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TimesTalks | Yuval Noah Harari
Bari Weiss, Op-Ed staff editor and writer at The New York Times, will join Yuval Noah Harari, historian, philosopher and international best-selling author of “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus” for a thought-provoking evening of conversation. Harari’s new book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” untangles political, technological, social and existential issues. It clarifies the most important questions humankind faces today, and empowers all of us to help answer them. His provocative insights on the most pressing issues of the day have won him fans ranging from Bill Gates and Barack Obama to Natalie Portman and Janelle Monáe.
Sonia Sotomayor on Turning Pages: My Life Story
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor talks with PBS Books co-host Rich Fahle about here books, My Life Story and The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor at the 2018 National Book Festival.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

(My Life Story)

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor tells her own story for young readers for the very first time!

As the first Latina Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor has inspired young people around the world to reach for their dreams. But what inspired her? For young Sonia, the answer was books! They were her mirrors, her maps, her friends, and her teachers. They helped her to connect with her family in New York and in Puerto Rico, to deal with her diabetes diagnosis, to cope with her father’s death, to uncover the secrets of the world, and to dream of a future for herself in which anything was possible.

In Turning Pages, Justice Sotomayor shares that love of books with a new generation of readers, and inspires them to read and puzzle and dream for themselves. Accompanied by Lulu Delacre’s vibrant art, this story of the Justice’s life shows readers that the world is full of promise and possibility–all they need to do is turn the page.

(The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor)

Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, was a young girl when she dared to dream big. Her dream? To become a lawyer and a judge.

As Justice Sotomayor explains, "When I was a child my family was poor and we knew no lawyers or judges and none lived in our neighborhood. I knew nothing about the Supreme Court and how much its work in reinterpreting the Constitution and the laws of the United States affected peoples' lives. You cannot dream of becoming something you don't even know about. That has been the most important lesson of my life. You have to learn to dream big dreams."

Sonia did not let the hardships of her background—which included growing up in the rough housing projects of New York City's South Bronx, dealing with juvenile diabetes, coping with parents who argued and fought personal demons, and worrying about money—stand in her way. Always, she believed in herself. Her determination, along with guidance from generous mentors and the unwavering love of her extended Puerto Rican family, propelled her ever forward.
Celeste Ng on Little Fires Everywhere at the 2018 National Book Festival
Celeste Ng discusses Little Fires Everywhere at the 2018 National Book Festival.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother – who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the alluring mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When the Richardsons' friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town and puts Mia and Mrs. Richardson on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Mrs. Richardson becomes determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs to her own family – and Mia's.

Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of long-held secrets and the ferocious pull of motherhood-and the danger of believing that planning and following the rules can avert disaster, or heartbreak.
Charlene Carruthers | Unapologetic
Charlene A. Carruthers is a Black, queer feminist community organizer. As the founding national director of the Black Youth Project 100, she has worked alongside hundreds of young Black activists to build a national base of activist member-led organizations of Black 18-35 year olds dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all Black people. She has led grassroots and digital strategy campaigns for national organizations including the Center for Community Change, the Women's Media Center, ColorOfChange.org and National People's Action, as well as being a member of a historic delegation of young activists in Palestine in 2015 to build solidarity between Black and Palestinian liberation movements.

Join us as she reads a piece of her new book Unapologetic and discusses her struggles and inspirations with organizer, educator and curator Mariame Kaba.

Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.
Walter Rodney’s Russian Revolution
With Robin D.G. Kelley, Vijay Prashad, and Christina Heatherton. At Verso Books in Brooklyn, May 24, 2018.

—-

In his short life, Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the foremost thinkers and activists of the anti colonial revolution, leading movements in North America, Africa, and the Caribbean, Wherever he was, Rodney was a lighting rod for working-class Black Power organizing. His deportation sparked Jamaica’s Rodney Riots in 1968, and his scholarship trained a generation how to approach politics on an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, the thirty-eight-year-old Rodney was assassinated.

