Jackson Pearce: Sisters Red
Decatur Library Auditorium
July 26th , 7:15 p.m.
Atlanta author Jackson Pearce is the highly praised author of several books for young readers including ”As You Wish” and her latest, ”Sisters Red.” Pearce will discuss ”Sisters Red,” written for 8th graders and up, a fable-inspired thriller featuring some dangerous werewolves and a mystery to be solved. School Library Journal gives it a starred review and calls it ”an adventure that grabs the reader and never lets go.”

For Scarlett and Rosie March, the world is not what it seems. Werewolves, called Fenris, live among them in the form of good-looking men who prey on pretty young girls. When a Fenris attacked the March girls, it killed their grandmother and left them emotionally and, for Scarlett, physically scarred. Since then, they have taken action and revenge. With the help of a friend, Silas, the girls are on a mission—to destroy as many Fenris as they can. This goal becomes more complicated when they try to unravel the mystery behind the pack and prevent the next "Potential" from transforming fully into a soulless, evil monster.
Pearce is on the mark with this modern-day retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Told by the sisters in alternating chapters, this well-written, high-action adventure grabs readers and never lets go. Rosie and Scarlett are true heroines; smart, tough, and determined, but their special bond is put to test when Rosie and Silas's relationship becomes more than just friendship.

Pearl Cleage: Till You Hear From Me
Decatur Library Auditorium
July 27th, 7pm
Just when it appears that all her hard work on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is about to pay off with a White House job, thirty-five-year-old Ida B. Wells Dunbar finds herself on Washington, D.C.’s post-election sidelines even as her twenty-something counterparts overrun the West Wing. Adding to her woes, her father, the Reverend Horace A. Dunbar, Atlanta civil rights icon and self-described “foot soldier for freedom,” is notoriously featured on an endlessly replayed YouTube clip in which his pronouncements don’t exactly jibe with the new era in American politics.

Along with Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright, Cleage’s fictional Reverend Horace Dunbar is considered one of the old guard of the civil rights movement. His position in the post-Obama firmament seems secure until the Rev, as he is known, vents an unsuspected level of frustration to a reporter and the rant goes viral on YouTube. The PR fallout is damaging enough to bring his estranged daughter, Ida, home to Atlanta from Washington, where she anxiously awaits a job offer from the White House as a reward for her campaign work. Right behind her on the road to Atlanta, however, is Wes, the son of the Rev’s best friend, covertly sent by the RNC to steal the Rev’s extensive voter-registration list. While she and her father inch toward a rapprochement, Ida and a coterie of sharp, sassy women work to foil Wes’ plans. Within the timely, politically relevant milieu of the new administration, best-selling, incisive Cleage zestfully crafts an intuitive novel of trust and responsibility, kinship and conviction.

Cleage’s many bestselling books include Seen It All and Done the Rest, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day and Some Things I Never Thought I’d Do.

Rafe Esquith: Lighting Their Fires: Raising Extraordinary Children in a Mixed-up, Muddled-up, Shook-up World
Decatur Library Auditorium
August 2nd , 7:00 P.M.
Schools are starting their new year, and if you care about the quality of children’s education, you won’t want to miss our guest, the only teacher to have been awarded the President’s Medal of the Arts and the author of the bestseller, Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire.

Rafe Esquith’s super-successful, inspirational teaching methods have helped thousands of children maximize their potential. His new book is Lighting Their Fires: Raising Extraordinary Children, is a book that enlarges on his themes and shows us how to make our kids not just great students but thoughtful and honorable citizens.

Rafe Esquith is an innovative, multiple-award-winning American teacher at Hobart Boulevard Elementary School, in Los Angeles, California, where he has taught since 1981. Most of the school's 2,000 students come from immigrant Central American and Korean families. According to a 2005 report on National Public Radio, 90 percent of his students were living below the poverty level, and all were from immigrant families, with none speaking English as a first language.

