NYT's 100 Notable Books of 2009

Speakers

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  Andre Agassi Andre Kirk Agassi is a former World No. 1 professional American tennis player who won eight Grand Slam singles tournaments and an Olympic gold medal in singles.
  
  He is generally considered by critics and fellow players to be among the greatest tennis players of all time, and has been called the best service returner in the history of tennis. He is married to fellow retired professional tennis player and multiple Grand Slam champion Steffi Graf.
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  Reza Aslan Reza Aslan is a writer and scholar of religions.
  
  Born in Iran, Aslan is currently a research associate at the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy. He was a visiting assistant professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Iowa and the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction at the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
  
  A frequent commentator on television, radio, and in print, Aslan is a graduate of Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of Iowa. He is the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam and How to Win a Cosmic War: Why We're Losing the War on Terror.
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  David Boaz Cato's executive vice president David Boaz has played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement. He is a provocative commentator and a leading authority on domestic issues such as education choice, drug legalization, the growth of government, and the rise of libertarianism.
  
  He is the author of Libertarianism: A Primer, described by the Los Angeles Times as "a well-researched manifesto of libertarian ideas," the editor of The Libertarian Reader, and coeditor of the Cato Handbook on Policy.
  
  Boaz is the former editor of New Guard magazine and was executive director of the Council for a Competitive Economy prior to joining Cato in 1981. His articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, National Review, and Slate.
  
  He is a frequent guest on national television and radio shows, and has appeared on ABC's "Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher", CNN's "Crossfire", NPR's "Talk of the Nation" and "All Things Considered", "John McLaughlin's One on One", Fox News Channel, BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other media.
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  Phil Bronstein Phil Bronstein was named executive chair of the board of the Center for Investigative Reporting in April 2012, when the organization merged with The Bay Citizen. Bronstein joined the CIR board in 2006 and became board chair in 2011. He is now in charge of overall operations. Previously, Bronstein was editor-at-large and director of content development for Hearst Newspapers. Before that, he was executive vice president and editor-at-large of the San Francisco Chronicle, after serving as the newspaper’s editor from 2000 to 2008. Bronstein was editor of the San Francisco Examiner, which merged with the Chronicle in 2000, from 1991 to 2000. He started at the Examiner as a reporter in 1980, where he specialized in investigative projects and was a foreign correspondent for eight years. He was a 1986 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work in the Philippines. Before joining the Examiner, he was a reporter with public television station KQED in San Francisco. He is the former chairman of the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ International Committee and is currently on the advisory board of Litquake, the annual San Francisco literary festival.
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  Christopher Buckley Christopher Taylor Buckley is an American political satirist and the author of several novels. He is the son of William F. Buckley Jr. and Patricia Buckley.
  
  After a classical education at the Portsmouth Abbey School, Buckley, like his father, graduated from Yale University, as a member of Skull and Bones. He became managing editor of Esquire Magazine and later worked as the chief speechwriter for Vice President George H. W. Bush.
  
  His novels include God Is My Broker, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, The White House Mess, No Way to Treat a First Lady, Wet Work, Florence of Arabia, Boomsday, and, most recently, Supreme Courtship.
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  Jennifer Burns Jennifer Burns was educated at Harvard College and received her Ph.D. in American History from the University of California, Berkeley. Her new book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, began as her doctoral dissertation. She spent more than eight years working on the book, and was fortunate to be granted access to Rand's personal papers and private diaries for her research.
  
  Professor Burns teaches American history at the University of Virginia, and divides her time between Charlottesville, VA and Menlo Park, CA. Lectures from her introductory course on American history are available at iTunes.berkeley.edu and can be found by searching for History 7b in Social Sciences.
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  Evelyn Dilsaver Evelyn Dilsaver is the former Executive Vice President of Charles Schwab and President and CEO of Charles Schwab Investment Management.
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  David Grann David Grann has been a New Yorker staff writer since 2003. "The Lost City of Z," his New Yorker article about his journey into the Amazon to uncover the fate of a missing explorer, was expanded into a Times best-selling book. Many of his New Yorker pieces are collected in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession.
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  Moshin Hamid Moshin Hamid grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, and attended Princeton and Harvard. His first novel, Moth Smoke, was a Betty Trask Award winner, PEN/ Hemingway Award finalist, and New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His writing has also appeared in Time, The New York Times, and other publications. He lives in London.
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  Anne C. Heller Anne C. Heller is a magazine editor and journalist. She has been the managing editor of The Antioch Review, a fiction editor of Esquire and Redbook, the features editor of Lear's, and the executive editor of the magazine development group at Conde Nast Publications, with a special emphasis on money and finance.
  
  It was Ayn Rand's writing about money that first aroused her interest in the author, who is one of the most passionate defenders of capitalism of all time. Heller has written for a number of national magazines.
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  Steven Johnson Steven Johnson is the author of The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good for You, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Cities, Software and Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate and The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From was a finalist for the 800CEORead award for best business book of 2010, and was ranked as one of the year’s best books by The Economist.
  
  He is also the founder of several influential websites, including FEED, Plastic, and, currently, outside.in. His most recent book is Where Good Ideas Come From.
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  Barry MacKay Barry MacKay is a retired professional tennis player and tournament director, and a current television broadcaster. He was the NCAA Men's Singles Champion and Doubles Finalist with Richard Potter in 1957, while playing for University of Michigan.
  
