03 / 11
Start: 7:00 pm
End: 8:30 pm
The Rothko Chapel presents Afghan-Canadian filmmaker, writer, journalist, and human rights activist Nelofer Pazira for a talk about Afghanistan and booksigning of A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan. Book sale by Brazos to follow the event. More details here.
Start: 7:00 pm
End: 9:00 pm
PLEASE NOTE: The online box office is now closed and we are no longer selling tickets at the store or over the phone. Tickets will be available at the door. Doors open at 6 pm, seating at 6:30.
Dove go fresh deodorant presents
Rosalind Wiseman's
Moms and daughters (ages 8-14) are invited to join Rosalind Wiseman -- an internationally-recognized author, mom, and expert on teens and parenting -- for a fun-filled evening of mother-daughter bonding. In addition to celebrating Rosalind's latest books, the tour will feature an interactive discussion about confidence, friendships, sweat-inducing moments and common mother-daughter challenges. A Q&A session and book signing will follow. The two-hour event is sure to get mothers and daughters talking, laughing, and connecting.
TICKETS:
$40 per mother-daughter pair (two tickets) includes admission to the event, one copy of each of Rosalind's latest books, a complementary one-year subscription to Family Circle magazine, light refreshments and a gift bag! Individual tickets may be purchased for $20 per person (also includes a book and gift bag).
For more insight from Rosalind or information about Dove Go Fresh deodorant, visit www.dontfretthesweat.com
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03 / 12
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03 / 13
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03 / 14
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03 / 15
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03 / 16
Start: 7:00 pm
End: 8:30 pm
The Rice Department of English and Fondren Library's Cherry Reading Series continues at your neighborhood bookstore with the fantastic Elizabeth McCracken. She is the author of The Giant's House, which was nominated for the National Book Award; Niagara Falls All Over Again, winner of the PEN/Winship Award; and Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry?, a collection of stories. Her most recent book is a memoir titled An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination about the loss of her first child in the ninth month of pregnancy, called by McCracken "the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending."
"Reading it is a mysteriously enlarging experience. It could pair neatly with Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking: it's hard to imagine two more rigorous, unsentimental guides to enduring the very bottom of the scale of human emotion." Lev Grossman
"'A child dies in this book: a baby,' Elizabeth McCracken tell us
early on, so that we we might not hope too much, as she has, for the
beautiful child who would grace her life. Alert to every nuance of
feeling, McCracken writes with such clarity and immediacy that we hope
anyway. 'It's a happy life,' she says, 'and someone is missing.' That
these statements can both be true is the mark of great emotional
maturity, and of a writer who rises to the human complexity of grief
with all her powers, and all her heart." Mark Doty
"In An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Elizabeth
McCracken does not howl out her loss. She is devastatingly calm and in
this matches measure for measure her own fine writing. By the end of
this memoir you will have held a beautiful child in your hands and you
will have acknowledged him. This book is an extraordinary gift to us
all." Alice Sebold
Wikipedia Elizabeth McCracken.
Learn more about Elizabeth McCracken on Random House's Bold Type.
http://www.elizabethmccracken.com/
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03 / 17
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03 / 18
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03 / 19
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03 / 20
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03 / 21
Start: 4:00 pm
End: 6:00 pm
Read the Washington Post review of The Surrendered.
See Michiko Kakutani's rave review in the New York Times.
Chang-rae
Lee's powerful new novel (released March 9) had its beginnings twenty years ago in questions
he had about his father's Korean War experiences, something his father
had never wanted to discuss.
But
under prompting, the elder man finally opened up, describing the
horrors he had seen and endured as a boy fleeing with his family
southward ahead of the advancing North Korean army. Lee could never
shake those images. Now they have inspired the opening pages of The Surrendered, a novel Publishers Weekly hails as "deeply felt, compulsively readable and imbued with moral gravity."
It is the fourth novel from 44-year-old Korean-born, American-raised Lee, whose first book, Native Speaker (1995), won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first work of fiction.
Though it begins in the chaotic opening days of the Korean War, The Surrendered
expands outward over time and geography and becomes what Lee describes
as "not so much a war novel as a story concerned with the effects of
mass conflict on the human psyche and spirit, the private odysseys
those who've experienced conflict must endure."
