Free Library Podcast

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In conversation with Dick Polman, "Writer in Residence" at the University of Pennsylvania, and national political columnist at WHYY News

E.J. Dionne Jr. is a syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Washington Post and nearly 100 other newspapers, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. A regular commentator on National Public Radio and on other radio and television programs, his New York Times bestselling books include Why the Right Went Wrong and the National Book Award-nominated Why Americans Hate Politics. Norman J. Ornstein is a former resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and an editor and columnist for National Journal and The Atlantic. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the coauthor of the New York Times bestselling book It's Even Worse Than It Looks. In One Nation After Trump, Dionne and Ornstein lay bare the specific dangers of the Trump administration and argue for a populist alternative to the current president's divisive rhetoric and policies. 

Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture

(recorded 10/10/2017)

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''Absorbing and darkly funny'' (San Francisco Chronicle), James McBride is the author of the National Book Award winner The Good Lord Bird, in which a young boy born into slavery joins abolitionist John Brown's doomed mission. His nonfiction books include the New York Times bestselling memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother and Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. His other novels are Miracle at St. Anna, which he adapted for Spike Lee's film, and Song Yet Sung. Also an award-winning composer, screenwriter, and saxophonist, McBride received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2016. Five-Carat Soul is a short-story collection that examines history, race, and identity in unpredictably poignant ways.  (recorded 10/11/2017)

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A CNN political contributor and host of a popular recurring primetime special bearing his name, Van Jones was a green-jobs advisor to the Obama administration, overseeing billions in environmental recovery spending. His two bestselling books are The Green Collar Economy and Rebuild the Dream. One of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World, he is the founding president of Rebuild the Dream, an initiative to restore economic opportunity, as well as the cofounder of Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color for Change, and Green for All. A passionate manifesto that exposes hypocrisy on both sides of the political divide, Jones's latest book draws a blueprint for converting our collective angst and enmity into real change.

(recorded 10/12/2017)

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In conversation with Laura Kovacs, associate director, author events

''Powerful'' and ''full of magic'' (Los Angeles Times), Amy Tan is the author of the beloved novels The Joy Luck Club, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and for which she also co-wrote the film adaptation screenplay; The Kitchen God's Wife; The Hundred Secret Senses; and The Valley of Amazement, a decades- and continents-spanning story of three generations of women. In addition to several other novels and works of nonfiction, she is the author of two children's books, and her essays and stories have appeared in scores of periodicals and anthologies. Where the Past Begins is a memoir of Tan's life, art, and deeply personal inspirations that frame her fiction.

(recorded 10/17/2017)

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*National Book Award nominee and Yale Law School professor James Forman Jr. has spent decades teaching, writing, and working on the ground in criminal procedure and policy, juvenile justice, and education law and policy. A former law clerk for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, public defender in Washington, D.C., and Georgetown law professor, he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and law reviews. In his ''remarkable'' and ''beautifully written'' (Washington Post) new book, Forman seeks to understand the historical and continuing support for mass incarceration by African American leaders.

Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Endowed Lecture

*Due to technical difficulties, audience questions are difficult to hear. (recorded 10/18/2017)

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*In conversation with longtime broadcaster and journalist, Tracey Matisak

Best known for leading roles in a variety of comedies, dramas, and action films such as The Brothers, Deliver Us from Eva, Bad Boys II, and 2016's The Birth of a Nation, Gabrielle Union began her acting career in the 1990s in a string of successful television and film roles. An advocate for Susan G. Komen, Planned Parenthood, and survivors of violence, Union has been nominated for 11 BET Awards and eight NAACP Image Awards and has won one of each. We're Going to Need More Wine is an intimate, urgent collection of essays about race, bullying, competition between women in Hollywood, and her own trauma as a victim of sexual assault.

*Due to technical difficulties, audience questions are difficult to hear. (recorded 10/19/2017)

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*Pulling the delicate threads of ''fear and vulnerability, joy and passion, the capacity for love and pain and grief'' (The Washington Post), Alice McDermott's acclaimed fiction explores intersecting stories of familial love, Irish American culture and assimilation, and the hard-wrought lessons of adulthood. The Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, her novels include Someone, Charming Billy-winner of the 1998 National Book Award-and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This-all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. In The Ninth Hour, McDermott follows a young mother struggling with Catholic forgiveness and shame in the wake of her husband's violent suicide in early 20th-century Brooklyn.

*Due to technical difficulties, audience questions are difficult to hear. (recorded 10/23/2017)

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In conversation with Carlin Romano, Critic-at-Large, The Chronicle of Higher Education, former literary critic The Philadelphia Inquirer and author of America the Philosophical 

Lauded historian Simon Schama is the author of The Embarrassment of Riches; Scribble, Scribble, Scribble; and the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Rough Crossings, an account of the slaves who escaped to fight for the British during the American Revolutionary War. A professor of art history and history at Columbia University and cultural essayist for The New Yorker, he has written and presented more than 40 documentaries for the BBC, PBS, and The History Channel, including the seminal 15-part series A History of Britain and the Emmy-winning Power of Art. In the second part of The Story of the Jews, Schama details the Jewish experience in all corners of the world through the end of the 19th century.

(recorded 10/24/2017)

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Seeking to encourage and host conversations about differences and complex social issues, and in response to the National Endowment for the Humanities' call for public programming on the legacy of race in the United States, the Free Library is hosting this panel discussion. Dr. James Peterson, Director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University, will moderate the discussion between Andrea Ritchie, attorney and activist; Andrea Custis, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Urban League; Councilman Curtis Jones of Philadelphia's 4th District; and Kevin Bethel, Stoneleigh Fellow and former Deputy Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department. Participants will have the opportunity to engage the panel with questions.

Supported by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, this event has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.

(recorded 10/25/2017)

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In conversation with Nermeen Shaikh, co-Host and Producer at Democracy Now! Ms. Shaikh is the author of The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power and has an M.Phil. in politics from Cambridge University.

Juan González frequently co-hosts Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman and is the author of the books Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse and Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. He was a columnist for the New York Daily News from 1987 to 2016. A recipient of the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism and the Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award, González is a former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and an inductee into the New York Journalism Hall of Fame. His latest book argues that Bill De Blasio's landslide mayoral victory was a mandate for a more populist, less corporate Gotham.

(recorded 10/26/2017)