Mark Pendergrast: INSIDE THE OUTBREAKS
Wednesday, 9/8, 7pm
Carter Presidential Library & Museum Theater
In Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, Mark Pendergrast takes readers on a riveting journey through the history of this remarkable organization, following EIS officers on their globetrotting quest to eliminate the most lethal and widespread threats to the world’s health. Over the years they have successfully battled polio, cholera, and smallpox, and in recent years have turned to the epidemics killing us now — smoking, obesity, and violence among them. Since its founding by Alexander Langmuir in 1951 as a Cold War measure against biological warfare, the Epidemic Intelligence Service has waged war against every imaginable human (and sometimes animal) ailment. Suitcases packed, vaccinations ready, the mantra “time-place-person” on their lips, these young doctors — and veterinarians, dentists, statisticians, nurses, microbiologists, academic epidemiologists, social scientists, lawyers — call themselves “shoe-leather epidemiologists.” Always on call, often working 18-hour days during their two-year EIS stint, they have occasionally caught the bugs they were studying, but, astonishingly, only one officer has thus far died in the line of duty – in an airline crash. The successful EIS model has spread internationally: former EIS officers on the staff of the Centers for Disease Control have helped to establish nearly thirty similar programs around the world. EIS veterans have gone on to become leaders in the world of public health in organizations such as the World Health Organization.

Aiken Lecture: Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Atlanta History Center
Friday, 9/10 8:00 PM
The Warmth of Other Suns chronicles a watershed event in American history--the decades-long migration of African-Americans from the South to the North and West, from World War I through the 1970s—through the stories of three individuals and their families.
In her book, Wilkerson traces the lives of Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster, from their difficult beginnings in the South, to their critical decisions to leave behind all they know and look for a better life in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.
Isabel Wilkerson is Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. In 1994 she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. This is her first book.
Admission is $5 members; $10 for nonmembers. Reservations are required for all lectures. Call 404.814.4150.

Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor: TRAVELING WITH POMEGRANATES: A Mother-Daughter Story
Porter Auditorium at Wesleyan College, Macon, GA
Monday 9/13 6:45pm

Bestselling author of THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES, made into a major motion picture starring Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Hudson, has co-written a unique and profound spiritual memoir with her daughter; set against the backdrop of Sue and Ann's travels together in Greece and France.
TRAVELING WITH POMEGRANATES offers distinct perspectives from two women at different stages in life –a fifty something and a twenty something – each at crossroads and each on a quest to redefine herself while rediscovering one another.
Between 1998 and 2000, Sue and Ann travel throughout Greece and France. Sue, coming to grips with aging, caught in a creative vacuum, longing to reconnect with her grown daughter, struggles to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a novel. Ann, just graduated from college, heartbroken and benumbed by the classic question about what to do with her life, grapples with a painful depression. As this modern-day Demeter and Persephone chronicle the richly symbolic and personal meaning of an array of inspiring figures and sites, they also each give voice to that most protean of connections: the bond of mother and daughter.
A wise and involving book about feminine thresholds, spiritual growth, and renewal, Traveling with Pomegranates is both a revealing self-portrait by a beloved author and her daughter, a writer in the making, and a momentous story that will resonate with women everywhere.

Bookzilla has arrived. I hope to see any and all of you Verb followers out on the Decatur Square this weekend for the AJC-Decatur Book Festival.

Jonathan Safran Foer: EATING ANIMALS
Wednesday 9/1 7pm
Atlanta History Center
Jonathan Safran Foer will discuss his bestselling work, Eating Animals. Eating Animals is a carefully researched, artfully told, funny, and personal exploration of what we eat and why, how what we eat affects our lives and the environment, and how every individual can make seemingly small choices that will enact big change.
Jonathan Safran Foer, author of the acclaimed novel Everything Is Illuminated, delves into the environmental and social effects of factory farming and relates personal stories that influenced his decision to become a vegetarian. Eating Animals will move readers — and eaters — of every persuasion to participate in the ongoing conversation about what we eat and challenge them to take a naked look at what is too often conveniently brushed aside. Admission is $5 for members and $10 for nonmembers. Reservations are required for all lectures.