The
story centers on the life of June Wan, who escapes the war and builds a
business in New York, outlives a husband, and raises a son. But a
mid-life quest for that now-missing son prompts a journey into the past
and opens up the secrets she has nursed for three decades. The journey
also involves a reunion with the man, Hector Brennan, who saved her
life long ago. Novelist Junot Diaz says The Surrendered "looks to be Lee's epic masterpiece."
Born
in Korea in 1965, Lee emigrated to the United States with his family
when he was three. Raised in Westchester, N.Y., he graduated from Yale
University and worked briefly as a Wall Street analyst before turning
to writing full time. Native Speaker, about a Korean-American industrial spy, was followed by A Gesture Life (1999) and Aloft (2004). Lee's books have been named to "best books of the year" lists by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, and other publications. In addition to the PEN/Hemingway, he has won the Asian-American Literary Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. The New Yorker named him one of the twenty best writers under forty. He teaches creative writing at Princeton University and is widely considered the most important living Korean-American novelist.
His
reading will be followed by a reception and book-signing in nearby
Brochstein Pavilion. Brazos Bookstore will handle onsite book sales.
Admission to the reading is free to Asia Society members, $5 for
nonmembers. Click here to register.
Directions to Herring Hall:
Take Entrance 18 off Rice Boulevard, park in West Lot 1. For campus map, visit link below.
http://www.rice.edu/maps/maps.html
For more information, please call 713.439.0051 x17
or email fritzl@asiasociety.org
|
03 / 22
Start: 7:30 pm
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Tracy Kidder, a master of the non-fiction narrative, won the National
Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his book, Soul of a New Machine.
Kidder combines award-winning reportorial skill with what one New York Times
Book Review critic describes as “the author’s genuine love, delight, and
celebration of the human condition.” He has written nine books of nonfiction,
including House, Among Schoolchildren, Old Friends, Home Town
and My Detachment, Kidder’s personal account of his time as a soldier in
Vietnam,
where he was awarded the Bronze Star. Of his highly acclaimed book, Mountains Beyond Mountains,
author Thom Jones writes, “Mountains is the sort of book that makes you
want to buy a hundred copies and pass them out like a street corner
evangelist.” Kidder’s newest book, Strength in What Remains, has been
described as a book which will “resurrect your faith in the human spirit.” It
follows the story of Deogratias, a refugee from the civil war and genocide of
1990s Burundi, who makes his
way to New York City.
“Deo’s story,” says Alex Kotlowitz, “is remarkable, stunning really. His
journey is the story of our times, one that keeps the rest of us from
forgetting.”
General admission tickets: $5, on sale March 1, 2010.
Click here for tickets and details.
|
03 / 23
Start: 7:00 pm
End: 8:30 pm
An exploration of the racial politics of American sports, from
the Jim Crow era to the present day, witnessed through the life of
legendary African-American basketball coach and NCAA title winner Nolan
Richardson
Born in El Paso's Segundo Barrio, or Second Ward,
pioneering basketball coach Nolan Richardson grew up in the only black
family in a Mexican neighborhood and attended desegregated Bowie High
School in 1955. Richardson went on to play at Texas Western College,
now the University of Texas at El Paso, as the first black star player
for legendary coach Don Haskins. Richardson eventually rose to national
prominence as a coach in his own right. He became the first black coach
at a predominately white school in the Old South to win the NCAA
Championship in 1994 at the University of Arkansas. With Richardson's
Razorbacks playing at a high-pressure, electrifying pace—a style he
called "Forty Minutes of Hell," which became a nationally known
trademark—Arkansas made three appearances in the Final Four, and
Richardson was named NABC Coach of the Year in 1994.
Richardson's gradual political awakening, and his subsequent refusal to
keep quiet about overt or subtle racial injustices, marked his rise.
Regardless of his staggering win totals, tensions in Arkansas
culminated in an infamous 2002 press conference in which he accused the
University of Arkansas of discriminating against him, bringing about an
abrupt end to his college coaching career. The only coach in history to
win a Junior College National Championship, the NIT, and the NCAA
tournament, Richardson went on to coach internationally and in the
WNBA.
