| The Clarion Nonfiction of Tracy Kidder Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder has been called a "master of clarion non-fiction" by Booklist, his books regularly grace bestseller lists, and he has become required reading in creative non-fiction writing programs across the nation. His last book, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Care the World(Random House, 2003) narrates the story of a doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infections-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, and a world-class Robin Hood. Paul Farmer works for free most of the year working to heal the very poor of Haiti, Peru, Cuba and Russia, applying the principle of his mentor Rudolf Virchow that “disease is an expression of individual life under unfavorable conditions,” and that only “full and unlimited democracy” can cure epidemics. This powerful and inspiring book shows how one person can make a difference, as Paul Farmer makes house calls in Boston and the mountains of Haiti and blasts through convention to get results. Though Kidder usually writes about others, his most recent book, My Detachment (Random House, 2005) is about himself. It is a war story like none you had ever read before. In this moving memoir about his experiences as a young ROTC intelligence officer in Vietnam, Kidder gives us an honest, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes comical, always self-aware portrait of coming of age in a war that defined a generation. Kidder was just months out of college and expecting a stateside assignment, when his orders arrived for Vietnam. There, lovesick, anxious, melancholic, and young, he tried to assume command of a ragtag band of eight more-or-less ungovernable enlisted men. Kidder chronicles these experiences; struggling to make peace with his place in both the war and the world as he learned not only to lead his detachment but to laugh and drink with them as they shared the boredom, pointlessness and fear of war. My Detachment is a novel within a memoir as Kidder weaves his own war experience with the story of Larry Dempsey, “a strange, doomed young Army officer” who is the protagonist in Ivory Fields, Kidder’s first book which was rejected by publishers. In My Detachment, written more that three decades after Vietnam, Kidder sheds his alter-ego Dempsey and gives us his own account as a young lieutenant who sought to imagine himself, amid the tragedy of war, a hero. Kidder writes with a fine eye for the absurdity of rear echelon military life as well as for his own foibles, and also for those rare moments of redeeming grace in the midst of lunacy, danger and self-doubt. With its honesty and palpable emotion, My Detachment is an extraordinary memoir which Booklist compares to M*A*S*H: “at once funny and wrenching.” Tracy Kidder graduated from Harvard and studied at the University of Iowa. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and many other literary prizes. The author of Home Town, Old Friends, Among Schoolchildren, House, and The Soul of a New Machine, Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine. --Adapted with permission from Random House
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| Wednesday, March 22, 2006 • 7:00pm - 9:00pm • Miller Auditorium • Dearlove Hall |
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| Marge Piercy: A Cultural Touchstone In a co-sponsored event with Crandell Library of Glens Falls, Marge Piercy will be visiting the ACC campus to deliver an illustrated lecture on her most recent book, Sex Wars, an astonishing historical novel of gender, power, and the American Dream set in 19th century New York City.The novel is told through the viewpoints of some of the most notorious characters in American history, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthony Comstock, and Victoria Woodhull. The AMerican Library Association says Sex Wars is "triumphantly candid in its approach to sexuality: this is a message novel in the best possible sense, spectacularly engrossing, and truly moving." Marge Piercy is the author of seventeen volumes of poetry; a critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats;and seventeen novels, including The New York Times bestseller The Longings of Women and the classic Woman on the Edge of Time. Born in center city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she has been a key player in many of the major progressive political battles of our tme, including the anit-Vietnam war and the women's movement, and most recently in the resistance to the war in Irag. A popular speaker on college campuses, she has been a featured writer on Bill Moyers' PBS specials, Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion, Terri Gross' Fresh Air, the TODAY Show, and many radio programs nationwide. Piercy is one of Alfred A. Knopf's best selling poets-she is also the master of many genres: historical novels, science fiction, (for which she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction in the United Kingdom), novels of social comment and contemporary entertainments. The Hartford Courant said,"Marge Piercy is, unquestionably, a master of historical fiction." On her website, www.margepiercy.com, she says about writing Sex Wars:"I was attracted to the era after the Civil War because I found it had so many of the same divisions and conficts as our own time. The role of women in the public sphere and in the family, the degree to which sexual expression was valuable, permissible, tolerated or condemned, whether the Church and State should continue to be separated or whether Christianity should be the official religion, as opposed to all the other religions found in the States-these are all deep divisions in our own time as they were then. "As a woman active in the Second Wave of feminism, I was curious about the important figures in the First Wave. The standard figure is Susan B. Anthony, spinster, plain woman with her hair pulled back in a tight no-nonsense bun. Did she really represent the women active at that time?...I wanted to know if the Victorian period in American politics was really as staid as we imagine. And if course it wasn't-not even slightly." --Excerpted with permission from www.margepiercy.com
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| Tuesday, April 04, 2006 • 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm • Miller Auditorium • Dearlove Hall |
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| Thai Jones: Writing the Radical Life In 1981, at age four, Thai Jones's seemingly average family was suddenly anything but average. As heavily armed government agents stormed into their New York apartment and placed his parents under arrest, their secret history began to unravel. In A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience (Free Press, 2004). Thai Jones chronicles three generations of his family's involvement in twentieth century radical American politics. From chance childhood friendships to life-changing demonstrations, Jones's family illustrates, in a way that has never been told, the variety of paths taken to radicalism in this country. Beyond politics, A Radical Line is a family history, filled with tragic deaths, painful blunders, love honored and betrayed, narrow escapes and hope-filled births. Through extensive research and first-hand interviews with his parents and others, Jones, a former reporter for New York Newsday (a graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism) renders a personal account of one extraordinary family's path through American history beginning three generations back. He introduces his maternal grandparents, Arthur and Annie Stein. Arthur, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, would not testify about his membership in the Communist Party. His wife, Annie Stein, became interested in radical politics through a childhood friendship and later worked to desegregate national institutions. Thai Jones's paternal grandfather, Albert Jones, was a pacifist who refused fight in WWII and was remanded to an isolated work camp. Jeff Jones, Thai's father, was a member of the famous Weather Underground. This radical political group, outraged by racism and the Vietnam War, waged a low-level war against the United States government. Their activities included bombings and violent protests as the “Days of Rage.” As a result of these and other activities, many of the group’s members came under scrutiny of and were arrested by the FBI. A Radical Line recreates the economic, political, and chance influences on these characters, describing what led them into radical politics-and what ideology each person was drawn to from the wide-ranging groups and movements. For instance, initially, Jeff Jones had inherited from his father, Albert, an abhorrence of violence. But, Vietnam changed his mind. Jeff swore off pacifists and became convinced t hat, at certain times, fighting was the only way. William Ayers, professor of education and author of Fugitive Days: A Memoir, wrote,” A Radical Line is provocative, funny, heartbreaking, and touching in turn. Thai Jones combines a journalist’s nose, an ethnographer’s endurance, and a novelist’s hand as he brings to life an array of memorable characters…The result is a finely crafted and expertly calibrated memoir of real literary merit that echoes down the decades as a fitting homage to those who lived their lives against the grain.” --Adapted by permission from Simon and Schuster, Inc.
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| Saturday, May 20, 2006 • Room 206 • • Library Auditorium • Crandall Library |
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