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The Peacemakers with Bruce Jentleson

Bruce Jentleson discussed his new book "The Peacemakers," which he researched while the Kissinger Chair in the Library's John W. Kluge Center. The book explores how a variety of 20th-century leaders rewrote the scripts they were handed to make breakthroughs on issues long thought intractable.

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Rebecca and Floyd Skloot | 2019 AWP Conference and Bookfair
We talked to Rebecca Skloot, and her father (and poet), Floyd. Rebecca is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller, 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,’ while Floyd is a creative nonfiction writer, novelist and poet whose work has won three Pushcart Prizes, a Pen USA Literary Award, two Pacific NW Book Awards, and two Oregon Book Awards.
Jenny Brown | Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women's Work
Join us as feminist organizer Jenny Brown discusses her new book, Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women's Work, with Nation and Jacobin columnist Liza Featherstone.

When House Speaker Paul Ryan urged U.S. women to have more children, and Ross Douthat requested “More babies, please,” in a New York Times column, they openly expressed what policymakers have been discussing for decades with greater discretion. Using technical language like “age structure,” “dependency ratio,” and “entitlement crisis,” establishment think tanks are raising the alarm: if U.S. women don’t get busy having more children, we’ll face an aging workforce, slack consumer demand, and a stagnant economy.

Feminists generally believe that a prudish religious bloc is responsible for the protracted fight over reproductive freedom in the U.S. and that politicians only attack abortion and birth control to appeal to those “values voters.” But hidden behind this conventional explanation is a dramatic fight over women’s reproductive labor. On one side, elite policymakers want an expanding workforce reared with a minimum of employer spending and a maximum of unpaid women’s work. On the other side, women are refusing to produce children at levels desired by economic planners. By some measures our birth rate is the lowest it has ever been. With little access to childcare, family leave, health care, and with insufficient male participation, U.S. women are conducting a spontaneous birth strike.

In other countries, panic over low birth rates has led governments to underwrite childbearing and childrearing with generous universal programs, but in the U.S., women have not yet realized the potential of our bargaining position. When we do, it will lead to new strategies for winning full access to abortion and birth control, and for improving the difficult working conditions U.S. parents now face when raising children.
Cheryl Strayed and Lidia Yuknavitch | 2019 AWP Conference and Bookfair
Cheryl Strayed's second book, the 2012 memoir 'Wild,' went on to win the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Oregon Book Award, and would be adapted into a major motion picture in 2014, starring Reese Witherspoon. Lidia Yuknavitch is an author, editor, and teacher; her 2016 TED Talk, 'The Beauty of Being a Misfit' has more than 2.6 million views, and pawned her 2017 novel The Beauty of Being a Misfit. She also founded the workshop series, Corporeal Writing, in Portland.
Bookforum: "Fool That I Am"
Bookforum's annual Valentine's Day reading, featuring Lexi Freiman, Amitava Kumar, Sam Lipsyte, Minna Zallman Proctor, and Jess Row
David Browne + David Hiatt
Bruce Springsteen: The Stories Behind the Songs by Brian Hiatt: The legend of Bruce Springsteen may well outlast rock ’n’ roll itself. And for all the muscle and magic of his life-shaking concerts with the E Street Band, his legendary status comes down to the songs. He is an acknowledged master of music and lyrics, with decades of hits, from “Blinded by the Light” and “Born to Run” to “Hungry Heart,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “The Rising.”

In Bruce Springsteen: The Stories Behind the Songs, longtime Rolling Stone writer Brian Hiatt digs into the writing and recording of these songs and all the others on Springsteen’s studio albums, from 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. to 2014’s High Hopes (plus all the released outtakes), and offers a unique look at the legendary rocker’s methods, along with historical context, scores of colorful anecdotes, and more than 180 photographs. Hiatt has interviewed Springsteen five times in the past and has conducted numerous new interviews with his collaborators, from longtime producers to the E Street Band, to create an authoritative and lushly illustrated journey through Springsteen’s entire songbook and career.

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young by David Browne: Even in the larger-than-life world of rock and roll, it was hard to imagine four more different men. David Crosby, the opinionated hippie guru. Stephen Stills, the perpetually driven musician. Graham Nash, the tactful pop craftsman. Neil Young, the creatively restless loner. But together, few groups were as in sync with their times as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Starting with the original trio's landmark 1969 debut album, the group embodied much about its era: communal musicmaking, protest songs that took on the establishment and Richard Nixon, and liberal attitudes toward partners and lifestyles.

