By CHAUNCEY MABE

Three years ago, best-selling thriller writer and TV host Brad Meltzer researched and wrote a heartfelt little book titled “Heroes for My Son.” It was intended as a gift for his oldest child, Jonas. It was also a big mistake. “Every single day since then, my daughter, Lila, has demanded, ‘Where the heck is my book?’ ” Meltzer says. Now 6, Lila is happy – not only does Meltzer’s “Heroes for My Daughter” come out this week, but she’s on the cover.

A bestselling thriller writer, creator of comic books and host of “Brad Meltzer’s Decoded” on the History Channel, Meltzer grew up in Miami and now makes his home in Hollywood. Along with the new book, Meltzer has created a line of T-shirts for girls, with 10 percent of the proceeds going to charity. Meltzer has book signings at Barnes and Noble, 1400 Glades Road, in Boca Raton 11 a.m. Saturday. At 7 that evening, he’ll be at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Ave., in Coral Gables.

What was Lila’s response when you handed her the book?

I wrote a private note to her explaining that this book is going to change over the year. I think that’s always the case in a book with moral lessons. She can’t understand the intellectual depth of the book yet. The most important part for her is her picture on the cover. She’s thrilled.
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Yogi Berra, the longtime catcher and coach of the Yankees, and Ron Guidry, the team's pitching coach after an outstanding Yankees career, have been longtime friends. (AP)

DRIVING MR. YOGI, by Harvey Araton. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 256 pages; $26.

Driving Mr. Yogi began as a 1,500-word story in the New York Times last spring. Sportswriter Harvey Araton has greatly expanded the story for this book, and he hasn’t done himself any favors.

In sum, it’s about the friendship between Yogi Berra, the aging but game old Yankees catcher and mascot, and Ron Guidry, the Louisiana left-hander who was a pitching mainstay of the club in the ’70s and ’80s, and who serves as Berra’s valet and driver during spring training in Tampa.

It’s also about Berra’s renewed relationship with the team he boycotted after George Steinbrenner indulged in one of his characteristic displays of ugliness and unceremoniously fired Berra in 1985.

Berra and Guidry first became friendly in the mid-’70s, when Guidry joined the varsity and promptly reminded Berra of Lefty Gomez.

"Don’t think too much," he told Guidry, the same thing he told several hundred other pitchers. "Figure out a batter’s weakness and throw him that pitch over and over. And if he learns to hit that pitch, then throw him some other pitch that gives him trouble."

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Author Pat Conroy will be at the Love of Literacy Lunch at the Kravis Center on Friday. (Photo provided)

Pat Conroy’s nine novels have earned him millions of devoted readers. He arouses a passionate devotion because of his combination of lyricism and emotional honesty.

The son of a military man, Conroy was expected to follow suit. He became a writer instead and has explored themes of dysfunctional families and Southern life in bestselling books such as The Great Santini, The Water is Wide, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music.

He will be speaking at the Love of Literacy Lunch at the Kravis Center on Friday, kicking off this year’s Read Together Palm Beach County event. The lunch is sold out, but Conroy spoke to The Palm Beach Post from his home in Beaufort, S.C.

A sense of place is paramount in your work, yet you had a peripatetic childhood where you were never in one place for very long. When did you first feel at home in a place?

I can answer that right now. Beaufort, S.C., where I am now sitting. When my father was dying, he pulled out a book and said, "Do you want to see all the places you lived?" When I was 15, we drove across the bridge and came to Beaufort and that was my 23rd move since I was born.

Beaufort was my third straight high school. I complained to my mother that I didn’t get to go to the house of a single boy. I’d never danced with a girl, never held a girl’s hand. I went to an all-boy’s school.

And she said, "Make Beaufort your home. America needs a fighter pilot in Beaufort."

So I just honed in on this little town. They didn’t ask for me, they got me. And I’ve attached myself to this town in my work.