Esquith's fifth-grade students consistently score in the top 5 to 10 percent of the country in standardized tests. Many of Esquith's students voluntarily start class at 6:30 each morning, two hours before the rest of the school's students. They volunteer to come early, work through recess and stay as late as 6:00 pm, and also come to class during vacations and holidays.

Esquith has authored several books about teaching, and a documentary film has been made about his annual class Shakespeare productions.
His teaching honors include the 1992 Disney National Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award, a Sigma Beta Delta Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University, Oprah Winfrey’s $100,000 "Use Your Life Award", Parents Magazine’s "As You Grow Award", and a National Medal of Arts.

Jonathan Lerner: ALEX UNDERGROUND
Wednesday 7/21 7:30pm Outwrite Bookstore
Jonathan Lerner, a founding member of the Weather Underground, draws on memory and imagination to tell an authentic story of politics and passion, idealism and deceit, love, loss and survival.

It’s 1970, the era of transgressive sex, psychedelic drugs and violent revolution.

Alex gives an impassioned speech that incites a deadly campus riot; he and Doug take off on the run. Chicago, Paris, London, Havana. Highways and hideouts, cocktail bars and cruising spots, all-night drives, secret meetings and a bank heist that goes spectacularly wrong... Meanwhile Alex comes to see that his friend can never give him what he really wants. So he uses this clandestine interlude to uncover his own hidden truth.
Pretended identities, twisted secrets – but coming out gay and whole on the other side. “That awful year,” Alex will reflect much later, “when a benign impulse to remake the world led me to do so many strange and regrettable things.” This is a gripping story of the knotted psychology beneath political action, and one man’s struggle to find his honest self.

Alison Weir: CAPTIVE QUEEN: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine7/22 7pmMargaret Mitchell House

A Tudor specialist, popular British historian Weir has ventured, with great success, into the increasingly expansive world of historical fiction with Innocent Traitor (2007) and The Lady Elizabeth (2008); now she relocates further back in English history, into the twelfth century.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was the ruler of a powerful French duchy in her own right; her marriage to King Louis VII of France was annulled when she set eyes on the handsome Henry Plantagenet, count of Anjou. Eleanor and he married, he succeeded to the English throne, and Eleanor found herself queen of England. Their tumultuous marriage is the backbone of this novel. Henry was ever lusty, and Eleanor was no shrinking violet herself. Much of the battleground between these two strong-willed individuals was their sons: Henry fought against them; Eleanor fought for them like the she-lion she was.

The history itself is inherently dramatic, augmented here by Weirs usual lush detail, which stimulates rather than detracts from the well-paced narrative.

David Bottoms: The Onion’s Dark Core7/22 Decatur Library, 7:15 pm

David Bottoms, the distinguished Poet Laureate of Georgia and one of America’s finest poets will read from his latest work. The book is The Onion’s Dark Core, and it’s mostly a collection of essays composed by the poet. Edward Hirsch calls it a book that is ”personal, keenly thoughtful” and ”that treats poetry with the seriousness it deserves, as ’the most natural vehicle of the spirit’.” Bottoms has written six other books of poetry and two novels, and he holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

“What Bottoms has to say about place in poetry, consequence in poetry, and his own role in the murky matter, not to say sound, of Southern poetry is worth the price of multiple volumes. Bottoms writes something more like meditation than criticism and his book will pleasure long and well the most discriminating as well as the amateur reader.”
— Dave Smith, author of Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems 1992-2004

“David Bottoms has always been one of the seekers and yearners among our poets. In these pages he gives us an indelible sense of why that is so. Rooted in experience, rich with a sense of place, wise and frankly honest, these essays and interviews give an encouraging vision of our poetry as it makes its uncertain way into the 21st century.”
— Mark Jarman, author of Epistles: Poems

