Best Celebrity Appearance at a Fundraiser: Dame Helen Mirren helped raise money for a professorship at Hunter College without a designer gown, red carpet, or film to promote. She was there because the professorship is named in honor of a close friend of both hers and her director husband, Taylor Hackford: the late Jack Newfield, a heroic investigative journalist and a Hunter College graduate.

“We used to watch the boxing matches together,” Ms. Mirren said, referring to visits to the home Newfield shared with his wife, Janie Eisenberg. The Jack Newfield professor for the spring 2008 semester is filmmaker Charles Stuart, who co-produced half a dozen documentaries with Newfield, including “Don King, Unauthorized” and “Robert F. Kennedy: A Memoir,” based on Newfield’s books.

Runner-up: Sheryl Crow’s microphone wasn’t working when she started her set at the Breast Cancer Research Foundation’s Hot Pink Party. Instead of waiting for a fix, she switched to the working microphone at the podium. At fund-raisers, too, the show must go on.

Best Real Estate Spectacles: In the spring, Lincoln Center patrons said goodbye to Alice Tully Hall with a fireworks show over the building. Mayor Bloomberg was on hand to symbolically trigger the blast of lights.

In the fall, showers of light sprung from the Plaza Hotel’s roof and windows on the occasion of the building’s 100th anniversary — but they didn’t signal the re-opening of the hotel, which is now scheduled for the spring.

Best Book Parties: Writing a book is not easy, so authors deserve to have a fun at their book parties. No author deserved a good time more than the ABC correspondent Bob Woodruff, who was seriously injured while reporting in Iraq. He and his wife, Lee, basked in respect and affection at a Literacy Partners reading of their book, “In an Instant: A Family’s Journey of Love and Healing.”

At the Stone Rose Lounge, a former writer for the “Late Show with David Letterman,” Jill Davis, happily welcomed her parents and husband to celebrate her second novel, “Ask Again Later” (HarperCollins), about a single woman dealing with parenting issues.

Jill Kargman’s first solo project, “Momzillas” (Broadway), is about competitive Upper East Side mothers. The book party took place at her parents’ house on the Upper East Side, where she has said she had an upbringing totally unlike the scary kind satirized in her book.

The author of “The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Helen Epstein, had just the right setting for her book party: the home of her father, book publishing icon Jason Epstein, and his wife, journalist Judith Miller, where the shelves are filled with important and riveting books like hers. Ms. Epstein explores how the spread of AIDS can be stopped in Africa, paying particular attention to the prevalence of concurrent long-term sexual relationships.

The crowd was less literary and more glamorous at the party Bergdorf Goodman and Gilles Mendel held in honor of Patrick McMullan’s photography book, “Glamour Girls” (PMc). But with Mr. McMullan so ubiquitous at parties, the guest of honor at this event was his mom, Connie McMullan.

Meanwhile, Nicholas Griffin took partygoers on a historical jaunt at the Campbell Apartment to toast his historical novel “Dizzy City” (Steerforth Press), set in New York circa 1916.

The novel tells the story of an English soldier who escapes to New York to become a con man. But, Mr. Griffin’s genuine wit and warmth is no con.

RELATED: Photos of the Best Book Parties

agordon@nysun.com