Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American DreamMeet the Author talks are co-sponsored by the Newberry Library's A. C. McClurg Bookstore, where books of the featured author will be available for purchase. A book signing follows each talk. Admission is free.
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Speaker: Barbara Ehrenreich
2006 is the centennial of the publication of Upton Sinclair’s famous muckracking novel exposing working conditions in the Chicago Stockyards.Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich has carried on Sinclair’s tradition, but goes him one better by joining (and attempting to join) the workforce she writes about. Bait and Switch, the sequel to her best-selling Nickel and Dimed, recounts her demoralizing, expensive, and unsuccessful search for a corporate position. (Photo credit: Sigrid Estrada)
Thursday, September 21, 6:00 pm
Speaker: Ron Rosenbaum
Cultural critic Ron Rosenbaum asserts that we’ve been asking the wrong questions about Shakespeare. Rather than focusing on who Shakespeare was, The Shakespeare Wars takes the reader on a journey through the most significant controversies among scholars and theater directors over truly important questions about Shakespeare’s work, “how best to read, speak, and act it.”
Presented in collaboration with the Newberry Library’s Center for Renaissance Studies. (Photo credit: Nina Roberts)
Speaker: David Treuer (Leech Lake Band Ojibwe), University of Minnesota
Treuer, a prize-winning author, wants Native American literature to be read as creative works of the imagination. He reads from his new novel about a Native American librarian and translator of Native American texts who "according to the rules of authenticity . . . doesn't really count . . . he doesn't live on a reservation, or drive this old beat up car; . . . he doesn't talk about coyotes, and he's not poor."
Sponsored by the Newberry Library's D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History.
ThunderstruckTuesday, October 24, 6:00 pm
Speaker: Erik Larson
The best-selling author of The Devil in the White City will launch his newbook about a murderer,
Dr. H. H. Crippen, and the obsessive inventor,Guglielmo Marconi,whose wireless radio helped capture Crippin. Live coverage of police pursuit of a crime suspect has become a television staple. In 1910, newspapers covered the pursuit of a wife-murdering doctor and his mistress as they f led England for North America by ship. It was Marconi’s new invention that alerted police and enabled the public to follow the chase as it unfolded.
Pictured: Erik Larson
Saturday, December 2, 10:00 am
Speakers: Frank Joseph, To Love Mercy; Billy Lombardo, The Logic of a Rose; Elaine Soloway,The Division Street Princess
Moderator: Margaret Schmidt
A novel, a collection of short stories, a memoir—authors working in three different genres capture Chicago neighborhoods as viewed through the eyes of children. Two small South Side boys, one black, the other white, confront a segregated city in Frank Joseph’s novel set in the late 1940s. Billy Lombardo’s short stories capture the f lavor of childhood in an Italian enclave in the Bridgeport neighborhood in the early 1970s. Elaine Soloway’s memoir recounts her growing up in the 1940s above her father’s Humboldt Park grocery store in an apartment too small to hide anything from the children.
Following readings from their books by the three authors, Newberry Seminars writing instructor Margaret Schmidt will lead a discussion of how the authors brought to life the vanished worlds of their childhoods.
The Newberry Library
Center for Public Programs
60 West Walton Street
Chicago, IL 60610-7324
telephone: (312) 255-3700
fax: (312) 255-3680
e-mail: pubprog@newberry.org