The Free Library Podcast is an easy way to participate in the author events and lectures that take place at the Parkway Central Library. Visit Author Events to find upcoming events.
Charles Kenny | The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease
Jan 29, 2021
Show notes
A senior fellow and the director of technology and development at the Center for Global Development, Charles Kenny has extensively contributed to policy reforms in global health, UN peacekeeping, and international financial corruption, among many other urgent issues. A contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and a contributor to Business Week, he is the author of Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More and The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest Is Great for the West. In The Plague Cycle, Kenny reveals the precarious relationship between civilization and infectious disease over the past 5,000 years.
Books may be purchased through the Joseph Fox Bookshop
(recorded 1/28/2021)
Stephanie Schriock | Run to Win: Lessons in Leadership for Women Changing the World
Jan 28, 2021
Show notesIn conversation with Yvette Nicole Brown, star of screens big and small and known to audiences for her roles in Community, The Mayor, Supermansion, The Odd Couple, and many other films and TV shows.
The president of EMILY's List since 2010, Stephanie Schriock has helped steer the five-million-member organization to some of the greatest victories seen in its 35-year history. These victories included the election of many pro-choice women Democratic U.S. senators, U.S. representatives, governors, and state and local officials. Currently on the Board of Advisors of the anti-voter suppression group Let America Vote, Schriock served as the national finance director of Howard Dean's presidential campaign and managed the Senate races of Jon Tester in 2006 and Al Franken in 2008. In Run to Win, she offers strategies women can use to succeed in politics and other male-dominated fields. Stacey Abrams writes, ''Run to Win demystifies how to tackle the challenges of campaigns, using authentic voices to welcome readers with honesty, compassion and humor.''
Books may be purchased through the Joseph Fox Bookshop
(recorded 1/27/2021)
Salamishah Tillet | In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece
Jan 27, 2021
Show notesIn conversation with Errin Haines, founding member and editor at large at The 19th, a new, nonprofit newsroom focused on the intersection of women, politics and policy.Salamishah Tillet is the author of Sites of Slavery, an examination of how contemporary African American intellectuals utilize the subject of slavery to challenge African American exclusion from the narratives of American history. She is a contributing critic-at-large for the New York Times, the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark, and cofounder of the Chicago-based arts nonprofit A Long Walk Home. An amalgam of literary history, memoir, cultural criticism, and biography, Tillet's latest book explores the impact of Alice Walker's 1982 novel and the circumstances of its creation. (recorded 1/26/2021)
VIRTUAL - Sadeqa Johnson | Yellow Wife
Jan 26, 2021
Show notesIn conversation with Jennifer Weiner, bestselling author of numerous books including In Her Shoes and most recently Big Summer
Yellow Wife tells the harrowing story of an enslaved woman forced to barter love and freedom while living in the most infamous slave jail in Richmond, Virginia.
Sadeqa Johnson is the award-winning author of four novels, each exploring themes of marital fidelity, friendship, and the difficulties of connecting in modern life. Her accolades include being the recipient of the National Book Club Award, the Phillis Wheatley Award and the USA Best Book Award for best fiction.'' (recorded 1/25/2021)
Gabriel Byrne | Walking with Ghosts
Jan 22, 2021
Show notesIn conversation with musician and novelist Wesley Stace, author of Misfortune, By George, Wonder Kid and most recently Out Loud with dancer and choreographer Mark Morris
An actor renowned as much for his versatility as his depth, Gabriel Byrne has portrayed King Arthur, Satan, Pope Gregory X, Lord Byron, a heartless Irish-American gangster, a Viking chieftain, D'Artagnan the Musketeer, and an ersatz Keyser Söze, among hundreds of other screen and stage roles. He earned a Golden Globe Award and two Emmy nominations for his role as a self-doubting psychotherapist on HBO's In Therapy, and was thrice nominated for Tony Awards for his roles in Eugene O'Neill's plays. In Walking with Ghosts, Byrne traces his path as a boy wandering the outskirts of working-class Dublin, to his entrance and expulsion from the Catholic seminary, to his days in amateur theater that launched a 40-year career.
