Fact and fiction sat across from each other over coffee one morning this week. They also happened to be brother and sister.
“I write history and was jealous of the freedom that you had,” Paul Schneider said to his sister, Bethany (Bee) Ridgway.
“With fiction, you can do whatever you want,” she agreed. “As an academic, I’m so pencil-licky about things. I just busted free.
It was standing room only Wednesday night at the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven when broadcast and TV journalist Alison Stewart of New York and Oak Bluffs told the story of writing her new book, First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School. Although she has had a 20-year career anchoring and reporting for MTV, PBS, NBC News, ABC News and CBS News, First Class is her first book.
Mark Leibovich’s new book This Town, a critical expose of the Washington power structure and New York Times best seller this summer, is as popular with the right as it is with the left. Or with anyone who believes that government is broken.
Fred Waitzkin, whose memoir Searching for Bobby Fischer inspired the movie by the same name, has been waiting his whole life to write a novel. A seasoned journalist and seasonal resident of the Vineyard, Mr. Waitzkin said that his nonfiction books had progressively begun to resemble novels. He finally decided it was now or never.
Two trailblazing artists and their relationship is the theme of historian Henry Adams’s book Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock. Abstract impressionist Mr. Pollock let the paint fall where it may, while Mr. Benton’s style was the polar opposite. Mr. Pollock was a student of Benton’s.
Michael Pollan left an overflow crowd at the Farm Institute with a clear message last week: start cooking.
“You can take a deep dive into the soul with cooking,” he said a during a sold-out a reading of his new book Thursday night.