Jonathan Franzen: FREEDOM
Friday 9/3 8pm
Agnes Scott College’s Presser Hall
The keynote address for the AJC-Decatur Book Festival, this is Franzen’s first stop on his international tour for Freedom.
The first question facing Franzen's feverishly awaited follow-up is whether it can find its own voice in its predecessor's shadow. In short: yes, it does, and in a big way. Readers will recognize the strains of suburban tragedy afflicting St. Paul, Minn.'s Walter and Patty Berglund, once-gleaming gentrifiers now marred in the eyes of the community by Patty's increasingly erratic war on the right-wing neighbors with whom her eerily independent and sexually precocious teenage son, Joey, is besot, and, later, "greener than Greenpeace" Walter's well-publicized dealings with the coal industry's efforts to demolish a West Virginia mountaintop.
The surprise is that the Berglunds' fall is outlined almost entirely in the novel's first 30 pages, freeing Franzen to delve into Patty's affluent East Coast girlhood, her sexual assault at the hands of a well-connected senior, doomed career as a college basketball star, and the long-running love triangle between Patty, Walter, and Walter's best friend, the budding rock star Richard Katz. By 2004, these combustible elements give rise to a host of modern predicaments: Richard, after a brief peak, is now washed up, living in Jersey City, laboring as a deck builder for Tribeca yuppies, and still eyeing Patty. The ever-scheming Joey gets in over his head with psychotically dedicated high school sweetheart and as a sub-subcontractor in the re-building of postinvasion Iraq. Walter's many moral compromises, which have grown to include shady dealings with Bush-Cheney cronies (not to mention the carnal intentions of his assistant, Lalitha), are taxing him to the breaking point. Patty, meanwhile, has descended into a morass of depression and self-loathing, and is considering breast augmentation when not working on her therapist-recommended autobiography.
Franzen pits his excavation of the cracks in the nuclear family's facade against a backdrop of all-American faults and fissures, but where the book stands apart is that, no longer content merely to record the breakdown, Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters and find where they (and we) went wrong, arriving at--incredibly--genuine hope.

Natasha Trethewey: Beyond Katrina, A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast
Sunday 9/5 1:15 pm
AJC-Decatur Book Festival, First Baptist Carreker Hall Stage
Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina.
Trethewey spent her childhood in Gulfport, where much of her mother’s extended family, including her younger brother, still lives. As she worked to understand the devastation that followed the hurricane, Trethewey found inspiration in Robert Penn Warren’s book Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, in which he spoke with southerners about race in the wake of the Brown decision, capturing an event of wide impact from multiple points of view. Weaving her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors, Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos.
She chronicles decades of wetland development that exacerbated the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast whose citizens—particularly African Americans—were on the margins of American life well before the storm hit. Most poignantly, Trethewey illustrates the destruction of the hurricane through the story of her brother’s efforts to recover what he lost and his subsequent incarceration.
Renowned for writing about the idea of home, Trethewey’s attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review. For Beyond Katrina, Trethewey has expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home.

Jennifer Arnold: Through A Dog’s Eyes
8/24
Decatur Library, 7:15pm
Arnold, founder and executive director of Canine Assistants, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing service dogs for people with disabilities, educates and inspires in this transformative guide to training and celebrating service animals.
Arnold’s new book is a ”must read” for all dog owners and for everyone who loves man’s best friend. ”Through a Dog’s Eyes” is a knowledgeable, compassionate exploration of the intelligence, strength and capabilities of our four-legged friends based on her proven training methods. Her work with dogs is centered on inspiring a dog’s trust and teaching dogs to make choices, as opposed to simply following commands.
Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at age 16, Arnold was encouraged by her father to start an organization devoted to helping people with physical disabilities. Now after 20 years of dog training, she shares her methodology and stories of canine intelligence, sensitivity, language comprehension, and prescience bordering on telepathy. She offers shining examples of the heroism of service dogs, from anticipating seizures to resetting a ventilator switch. Along the way, she emphasizes choice-based, positive-reinforcement-only teaching methods and shares valuable insights that every dog owner should know. Engagingly written with a perfect balance of science and observation, this book--soon to be a PBS one hour special and series--is a worthy tribute to our canine friends.

Blane Bachelor: On Being a Bachelor
8/26
OutWrite Books, 7:30pm
As many in the media know, attention spans are shrinking at light speed these days. Attracting – and keeping – readers has become a top challenge for editors, reporters, writers, and everybody in between. It’s even tougher in the dating/relationship genre, where everybody and their hamster has something to say. That’s where syndicated columnist Blane Bachelor comes in. For two years the internationally published writer wrote a popular column entitled “On Being a Bachelor” for the Atlanta alternative newspaper Sunday Paper. Every week, Bachelor captured readers’ attention and emotion with her humor, wit and insight into matters of the heart (and, um, other organs). ON BEING A BACHELOR is a collection of those columns.
Equally Wed Magazine says: “Blane Bachelor’s writing is laced with acerbic wit, thoughtful human insight, and plentiful charm. She takes you along with her on her romantic trysts and mighty adventures, while sharing wise advice to apply to your own life.” And Corinna Allen, host of CBS Better Mornings Atlanta, calls the book “a gritty, unflinching look into the trenches of single life. A must-read for anyone who’s been there, and, for God’s sake, anyone considering going back.”