MARY KAY ANDREWS : THE FIXER-UPPER
Tuesday 7/13 The Iberian Pig, 5pm

The delightful New York Times bestselling author returns with a hilarious novel about one woman's quest to redo an old house . . . and her life.
After her boss in a high-powered Washington public relations firm is caught in a political scandal, fledgling lobbyist Dempsey Jo Killebrew is left almost broke, unemployed, and homeless. Out of options, she reluctantly accepts her father's offer to help refurbish Birdsong, the old family place he recently inherited in Guthrie, Georgia. All it will take, he tells her, is a little paint and some TLC to turn the fading Victorian mansion into a real-estate cash cow.
But, oh, is Dempsey in for a surprise when she arrives in Guthrie. "Bird Droppings" would more aptly describe the moldering Pepto Bismol–pink dump with duct-taped windows and a driveway full of junk. There's also a murderously grumpy old lady, one of Dempsey's distant relations, who has claimed squatter's rights and isn't moving out. Ever.
Furthermore, everyone in Guthrie seems to know Dempsey's business, from a smooth-talking real-estate agent to a cute lawyer who owns the local newspaper. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the pesky FBI agents who show up on Dempsey's doorstep, hoping to pry information about her ex-boss from her.
All Dempsey can do is roll up her sleeves and get to work. And before long, what started as a job of necessity somehow becomes a labor of love and, ultimately, a journey that takes her to a place she never expected—back home again.

Jennifer Weiner: FLY AWAY HOME
7/16 6pm
Margaret Mitchell House

Jennifer Weiner is the author of bestsellers, Best Friends Forever, Certain Girls, Good in Bed, In her shoes, Little Earthquakes, and The Guy Not Taken. Her latest, FLY AWAY HOME is written with an irresistible blend of heartbreak and hilarity. Fly Away Home is an unforgettable story of a mother and two daughters who after a lifetime of distance finally learn to find refuge in one another.
When Sylvie Serfer met Richard Woodruff in law school, she had wild curls, wide hips, and lots of opinions. Decades later, Sylvie has remade herself as the ideal politician’s wife—her hair dyed and straightened, her hippie-chick wardrobe replaced by tailored knit suits. At fifty-seven, she ruefully acknowledges that her job is staying twenty pounds thinner than she was in her twenties and tending to her husband, the senator.
Lizzie, the Woodruffs’ younger daughter, is at twenty-four a recovering addict, whose mantra HALT (Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired?) helps her keep her life under control. Still, trouble always seems to find her. Her older sister, Diana, an emergency room physician, has everything Lizzie failed to achieve—a husband, a young son, the perfect home—and yet she’s trapped in a loveless marriage. With temptation waiting in one of the ER’s exam rooms, she finds herself craving more.
After Richard’s extramarital affair makes headlines, the three women are drawn into the painful glare of the national spotlight. Once the press conference is over, each is forced to reconsider her life, who she is and who she is meant to be.

Joseph Gatins: WE WERE DANCING ON A VOLCANO: Bloodlines and Fault Lines of a Star-Crossed Atlanta Family, 1849-1989
7/17 Roswell Public Library, 2pm

This compelling saga, family biography and unsentimental social history follows the adventures of more than five generations of families that made their mark on Atlanta, New York, Savannah, Paris, Bogota and Killybegs, the tiny fishing village in County Donegal, Ireland, where the clan originated. The narrative especially highlights Gatins’ French grandmother's brave work with the French Resistance in World War II and her untiring efforts to successfully help her only son escape from Nazi prisoner of war camps.

The book, richly illustrated, has been more than a dozen years in the making, fruit of detailed research in courthouses and archives on three continents and review of voluminous family correspondence, documents and photo albums. Bilingual in French and English since childhood, he is responsible for all translations contained therein.

Now retired, Joseph Gatins for many years was a reporter and special projects editor with The Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia. He was reared in Paris and Atlanta and now lives with his artist-author wife Fran in the mountains of north Georgia, where he is learning to appreciate the wilds that surround them.

Stan Cox: LOSING OUR COOL: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer)
Tuesday 7/6/2010 7pm Manuel’s Tavern, A cappella Books

In America, and especially across the South, air conditioning has become a summer way of life, as ubiquitous as cookouts and baseball. And as climate change continues to push the mercury upward, the role that A/C plays during the sultry times of the year promises to rise along with it. But despite the integral place air conditioners occupy in the modern world, it's rare that they are paid much mind – unless they break or fall victim to a power outage, that is.