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Jeannette Walls became a household name telling the stories of famous people as MSNBC’s gossip columnist. But it wasn’t until she was confronted on the way to a fancy event with something she’d been desperately hiding – her mother’s homelessness – that she considered the risks and beauty of telling her own.

"I’m just a woman with a past a woman with a story," Walls said last week in a speech at the Palm Beach County Convention Center as part of PNC Bank’s "Women in Power Lecture Series."

She is the author of the memoir The Glass Castle, about her unorthodox, transient childhood with an alcoholic dreamer father and her manic, creative mother, and Half Broke Horses, a novelization of her grandmother’s maverick life in Arizona.

Walls gave some ideas of how to sift through the painful, hilarious, real pages of one’s life and strike gold.

• Don’t be afraid to tell the truth: Walls said that until she confronted her past, she "felt like a phony" among people she assumed would reject her if they knew the truth.

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Denise Nieman, the Palm Beach County attorney, turned to writing when her usual stress-relieving remedies didn't work. The result: 'Rock the World Rehab.' (Damon Higgins / Palm Beach Post)

At the intersection of yin and yang, where the rational left brain intersects the dreamy right hemisphere, where a high-powered government attorney can also be a girly guru who signs emails "sparkle on," you’ll find Denise Nieman, a puzzle and a paradox.

On the one hand, she’s the Palm Beach County attorney, who provides legal counsel for county government and the County Commission – not an easy job when four commissioners in four years are drummed out of office on criminal charges.

"You realize who your real friends are," is all she’ll say about that experience.

One the other hand, "lawyer" is too small a box for Nieman, whose creative side requires regular workouts.

"My inner child needs to come out and play," she said of her life outside of work.

A few years ago, she invented a sunny alter ego she calls Rox, the Concert Chick, who loves tiaras and tutus, yoga, rock concerts and Paris vacations and loathes energy-sucking "dopes and mopes."

(Nieman’s second husband, Joe, manages Cruzan Ampitheatre, so she attends a lot of concerts.)

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We didn’t have the Encyclopaedia Britannica in my house. We didn’t even have the World Book. We had Funk & Wagnall’s, which I seem to recall cost $2 a volume for 20 weeks at the local A&P.

The crisis came when you missed a week because you got there after the new volume was sold out, which meant somebody had to go scavenging among all the other A&P stores for the missing volume.

I didn’t see an Encyclopaedia Britannica until I went to high school. When I dove into it – which honesty compels me to admit I did sparingly – the entries seemed weighty, like a chemistry textbook translated from unyielding Greek.

But there it was: authority, properly vetted, edited and re-edited within an inch of its life. And now it will be gone, at least as we used to know it: Britannica officials announced last week that it will discontinue the print edition and produce it only online.

The Britannica wasn’t so vulgar as to bring out an edition every year. Decades would go by with the scholar/squirrels writing and updating. Everybody seems to agree that the 11th edition, from 1911, was the gold standard, combining scholarship and literary style.

Certainly, you knew everything in it was factual, because the Britannica hired authorities to write their entries: Lon Chaney wrote the entry on makeup, and other contributors over the years included Albert Einstein and Leon Trotsky.

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CAMOUFLAGE, by Bill Pronzini. Forge; 269 pages; $24.99.

From the beginning of Bill Pronzini’s Camouflage, there is a comforting classicism to the storytelling: a man walks into an office and tells the detective his problem.

In this case, he wants the detective to find his ex-wife and get her to agree to an annulment of their long-ago wedding.

It’s an unusual request, but it seems the man’s fiancée is Catholic and can’t have the church-sanctioned wedding she requires unless his previous wedding is annulled.

This apparently simple task is the proverbial loose thread that gradually unravels until we’re confronted with child abuse and a pile of dead bodies, including the aforementioned prospective husband, who turns out to have bad luck in all things.

Camouflage is Bill Pronzini’s 35th novel featuring The Nameless Detective, a character who made his first appearance in a short story in 1967 – another world ago.