A book and signed book plate are included with the price of your ticket.
Books will be mailed after the event.
Please allow 2 - 3 weeks for delivery.
(recorded 1/21/2021)
Ijeoma Oluo | Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America
Jan 20, 2021
Show notes
In conversation with Tracey Matisak, award-winning broadcaster and journalist
''A nuanced analysis of White male America'' that ''deftly combines history and sociological study with personal narrative'' (Washington Post), Ijeoma Oluo's So You Want to Talk About Race took a frank look at America's institutionally racist political, economic, and social systems. A New York Times bestseller, it garnered wide critical acclaim and was named to a plethora of 2018's best-of-the-year lists. Named one of the Root's 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2017, Oluo has written for the Guardian, the Stranger, Time, and Elle, among other publications. In Mediocre, she investigates the costs and consequences of white male supremacy over the last 150 years of American history.
Closed captioning and ASL Interpretation will be provided.A book and signed book plate are included with the price of your ticket.
Books will be mailed after the event.
Please allow 2 - 3 weeks for delivery.
(recorded 1/19/2021)
George Saunders | A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Masterclass on Writing, Reading, and Life
Jan 19, 2021
Show notes
In conversation with Daniel Torday, Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West, Boomer1, and The Sensualist, and two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award.
''One of the most gifted, wickedly entertaining story writers around'' (New York Times Book Review), George Saunders won the Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, a kaleidoscopic tale of the 16th President's son's death and purgatorial afterlife. His surreal short story collections include the New York Times notable books Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline; and Tenth of December, a National Book Award finalist. A professor of creating writing at Syracuse University, Saunders is the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships and has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Pairing iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol with seven corresponding essays, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a meditative master class on what makes great fiction click.
A signed book is included with the price of your ticket.
Books will be mailed after the event.
Please allow 2 - 3 weeks for delivery. (recorded 1/18/2021)
Tommy Lasorda | I Live for This: Baseball's Last True Believer
Jan 12, 2021
Show notes
In conversation with author, journalist, and editor Larry Platt
After 20 years of managing and 57 years with one franchise, Tommy Lasorda still suits up in Dodger Blue every day. The embodiment of the American dream, Lasorda went from a scrawny, overlooked Italian kid of average ability to become one of the most successful managers in baseball history--a Hall of Famer who led the Dodgers to eight division titles and two world championships in his storied seasons as manager. (recorded 11/16/2007)
Katherine May | Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Dec 11, 2020
Show notesIn conversation with Tracey Matisak, award-winning broadcaster and journalistKatherine May's fiction and memoirs include The Electricity of Every Living Thing, Burning Out, and No-Stress Meditation. She was also the editor of The Best, Most Awful Job, an anthology of essays about motherhood. Her latest book is Wintering, a paean to how we muddle through life's inevitable fallow seasons and embrace the opportunities these moments offer. Melding lessons from literature, the natural world, and personal experience, it's referred to by Elizabeth Gilbert as ''every bit as beautiful and healing as the season itself.'' The former Programme Director for Creative Writing at Canterbury Christ Church University, May has published work in such varied periodicals as Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and the Times of London.
Books available through theJoseph Fox Bookshop
(recorded 12/10/2020)
Jerald Walker | How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
Dec 10, 2020
Show notesIn conversation with author, essayist, and radio host Solomon Jones.Jerald Walker's recent How to Make a Slave and Other Essays was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award. A ''restless, brilliant'' collection that ''can alight on a truth without pinning it in place'' (New York Times), it examines such wide-ranging topics as the medical establishment's racial biases, the burden of cultural stereotypes, and other elements that speak to what it means to be a Black American male in this charged moment. A creative writing professor at Emerson College and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Walker is also the author of Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption; and The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult.
(recorded 12/9/2020)
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