  He was a Doubles Finalist with Sammy Giammalva at the U.S. Championships in 1958. He was a Semifinalist at Wimbledon in 1959. Barry twice won what is now the SAP Open, including ten other tournaments in 1960.
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  Jay McInerney Jay McInerney is a writer whose novels include Bright Lights, Big City; Ransom; Story of My Life: Brightness Falls; and The Last of the Savages. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote the screenplay for the television film Gia. He was the wine columnist for House & Garden magazine, and his essays on wine have been collected in Bacchus & Me(2000) and A Hedonist in the Cellar (2006). His most recent novel is titled The Good Life, published in 2006.
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  Daniyal Mueenuddin Daniyal Mueenuddin was brought up in Lahore, Pakistan and Elroy, Wisconsin. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories 2008, selected by Salman Rushdie. For a number of years he practiced law in New York. He now lives on a farm in Pakistan's southern Punjab.
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  Orhan Pamuk Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. His novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. He lives in Istanbul.
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  Robert Rosenthal Robert Rosenthal is the Executive Director of the Center for Investigative Reporting.
  
  An award-winning journalist with nearly 40 years of experience, Rosenthal has worked for some of the most respected newspapers in the country, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer and, most recently, the San Francisco Chronicle.
  
  As a reporter, his awards include the Overseas Press Club Award for magazine writing, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for distinguished foreign correspondence, and the National Association of Black Journalists Award for Third World Reporting.
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  Neil Sheehan Neil Sheehan is a former correspondent for The New York Times. Sheehan is also a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of A Fiery Peace in a Cold War.
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  Julia Flynn Siler Julia Flynn Siler is the author of The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, published by Penguin's Gotham Books in June, 2007. A graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Flynn Siler began her career as a staff correspondent for BusinessWeek, working in the magazines Los Angeles and Chicago bureaus. She wrote about Midwestern businesses for The New York Times and earned an MBA at night from Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management. In 1993, she won a fellowship to teach business journalism in Prague. Based out of the Center for Independent Journalism, a not-for-profit organization supported, in part, by The New York Times Foundation, Ms. Flynn Siler then went on to serve as a London-based foreign correspondent, first for BusinessWeek and then for The Wall Street Journal. She wrote about everything from Dolly the cloned sheep to Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Airways. In 2000, she moved back to the U.S. to join a family business in San Francisco and raise her two young sons. After a few years, Ms. Flynn Siler returned to writing for The Wall Street Journal. One of her first stories was about the turmoil within the Mondavi family's wine empire, which ran as a front page story in June of 2004. That story led to her book The House of Mondavi, which involved more than 500 hours of interviews and examination of tens of thousands of pages of documents. Flynn Siler is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors and continues to write for The Wall Street Journal out of its San Francisco bureau, focusing on family businesses, wine, and philanthropy. Flynn Siler is also a member of the San Francisco-based writing collective North 24th. The group's members have four books scheduled to be published in 2007-2008. She is involved in a wide range of community volunteer activities.
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  Tad Taube Tad Taube serves as president of the Koret Foundation. He is chairman and founder of the Woodmont Companies, a diversified real estate investment and management organization; and was chairman and CEO of Koracorp Industries (successor to Koret of California) from 1973 until its merger with Levi Strauss in 1979.
  
  He is a governor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and has served as trustee of Notre Dame de Namur University and of the University of San Francisco.
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  Calvin Trillin Calvin Trillin joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1963 and has contributed reporting pieces, humor, poetry, and essays. His many books include the comic novels "Floater" and "Tepper Isn't Going Out"; "Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme"; and the memoir "About Alice," which grew out of his New Yorker piece "Alice, Off the Page."
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  David Wessel David Wessel is economics editor for The Wall Street Journal and writes the Capital column, a weekly look at the economy and forces shaping living standards around the world. He is responsible for overseeing coverage of the Fed and the Journal’s daily coverage of the macro economy, global trade and economic trends. He appears frequently on National Public Radio and WETA’s “Washington Week.”
  
  David has written two New York Times best-sellers: “Red Ink: Inside the High Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget” (2012) and “In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic” (2009).
  
  He was deputy bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau. David joined The Wall Street Journal in 1984 in Boston, and moved to Washington in 1987. In 1999 and 2000, he served as the newspaper’s Berlin bureau chief.
  
  A native of New Haven, Conn., and a product of its public schools, David previously worked for the Boston Globe, the Hartford (Conn.) Courant and Middletown (Conn.) Press. A 1975 graduate of Haverford College, he was Knight Bagehot Fellow in Business & Economics Journalism at Columbia University in 1980-81.
  
  David has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Boston Globe stories in 1983 on the persistence of racism in Boston and the other for stories in The Wall Street Journal in 2002 on corporate wrong-doing. He is also the co-author, with Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Davis, of Prosperity, a 1998 book on the American middle class.
  
  David is a trustee of Temple Sinai in Washington, D.C. He and his wife, Naomi, have two children.
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  Colson Whitehead Colson Whitehead was born in 1969, and was raised in Manhattan. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music.
  
  His first novel, The Intuitionist, concerned intrigue in the Department of Elevator Inspectors, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award.
  
  John Henry Days followed in 2001, an investigation of the steel-driving man of American folklore. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The novel received the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
  
  The Colossus of New York is a book of essays about the city. It was published in 2003 and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
  
  Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) is a novel about a "nomenclature consultant" who gets an assignment to name a town, and was a recipient of the PEN/Oakland Award.
  
  Sag Harbor, published in 2009, is a novel about teenagers hanging out in Sag Harbor, Long Island during the summer of 1985.
  
  Colson Whitehead's reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper's and Granta.
  
  He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.