Rehoboth Beach authors to be featured at 2023 History Book Festival
Two Rehoboth Beach residents and their book of postcards from the Rehoboth Beach Museum collection will be among the authors featured at this year’s History Book Festival, taking place Friday and Saturday, Sept. 29 and 30, and Sunday, Oct. 1, in Lewes.
In partnership with the Rehoboth Beach Historical Society & Museum, authors Roland Forster and David McDonald, who are museum volunteers, published “Greetings from Rehoboth Beach: Postcards from the Collection of the Rehoboth Beach Museum.” The book includes images of black-and-white, sepia-tone, tinted and full-color postcards produced in or for Rehoboth Beach from 1905 to the present. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Rehoboth Beach Camp Meeting Association in 1873, an event recognized as the founding of what came to be known as the Nation’s Summer Capital.
Forster and McDonald’s History Book Festival event will be held on the second day of the festival, Sept. 30, when all author presentations are free, thanks to the support of funding partners the Lee Ann Wilkinson Group, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices/PenFed Realty and Delaware Humanities.
In addition to “Greetings from Rehoboth Beach,” the festival highlights many other recently published works of both historical fiction and nonfiction, including a story about two sisters separated by China’s civil war, and an account of the friendship between Marine Corps aviator John Glenn and professional baseball player Ted Williams.
Zhuqing Li’s “Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden” is the true story of two Chinese sisters, inseparable as children, whose lives were irrevocably disrupted when the “bamboo curtain” dropped between Communist mainland China and Nationalist Taiwan in 1949. Li is a professor of East Asia Studies at Brown University and the author of four scholarly books on Chinese linguistics. “Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden” is based on the lives of her two aunts.
Another historical nonfiction book that will be featured at the festival is “The Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams” by Adam Lazarus, which begins in 1953 during the Korean War. Glenn was an ambitious officer with 59 World War II combat missions under his belt. His wingman? None other than Ted Williams, the two-time American League Triple Crown winner who, at the pinnacle of his career, was inexplicably recalled to active service in the Marine Corps. Lazarus has published other books on iconic figures in American sports history, including Arnold Palmer and Joe Montana.
Forster, McDonald, Li and Lazarus are just four of two dozen authors who will be featured at the first and only festival in the U.S. devoted solely to historical nonfiction and fiction.
For more information on all presenting authors and their featured books, go to historybookfestival.org.
Books can be purchased after each presentation, when authors will be available to sign them, or they may be bought in advance at Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach, the official bookseller of the History Book Festival, or at Biblion in Lewes. All festival titles may also be borrowed from the Delaware Public Library system as the books are available.