Dr. Muhammed Yunus: Building Social Business
8/25
Agnes Scott College, Presser Hall 8:15 p.m.
Dr. Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in the field of microcredit, founding Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which provides small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional loans. Dr. Yunus’ first loan consisted of $27.00 from his own pocket.
Since 1983, the Grameen Bank has issued $6.38 billion to 7.4 million borrowers. More than 94 percent of Grameen loans have gone to women, who suffer disproportionately from poverty around the world and who are more likely than me to devote their earnings to their families. The Grameen Bank's approach to microcredit has inspired similar efforts around the world. In 2009 President Obama bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Dr. Yunus to honor his work as a global agent of change.
Dr. Yunus has developed a visionary new dimension for capitalism that he calls "social business." In his new book, Building Social Business, he outlines this concept. Promotional materials for the book state "By harnessing the energy of profit-making to the objective of fulfilling human needs, social business creates self-supporting, viable commercial enterprises that generate economic growth even as they produce goods and services that make the world a better place."
This event is free and open to the public, no ticket required. A book-signing will follow lecture.

If you are a crackpot organization like the DBF, how do you celebrate your fifth festival? You host Grammy-winning musical icon, a Time-Magazine cover-getting, National-Book-Award-winning great American novelist, and then you add the winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, just because you can. That's all in a three-week stretch. Muhamed Yunus, won the big one for his work in Microfinance, and will discuss his new book , Building Social Business. The event is free and open to the public. Please come out for a once-in-a-lifetime chance. We are co-hosting with Agnes Scott College and Coca-Cola.
Wednesday, August 25th, 8pm
Agnes Scott College, Presser Hall

Eric Jerome Dickey: Tempted By Trouble
8/17
Barnes &Noble, Buckhead 7pm
New York Times Bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey returns with a flaming-hot-stand-alone set in the world of conmen and thieves.

We can plan all we want, but sometimes fate has a different agenda. Dmytryk was a respectable man...once. But when a crippling recession annihilates the auto industry, Dmytryk and his wife, Cora suddenly find themselves without jobs. And after two years of trying to live honestly, they begin to realize that honesty just doesn't pay the bills.
Afraid of losing her home and her marriage, Cora compromises her faith and makes some choices that she isn't proud of. And when a ruthless crime boss gives them an opportunity to buy back their old lives, Cora urges Dmytryk to man up. All he has to do is join a crime ring and rob some banks: two minutes, in and out, nobody gets hurt.
Torn between desperation and moral integrity, Dmytryk gives in, but no sooner than he doesCora abandons him, taking with her his dreams for a better life and disappearing without a trace.
Now, determined more than ever to get his life back, Dmytryk is one bank job away from having the money to leave the crime ring and find Cora. But when the job goes wrong he realizes yet again that destiny has another plan for him. Forced into seclusion with one of his partners - Dmytryk wonders if he'll ever find his way back to his old life. And in the end, will he even want to?

Suzanne Ruff: The Reluctant Donor
8/22
Borders, Buckhead 4pm
The only sibling with healthy kidneys, Suzanne is ambivalent about donating a kidney to a sister she's not even sure she likes--but she makes the offer. Eight family members, including her mother, have died from the disease. Now her sisters have PKD and each need kidney transplants. The Reluctant Donor exposes Suzanne's doubts, raw fear, and strong Irish Catholic family history.

Her terror at the prospect of surgery is offset by her wonder at the small miracles that surround her. Inspired by her faith and the courage of those who came before her, Suzanne Ruff navigates uncertainty with humor and honesty.

Ruff believes that being a living donor is an intensely personal choice. She is delighted that her old kidney now happily resides in her sister's body. In the case of a sudden or unexpected death and during a family's worst nightmare, she believes being an organ donor is one of the noblest things we can do. Suzanne continues to work for a cure for PKD and spread the word about the miracle of organ donation. She and her husband Bill live in Minnesota.