Rus Bradburd, a former college basketball coach who
also worked with Don Haskins, highlights Richardson's trailblazing
career with empathy and intimacy, revealing a man whose hard-won
successes were matched by deeply felt losses. An intensive inside look
at elite collegiate athletics and a chronicle of the transition away
from the segregated era of American sport, Forty Minutes of Hell
is the first full-length biography of Nolan Richardson, setting his
complicated story against the backdrop of a decisive time in American
history.
"Nolan Richardson's extraordinary life and
success as the University of Arkansas' coach are an important chapter
in the history of our country's struggle for racial equality, with all
the excitement of the Final Four. What an incredible journey! I am
grateful that I got to see a lot of it first hand and to know such an
able and remarkable man."
- President Bill Clinton
"This
is a great story about America and its hidden histories. Nolan
Richardson understands the struggle because he did the heavy lifting.
Every black college coach with a good job today owes Nolan Richardson a
measure of respect for the fearless way he kicked down doors. Every
American should thank him for showing us it was possible.
- Charles Barkley
"I've
never read a sports book I would describe as operatic until now. Nolan
Richardson's story, both unique and universal, would challenge the most
seasoned biographer, but Bradburd's libretto is heartbreaking and
inspiring. This is the finest sports biography I've read in years,
hands down."
- Dave Zirin, author, A People's History of Sports in the Unites States
Establishes Richardson as one of college basketball’s most compelling figures, both because of and in spite of his race.
- Kirkus Reviews
Rus Bradburd teaches writing classes in New Mexico State
University’s MFA program. A Chicago native, he coached basketball at
UTEP and New Mexico State for fourteen seasons before resigning to
pursue a writing career in 2000.
Rus Bradburd coaching in Ireland, the subject of his memoir Paddy on the Hardwood.
At NMSU, he studied with Robert Boswell, Antonya Nelson, and Kevin McIlvoy. His fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, Freight Stories, and Aethlon.
Since retiring from college coaching, his essays have appeared in The Houston Chronicle, El Paso Times, Las Cruces Sun-News, Heartland Journal, SLAM Magazine, Bounce, and Los Angeles Times.
Rus went to Ireland in 2002 to coach Tralee's Frosties Tigers. Paddy on the Hardwood: A Journey in Irish Hoops was his first book, published in 2006.
Forty Minutes of Hell: The Extraordinary Life of Nolan Richardson was published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Read Rus Bradburd's piece on teaching his dribbling drills to Portland Trailblazer Jerryd Bayless here.
Read Sports Illustrated's piece on Nolan Richardson and Bert Williams and their role in desegregating
El Paso here.
|
03 / 24
Start: 11:30 am
End: 1:00 pm
Asia Society's Wells Fargo South Asia Lecture Series presents Mack Professor of Management and Vice Dean for Global Initiatives at the Wharton School of Business Harbir Singh. Co-author of The India Way: How India's Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management, which will be released this March, Singh will discuss how management innovation in the future won't pass from West to East but will become a two-way street.
Start: 7:00 pm
End: 8:30 pm
Do we have free will? What counts as justice in the Peruvian Amazon? Is
Catherine Zeta-Jones objectively hotter than Drew Barrymore? These are
just a few of the questions that philosopher Tamler Sommers attempts to
answer in far-spanning interviews with ten acclaimed researchers in the
burgeoning field of moral psychology contained in his new book, A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain. Philip Zimbardo talks about his
famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” and how it relates to abuses of Abu
Ghraib. Harvard neuroscientist Josh Greene reports on the ways our
brains react to ethical dilemmas. Jonathan Haidt explains why we object
to incest and how that relates to disagreements between conservatives
and liberals. Renowned Primatologist Frans de Waal juxtaposes human
behavior with that of the bonobo (a species he terms the "hippie ape.")
And much more. A Very Bad Wizard is essential reading for anyone curious about the origins and inner workings of our moral lives.
"An intellectual feast, completely engrossing."
— Ian McEwan
“A thought-provoking and entertaining tour of one of the frontiers of human knowledge — the roots of our moral sense.”
— Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought
“Tamler
Sommers has become something of a legend in the world of philosophy,
not only for his profound insights into human morality, but also for
the almost supernaturally funny and engaging way he presents
philosophical ideas.… These interviews give the reader a real sense for
some of the most important new research in the cognitive science of
morality, but they also do an amazing job of capturing some of the
verve and excitement of this emerging new field.”
— Joshua Knobe, Assistant Professor, Program in Cognitive Science and Department of Philosophy, Yale University
Tamler Sommers is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Houston, and holds a joint appointment with the Honor’s College. He
teaches primarily in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy
of law, specializing in issues relating to free will and moral
responsibility. His current research project examines differences in
perspectives about moral responsibility across cultures and what these
differences mean for the philosophical debate. A book on this topic
entitled Relative Justice is under contract with Princeton
University Press. Recent publications include “The Two Faces of
Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor” (Biology and Philosophy), “More Work for Hard Incompatibilism” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), and “The Objective Attitude” (Philosophical Quarterly). Sommers also contributes regularly to the Times Literary Supplement and conducts interviews for The Believer. A collection of his interviews, entitled A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain, will has just been published by McSweeney’s Press.
|
03 / 25
Start: 6:00 pm
End: 8:00 pm
PRESENTS
A Special Reception and Booksigning
Thursday, March 25, 2010
6 PM to 8 PM
To celebrate the opening of the exhibit
DAVID ROW
MORPHOLOGY
i sold Andy Warhol. (too soon)
by Richard Polsky
Remarks by the Author - 7 pm
Co-sponsored by PaperCity Magazine
McClain Gallery
2242 Richmond Ave
Houston, Texas 77098
(713) 520-9988
info@mcclaingallery.com
Start: 6:00 pm
Join the Central Library for a visit from novelist Shilpi Somaya Gowda, who will discuss and sign copies of her debut novel Secret Daughter.
In a tiny hut in rural India, Kavita gives birth to Asha. Unable to
afford the “luxury” of raising a daughter, her husband forces Kavita to
give the baby up – a decision that will haunt them both for the rest of
their lives. Halfway around the globe, Somer, an American doctor,
decides to adopt a child after making the wrenching discovery that she
will never have one of her own. When her husband Krishnan shows her a
photo of baby Asha sent to him from a Mumbai orphanage, she falls
instantly in love. As she waited for the adoption to be finalized, she
knew her life would change. But she was convinced that the love she
already felt would overcome all obstacles.
Shilpi Somaya Gowda was born and raised in Toronto to parents who
migrated there from Mumbai. She holds an MBA from Stanford University
and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1991,
she spent a summer as a volunteer in an Indian orphanage. She currently
lives in Dallas with her husband and two daughters.
Book sale by Brazos Bookstore to precede the reading.
Learn more about the Houston Public Library's Author Series.
Start: 7:00 pm
End: 9:00 pm
Featuring
Usha Akella, Poet
Steve Gorn, Flute
Poet Usha Akella will read from her most recent book of poems, accompanied by the internationally-renowned musician Steve Gorn. The poetry celebrates the Sufi spirit with poems of devotion, love, and yearning for the divine. The work resonates with the sanctity and dignity of the Rothko Chapel's mission and is universal in its spiritual message of love and harmony. A signing and booksale by Brazos will follow the program. Akella's book, A Face That Does Not Bear the Footprints of the World, will be available.
Visit the Rothko Chapel online for more information.
|
03 / 26
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03 / 27
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03 / 28
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03 / 29
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03 / 30
|
03 / 31
Start: 11:30 am
End: 1:30 pm
Join Brazos Bookstore and the Asia Society at the Houston Club for a luncheon with bestselling author Michael Lewis, author of The Blind Side, to discuss his just-released book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a character-rich and darkly humorous account of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff.
Who better than the author of the signature bestseller Liar’s Poker
to explain how the event we were told was impossible—the free fall of
the American economy—finally occurred; how the things that we wanted,
like ridiculously easy money and greatly expanded home ownership, were
vehicles for that crash; and how shareholder demand for profit forced
investment executives to eat the forbidden fruit of toxic derivatives.
Michael Lewis’s splendid cast of characters includes villains, a few
heroes, and a lot of people who look very, very foolish: high
government officials, including the watchdogs; heads of major
investment banks (some overlap here with previous category); perhaps
even the face in your mirror. In this trenchant, raucous, irresistible
narrative, Lewis writes of the goats and of the few who saw what the
emperor was wearing, and gives them, most memorably, what they deserve.
