THE WASHINGTON POST • BOOK WORLD • SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010


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ranch. Her days are spent “wrangling children, chipping dried manure from boots, washing jeans and making gra- vy.” Her best-selling “The Pioneer Wom- an Cooks” is filled with recipes she loves to cook on the ranch. Signing 2 p.m.


Contemporary Life pavilion


10:00 A.M. 1 SPIKE MENDELSOHN Spike Mendelsohn appeared on Bravo TV’s “Top Chef” and opened Good Stuff Eatery on Capitol Hill in 2008. A gradu- ate of the Culinary Institute of America, he has also worked at such highly rated restaurants as Bouchon in Napa Valley, Les Crayeres in France and Le Cirque in New York City. He has just released (with Micheline Mendelsohn) “The Good Stuff Cookbook: Burgers, Fries, Shakes, Wedges and More.” Signing 12:30 p.m.


10:35 A.M 2 REE DRUMMOND A former city girl, Ree Drummond now lives in Oklahoma on a working cattle


If you’re interested in ...


How the idea of race has influenced history


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n 2008, in the midst of the heated presidential campaign, Barack Oba- ma gave a speech in which he de- clared, “Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore.” Yet at times it seems that racial divisions loom so large over our country that they overshadow all else. This year at the National Book Festival, we are lucky to host writers who have coolly consid- ered race in all its kaleidoscopic permu- tations, from politics to culture to his- tory to family life. Unfortunately, you’ll be wishing for an avatar — beautifully blue-skinned, of course — because some of these authors will be appearing at the same time in different tents. In “The History of White People,”


Nell Irvin Painter (History & Biography at 11:10 a.m.) argues that “race is an idea, not a fact.” From ancient times to present day, she traces how that idea developed. The Greeks and Romans did not differentiate people by skin color, for instance, and as early Irish im- migrants to America could attest, one might have white skin and still not qualify as “white.”


In 1955, before Rosa Parks held her ground at the front of a bus, Claudette Colvin, just 15 years old, refused to give up her seat to a white woman in Mont- gomery, Ala. She will appear at the festi- val with Phillip Hoose (Teens & Chil- dren at 11:10 a.m.), who wrote “Clau- dette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” a biography aimed at kids but essential reading for anyone curious about a cou- rageous, forgotten hero of the civil rights movement. New Yorker editor David Remnick


(History & Biography at 5 p.m.) ob- serves the politics of race in “The Bridge,” his biography of Barack Oba- ma. As Gwen Ifill put it in her review of the book for The Post, “Remnick seeks to illuminate Obama’s role as racial hero and lightning rod, and to discern the president’s own mixed feelings about it.” National Public Radio host Michele


Norris (Contemporary Life at 5 p.m.), in her memoir, “The Grace of Silence,” de- scribes how race and the consequences of discrimination have threaded their way through her life. “The discussion about race within my own family,” she admits, “was not completely honest.” (See our review on page 12.) —Rachel Hartigan Shea shear@washpost.com


11:10 A.M. 3 LIDIA MATTICCHIO BASTIANICH Lidia Matticchio Bastianich’s cook- books include, most recently, “Lidia Cooks from the Heart of Italy” and “Nonna Tell Me a Story: Lidia’s Christ- mas Kitchen.” Her Emmy-nominated cooking show has been a fixture on PBS since 1998. She always closes with the line: “Tutti a tavola a mangiare!” or “Everybody to the table to eat!” Signing 1 p.m.


11:45 A.M. 4 BRUCE FEILER Bruce Feiler is the best-selling author of nine books, including “Walking the Bi- ble” and “America’s Prophet.” His latest book, “The Council of Dads: My Daugh- ters, My Illness and the Men Who Could Be Me,” describes how he responded to a diagnosis of cancer by asking six friends to be present throughout his


young daughters’ lives. “I believe my daughters will have plenty of opportu- nities in their lives,” he wrote these men. “They’ll have loving families.... They’ll have each other. But they may not have me. They may not have their dad. Will you help be their dad?” Sign- ing 1:30 p.m.


12:20 P.M. 5 CRAIG ROBINSON A former bond trader, Craig Robinson is the head men’s basketball coach at Or- egon State University and former head coach at Brown University. His book is “A Game of Character: A Family Jour- ney from Chicago’s Southside to the Ivy League and Beyond.” Robinson is the older brother of Michelle Obama and brother-in-law of President Obama. Signing 3:30 p.m.


12:55 P.M. 6 JULES FEIFFER


Please see 11:50 a.m. listing under Chil- dren on page 4.


1:30 P.M.


7 GURCHARAN DAS A former Proctor & Gamble executive, Gurcharan Das is the author of the international bestseller “India Un- bound.” He writes a column on Sundays for the Times of India and guest col- umns for the Wall Street Journal, Fi- nancial Times and Time magazine. His most recent book is “The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dhar- ma.” Signing 3 p.m.


2:05 P.M. 8 JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER Jonathan Safran Foer’s thesis from Princeton became his novel “Everything Is Illuminated,” which won the National Jewish Book Award and was made into a motion picture. His second novel, “Ex- tremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” told the story of a 9-year-old who must learn to deal with his father’s death in the World Trade Center. His most re- cent book, “Eating Animals,” is nonfic- tion and combines philosophy, litera- ture, science and detective work to “ex- plore the many stories we use to justify our eating habits.” Signing 3 p.m.


2:40 P.M. 9 EDWARD O. WILSON Early in his career, Edward O. Wilson conducted work on the classification and ecology of ants in New Guinea and other Pacific islands, and in the Ameri- can tropics. In 2003 Wilson published “Pheidole in the New World,” a mono-


graph concerning 19 percent of the known ant species of the Western Hemisphere. Of the 624 species cov- ered, 337 were new to science. His new book, “Anthill,” is a work of fiction. Signing 12:30 p.m.


3:15 P.M. 10 HENRY PETROSKI Henry Petroski is a professor of civil en- gineering and of history at Duke Uni- versity, where he specializes in the analysis of failure. The first of his many books was “To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design.” He has most recently written “The Es- sential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems.” Signing 1:30 p.m.


3:50 P.M.


11 RICHARD RHODES Richard Rhodes is the author “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Cir- cle Award; “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb,” which was short- listed for a Pulitzer Prize; an investiga- tion of the roots of private violence, “Why They Kill”; a personal memoir, “A Hole in the World”; a biography, “John James Audubon”; and four novels. A third volume of nuclear history, “Ar- senals of Folly,” examines the interna- tional politics of nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War. A fourth and final volume, “The Twilight of the Bombs,” has just been published. Sign- ing 12:30 p.m.


4:25 P.M. 12 HAROLD VARMUS In 1989 Harold Varmus and J. Michael Bishop shared the Nobel Prize in physi- ology or medicine for their “identifica- tion of a large family of genes which control the normal growth and division of cells.” Varmus has written five books, including his recent memoir, “The Art and Politics of Science.” Read Varmus’s essay on writing on page 11. Signing 12:30 p.m.


5:00 P.M.


13 MICHELE NORRIS Michele Norris co-hosts NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Before coming to NPR, Norris was a correspondent for ABC News. In 2009 she was named “Journalist of the Year” by the National Association of Black Journalists. Her new book is a memoir called “The Grace of Silence.” She lives in Washing- ton, D.C. Signing 11 a.m.


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