With the release of Stan Cox's new book, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer), however, the myriad problems posed by the world's fast-increasing reliance on air conditioning is being revealed. The first book to tackle the weighty issue of air conditioning's effects on energy use – and thus its role in feeding the warming trend it is being used to combat – as well as on our health itself, Cox's work "offers much for consumers, environmentalists, and policy makers to consider before powering up to cool down," as its recent review in Publishers Weekly read. Losing Our Cool is a thoroughly researched, sweeping account of what lies ahead for our artificially cooled world.
A scientist and environmental writer who currently works at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, Cox spent time in Florida, Arizona and India working on the book. His research uncovered astonishing details of the ways in which air conditioning has taken hold of our lives, including the facts that the amount of energy used to power home air-conditioning systems in America, as well as the greenhouse emissions they produce, has doubled over just the last decade, and energy devoted to cooling the country's retail stores has risen by two-thirds. Six out of every seven gallons of diesel fuel imported by the U.S. into Iraq and Afghanistan goes toward running air conditioners. And amazingly, the amount of electricity Americans use for air conditioners each year is equal to what it takes to power the entire continent of Africa. In addition to those eye-popping details of air conditioning's role in energy use, Cox presents troubling accounts of the technology's effects on rates of infection, allergy, asthma and obesity.
As summer turns up the heat outdoors and inevitably leads us to turn to air conditioning to keep it down indoors, Cox's new book is sure to spark lively discussions of just where all the Freon-induced comfort is leading.

Julie Andrews: THE VERY FAIRY PRINCESS
Friday July 9, 6pm Little Shop of Stories

As any library staff member will tell you, there can never be too many princess stories. Geraldine leads a rather ordinary life, and each page highlights a part of her mundane day. However, in the grand tradition of other literary, bedazzled mini-divas, Geraldine's imagination and love for the color pink brighten the daily grind of being a scab-kneed little girl. Readers will enjoy Geraldine's princess attitude and the vibrant fantasy brought to life through Davenier's ink and colored pencil illustrations.
While her friends and family may not believe in fairies, Geraldine knows, deep down, that she is a VERY fairy princess. From morning to night, Gerry does everything that fairy princesses do: she dresses in her royal attire, practices her flying skills, and she is always on the lookout for problems to solve. But it isn't all twirls and tiaras - as every fairy princess knows, dirty fingernails and scabby knees are just the price you pay for a perfect day! This new picture book addition to the Julie Andrews Collection features the joyful illustrations of Christine Davenier, and is sure to inspire that sparkly feeling within the hearts of readers young and old.

Jon Clinch: KINGS OF THE EARTH
Monday, July 12, 2010 7pm Georgia Center for the Book

In Clinch’s multilayered, pastoral second novel (after Finn), a death among three elderly, illiterate brothers living together on an upstate New York farm raises suspicions and accusations in the surrounding community. After their beloved mother, Ruth, dies, Audie, considered mentally "fragile," is devastated, but goes on tending to the Carversville farm with his brothers Vernon and Creed. When Vernon, frail at 60 and not under a doctor’s care, dies in his bed with evidence of asphyxiation, Creed is interrogated by troopers, along with Audie, the brother closest to Vernon. Family histories and troubles are divulged in short chapters by a cacophony of characters speaking in first person. Secrets and hidden alliances are revealed: Vernon’s nephew, Tom, grew and sold marijuana, which the family used medicinally; the brothers endured painful, bloody haircuts administered by their father. Alongside the police troopers’ investigation, each player contributes his own personal perspectives and motivations, including allusions to homosexual behavior. Inspired by the Ward brothers (of the 1992 documentary My Brother’s Keeper), Clinch explores family dynamics in this quiet storm of a novel that will stun readers with its power.

