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Library Book Sale in Mountain Brook

The Friends of the Emmet O’Neal Library Book Sale 2012 is this weekend!

It actually starts tonight (Thursday, Feb. 23) for any patron who donates $25 or more to the library. Do this, and you can attend the Library Book Sale Preview Party. This wine and cheese reception is happening from 6 to 8 p.m. Go to http://www.eolib.org/friends.php to donate and join the fun.

The sale is set for Friday and Saturday, February 24-25 from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday, February 26 from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

New this year:

• Dream Cakes truck on site
• Cookbook signings 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday
• Sesame Street characters from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday
• 10% discount for seniors 60+ all day Friday and Saturday
• Half-price books on Sunday (basement books $10 for a bagful)

 

Tim Dorsey's Florida

Sometimes truth is well and truly stranger than fiction.

Consider the exploits of Tim Dorsey, the New York Times bestselling author of a darkly funny collection of books set in Florida and featuring a history-loving, gloriously unrepentant serial killer named Serge Storms.

In Dorsey’s newest book, Pineapple Grenade, Serge—a maniacal, yet quite lovable, hero—has managed to become a secret agent in Miami where he’s spying for the president of a banana republic. But Miami has problems beyond those surrounding Serge:  There’s a media frenzy over the “Hollow Man,” a corpse found on the beach without any innards. Also, someone has been leaving giant shark carcasses at busy intersections around the city. Fishy enough, but then the medical examiner finds severed limbs from an unknown body inside them.

I should mention that there’s a certain fantastically gross factor in these rather violent books.

Dorsey, an Auburn grad who once edited The Plainsman, does have quite the imagination, but strangeness has always managed to find him on a fairly regular basis.

I knew Tim when we both worked at The Alabama Journal in Montgomery in the mid-80s. We—along with my husband and some of our oldest and dearest friends—were part of a really small newsroom that did some really great work. Many of us also went on to work at The Tampa Tribune. Tim stayed longer than most and worked as a general assignment reporter, a political reporter, a copy desk editor and the paper’s night metro editor before leaving in August of 1999 to write full time. Today, he lives in Tampa with his wife and two daughters.

When I got Pineapple Grenade in the mail recently, my husband and I began remembering “Dorsey stories” from way back when. Granted we’re relying on 25-year-old (plus!) memories, but some things tend to stay with you.

• Tim had a column in The Alabama Journal, and once he wrote a piece about the Wall Street Journal’s role as a fashion accessory. This prompted a nasty letter from the WSJ saying that the esteemed and award-winning newspaper was indeed quite a bit more than a fashion accessory. We seem to recall that they also sent Tim a tutorial about how to read the WSJ; this was something they usually sent to schoolchildren.
• Our favorite Dorsey story involved a presidential motorcade. In 1984 President Reagan visited Alabama, and Tim drove out to the airport in his Trans Am to cover this newsworthy event. When the President got into his waiting limo and the motorcade began to travel to his destination, Tim jumped into his car, too. Some helpful spectators, seeing that Tim was trying to leave the airport, pulled the barricade aside allowing him to inadvertently become part of the actual motorcade. There he was, speeding along, sandwiched between two Secret Service cars full of agents furiously waving him away. When they finally pulled him over, Tim didn’t have his driver’s license on him—but he did have his library card. They told him he was lucky to be alive.

So when Tim writes about dumb guys hooked on cocaine and cartoons, rampaging Hemingways, drugged-out Don Johnson impersonators and dressed-up lap dogs that predict the weather (I know for a fact that the weatherdog is based on real life), I just happily go along for another wild ride.

Pineapple Grenade is Tim’s 15^th novel, and my, how things have changed. When his first book, Florida Roadkill, was published, I remember that Tim loaded up the enormous trunk of his old Cadillac with boxes of books and took himself on tour, stopping at whatever bookstore would have him. Now he’s in the middle of a 30-city tour throughout Florida followed by a busy national tour that will take him all across the country. This book tour culminates with the first-ever “Serge Storms” Caribbean cruise out of Tampa on the Carnival Legend on March 11 to 18. This fundraiser, organized and sponsored by the Friends of the St. Pete Beach Library, is billed as “seven days of mayhem and trivia” with a cocktail reception; “at-sea” programs; and manic tours with Tim of Grand Cayman, Belize, Cozumel and Isla Roatan.

 

Today on Fox 6

Here are the books I talked about today on Fox 6. There's fiction, nonfiction and fiction based on nonfiction. What's not to love? 

Pineapple Grenade (HarperCollins) by Tim Dorsey

Dorsey’s newest darkly comic thriller, Pineapple Grenade, again features Serge Storms— a history-loving, gloriously unrepentant serial killer who also happens to be a somewhat lovable, hero. Serge has managed to become a secret agent in Miami where he’s spying for the president of a banana republic. But Miami has problems beyond those surrounding Serge:  There’s a media frenzy over the “Hollow Man,” a corpse found on the beach without any innards. Also, someone has been leaving giant shark carcasses at busy intersections around the city. Fishy enough, but then the medical examiner finds severed limbs from an unknown body inside them. It’s all connected. Of course. Dorsey, an Auburn grad, is the New York Times bestselling author of 15 truly funny (sometimes gross) thrillers set in Florida.

Writer, M.D. (Vintage) edited by Leah Kaminsky

Chekhov did it. So did Maugham. More recently, Abraham Verghese also did, to the delight of millions of fans. These doctors brought their own, unique perspectives to smart literature. Writer, M. D. celebrates this tradition with a collection of fiction and nonfiction by today’s most beloved physician-writers. Verghese is here, of course. He writes about the lost art of the physical exam. Pauline Chen writes about the bond between a med student and her first cadaver, while Atul Gawande shares some of the ethical dilemmas of a young surgical intern. Danielle Ofri has a heartbreaking piece on the devastation of losing a patient, and Ethan Canin writes about love, poetry and growing old. These essays and stories from men and women who deal with trauma, illness, mortality and grief on a daily basis offer a moving glimpse behind the doctor’s mask. 

The Dovekeepers (Scribner) by Alice Hoffman

This newest book from the author of Here on Earth (an Oprah Book Club selection), Practical Magic and Fortune’s Daughter wasn’t sitting on the libraries’ new-book shelves for long before being snatched up and put on wait lists by Hoffman’s devoted fans. In her own magical way, Hoffman takes readers to ancient Israel in a book that was more than five years in the writing.  In 70 C.E., 900 Jews are on Masada, a mountain fortress in the Judean desert, holding out against determined Roman armies. According to the ancient historian Josephus, two women and five children survived the siege. In this epic novel, Hoffman tells the story of four extraordinarily resourceful and brave women. All are dovekeepers at the fortress, and all keep lots of secrets, too. This is an amazing book full of fascinating superstitions, Biblical references, and a great deal of both beauty and sadness.

Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood (The University of Alabama Press) by Ralph F. Voss

A lot has been said and written about the time Truman Capote spent in Holcomb, Kansas, following the Clutter family murders in 1959. The author of this journalistic examination of that time was a high school junior in Plainville, Kansas, when the gruesome crimes were committed. Now, more than 50 years later, Ralph Voss, a retired professor of English at The University of Alabama, looks not only at Capote and In Cold Blood, but also at the two together as a singular story. He considers why Capote included “this” and not “that” when it came to which facts would make his book more marketable. He looks at how Capote shaped the narrative of his 1966 blockbuster—even examining Capote’s need for the killers to remain alive while he gathered the story and then for them to die so he could finish it. 

This list is in the February issue of Birmingham magazine.