures. Where do we go now? How about to Camp Half-blood? San Antonio native Rick Riordan and his Percy Jackson series are the natural heirs to J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. Good news for slow and lazy readers; his books aren't nearly 800 pages, either.
1:30 - 2:15 Bad vs. Worse: The Ultimate Guide to Making Lose-Lose Decisions (Capitol Extension Room E2.012)
Flesh-eating bacteria or leprosy? Spanish Inquisition or a land-war in Asia? Bette Midler or Bette Midler? Joshua Piven present a series of impossible choices, as well as facts, figures, stats, and tips you’ll need to make a decision when the only choices are worse and “worser.”
3:00 - 4:00 Jesse Sublett (Music Tent)
Jesse and his band, the Skunks, helped to put Austin on the map for something other than doped-out space cowboys in the 80s. He has since survived cancer and the tragic murder of his girlfriend and the trauma of being the main suspect in that murder. It is all in his memoir, Never the Same Again: A Rock 'N Roll Gothic. Jesse Sublett is also the author of three mystery novels - Rock Critic Murders, Tough Baby, and Boiled in Concrete.
8:00 - 9:30 A.J. Jacobs (Dell Jewish Community Center)
Esquire editor-at-large A.J. Jacobs tried to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vowed to follow all of the the Ten Commandments. (To be fruitful and multiply, to love his neighbor, any of this sound familiar?) But he also obeyed the hundreds of less-publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to play a ten-string harp; to tell the truth in all situations; to stone adulterers. Uh-oh. Sounds like A.J might have run into trouble.
Sunday
12:00 - 12:45 Carl Bernstein (House Chamber)
He took down the President and raised the profession of journalism to rock star status. What have you done lately?
12:30 - 1:30 Define-a-Thon (Capitol Auditorium Room E1.004)
Spelling Bees are for chumps. Defining is where it’s at. This is your chance to pit your knowledge of the English language against great authors in bloody, hand-to-hand combat. The game will be hosted by the slightly-crazy-sounding Senior Editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, Steve Kleinedler, who is the only lexicographer we know with the tattoo of a phonetic vowel chart on his shoulder. Word.
12:30 - 1:15 Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons (Capitol Extension Room E2.012)
Nuclear weapons sure are a bummer, er, scary as all hell. As it turns out, our government has been very complicit in the proliferation of the bomb. Deception puts our current standoffs with Iran and North Korea in a startling new perspective, and makes clear that Pakistan, far from being an ally, is a rogue nation at the epicenter of world destabilization.
1:00 - 2:00 Ephraim Owens (Music Tent)
As far as we can tell, Ephraim isn’t part of the Book Festival because he wrote a book. In fact, as far as we can tell, he hasn’t written a book at all. He is, however, one bad-ass trumpet player. So good that he didn’t need to write a book, apparently. This is an Austin treasure not to be missed.
2:30 - 3:15 Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music (Capitol Extension Room E2.014)
Many stars of stage and screen buy the farm at an early age after eating drugs like they’re breakfast cereal, but there is only one that we can think of whose friends stole his corpse, took it to Joshua Tree National Monument, and set it on fire.
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