Pam Grier:
Foxy
Wednesday, June 16, 2010,
6:30 pm at Outwrite Books

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzgw0ppe1oM(there’s 15 seconds of non-FCC complaint inducing sound at 1:35, although if you bleep one mothereffing word, it would be better to start at 1:20)

In this prickly autobiography, the iconic actress is almost as hard-nosed toward lovers as her filmic alter -ego was toward enemies. Grier recalls a flamboyant career, from B-movie starlet in Women in Cages through blaxploitation diva in Foxy Brown to Tarantino muse in Jackie Brown, all of it shaped by a rigorous Stanislavskian method. (Her self-transformation into a strung-out killer prostitute for an audition almost got her arrested by the NYPD.)

Grier nods to the feminist and black power movements that inspired her screen persona as a glamorous badass shot gunning a white and/or male power structure—Hollywood's answer to Angela Davis—while distancing herself from the myth: deep down she's a Colorado farm girl, scarred by two rapes, who loves horses. But there's a resemblance to her onscreen persona in her tough, wary attitude toward domineering boyfriends like Kareem Abdul Jabbar, who futilely tried to convert her into a submissive Muslim wife, and comedian Freddie Prinze, whose suicide garners less space and pathos than does the death of her dog. “What harm would it do to say yes and keep on watching his behavior?” she strategizes when a suitor presents an engagement ring.
 
 
Sebastian Junger:
War
June 16, 2010
7pm at Barnes & Noble Buckhead

“War is insanely exciting.... Don't underestimate the power of that revelation”, warns bestselling author and Vanity Fair contributing editor Junger (The Perfect Storm).

The war in Afghanistan contains brutal trauma but also transcendent purpose in this riveting combat narrative. Junger spent 14 months in 2007–2008 intermittently embedded with a platoon of the 173rd airborne brigade in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the bloodiest corners of the conflict. The soldiers are a scruffy, warped lot, with unkempt uniforms—they sometimes do battle in shorts and flip-flops—and a ritual of administering friendly beatings to new arrivals, but Junger finds them to be superlative soldiers. Junger experiences everything they do—nerve-racking patrols, terrifying roadside bombings and ambushes, stultifying weeks in camp when they long for a firefight to relieve the tedium. Despite the stress and the grief when buddies die, the author finds war to be something of an exalted state: soldiers experience an almost sexual thrill in the excitement of a firefight—a response Junger struggles to understand—and a profound sense of commitment to subordinating their self-interests to the good of the unit.

 Junger mixes visceral combat scenes—raptly aware of his own fear and exhaustion—with quieter reportage and insightful discussions of the physiology, social psychology, and even genetics of soldiering. The result is an unforgettable portrait of men under fire.
 
 
Bret Easton Ellis:
Imperial Bedrooms
Friday June 18th, 2010
6:30 pm at SCAD Atlanta Campus

Bret Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero, is one of the signal novels of the last thirty years, and he now follows those infamous teenagers into an even more desperate middle age.
 
Clay, a successful screenwriter, has returned from New York to Los Angeles to help cast his new movie, and he’s soon drifting through a long-familiar circle. Blair, his former girlfriend, is married to Trent, a powerful manager who’s still a bisexual philanderer, and their Beverly Hills parties attract various levels of fame and fortune. Then there’s Clay’s childhood friend Julian, a recovering addict, and their old dealer, Rip, face-lifted beyond recognition and seemingly even more sinister than in his notorious past. But Clay’s own demons emerge once he meets a gorgeous young actress determined to win a role in his movie. And when his life careens out of control, he’s forced to come to terms with the deepest recesses of his character – and with his proclivity for betrayal.
 
Christopher Hitchens:
Hitch-22: A Memoir
Friday June 18th, 2010
7 pm at Barnes & Noble Buckhead

Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide.
 
In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political.
 
This is the story of his life, lived large.
 
About the Author:
Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School. He is the author of numerous books, including works on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George Orwell, Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and his #1 New York Times bestseller and National Book Award nominee, God Is Not Great.