But their story would rarely be as harmonious as their legendary and influential vocal blend. In the years that followed, these four volatile men would continually break up, reunite, and disband again—all against a backdrop of social and musical change, recurring disagreements and jealousies, and self-destructive tendencies that threatened to cripple them both as a group and as individuals.

In Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock's Greatest Supergroup, longtime music journalist andRolling Stone writer David Browne presents the ultimate deep dive into rock and roll's most musical and turbulent brotherhood on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. Featuring exclusive interviews with David Crosby and Graham Nash along with band members, colleagues, fellow superstars, former managers, employees, and lovers-and with access to unreleased music and documents—Browne takes readers backstage and onstage, into the musicians' homes, recording studios, and psyches, to chronicle the creative and psychological ties that have bound these men together—and sometimes torn them apart. This is the sweeping story of rock's longest-running, most dysfunctional, yet pre-eminent musical family, delivered with the epic feel their story rightly deserves.
Christopher Castellani Reads From His Novel Leading Men
Christopher Castellani’s novel Leading Men (2019) is a reflection on the nature of fame, private life, and romantic entanglement set in the social world of gay 20th century icons Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote in the 1950s. Castellani is the artistic director of Boston’s GrubStreet, one of the country’s leading creative writing centers.
Tiya Miles, "The Dawn of Detroit" Winner of The Fredrick Douglass Book Prize
Book TV presents coverage of the 20th annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

Here is Tiya Miles whose book "The Dawn of Detroit" was one of the two winners of the prize.
Our History Is the Future: Lakota Historian Nick Estes on Indigenous Resistance
As Nebraska and the U.S. Midwest recover from devastating climate change-fueled floods, we continue our interview with Lakota historian Nick Estes on how two centuries of indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming “Water is life.” Estes’s new book is titled Our History Is the Future. He is a co-founder of the indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.
TimesTalks: Robert Caro
Parul Sehgal, a book critic at The New York Times, moderates a conversation with Robert Caro, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Power Broker” and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” His upcoming book “Working” (out on April 9th) is an unprecedented gathering of vivid, candid, and deeply revealing recollections about his experiences researching and writing his acclaimed books. Join us for a discussion on why Caro writes not just about the men who wield power, but about the people and the politics that are shaped by that power.
Cory Doctorow | eh List
Cory Doctorow discussed Radicalized, his timely novel on the social, technological, and economic visions of today and what society could be in the near, near future.

Watch Cory Doctorow in conversation with Barry Hertz.

This event was held in the Atrium of Toronto Reference Library.
Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State
Book launch for Samuel Stein’s “Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State,” with Samuel Stein, Raquel Namuche, Rob Robinson, Shellyne Rodriguez and Esteban Girón.

Recorded at Verso Books in Brooklyn, February 25, 2019.

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Our cities are changing. Global real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, 36 times the value of all the gold ever mined. It makes up 60% of the world's assets, and the most powerful person in the world—the president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and real estate developer.

As Samuel Stein makes clear in his tightly argued book, it’s through the seemingly innocuous profession of city planners that we can best understand the transformations underway. Planners provide a window into the practical dynamics of urban change: the way the state uses and is used by organized capital, and the power of landlords and developers at every level of government. But crucially, planners also possess some of the powers we must leverage if we ever wish to reclaim our cities from real estate capital.

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About the speakers:

Samuel Stein studies geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and teaches urban studies at Hunter College. His writing on planning politics been published by Jacobin, The Journal of Urban Affairs, Metropolitics, and many other magazines and journals. In addition to studying and teaching urban geography, he worked as a researcher, organizer, and planner on numerous New York City union campaigns, tenant mobilizations, and public policy initiatives.

Raquel Namuche is a long-time tenant organizer. Born in Peru and raised in Queens, she is an organizer with the Ridgewood Tenants Union, an independent tenant-led housing group she started in 2014.

Rob Robinson was a co-founder and member of the Leadership Committee of the Take Back the Land Movement and a staff volunteer at the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI). He came into the land and housing movement after spending two years homeless on the streets of Miami and ten months in a New York City Homeless shelter.