Josh Russell: My Bright Midnight
8/23
Decatur Library, 7:15pm
Josh Russell, the bestselling author of Yellow Jack, will be at the Center for the Book with his exciting second novel, My Bright Midnight. It’s a wonderfully engrossing story about a German immigrant named Walter Schmidt, haunted by his past and trying to find a place for himself in the decadent, steamy city of New Orleans.

Walter Schmidt's life isn't simple: His wife Nadine wants to live next door to her dead first husband's mother, the Mississippi River is three blocks down the street and rising dangerously, FDR is dead, and the war seems like it will never end---but for the most part, things are going Walter's way. Then one bright April morning in 1945, Walter comes home early from work to find Nadine in bed with his best friend, Sammy.
Shocked into silence, when she then calls him a "kraut," Walter becomes even more confused. True, he's a German immigrant, but he's lived in New Orleans for almost twenty years, and an hour before, he thought he was a happy American---baseball fan, reader of pulp novels, lover of gangster movies. Suddenly Walter wonders if Nadine's right, if he's more German than American, more enemy than friend. When Sammy later offers him $1,000 as an apology for sleeping with his wife, Walter accepts, desperately hoping to hurt his friend, but instead setting in motion a series of events more dangerous than betrayal and petty revenge.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey calls the novel ”a compelling invocation of the way people build, from the ntruth of their lives, something they can live with, the endless possibilities of beginnings.” Russell teaches creative writing at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

A Triple Play Baseball Literary Event with Dave Cohen, Hal Jacobs, and Pete Van Wieren
8/10/10
Decatur Public Library, 7:15pm
With the Braves in the midst of their best season in years, fans in Atlanta and elsewhere across the South are buzzing with excitement. Barely past the mid-point of baseball's calendar, the team has already amassed what seems like a full season's worth of storylines and eye-popping moments. Sitting firmly atop the National League East, the squad is drawing interest not seen since its days as "America's Team," when it rode an amazing stretch of success to take the division title 14 straight years starting in 1991.

With all the heady enthusiasm now swirling around the Braves, baseball is back in the air in Atlanta, and next month, fans will have a chance to further feed their passion for the game. The bases will be loaded as authors of three new books – Of Mikes and Men: A Lifetime of Braves Baseball by Pete Van Wieren and Jack Wilkinson; Matzah Balls and Baseballs: Conversations with 17 Jewish Former Major League Baseball Players by Dave Cohen; and Ball Crazy: Confessions of a Dad-Coach by Hal Jacobs – come together to discuss their works and sign copies.
Of Mikes and Men is a memoir of Van Wieren's more than 30 years calling Braves games on TV and radio, starting in 1976. "The Professor," as Van Wieren is known, was inducted into the Braves Hall of Fame in 2004, and in the book he takes readers back through the years, including that miraculous, "Worst-to-First" 1991 season.
In Matzah Balls and Baseballs, Dave Cohen, the longtime voice of Georgia State University Athletics, takes a look at the role Jewish ballplayers, like Hall of Famers Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, have played in the game over the years. The book includes interviews with Ken Holtzman, who holds the record for the most wins by a Jewish pitcher, Steve Stone, 1980's American League Cy Young winner, and many others.
Hal Jacobs's Ball Crazy chronicles a summer of youth baseball from a father's point of view, as Jacobs – a former columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution – served as the coach of his then 12-year-old son's team, watching the pressure the game put on his son and the obsession it inspired in parents.

Rosanne Cash: Composed
8/14/10
Presser Hall at Agnes Scott College, 7pm
Presented by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival and Yuenging Beer and hosted by Agnes Scott and A Cappella Books, this event promises to be much more than an author talking about her new book.

Cash, daughter of music legend Johnny Cash, has promised to share some stories, sign books, and play a couple of songs as part of the event. She will perform on a custom-made Martin D-41 guitar donated by America's oldest brewery, Yuengling. And it gets better – this guitar will be auctioned after the event, with proceeds going to the festival's literacy efforts.
This will be Cash's first trip to Atlanta following the book's August 10 publication.
According to her publisher, in Composed Cash "writes candidly about her upbringing, her development as an artist, and her current life."
Cash earned 11 No. 1 country hits in the '80s, including "Seven Year Ache," "The Way We Make a Broken Heart," and "I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me." Her 2009 album, "The List," was inspired by a list of influential songs given to her as a teenager by her father.
Her first book, Bodies of Water (Hyperion, 1995), received widespread critical acclaim, as did her children's book, Penelope Jane: A Fairy's Tale. Her essays and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Oxford-American, New York Magazine, and various other periodicals.