He proves yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of
our times.
Tickets: $38.50 Individuals, $360 Table of 10
Reservations: 713-229-2215 or email sjones@houstonclub.org
PLEASE NOTE: Michael Lewis will sign only those books bought from Brazos Bookstore.
Start: 6:30 pm
End: 8:30 pm
We are delighted to host, together with the Princeton Alumni Association of Houston, Michael Lewis in Shell Auditorium at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business. Lewis's new book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, covers the fall of the American economy with humor, rich characters, and insight.
Who better than the author of the signature bestseller Liar’s Poker
to explain how the event we were told was impossible—the free fall of
the American economy—finally occurred; how the things that we wanted,
like ridiculously easy money and greatly expanded home ownership, were
vehicles for that crash; and how shareholder demand for profit forced
investment executives to eat the forbidden fruit of toxic derivatives.
Michael Lewis’s splendid cast of characters includes villains, a few
heroes, and a lot of people who look very, very foolish: high
government officials, including the watchdogs; heads of major
investment banks (some overlap here with previous category); perhaps
even the face in your mirror. In this trenchant, raucous, irresistible
narrative, Lewis writes of the goats and of the few who saw what the
emperor was wearing, and gives them, most memorably, what they deserve.
He proves yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of
our times.
Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Panic, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children.
This event is free and open to the public. Please note that Michael Lewis will sign only those books bought from Brazos Bookstore.
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04 / 1
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04 / 2
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04 / 3
Start: 10:00 am
End: 5:00 pm
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04 / 4
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04 / 5
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04 / 6
Start: 7:00 pm
End: 8:30 pm
Another April means another National Poetry Month, and another book from Ed Hirsch means (as long as we're lucky) another delightful evening of poetry here at Brazos. We love welcoming Hirsch back to Houston and celebrating his work, past and present. His rich and significant upcoming collection of more than one hundred new and selected poems chronicle insomnia (“the blue-rimmed edge / of outer dark, those crossroads /
where we meet the dead”), art and culture (poems on Edward Hopper and
Paul Celan, love poems in the voices of Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein,
a meditation on two suitcases of children’s drawings that came out of
the Terezin concentration camp), and his own experience, including the
powerful, frank self-examinations in his more recent work.
Repeatedly confronting the darkness, his own sense of godlessness
(“Forgive me, faith, for never having any”), he also struggles with the
unlikely presence of the divine, the power of art to redeem human
transience, and the complexity of relationships. Throughout the
collection, his own life trajectory enriches the poems; he is the
“skinny, long-beaked boy / who perched in the branches of the old
branch library,” as well as the passionate middle-aged man who tells
his lover, “I wish I could paint you— / . . . / I need a brush for your
hard angles / and ferocious blues and reds. / . . . / I wish I could
paint you / from the waist down.”
Grieving for the losses
occasioned by our mortality, Hirsch’s ultimate impulse as a poet is to
praise—to wreathe himself, as he writes, in “the living fire” that
burns with a ferocious intensity.
Edward Hirsch is the author of seven previous collections of poetry and four prose books, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry,
a national best seller. He has received numerous awards for his poetry,
including the National Book Critics Circle Award and a MacArthur
Fellowship, and publishes regularly in a wide variety of magazines and
journals. A longtime teacher, at Wayne State University and in the
Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, Hirsch is now
president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in
New York City.
|
04 / 7
Start: 7:00 pm
End: 8:30 pm
The Rice Cherry Reading Series is presented by the Rice Department of English and Fondren Library. Brazos is the proud bookseller of the series.
Rarely has a first book of poems been more exalted than Gabrielle Calvocoressi's The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, which the Times Literary Supplement called "an excoriation of present-day America by a new and lethal commentator." Now, in Apocalypthis extraordinary follow-up, Calvocoressi continues her
mission to document the particular hardships of derelict American small
towns.