Shellyne Rodriguez is a community organizer and a visual artist. As an organizer, she is an active member of radical grassroots collective Take Back the Bronx, who agitate and organize for community control of land and housing. As an artist, her work is a decolonial baroque practice which utilizes text, drawing, painting, found materials, and sculpture to depict subjects and spaces in contention with subjugation.

Esteban Girón is a member of the Crown Heights Tenant Union and serves on the board of Tenants PAC. He lives in Crown Heights with his husband Sean and his dog Chicochu, spending his days making life miserable for his landlord and the developers & politicians who are trying to empty his neighborhood of working-class people of color.
Black Writers Matter | eh List
As part of our eh List and #OnCivilSociety series, we hosted a discussion about Black Writers Matter, a powerful new anthology of African-Canadian writing, edited by Whitney French.

The stories in this collection offer a cross-section of established writers and newcomers to the literary world who tackle contemporary and pressing issues with beautiful, sometimes raw, prose.

Participants:

- Whitney French: writer, storyteller, and multidisciplinary artist.

- Angela Walcott: multidisciplinary artist and writer.

- Sapphire Woods: queer nerd with a passion for Black education.

Moderated by Canisia Lubrin, award-winning writer, poet, critic, and teacher.
Adam Rutherford | Humanimal
We like to think of ourselves as exceptional beings, but are we really more special than other animals? In this original and entertaining tour of life on Earth, Adam Rutherford explores how many of the things once considered to be exclusively human are not: We are not the only species that communicates, makes tools, uses fire, or has sex for reasons other than procreation. Evolution has, however, allowed us to develop a culture far more complex than any other observed in nature. Humanimal explains how we became the creatures we are today, uniquely able to investigate ourselves. Illuminating the latest genetic research, it is a thrilling account of what unequivocally fixes us as animals—and what makes us truly extraordinary.

Adam Rutherford wrote A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived—finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction—and Creation, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize. He writes and presents BBC’s flagship weekly Radio 4 program Inside Science; The Cell for BBC Four; and Playing God (on the rise of synthetic biology) for leading science series Horizon; in addition to writing for the Guardian.
Ada Limon | 2019 AWP Conference and Bookfair
We spoke with Ada Limón about her latest poetry collection, 'The Carrying' which was featured on PBS Books' Best of 2018 List, and it recently won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including 'Bright Dead Things,' which was named a finalist for the National Book Award. She also works as a freelance writer in Lexington, Kentucky.
Cecile Richards | Make Trouble
From Cecile Richards—president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund for more than a decade, daughter of the late Governor Ann Richards, featured speaker at the Women’s March on Washington, and a “heroine of the resistance” (Vogue)—comes a story about learning to lead and make change, based on a lifetime of fighting for women’s rights and social justice.

Cecile Richards has been an activist since she was taken to the principal’s office in seventh grade for wearing an armband in protest of the Vietnam War. She had an extraordinary childhood in ultra-conservative Texas, where her civil rights attorney father and activist mother taught their kids to be troublemakers. In the Richards household, the “dinner table was never for eating—it was for sorting precinct lists.”

From the time Richards was a girl, she had a front-row seat to observe the rise of women in American politics. She watched her mother, Ann, transform from a housewife to an electrifying force in the Democratic party who made a name for herself as the straight-talking, truth-telling governor of Texas. But Richards also witnessed the pitfalls of public life that are unique to women. Her experiences paints a powerful portrait of misogyny, sexism, fake news, and even the threat of violence confronting those who challenge authority.

As a young woman, Richards worked as a labor organizer alongside women earning minimum wage and learned that those in power don’t give it up without a fight. Now, after years of advocacy, resistance, and progressive leadership, she shares her story for the first time—from the joy and heartbreak of activism to the challenges of raising kids, having a life, and making change, all at the same time.

She shines a light on the people and lessons that have gotten her through good times and bad, and encourages readers to take risks, make mistakes, and make trouble along the way. Richards has dedicated her life to taking on injustice, and her memoir will inspire readers to hope and action.

Join us as Cecile sits down with Aminatou Sow, co-host of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend.

Aminatou Sow co-hosts Call Your Girlfriend, a podcast that tackles the intricacies of feminism, pop culture and the latest in politics every single week. She is also a member of the Sundance Institute Director's Advisory Group and previously led Social Impact Marketing at Google. She was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Tech. She is working on a memoir about friendship with her friend, the journalist, Ann Friedman. Aminatou lives in Brooklyn.

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