The very name The Nameless Detective promises a sort of smoky noir world of disguises and double-disguises, but he’s not nameless because he’s hiding something, he’s nameless because his first-person narration never gets around to mentioning his last name. (His first name is Bill.)

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Michael Chabon credits his latest honor to the gray in his beard.

“I knew that when the gray came in it was only a matter of time before my augustness would be recognized,” the 48-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner said with a laugh during a recent telephone interview about being voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an “honor society” where members include Toni Morrison, Maya Lin and Philip Glass.

“I am definitely honored and delighted and when I saw who else was in the academy I was sure they had made some kind of mistake.”

Three acclaimed contemporary writers — Chabon, Jonathan Franzen and Jhumpa Lahiri — are among the class of 2012, announced Friday.

Franzen, 52, has written two of the most talked-about literary novels of the past decade, “The Corrections” and “Freedom.” Both were chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, and “The Corrections,” published in 2001, won the National Book Award. A book of essays, “Farther Away,” is coming out in April.

Lahiri, 44, won the Pulitzer in 2000 for her first book, the story collection “Interpreter of Maladies.” Her 2003 novel, “The Namesake,” was later made into a film of the same name, starring Kal Penn.

Chabon received the Pulitzer in 2001 for “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” and also is known for the novels “Wonder Boys” and “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.” A new novel, “Telegraph Avenue,” is scheduled for the fall.

The academy also selected visual artist Kara Walker, sculptors Lynda Benglis and Robert Gober, architect Elizabeth Diller, architect-critic Kenneth Frampton and composers Stephen Jaffe and Tobias Picker. Soprano Leontyne Price and three foreign artists — sculptor Anish Kapoor, artist-author-filmmaker Yayoi Kusama and composer Jo Kondo — were made honorary members. Read the full story

Adult fans of J.K. Rowling can rejoice: She has a new novel coming, for grownups.

The kids will have to wait and see.

The author of the mega-selling “Harry Potter” series has an agreement with Little, Brown in the United States and Britain to release her first adult novel, the publishers announced Thursday. The title, release date and details about the book, long rumored, were not announced. A neighbor of Rowling’s in Edinburgh, author Ian Rankin, tweeted Thursday that he thinks Rowling has written a mystery novel.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults turned out to be a crime story set in Edinburgh?” Rankin wrote. “My word yes.”

Her seventh and final Potter story came out in 2007, and in recent years the British author has said that she was working on an adult book and on a Potter encyclopedia. Rowling’s Potter books, which broke sales records around the world, were published by Bloomsbury in Britain and Scholastic in the U.S. Rowling will now share the same publisher with Stephenie Meyer, whose “Twilight” series at least partially filled the gap opened by the conclusion of the Potter stories.
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LUCKY BREAK, by Esther Freud. Bloomsbury; 320 pages; $16.

At first, I thought Esther Freud had written the wrong novel.

Lucky Break is the story of a group of aspiring actors who all meet at a borderline ridiculous school of dramatic art in London, run by a camp pair of queens.

Freud carefully sketches in her people, all more or less familiar types if you’ve ever been an aspiring actor – the one who auditions brilliantly but never gets any better; the one who glows with radiant sexuality which many mistake for talent; the slightly awkward one who can’t get out of her own way and is looking to escape her own personality into more appealing alternatives.

Dan is the serious grind, Jemma is the girl he falls in love with, Charlie is the stunner, Nell is the apologetic, awkward one.

With the stage set, Freud makes a quick leap into the kids post-graduation careers, and it was at this point that I thought she’d jumped the rails. The set-up had led me to think the book would be a more sophisticated version of Glee, with the twists and turns of post-adolescence and halting maturity carefully delineated.

But my fears were unrealized; Freud didn’t lose the thread of her book, which succeeds as a sweet, slightly comic, ultimately moving, and quite realistic portrayal of the travails of a largely thankless profession.

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