Joshilyn Jackson:
Backseat Saints
Tuesday, June 8
7 pm at the Margaret Mitchell House

Backseat Saints will dazzle readers with its original and heart wrenching portrayal of the lengths to which a mother will go to right the wrongs she’s created as well as the distance a daughter must travel to escape the demands of forgiveness.  Taking a minor character from her beloved bestseller Gods in Alabama and turning everything we know about her on its ear, Joshilyn Jackson builds a story rich with her trademark sly wit, endearingly off-kilter characters, and riveting plot twists.
Ro Grandee is the perfect Texas housewife. She's determined to be nothing like her long-missing mother, the one who left her with only a heap of old novels and her father's fists for company, so Ro keeps quiet and takes her husband's punches like a lady. But Ro wasn't always this way. Underneath her pastel skirts and hidden bruises lies Rose Mae Lolley, teenaged spitfire, Alabama heartbreaker, and a crack shot with a pistol. Rose Mae is resurrected when a gypsy's tarot cards foretell doom for dutiful Ro: her handsome husband is going to kill her. Unless she kills him first.
Armed with only her wit, her pawpy's ancient 45, and her dog Fat Gretel, Rose Mae hightails it out of Texas. In a journey that is by turns harrowing and exhilarating, she uncovers long buried truths about her family and herself, running from the man who will never let her go, on a mission to find the mother who did.

Dr. William Jelani Cobb:
The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress
Thursday, June 10
7 pm at the Carter Presidential Library & Museum Theater

For acclaimed historian William Jelani Cobb, the historic election of Barack Obama to the presidency is not the most remarkable development of the 2008 election; even more so is the fact that Obama won some 90 percent of the black vote in the primaries across America despite the fact that the established black leadership since the civil rights era--Men like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Andrew Young, who paved the way for his candidacy--All openly supported Hillary Clinton. Clearly a sea of change has occurred among black voters, ironically pushing the architects of the civil rights movement toward the periphery at the moment when their political dreams were most fully realized.
How this has happened, and the powerful implications it holds for America's politics and social landscape, is the focus of The Substance of Hope, a deeply insightful, paradigm-shifting examination of a new generation of voters that has not been shaped by the raw memory of Jim Crow and has a different range of imperatives. Cobb sees Obama's ascendancy as "a reality that has been taking shape in tiny increments for the past four decades", and examines thorny issues such as the paradox and contradictions embodied in race and patriotism, identity and citizenship; how the civil rights leadership became a political machine; why the term "postracial" is as iniquitous as it is inaccurate; and whether our society has really changed with Obama's election. This event is sponsored by A Cappella books.

Jeffery Deaver:
The Burning Wire: A Lincoln Rhyme Novel
Monday, June 14
1 pm at the Atlanta-Fulton Central Public Library

The Burning Wire finds Rhyme and Sachs in a breathless two‑day race to stop a twisted killer whose horrific weapon of choice is the very energy that powers our lives.  At the same time, quadriplegic criminologist Rhyme finally decides to undergo risky experimental treatment that may restore his ability to walk. But it is a decision that threatens to derail his most important case to date – and could have even more dire consequences.
Called "a master gamesman" (The New York Times) and “the cleverest puzzle maker in the business” (Booklist), Deaver has been nominated for every major mystery and thriller award available, from the Edgar to the Macavity to the Anthony to the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Steel Dagger – and he only continues to rack up accolades.  Both novels he published in 2008 (The Broken Window and The Bodies Left Behind) were nominated for the International Thriller Writers Association’s Best Novel; Bodies won.  With 22 thrillers under his belt, including The Bone Collector, which was made into a film with Denzel Washington as Lincoln Rhyme and Angelina Jolie as Amelia Sachs, and Maiden’s Grave, which became an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, Deaver has proven once again to be the reigning king of thriller writing.

