Free Library Podcast

''Rapidly acquiring international guru status'' (Financial Times) as an authority on the ever-evolving world of work, Daniel Pink is the no. 1 New York Times bestselling author of Drive, A Whole New Mind, and To Sell is Human, a counterintuitive manifesto about the art of pitching, enticing, and moving others. He has also contributed to a wide array of publications, including the Harvard Business Review, Wired, and The Sunday Telegraph. One of the 50 most influential business thinkers in the world by Thinkers 50, Pink serves on several corporate and non-profit boards, and has been translated into more than 30 languages. His latest book details the scientific keys to good timing at work, school, and home.

(recorded 3/13/2018)

Introduced by Sonia Sanchez.

Walter Mosley is best known for the Easy Rawlins mystery series featuring the hard-boiled detective and World War II vet living in L.A.'s Watts neighborhood. His diverse body of work includes science fiction, story collections, a graphic novel, plays, erotica, a young adult novel, and other mystery volumes. His many honors include an O. Henry Award, two NAACP Image Awards, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Grammy award, and the PEN American Center's Lifetime Achievement Award. Down the River Unto the Sea tells the story of a wrongly convicted former NYPD investigator seeking justice and redemption.

(recorded 3/6/2018)

''Rapidly acquiring international guru status'' (Financial Times) as an authority on the ever-evolving world of work, Daniel Pink is the no. 1 New York Times bestselling author of Drive, A Whole New Mind, and To Sell is Human, a counterintuitive manifesto about the art of pitching, enticing, and moving others. He has also contributed to a wide array of publications, including the Harvard Business Review, Wired, and The Sunday Telegraph. One of the 50 most influential business thinkers in the world by Thinkers 50, Pink serves on several corporate and non-profit boards, and has been translated into more than 30 languages. His latest book details the scientific keys to good timing at work, school, and home.

(recorded 3/13/2018)

In conversation with A.D. Amorosi, reporter Philadelphia Style Magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Lamont ''U-God'' Hawkins is one of the founding members of the Wu-Tang Clan, ''the most significant posse in hip-hop'' (Rolling Stone). He and fellow members RZA, GZA, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, and CappaDonna released four gold and platinum studio albums, including 1993's Enter the Wu-Tang, widely considered to be one of the greatest albums in hip-hop history. Raised in some of New York City's harshest neighborhoods in the 1970s and '80s, U-God met and bonded with his future groupmates over a shared love of music and the dream of escape. Raw tells his deeply personal story.

(recorded 3/8/2018)

A staff writer for The New Yorker, Steve Coll is the author of The Bin Ladens, a history of the eponymous clan and its most infamous member; the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars; and Private Empire, an examination of the notoriously secret machinations of the ExxonMobil Corporation. A former president of the public policy institute of the New America Foundation, Coll was a 20-year writer and editor at The Washington Post, where he also won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. He is currently the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. Directorate S tells the sprawling story of America's post-9/11 battle against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Pinetree Foundation Endowed Lecture

(recorded 3/5/2018)

In conversation with longtime broadcaster and journalist, Tracey Matisak.

The anchorman for Noticiero Univision for more than 30 years, eight-time Emmy-winning broadcaster and columnist Jorge Ramos is one of America's most popular and influential journalists. His 10 bestselling books include The Other Face of America, No Borders: A Journalist's Search for Home, and A Country for All: An Immigrant Manifesto. His weekly column is carried by dozens of newspapers across the U.S. and Latin America. Ramos's many honors include the Walter Cronkite Award and The Gabriel García Márquez Prize. In Stranger, the legendary journalist draws from hard data and personal experience to respond to the Trump administration's controversial remarks and policies directed toward Latino-indeed all-immigrants to this country.

Each ticket includes a copy of the book which you will collect as you enter the auditorium.

(recorded 3/2/2018)

''Erudite and compelling'' (Chicago Tribune), theoretical physicist and futurist Dr. Michio Kaku is a renowned popularizer of science and co-founder of String Field Theory, continuing Einstein's quest to discover a unified field theory. His bestselling popular science books include The Future of the Mind, Beyond Einstein, Physics of the Future, Physics of the Impossible, and Parallel Worlds. He has hosted several television specials for the BBC, the Science Channel, and the Discovery Channel. In his latest book, Kaku peers beyond the frontiers of science at a hopeful vision of man's future among the stars.

(recorded 2/27/2018)

Counting Fortune 500 CEOs, veterans with PTSD, Michael J. Fox, inner-city youth, and Oprah Winfrey among his eclectic student body, Bob Roth is one of the world's most respected teachers of Transcendental Meditation. For more than 45 years he's sought to lessen the emotional and physical toll stress places on our lives through this 5,000-year-old practice, training first under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, one of the 20th century's most popular meditation gurus. In Strength in Stillness, Roth explains the three types of meditation, breaks down the science behind them, and in simple language explains how Transcendental Meditation is the best way to eliminate stress from our lives.

(recorded 2/20/2018)

Cultural historian Robert Darnton is the author The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History. His many other books include The Business of Enlightenment, Berlin Journal, The Case for Books, and The Devil in the Holy Water. His towering and sundry honors include a MacArthur "genius" grant, election to the French Legion of Honor, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. In his latest book, the former director of the Harvard University library maps the rollicking, comedic, occasionally dangerous trails traveled by those in the French publishing industry during that country's time of greatest upheaval.

(recorded 2/15/2018)

Watch the video here.

Focusing mostly on the urban South, Tayari Jones‘s four novels include Silver Sparrow, The Untelling, and Leaving Atlanta, winner of the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction. ''One of the best writers of her generation'' (Atlanta Journal Constitution), she currently teaches writing in Rutgers University's MFA program. Her new novel follows a husband and wife who seem to embody the new South but are unmoored by false accusation and imprisonment.  

Stephanie Powell Watts is the author of the 2017 novel No One Is Coming to Save Us, a Great Gatsby-esque tale of African Americans in Jim Crow North Carolina, which presents ''an important, largely missing part of our ongoing American story'' (Chicago Review of Books). In 2017, No One is Coming to Save Us was chosen by Sarah Jessica Parker as an inaugural pick for the American Library Association's Book Club Central, and in 2018 the novel earned Ms. Watts the NAACP Image Award in the category of Debut Author. Her story collection We Are Taking Only What We Need was a PEN/Hemingway finalist, and one of O: The Oprah Magazine's 2013 Best Summer Reads. A professor at Lehigh University, Watts is the winner of a Pushcart Prize.

(recorded 2/13/2018)