EVENT PREVIEW
Prologue to the Book Festival of the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta. Sept. 7-25. 5342 Tilly Mill Road, Dunwoody. 678-812-4005, www.atlantajcc.org/interior-pages/arts-and-culture-book-festival-page-from-the-book-festival/.
From Nov. 5-20, the Book Festival of the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta celebrates its 25th year. In anticipation of its silver anniversary, the center presents a “prologue” of four separate author events this month. The foursome of prominent writers will discuss their latest books, which include a memoir by a famed SEC football coach, a narrative account of the rise of ISIS, a humorous mystery in Key West and an evocative tale of women in the French Resistance.
Steve Spurrier
College football coach Steve Spurrier always gave a particular pep talk to motivate his players. “I would say, ‘This is the biggest game of our lives coming up,’ because it’s the one we’d prepared for,” he says. “The next game was always the biggest one.”
His memoir “Head Ball Coach: My Life in Football” (Blue Rider Press, $28, 320 pages) recounts a career of big games. Written with Buddy Martin, “Head Ball Coach” spans Spurrier’s life on the gridiron, beginning with his emergence as a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback at the University of Florida.
The book emphasizes his achievement as a self-styled “Head Ball Coach,” especially over 12 seasons at the University of Florida (1990-2001), where his “Fun ’n’ Gun” offense led the Gators to six SEC championships. In 2005, he joined the University of South Carolina and similarly invigorated its football program.
Spurrier retired from coaching in 2015 but now serves as a consultant to the University of Florida’s athletic department. So whom does he root for when the Gators play the South Carolina Gamecocks? “It’s very simple,” he says. “I work for Florida, so I pull for Florida at every game. And I pull for South Carolina at every game they play — except when they play Florida.”
6:30 p.m. Sept. 7. Free.
Joby Warrick
In 2015, Joby Warrick of The Washington Post won his second Pulitzer Prize, for his nonfiction book “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS” (Anchor Books, $16, 384 pages). Drawing on sources at the CIA, the kingdom of Jordan and around the world, Warrick traces the often-bloody evolution of the group known as the Islamic State, or “ISIS.”
In researching the book, Warrick was surprised to learn of the extent the West played in the creation of ISIS. “The group we now know as the Islamic State is just a rebranded version of al-Qaida in Iraq, the terrorist movement that formed in direct response to the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003,” Warrick says. “The current leaders of ISIS were radicalized and schooled as terrorists inside U.S. prison camps in Iraq. The essence is undeniable: U.S. policies played a huge role in the formation of ISIS.”
The new edition of “Black Flags” includes an Afterword that addresses the ISIS attack on Paris in November 2015. Currently a national environment reporter, Warrick encourages U.S. readers to avoid magnifying ISIS as a domestic threat. “People have an exaggerated fear about the presence of ISIS in this country,” he says. “There’s an unfortunate tendency to credit ISIS for every violent act committed by a deranged person who evokes the name of the terrorist group.”
7:30 p.m. Sept. 13. $10-$15.
Carl Hiaasen
Carl Hiaasen’s slapstick Florida mysteries often rely on outlandish plots. Nevertheless, with his 14th novel “Razor Girl” (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95, 337 pages), the veteran Miami Herald columnist continues to draw from real life.
“The bizarre crash in the opening chapter of ‘Razor Girl’ was inspired by a real car accident that happened in the Florida Keys,” Hiaasen says. “I’d say that more than 75 percent of the plotline has its origin in one true headline or another, but that’s just Florida.”
“Razor Girl” offers one of Hiaasen’s characteristic, crazy-quilt storylines that include such seemingly disparate threads as the erosion of Florida beaches, a renegade health inspector and an incursion of Gambian pouched rats. Perhaps the most pointed plotline involves the star of a Southern-set reality show whose bigoted rants find an unhinged audience.
In recent years, Hiaasen has frequently taken aim at reality television. “Satirists are always attracted to the absurd, and there’s nothing more absurd in our culture right now than reality TV,” Hiaasen says.
7:30 p.m. Sept. 22. $10-$15.
Kristin Hannah
Prolific New York Times best-seller Kristin Hannah found the seed for her latest novel when reading about a young Belgian woman who created one of the first escape routes out of Nazi-occupied France. “The more I read about this young woman, and women like her, the more I wanted to share their stories with the world in a fictional way that would resonate deeply with modern readers,” Hannah says.
Hannah spent years researching and writing “The Nightingale” (St. Martin’s Press, $27.99, 440 pages), a historical novel about the women of the World War II Resistance in both Paris and the French countryside.
In “The Nightingale,” Hannah crafts scenes of the protagonist as an elderly woman in the 1990s to demonstrate the often-forgotten legacy of the female heroes of World War II. “The narrative shifts between ‘now’ and then were there to pay tribute to the Greatest Generation,” she says. “As we know, the number of WWII survivors is diminishing every year. It’s imperative that we listen to and share their stories now while we still can.”
7:30 p.m. Sept. 25. $10-$15.
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