Carolyn Jessop:
Triumph: Life After the Cult--A Survivor’s Lessons.
Tuesday, June 1st
7 pm at the Decatur Library

On April 21, 2003, when Jessop was 35, she left her husband's family and the FLDS church, fleeing to a safe house in Salt Lake City. Subsequently, she sued for custody of her children, and became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. In 2007, she co-authored her book Escape with Laura Palmer and chronicled her life in the FLDS organization, her adulthood and disillusionment, and her eventual flight. She was forced into an arranged marriage to Merril Jessop at age 18. Merril Jessop was 32 years her senior and already had three wives and more than 30 children, several of them older than his new wife. Once married, Carolyn Jessop did get to attend college, but her husband decided that she would study elementary education, not medicine. Just months into the marriage, the FLDS's new leader, Rulon Jeffs, gave Merril two new wives.

In her book, Carolyn Jessop stated that she endured regular unwanted sexual relations with Jessop in exchange for better emotional treatment. Jessop had eight children with her husband, the last four after she was warned against further pregnancies by her doctors. The final pregnancy was life-threatening and required an emergency hysterectomy, during which time Jessop maintains that her husband and his family regarded her condition with disinterest. Jessop contends that the resulting freedom from pregnancy helped her escape from her abusive marriage and volatile home situation.

On May 4, 2010, Jessop released Triumph: Life After the Cult-- a Survivor's Lessons, the autobiographical sequel to Escape. Triumph details Jessop's unique insights and inside information regarding the Texas FLDS Raid and its aftermath as well as Jessop's struggle to come to terms with her oldest daughter's return to the cult. Jessop also reveals the various sources of strength and resources on which she has drawn as she overcame the obstacles to achieving success after a lifetime of trauma living inside a cult. Triumph concludes with Jessop's victorious court battle to win back child support for the years since her escape as well as lifetime support for her severely disabled son, Harrison.

Paul Guest:
One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir
Wednesday, June 2nd
7 pm at Barnes and Noble, Buckhead

Paul Guest was twelve years old, racing down a hill on a too big, ancient bicycle, when he discovered he had no brakes. Steering into anything that would slow down the bike, he hit a ditch, was thrown over the handlebars, and broke his neck.
One More Theory About Happiness follows a boy into manhood, from the harrowing days immediately after his accident to his adult life as a teacher, award-winning poet, and soon-to-be husband. With wit, courage, and an unstoppable drive to live a life of his own creation—stemming in part from his remarkable parents, who insisted he return to school only days after arriving home from the hospital—Paul makes peace with his paralysis. As he grows older, he transforms it with his art, cultivating his lifelong gift for language into a searing poetic sensibility that has earned him praise from the highest ranks of American letters (“Wonderful”— John Ashbery; “Astonishing”—Jorie Graham; “Fierce and unnerving”—Robert Hass).
An unforgettable story—shatteringly funny, deeply moving, and breathtakingly honest—One More Theory About Happiness takes us from a body irrevocably changed to a life fiercely cherished.

Lee Harris:
The Next American Civil War
Thursday, June 3
7pm at the Carter Library

Many were surprised by the escalating incidents that began right after Barack Obama's election, such as tea parties, guns toted to town hall meetings, rumors of socialism, and death panels. But Lee Harris knew this was coming. Harris has long been reflecting on freedom and what it really means. In this new book, he explains that the outrage we're witnessing is born of the age-old fear 'as old as the nation itself' that someone will take away our freedom. It is this fear that sparked the current populist revolt, led by people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin who claim that Obama's push for reform is simply the intellectual elite's most recent power-grab. Here, Harris shows that in reality, this ongoing debate is good and necessary. Throughout our history, Americans have challenged the definition of liberty and this has allowed us to progress as a society. Harris argues that we must listen carefully to this new populist uprising and take it seriously if we are to defend our founding principles and achieve true freedom for all. This event is Sponsored by A cappella books

