Tonight Book Expo attendees can feel the Bern and tomorrow they’ll have to decide how they feel about Spicey, and politics was on the agenda for many of the opening breakfast authors as well. Trevor Noah — for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah Presents The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library — said of Trump,”We believe you’ll come to understand why he should not be president. Although he is wildly entertaining, he should not be leading anything other than a Twitter account.”
Written with the Daily Show Staff, Noah’s book compiles and attempts to analyze the president’s tweets “in a truthful and glaring form.” Noah suggested that “to truly delve into the mind of President Trump, you have to live in the world he lives in all the time, and that is the Twittter.” At the end of his term, said Noah, all we’ll have to remember Trump by is his tweets: “That and the apocalyptic landscape.”
Barbara Kingsolver (Unsheltered) was one of two fiction writers on the panel, along with Nicholas Sparks (Every Breath) , and she said the fears sparked by the current political climate inspired her new novel. “The thing that scares me now is how so many of the rules we learned in the past don’t apply anymore for the future.” She underscored, “They say there’s nothing new under the sun and I’m not sure I believe that, because we’re dealing with some seriously new s–t here.” She said her new novel, which takes place in both the present day and in the turbulent 1870s, asks, “do these scary kinds of times always bring out narrow mindedness and fondness for bullying leaders and if so what happened then?”
Nick Offerman and Megan Mullalley hosted the panel, also promoting their book The Greatest Love Story Ever Told. It also featured Jill Lapore, who presented her book These Truths, a history of the United States told in less than 1,000 pages, with a slide show recounting an abridged history of the country told in maps and graphics. She stated that she hoped her book would remind readers that much that much of what we see in our discourse “has really long origins” and some of the symbols used today can be reclaimed. She concluded that, like art, history can show us “that twoness, that doubleness” of America, “how it can be full of tragedy and agony and horror the way American history is, and also full of courage, and hope, and beauty, and especially daring.”