Without sacrificing one iota of poetic imagination or brilliance, Calvocoressi writes unbelievably potent poetry that everyday people connect with, poetry about real lives set in the real world. The small-town settings she writes of aren't happy -- there's brutality and bigotry -- but the poems have a beauty and spiritedness that make then feel incrediby heroic. The book contains unforgettable poems about jazz and boxing, two things to which its speaker turns to find solace and confidence. Reminiscent of work by Philip Levine and Mary Karr, it is a book about America, in all of its struggling and defiantly hopeful glory.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi has won the Bernard F. Connors Prize from the Paris Review
and a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers. She teaches in the
graduate writing programs of California College of the Arts and Warren
Wilson College. She lives in Los Angeles.
|
04 / 8
Start: 11:30 am
End: 1:30 pm
Asia Society Texas Center Presents
The BP Speaker Series
Prospects for Democracy in China, Afghanistan and
North Korea
Afghanistan: Is Success Possible?
A Lecture by the Honorable Ronald Neumann
President, American Academy of Diplomacy
Ambassador to Afghanistan (ret.)
Thursday, April 8, 2010
11:30 a.m. registration
12:00 luncheon
The Houston Club
811 Rusk Ave.
Houston, TX 77007
Tickets:
$30 ASTC members
$40 nonmembers
$300 table of 10
Click here to register online
no cancellations, exchanges or refunds
President Obama has made the Afghan war his war.
What, realistically, can the United States accomplish there? And what
are the obstacles in our path?
Ronald E. Neumann brings an
informed and incisive perspective to these questions, having served as
U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, years that saw
coalition forces challenged by a renewed Taliban insurgency. Lessons
learned will form the basis of his April 8 lecture, Afghanistan: Is
Success Possible? the second in the three-part BP Speaker Series:
Prospects for Democracy: China, North Korea, Afghanistan.
Neumann's lecture draws on his new book The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan,
which journalist Ahmed Rashid praised as "deeply insightful and
thoughtful ... at times amusing and always frank." Former Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage said of the book: "President
Obama's strategy for Afghanistan needs to be informed by this tale.
Clearly a vision of a nation is not sufficient to prevail. As
Ambassador Neumann indicates, execution and accountability are
essential."
Neumann knows Afghanistan intimately. His father,
Robert G. Neumann, served as ambassador there in the late 1960s, and
the son traveled extensively in the country after college. After
serving as a combat infantryman in Vietnam, Neumann joined the State
Department and began a diplomatic career that spanned almost four
decades. Before his Kabul posting he served as ambassador to Algeria
and Bahrain, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern
Affairs, and political adviser in Iraq. Today he is president of the
American Academy of Diplomacy in Washington, D.C.
He concluded
his article in the September issue of Foreign Policy magazine with this
piece of advice about Afghanistan: "Americans will understand
limitations that are explained in advance along with thoughtfully
conceived near-term actions. But we need to guard against the
temptation to make short-term, 'feel-good' promises now that destroy
credibility later when they cannot be achieved."
Start: 6:00 pm
End: 8:00 pm
Photo by Paul Hester
Glenwood Cemetery has long offered a serene and pastoral final resting
place for many of Houston's civic leaders and historic figures. In Houston's Silent Garden,
Suzanne Turner and Joanne Seale Wilson reveal the story of this
beautifully wooded and landscaped preserve's development—a story that
is also very much entwined with the history of Houston.
In 1871,
recovering from Reconstruction, a group of progressive citizens noticed
that Houston needed a new cemetery at the edge of the central city.
Embracing the picturesque aesthetic that had swept through the Eastern
Seaboard, the founders of Glenwood selected land along Buffalo Bayou
and developed Glenwood. Since then, the cemetery's monuments have
memorialized the lives of many of the city's most interesting residents
(Allen, Baker, Brown, Clayton, Cooley, Cullinan, Farish, Hermann,
Hobby, House, Hughes, Jones, Law, Rice, Staub, Sterling, Weiss, and
Wortham, among many others). The monuments also showcase the artistry
and craftsmanship of some of the region's finest sculptors and artisans.