John Sandford: Storm Prey
Monday 05/24/10
Decatur Library
7:00 pm

Sandford's popular "Prey" series has sold millions of copies and made him one of America's most highly regarded authors. He'll be visiting us to talk about Storm Prey, the 20th book in this prize-winning series. Sandford is really John Camp, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former newspaper journalist whose many successful books include Phantom Prey and Dark of the Moon. Sandford is also the author of two nonfiction books on plastic surgery and art and is the principal financial backer for a major archaeological project in the Jordan Valley of Israel

Wes Moore: The Other Wes Moore
Monday 5/24/2010
Carter Library
7:00 pm

In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes scholarship. The same paper also ran a huge story about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore.
Wes just couldn't shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen?
That letter led to a correspondence and relationship that have lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, Wes discovered that the other Wes had had a life not unlike his own: Both had grown up in similar neighborhoods and had had difficult childhoods, both were fatherless, both were in and out of school; they'd hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their young lives they had come across similar moments of decision, yet their choices would lead them to astonishingly different destinies.
Told in alternating dramatic narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.

Jonathan Alter: The Promise: President Obama, Year One
Wednesday 05/26/10
Atlanta History Center
7:00 pm

In The Promise, Jonathan Alter provides a fast-paced inside account of the breakneck speed with which Barack Obama began making critical decisions and assuming the burdens of office amid the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.  With dozens of exclusive details about everything from the selection of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state to the president’s personal secrets for running a good meeting, Alter paints a fresh and often surprising portrait of a highly disciplined and self-aware president and his team.
Jonathan Alter is a senior editor at Newsweek where he has written an acclaimed column on politics, history, media, and society at large since 1991. Alter is also an analyst and contributing correspondent for NBC News.

Imagine being a musician and songwriter trying to establish your own name despite having a country legend as a father. Or after several # 1 Billboard Country hits not being able to sing for two years because of brain surgery. Or being married to one of the most respected songwriter/producers in Nashville, and seeing all your marital problems splashed on the front page of the news.

Can’t imagine what it’s like to be Rosanne Cash? Neither can I.

She has broken through her father’s shadow and has successfully made her own mark for sure. Cash has a couple of #1 Billboard Country hits, bestsellers under her belt and has written fiction ranging from fairy tales to short stories. Seems like a lot doesn’t it? Well, the only thing that she hasn’t done is visited us here in Decatur—which is what she’ll be doing on the 14th of August to share her new memoir, Composed.

Mark your calendars and come on over to Agnes Scott College’s Presser Hall where Cash has promised to share some stories, sign your books and also play a couple of songs at the end of the event. She will perform on a custom-made Martin guitar donated by America’s oldest brewery, Yuengling. And it gets better—this awesome guitar will be auctioned after the event, proceeds of which will go towards the festival’s literacy efforts.

Do you want to purchase her new book and also attend the event? Worried about the cost? Don’t worry; purchasing the book will be your entry into the event. The event is being brought together by DBF, A Cappella Books and Agnes Scott College.

The Decatur Book Festival is bringing Bruce Feiler to town on May 25th. He'll be at Agnes Scott College at 7pm at Presser Hall.

Bruce is a great speaker, and this is his most personal book:

Bruce Feiler was a young father when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. He instantly worried what his death might mean for his daughters. “Would they wonder who I was? Would they wonder what I thought? Would they lack for my approval, my discipline, my voice?”
Three days later he came up with a stirring idea of how he might give them that voice. He would reach out to six men, from all the passages in his life, and asked them to be present through the passages in his daughters’ lives. And he would call this group of men, “The Council of Dads.”
“I believe my daughters will have plenty of opportunities in their lives,” he wrote to these men. “They’ll have loving families. They’ll have welcoming homes. They’ll have each other. But they may not have me. They may not have their dad. Will you help be their dad?”
The Council of Dads is the inspiring story of what happened next. Mixing the harrowing tale of his treatment with the uplifting lessons of these men–“Approach the Cow,” “Pack Your Flip-Flops,” “Live the Questions,” “Harvest Miracles”–Feiler’s account is touching, funny, and ultimately a deeply moving account of parenthood, loss, and love.

I'm really looking forward to having Bruce here on campus--this should be a marvelous event.