What have you been reading lately (besides Boca magazine, of course)? We’re in peak beach weather in South Florida—our not-too-cold, not-too-hot Goldilocks zone—and there’s no better time to immerse yourself in a great book while enjoying the breeze. Once again, we asked Mitch Kaplan of Miami institution Books & Books for his recommendations, which this month include a biography of a TV titan, an exploration of a failed presidential assassination, and a meditative journey into space. Support the independent bookstore by ordering them from the links below.
BIOGRAPHY
Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison
The 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live” has elevated the series back into the cultural vanguard, thanks in no small part to a well-received major motion picture (2024’s “Saturday Night”), a semicentennial NBC special watched by just about everyone, and now “Lorne,” a hulking doorstop of a biography by Susan Morrison, who also penned an elucidating New Yorker profile of Lorne Michaels last month. A complicated, Sphinxlike figure in American comedy, Michaels has remained at the helm of “SNL” through its boom and lean times alike, and Morrison’s unprecedented access paints the richest portrait yet of both the producer and the “secret sauce” that has kept the sketch series relevant for its extraordinary run. Needless to say, the Rolodex of interviewees in the book is a who’s-who of modern comedy history.
NONFICTION
Brad Meltzer certainly knows how to craft a title. In this case, the portion following the emdash is certain to pique just about anyone’s interest; in what universe did the plot to kill Kennedy “fail?” In fact, Meltzer’s seventh nonfiction book details a different attempt on Kennedy’s life, this one taking place before he was sworn in as the 35th president. It even has a local angle: On Dec. 11, 1960, Richard Paul Pavlick, a disgruntled former postal worker (yes, one of those again), parked his dynamite-loaded Buick on a street in Palm Beach, where the Kennedy family kept a famous compound, waiting for the president to arrive. The attempted assassin’s lack of success makes his story no less interesting. Meltzer is an author long fascinated by conspiracies (this is his fourth book on clandestine plots against world leaders), but he always brings the receipts, and “The JFK Conspiracy” should be another page-turner from this master of the form.
HISTORICAL FICTION
Harlem Rhapsody By Victoria Christopher Murray
A vital figure in the annals of Black literary history but a largely unsung one in popular culture writ large, author and educator Jessie R. Fauset held a position as literary editor for The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP, from 1919 to 1926. That heady and transformative period, and Fauset’s role within it, is the subject of this novel by Victoria Christopher Murray, an author of more than 30 books and, some might argue, the Jessie R. Fauset of our time. Harlem Rhapsody dramatizes Fauset’s entry into the leadership of The Crisis and her subsequent affair with its influential publisher, W.E.B. DuBois, as well as her keen eye in discovering consequential talent to write for the magazine—including a then-17-year-old Langston Hughes. The book is a love letter to the flourishing Harlem Renaissance, but as Fauset will realize in Murray’s sharply observed account, her success won’t come without a price.
SCIENCE FICTION
To win the Booker Prize is to enter esteemed company: This literary award, established in 1969, recognizes the single best work of fiction in the English language published in the U.K. or Ireland. When Samantha Harvey won the Booker for her most recent novel “Orbital,” she joined the ranks of such Booker winners as Margaret Atwood, George Saunders, Salman Rushdie and William Golding. A slim novel—it finishes its orbit in fewer than 200 pages—Harvey’s book is set on the International Space Station, where a multicultural crew of astronauts and cosmonauts has embarked on one of the last space missions of its kind. Inspired by the research of Carl Sagan, Harvey explores the day-to-day realities of life in zero G but also the spiritual, metaphysical and environmental questions that percolate among the characters’ airless confines, as they travel some 17,000 miles removed from our pale blue dot. What the novel lacks in a propulsive plot it makes up for in deep feeling and a borderless sense of humanity.
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