Free Library Podcast

Watch the video here.

John Banville won the Man Booker Prize for The Sea, a story of loss and the fickle power of memory celebrated for its ''power and strangeness and piercing beauty'' (The Washington Post Book World). His other fiction-including The Book of Evidence, Ancient Light, and The Untouchable-has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Irish PEN Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is also an acclaimed playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, and crime novelist. In Mrs. Osmond, Banville broadens the story of the titular heroine of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady into intense, subtle, thrilling new realms.

(recorded 11/14/2017)

Watch the video here.

''By turns grim and absurd, deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny'' (New York Times), Roz Chast has published more than 800 cartoons in The New Yorker since 1978. Chast has written or illustrated more than a dozen books, including several collected volumes of her published cartoons and the memoir Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a bestselling multi-genre narrative about her aging parents that won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a National Book Award Finalist. Told with nostalgia, wonder, and deft observation, Going into Town is an illustrated paean/guide/thank-you note to Manhattan.

Carole Phillips Memorial Lecture

(recorded 11/21/2017)

Watch the video here.

Lawrence O'Donnell is the host of MSNBC's The Last Word, one of cable television's most watched news and political commentary programs. In addition to writing for a variety of periodicals, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, he won an Emmy Award as executive producer and writer for The West Wing, was a senior advisor to Sen. Daniel Moynihan, and worked on a number of Senate committee staffs. In Playing with Fire, O'Donnell offers an account of one of the most dramatic presidential elections in U.S. history; the roles played by Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and a slew of other lastingly consequential figures; and the election's relevance to today's dirty politics and cutthroat political races. 

Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture

(recorded 11/28/2017)

Watch the video here.

Pioneering physician Dr. Nadine Burke Harris is a longtime crusader for targeting care to vulnerable and traumatized children. Her prolific work on the link between toxic stress and chronic illnesses includes more than 17,000 surveys of adult patients' adverse childhood experiences. She is the founder and CEO of San Francisco's Center for Youth Wellness, the subject of a widely read New Yorker profile, and presenter of the popular TED talk ''How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime.'' Through scientific evidence and affecting stories of individual impact, The Deepest Well presents a vital argument for how childhood stresses create lifelong neural system changes.

Introduced by Dr. Ruth Shaber

Sandra Shaber Memorial Lecture

(recorded 1/23/2018)

Watch the video here.

Dubbed the ''anti-Tiger Mom,'' contrarian economist Bryan Caplan is the author of the ''wickedly subversive'' (Wall Street Journal) parenting manifesto Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, which argues that parenting has needlessly been turned into a tedious chore; and The Myth of the Rational Voter, which questions fundamental assumptions about why Americans vote as they do. In his latest book, Caplan argues that we need to stop wasting public money on education, explains why graduate degrees are little more than conformity signals, and advocates for major policy changes at levels of the academy. Read Caplan's essay The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone in the current issue of The Atlantic.

(recorded 1/25/2018)

Watch the video here.

The host of MSNBC's popular news and commentary program Hardball, Chris Matthews is one of America's most familiar media faces. A former longtime syndicated print media columnist, staffer for several Democratic members of Congress, and speechwriter during the Carter administration, he has penned many books, including Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think; Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked; and Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, which was critically lauded and spent a dozen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Matthews's latest book examines the underdog Kennedy brother who, though overlooked and overshadowed, came to represent hope and idealism for a generation of young Americans.

(recorded 11/3/2017)

Watch the video here.

In conversation with Marty Moss-Coane, host of Radio Times on WHYY

In a publishing career that stretches back more than four decades, Tina Brown has been editor-in-chief of the popular and acclaimed magazines Tatler, Vanity Fair, Talk, and The New Yorker. She is also the author of the bestselling 2007 biography The Diana Chronicles, an ''amazingly detailed'' and ''jam-packed, juicy'' (Washington Post) portrait of the Princess of Wales. The founding editor of The Daily Beast and creator of Tina Brown Live Media, she is also the founder of the Women in the World summit. In her new book, Brown draws upon the diaries she kept during her meteoric years at Vanity Fair to provide a personal and cultural chronicle of a fascinating era. 

(recorded 11/30/2017)

Watch the video here.

Released just weeks after the tech guru's death, Walter Isaacson's ''staggering'' (The New York Times) portrait of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs instantly became an international bestseller. Isaacson has also penned bios of Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, and Albert Einstein, and he is the author of The Innovators, a century-spanning saga of the people who created the computer and the internet. Former CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, managing editor of Time magazine, and chairman emeritus of Teach for America, he currently is the University Professor of History at Tulane University. Isaacson's new biography of history's quintessential Renaissance man uses new discoveries and Leonardo's own notebooks to paint a portrait that connects his life to his art. 

Pine Tree Foundation Endowed Lecture

(recorded 11/29/2017)

Watch the video here.

Bill McKibben gave one of the earliest cautions about global warming with his 1989 book The End of Nature. His myriad other bestselling books about the environment include Deep Economy, Eaarth, and Oil and Honey, a call to arms in the fight for a sustainable planet. Recipient of the 2013 Gandhi Peace Award, McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In his debut novel, ''the world's best green journalist'' (Time) draws upon the current state of politics to imagine a band of Vermont patriots who decide to secede from the United States. (recorded 11/30/2017)

Watch the video here.

In conversation with Marc Lamont Hill, Steve Charles Chair in Media, Cities and Solutions at Temple University, and author of  Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond.

An L.A.-based artist, activist, and advocate for criminal justice reform, Patrisse Khan-Cullors is one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. She is also a Fulbright scholar, a 2015 NAACP History Maker, and one of Fortune's 2016 World's Greatest Leaders. A former features editor for Essence magazine and a senior director at the Drug Policy Alliance, asha bandele is the author of the memoirs The Prisoner's Wife and Something Like Beautiful, as well as two poetry collections. When They Call You a Terrorist is an impassioned rebuttal to those who call Black Lives Matter a threat to America, praised by Michael Eric Dyson for portraying its genesis in ''love-love of self, community, people, and, ultimately, the very soul of a democratic nation."

Poet Miriam Harris begins the evening with a powerful reading of two of her poems.

(recorded 1/18/2018)