Tickets to the event are $30 and include a copy of Composed. Tickets are available at Ticket Alternative.

June Hall McCash: Almost to Eden
8/16/10
Decatur Public Library, 7:15pm
The author of three very popular and informative coastal histories The Jekyll Island Club, The Jekyll Island Cottage Colony and Jekyll Island’s Early Years, will be reading from her exciting new historical novel, Almost to Eden. The setting is Jekyll Island and nearby Brunswick, and is a story about an Irish immigrant, Maggie O’Brien, who comes to the Georgia coast hoping for freedom and a new life and who finds herself caught up in the lives of coastal residents.

McCash presents a novel that began with a simple question - What's the story behind the 1912 drowning victim who lies in Jekyll Island’s north end cemetery? McCash has blended her decades of historical research with a gift for story-telling as she relays the story of Maggie.
Seeking a new Eden in America, Maggie discovers that freedom and justice, even in the new world, do not always triumph over wealth and power. In the process of her journey, Maggie finds and loses the things she loves most, but grace and courage lead her toward a fulfillment she never thought to find.
McCash has taught at Emory University and is the 1996 Outstanding Alumna Award winner from Agnes Scott College in Decatur.

Women Writing Baseball
8/5/10
Charis Books and More, 7:30pm
This special event features four very important baseball scholars: Dorothy Seymour Mills, Christina Kahrl, Judith Testa, and Cecilia Tan. This is a chance to talk baseball with four of the sport’s greatest scholars and writers, all of whom just happen to be women.

Dorothy Seymour Mills is the co-author of the first scholarly books of baseball history, published over the years 1960-1990 under the name of her husband and colleague, Harold Seymour. Her autobiography, "A Woman's Work: Writing Baseball History with Harold Seymour," was published in 2004. Her latest book, "Chasing Baseball: Our Obsession with Its History, Numbers, People and Places" is already in its second printing. Mills, an independent scholar, has published a total of 25 books on various subjects.

Christina Karl is one of the co-founders of Baseball Prospectus, and is currently the executive director of the think tank's website, BaseballProspectus.com. Her regular column covers major league transactions, and has been an online staple for 15 years.
Judith Testa grew up as a Brooklyn Dodger fan, and swore off baseball when the Dodgers moved to LA. After retiring from a career as an art history professor, she returned to her childhood interest in baseball, and remembering Maglie, as a fascinating baseball character from childhood, decided to write a biography of him, "Sal Maglie: Baseball's Demon Barber."
Cecilia Tan's first love was the New York Yankees. She also played baseball for several years in the women's hardball leagues of New England. She is the author of many books for fiction and nonfiction including "The 50 Greatest Yankee Games," "50 Greatest Red Sox Games," "White Flames," and "The Hot Streak."

David Herlihy: The Lost Cyclist, The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance
8/9/10
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, 7pm.
In the recently released book, The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance, the well-known cycling historian David Herlihy (author of 2004's Bicycle: The History) backtracks to uncover what became of cyclist Frank Lenz.

In the late 19th century a biking craze swept the world as newer models became safer, less expensive, and easier to ride. One of the celebrities of the largely forgotten “golden age of cycling” was Frank Lenz, a bookkeeper from Pittsburgh who had a made a name for himself racing bikes. Seizing on the "safety bicycle" craze, Lenz set out to become the first to circumnavigate the globe solo by bike, and he was commissioned to document his journey for New York's Outing magazine before setting off in 1892.

It took Lenz about five months to travel from New York to California, where he hopped a steamer to Japan to continue pedaling. Just 25 years old at the time, he eventually made his way to China, down through India and into Persia. With Europe in his sights, Lenz hoped to safely roll through Turkey, which was in the midst of a bloody Turkish and Kurdish campaign against Armenians, but in the eastern part of the country he disappeared, meeting a mysterious demise that made headlines back in America.

Afterward, Outing dispatched another well-known cyclist, William Sachtleben, to find what had become of Lenz. He never did, but when Sachtleben made his way to Turkey with a traveling companion to search for Lenz’s grave, he witnessed first-hand events that would eventually lead to the Armenian genocide, returning to America forever altered by what he witnessed.

Herlihy's The Lost Cyclist is a literary crossbreed – a biography of an obsessed adventurer mixed with a vivid account of a dark and sometimes overlooked moment in history. The book – and the upcoming reading – are sure to capture the imaginations of bike lovers and history buffs alike.

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