Walter Rodney’s “The Russian Revolution” collects surviving texts from a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Dar Es Salaam, an intellectual hub of the independent Third World. It had been his intention to work these into a book, a goal completed posthumously with the editorial aid of Robin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin. Moving across the historiography of the long Russian Revolution with clarity and insight, Rodney transcends the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. Surveying a board range of subjects—the Narodniks, social democracy, the October Revolution, civil war, and the challenges of Stalinism–Rodney articulates a distinct viewpoint from the Third World, one that grounds revolutionary theory and history with the people in motion.
Karl Ove Knausgaard: The Waterstones Interview
With the arrival of the final book in his six-volume autobiographical novel series, My Struggle, it was time to sit down and have a proper chat with Karl Ove Knausgaard about The End, its very beginnings, and the crucial question after all the fallout and recriminations: was it worth it?
Ottessa Moshfegh: The Waterstones Interview
Following on from the success of her Man Booker Prize-nominated novel, Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh spoke to us about My Year of Rest and Relaxation - a couriously affecting tale of a woman who wants to medicate herself to sleep for a whole year. Where did this unique idea come from?
How to Abolish the Police State
With Yasmina Price, David Correia, Tyler Wall, Alex Vitale, and tag. At Verso Books in Brooklyn, on May 31, 2018.

Co-sponsored by the NYC DSA Racial Justice Working Group.

—-

What tools and language do we need to arm activists with in the struggle to dismantle the police state? How can we connect the struggles against police violence with the legacy of US colonial oppression and the militarization of borders? How can we link current policing practices as tools of social control to their racist origins?

Join panelists Yasmina Price, David Correia, Tyler Wall, Alex Vitale, and tag for an in-depth discussion on the origins of modern policing, how the language of policing reinforces oppressive structures, and strategies for working toward police and prison abolition. We need to move beyond the limits of reform, in language and policy, to work across movements toward a society free from police violence and from police entirely.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

YASMINA PRICE is a Brooklyn-based organizer committed to the development of robust networks of leftists from the African diaspora and abolishing prisons, police and all oppressive structures. Growing up in Niger, France, and Italy, she is dedicated to working towards to dismantling the international mechanisms of racism, imperialism and colonialism. She is on the Racial Justice organizing committee of NYC-DSA and is one of the founders of its National Afro-Socialist & Socialists of Color Caucus. She is currently employed by New York Communities for Change, a local community organization fighting against racial oppression and economic injustice.

DAVID CORREIA is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico.

TYLER WALL is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee.

ALEX S. VITALE is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project there. He has spent the last 25 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have appeared in the New York Daily News, New York Times, Nation, Gotham Gazette, and New Inquiry.

tag is a prison slavery abolitionist from Harlem who works with organizations engaged in Abolitionism such as The Campaign to Bring Mumia Home & IWOC-NYC. He currently resides in the Bronx, where attacks on public housing in the form of "gang raids" have been rampant in recent years.
James McBride on Five-Carat Soul at the 2018 National Book Festival
James McBride discusses Five-Carat Soul at the 2018 National Book Festival.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

The stories in Five-Carat Soul—none of them ever published before—spring from the place where identity, humanity, and history converge. McBride explores the ways we learn from the world and the people around us. An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. Five strangers find themselves thrown together and face unexpected judgment. An American president draws inspiration from a conversation he overhears in a stable. And members of The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band recount stories from their own messy and hilarious lives.
James Fallows + Deborah Fallows on Our Towns at the 2018 National Book Festival
James Fallows and Deborah Fallow discuss Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America at the 2018 National Book Festival.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

A vivid, surprising portrait of the civic and economic reinvention taking place in America, town by town and generally out of view of the national media. A realistically positive and provocative view of the country between its coasts.

For the last five years, James and Deborah Fallows have been traveling across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, they have met hundreds of civic leaders, workers, immigrants, educators, environmentalists, artists, public servants, librarians, business people, city planners, students, and entrepreneurs to take the pulse and understand the prospects of places that usually draw notice only after a disaster or during a political campaign.