Accompanied
by the breathtaking photography of Paul Hester, this book chronicles
the cemetery's origins from its inception in 1871 to the present day. Through
the story of Glenwood, readers will appreciate some of the natural
features that shaped Houston's evolution and will also begin to
understand the forces of urbanization that positioned Houston to become
the vital community it is today. Houston's Silent Garden is a must-read for those interested in Houston civic and regional history, architecture, and urban planning.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Suzanne Turner is professor emeritus of the School of Landscape
Architecture at Louisiana State University and principal of Suzanne
Turner Associates. She resides in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Joanne Seale Wilson of Houston is the author of several publications in
horticulture and landscaping, including a biography of historic
landscape architect Rose Ishbel Greely. Paul Hester teaches in the
Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts at Rice University. His
photographs have appeared in many books, magazines, and exhibitions.
Start: 7:00 pm
End: 8:30 pm
Poet, Playwright, and Civil Rights Activist
Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark,
NJ. After leaving Howard University and the Air Force, he moved to the
Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1957 and co-edited the avant-garde
literary magazine Yugen and founded Totem Press, which first
published works by Allen Ginsberg,
Jack Kerouac, and others.
He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a
Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. Blues People: Negro Music in
White
America,
still regarded as the seminal work on Afro-American music and culture. He
also edited The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in
America
were published in 1963. His reputation as a playwright was established with
the production of Dutchman at the Cherry Lane Theatre
in New York on March 24, 1964. The controversial play subsequently won an
Obie Award (for "best off-Broadway play") and was made into a film. (The
play was revived by the Cherry Lane Theatre in January 2007 and has been
reproduced around the world).
In 1965, Jones moved to Harlem,
where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. The BARTS lasted
only one year but had a lasting influence on the direction of Afro American
Arts. Sending five trucks a day into the Harlem community, art show on one,
poetry reading from the other, music, another, drama the other, where
performances would be given in a changed location each day. Vacant lots,
play grounds, housing projects pushing Art that would be Black as Bessie
Smith, mass-based and taken to the people and Revolutionary, reflecting the
intensity of the entire Black Liberation Movement
In 1966, when the BARTS was dissolved, Baraka returned to Newark,
his hometown and set up with his new bride, Amina Baraka, (who was a founder
of Newark’s “Loft” a local venue of contemporary art), Spirit House and the
Spirit House Movers, which brought drama, music and poetry from across the
country.
During this period, the Barakas founded the Committee for Unified
Newark and the Congress of Afrikan People which led the election of Ken
Gibson as the first Black Mayor of a major northeastern city spearheaded by
the 1972 Gary (IN) Convention. In 1968, he co-edited Black Fire: An
Anthology of Afro-American Writing with Larry Neal.
He and his wife, Amina Baraka, edited The Music (Meditations
of Jazz & Blues (Morrow) Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American
Women, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus
Foundation. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was
published in 1984. His recent publications are Y’s/Why’s/Wise (3rd
World 1992) Funk Lore (Littoral 1993), Eulogies, (Marsilio,
94,) Transbluesency, (Marsilio 1996), Somebody Blew Up America &
Other Poems (Nehesi 2002).
Amiri Baraka's numerous literary honors include fellowships from
the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the
PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston
Hughes Award from The City College of New York, and a lifetime achievement
award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He was inducted into the American
Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995. In 1994, he retired as Professor of
Africana Studies at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, and in
2002 was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey and Newark Public Schools. In
January 2007, his award-winning, one-act play, Dutchman, was revived
at the new Cherry Lane Theatre in New York and received critical acclaim and
international attention. His recent book of short stories, Tales of the
Out & The Gone (Akashic Books) was published in late 2007. Home,
his book of social essays, will be re-released by Akashic Books in early
2009. Digging: The Afro American Soul of Music (Univ.
of California) is also due out this year.
Learn more about the Rothko Chapel.
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04 / 9
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04 / 10
Start: 5:30 pm
End: 7:30 pm
We just wouldn't feel right if Katherine Center's next book came out and we didn't celebrate in a big way. Get Lucky is her third novel and equally as insightful and hilarious as her previous two, The Bright Side of Disaster and Everyone is Beautiful. As good books often do, it starts with a bang:
First: I got fired. For emailing a website with hundreds of pictures of
breasts to every single person in our company. Even the CEO and
chairman of the board. Even the summer interns.
Please join us for a reception, talk and booksigning by one of our favorite authors, within or without Houston city limits.
Read more about Katherine Center.
Check out her awesome blog.
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