Jeremi Suri
Central Library, Community Rooms 301 & 302, Nov. 2, 5:30 p.m.
Former UW-Madison history prof Suri’s ambitious new book, The Impossible Presidency, ponders the arc of American executive power. His premise is that the successes of pivotal figures like George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and the two Roosevelts expanded expectations of the office to where later presidents, from Kennedy to Obama, have struggled with the yawning gap “between promise and possibility.” Modern presidents, he argues, are doomed to failure — which, in the case of the current White House occupant, is actually reassuring. (B.L.)
Dan Egan
Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, DeLuca Forum, Nov. 2, 7 p.m.
If you ever enjoyed great times on one of the Great Lakes, you owe it to yourself to better understand the threats facing Lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario and Superior — which collectively contain 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water. “A Great Lake can hold all the mysteries of an ocean, and then some,” Egan writes in the introduction of The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Award for excellence in nonfiction. The Pulitzer Prize finalist explores how invasive creatures, toxic algae and changing water levels have wreaked havoc on a once-thriving ecosystem — and offers suggestions for how the Great Lakes can be great once again. Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival. (M.P.)
Patricia Skalka
Central Library, The Bubbler, Nov. 2, 7 p.m.
Few Wisconsin novelists capture a place in our state as evocatively and effectively as Skalka, whose noirish “Dave Cubiak Door County Mystery” series will reach four titles next May with Death Rides the Ferry. For the third installment, 2016’s Death in Cold Water, the former Reader’s Digest writer entangled former Chicago cop Cubiak in a Green Bay Packers-centric murder case. Death in Cold Water won the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award of the Council for Wisconsin Writers earlier this year. (M.P.)
Angela J. Davis
Central Library, Community Room 302, Nov. 3, 7:30 p.m.
Okay, calm down. It’s not that Angela Davis. It’s a different African American academic, a law professor at American University, who has edited a bracing new collection of essays, Policing the Black Man, on rampant racial inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. She and others including Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative probe the various components of this bias, from searches to arrests, from racial profiling to tainted prosecutions, from “terror lynchings” to modern-day police street executions, and suggest solutions. It’s an urgent and eye-opening book, and this Davis, like the other, deserves our full attention. (B.L.)
Jessica Bruder
Central Library, Community Rooms 301-302, Nov. 4, 10:30 a.m.
In the wake of the Great Recession, people with once-steady jobs now roam the country eking out just enough cash to keep on keeping on. For Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Bruder hit the road with some of these transient Americans who call themselves “workampers” and live in RVs, trailers and vans. She racked up 15,000 miles over two years, working alongside single women and senior citizens harvesting sugar beets in North Dakota and picking, packing and stowing product in Amazon’s Texas fulfillment centers as part of that company’s CamperForce. “There is hope on the road,” Bruder writes. “It’s a by-product of forward momentum. A sense of opportunity, as wide as the country itself.” (M.P.)
Frank Bures
Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, DeLuca Forum, Nov. 4, 4 p.m.
This longtime magazine writer, onetime Madison resident and, briefly, Isthmus contributor pretty much says it all in the title and subtitle of his 2016 book, The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World’s Strangest Syndromes. The book delves into how culture shapes reality, including that of people in Africa who, to this day, sometimes come to believe someone is causing their genitals to shrink or disappear. And Bures does it without a teeny weenie bit of condescension, noting the prevalence in our own culture of ailments like depression that are likewise tied to “the stories we believe, the scripts we follow.” (B.L.)
Nickolas Butler
Central Library, The Bubbler, Nov. 4, 4:30 p.m.
UW-Madison alum Butler won multiple awards for his first novel, Shotgun Lovesongs — a tale of four high school buddies from the tiny town of Little Wing, Wisconsin, reunited in their 30s for a wedding. The Hearts of Men, Butler’s second novel, returns to the fertile rural Wisconsin territory Butler knows so well. Published earlier this year and in the running for more awards, the book spans decades and revolves around the experiences of multiple generations at Camp Chippewa in Northern Wisconsin. Finding an author more steeped in Midwestern tradition and values than Butler would be difficult. (M.P.)
Shawn Otto
Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, DeLuca Forum, Nov. 4, 6 p.m.
This event is worth attending just to see how Otto, a science advocate, novelist and filmmaker, boils down his exhaustively researched 500-page tome, The War on Science, into a single talk. The book notes that at a time when science is providing humankind with “increasingly clear pictures of how to solve many of our own challenges,” its precepts have fallen into disrepute. He spares no one, including folks who refuse to accept the scientific research that affirms the safety of eating genetically modified foods. Otto argues for science-based public policy as though our lives depended on it. Because they do. (B.L.)
Amy Goldstein
Central Library, Community Rooms 301 & 302, Nov. 4, 6 p.m.
Pulitzer Prize winner Goldstein reports from the front lines of the fight for middle-class survival, in the city that General Motors abandoned in 2008. Janesville: An American Story follows a small cast of characters during the five years after this seismic event, documenting their struggles and resilience. It’s a beautifully written and often heartbreaking account, as when it describes workers offered a chance to pull in a few more paychecks by training their replacements in Mexico. Goldstein at one point mentions a health-clinic sign: “Life is not about waiting for storms to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” Janesville, in her book, is learning to dance. (B.L.)
Michael Perry
Central Library, Community Room 301, Nov. 5, noon
Perry will publish his second book of 2017, Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy, two days after his Wisconsin Book Festival appearance. While suffering from a particularly nasty kidney stone, Perry read up on his condition and realized that the 16th-century French essayist documented his own kidney stone. The more he read Montaigne’s work, the more he recognized its application to modern-day life in everything from sex to Twitter to faith. In the end, reading — and writing about — Montaigne made Perry want to be a better man. And isn’t that what anyone hopes for from a book these days? (M.P.)