The America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but itis also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.
“Make Trouble”: Cecile Richards on Her Life Story, Reproductive Rights
From the massive Women’s March against President Trump’s inauguration, to the wave of teachers’ strikes sweeping across red states nationwide, to the #MeToo movement, women have been at the forefront of rising political and social mobilizations challenging the Trump administration’s agenda and the entrenched gender-based violence and white supremacy in U.S. society. For more, we speak with Cecile Richards, who has just stepped aside as president of Planned Parenthood after 12 years. She’s just published a new memoir, “Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead.”
Charlene Carruthers | Unapologetic
Charlene A. Carruthers is a Black, queer feminist community organizer. As the founding national director of the Black Youth Project 100, she has worked alongside hundreds of young Black activists to build a national base of activist member-led organizations of Black 18-35 year olds dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all Black people. She has led grassroots and digital strategy campaigns for national organizations including the Center for Community Change, the Women's Media Center, ColorOfChange.org and National People's Action, as well as being a member of a historic delegation of young activists in Palestine in 2015 to build solidarity between Black and Palestinian liberation movements.

Join us as she reads a piece of her new book Unapologetic and discusses her struggles and inspirations with organizer, educator and curator Mariame Kaba.

Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.
Martha Nussbaum - The Monarchy of Fear
A discussion with philosopher and professor, Martha C. Nussbaum, on her new book The Monarchy of Fear at the Cambridge Public Library. Co-sponsored by Boston Review (http://www.bostonreview.net) and Harvard Book Store (http://www.harvard.com/events/) through their ongoing author series.

Professor Nussbaum speaks to an audience, many fresh from the voting polls for the pivotal 2018 primary election, on the evening of September 4th, about how fear has played a key role in our current political crisis.
Keisha N. Blain: Set the World on Fire
Keisha N. Blain discusses her book, the first to examine how black nationalist women engaged in national and global politics in the mid twentieth century, with NYU professor Thomas J. Sugrue.

In 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa. In 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural black workers around black nationalist causes. In the late 1940s, from her home in Kingston, Jamaica, Amy Jacques Garvey launched an extensive letter-writing campaign to defend the Greater Liberia Bill, which would relocate 13 million black Americans to West Africa. Gordon, Allen, and Jacques Garvey—as well as Maymie De Mena, Ethel Collins, Amy Ashwood, and Ethel Waddell—are part of an overlooked and understudied group of black women who take center stage in Set the World on Fire.

Historians of the era generally portray the period between the Garvey movement of the 1920s and the Black Power movement of the 1960s as an era of declining black nationalist activism, but Keisha N. Blain reframes the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War as significant eras of black nationalist—and particularly, black nationalist women’s—ferment. In Chicago, Harlem, and the Mississippi Delta, from Britain to Jamaica, these women built alliances with people of color around the globe, agitating for the rights and liberation of black people in the United States and across the African diaspora. As pragmatic activists, they employed multiple protest strategies and tactics, combined numerous religious and political ideologies, and forged unlikely alliances in their struggles for freedom. Drawing on a variety of previously untapped sources, including newspapers, government records, songs, and poetry, Set the World on Fire highlights the flexibility, adaptability, and experimentation of black women leaders who demanded equal recognition and participation in global civil society.

Keisha N. Blain is an award-winning historian who writes on race, politics, and gender. She obtained a PhD in History from Princeton University and currently teaches history at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and co-editor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016). Her work has been published in several academic journals such as the Journal of Social History and Souls; and popular outlets including the Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and The Feminist Wire. She is the president of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and senior editor of its popular blog, Black Perspectives.

Thomas J. Sugrue is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History, the founding Director of the Collaborative on Global Urbanism, and the Director of the Program in American Studies at New York University. The author of four books and editor of three others, he contributes to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Salon. He is a frequent commentator on modern American history, politics, civil rights, and urban policy. Sugrue has given over 350 public lectures throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Asia.
Dr. Carla Hayden interview at 2018 National Book Festival
Dr. Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, talks with host Jeffrey Brown at the 2018 National Book Festival.

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