Put it on Your Calendar!

The Library will be holding a series of talks in the forthcoming months called AUTHORS @ NIGHT @ DPL: Booktalks by local writers. They will be held in the Lecture Hall at 7, and as always, they are free.

Monday, January 10:   Louis Salome   “Violence, Veils & Bloodlines”

This memoir by an American journalist explores how entrenched notions of self, family, and tribalism dictate human behavior in our modern world. Salome's work as a foreign correspondent, reporting from such places as Belfast, Kabul, Bosnia, and Somalia, provided him with a unique perspective on the role nationalism and tribalism play in global conflicts. 

     

Monday, January 31:   Harrison Thorp   “Freak the News”

Fiction. Chris' is a 50-something seasoned journalist who enjoys a good drink. After years away from the field, he returns to his first love, the copy desk, at a small newspaper in Maine. Shawn, a talented writer fresh out of journalism school, winds up at the same paper. He wants to hang around long enough to make a name for himself, get some clips and move on to a big-city paper. When a surgical deaths story at the local hospital is killed by newspaper executives, Chris and Shawn become suspicious and discover a scheme that involves the blackmail of an alcoholic physician into naming a cardiac care center after the paper. Against the backdrop of a frantic, fractious and bawdy newsroom, Chris and Shawn, each at times fearful and uncertain about their commitment to the cause, find themselves driven on to a climax that exposes the bad guys and gives the paper's readers a front page they'll never forget. It is a profession proudly steeped in the virtues of truth and integrity. But what most don't realize is that those virtuous journalistic endeavors are often no more than a means to an end. The only reason to "get it right" on most stories is so they can successfully manipulate readers on a precious few. 

Monday, March 7:        Michele Albion   “The Quotable Thomas Edison”

Thomas Edison was the "Wizard of Menlo Park." A prolific inventor and holder of numerous patents, he was also called a "magician," "the Napoleon of Science," and the "Inventor of the Age." But he was also a practical joker, a self-made man with a certain disdain for polite society, an ambitious explorer, and a public intellectual.
 The Quotable Edison offers a wealth of his insightful, enlightening, and sometimes humorous comments and witticisms on a wide range of subjects, from business to politics, from religion to nutrition, from advice to boys to opinions on women’s clothing.
 Famous for his dictum that "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration," Edison offered many other gems.
- On religion, "Satan is the scarecrow of the religious cornfield."
- On the English, "The English are not an inventive people; they don’t eat enough pie."
- On the law, "A lawsuit is the suicide of time."

Tuesday, February 8:   Stephanie Harzewski   “Chick Lit and Postfeminism”

Originally a euphemism for Princeton University's Female Literary Tradition course in the 1980s, "chick lit" mutated from a movement in American women's avant-garde fiction in the 1990s to become, by the turn of the century, a humorous subset of women's literature, journalism, and advice manuals. Stephanie Harzewski examines such bestsellers as Bridget Jones's Diary, The Devil Wears Prada, and Sex and the City as urban appropriations of and departures from the narrative traditions of the novel of manners, the popular romance, and the bildungsroman. Further, Harzewski uses chick lit as a lens through which to view gender relations in U.S. and British society in the 1990s.