Free Library Podcast

''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.

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(recorded 2/27/2018)

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.

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(recorded 3/2/2018)

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.

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Pinetree Foundation Endowed Lecture

(recorded 3/5/2018)

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.

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(recorded 3/8/2018)

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.

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(recorded 3/6/2018)

''One of those rare historian-humanists who bridge East and West'' (Wall Street Journal), Ian Buruma is the author of The Missionary and the Libertine; Murder in Amsterdam; Year Zero: A History of 1945; Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War; and Their Promised Land, an account of his grandparents' love and separation during the 20th century's darkest hours. The winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, the Erasmus Prize, and the Shorenstein Journalism Award, he is the editor of The New York Review of Books. A Tokyo Romance is an unsparing account of Buruma's journey into that city's frenetic and surreal '70s underground culture.

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(recorded 3/15/2018)

The Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Mary Frances Berry is one of America's most respected legal historians and human-rights advocates. Her many books include Power in Words, Five Dollars and Pork Chop Sandwich, and Black Resistance/White Law. A former chairwoman of the Commission on Civil Rights, she is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Society for Legal History and the recipient of 35 honorary degrees. In History Teaches Us to Resist, she offers a comprehensive tableau of the pushback against previous presidential administrations, posits that antagonistic leaders help progressive movements flourish, and details her six decades as an activist in an array of causes.

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Barbara Gohn Day Memorial Lecture

(recorded 3/20/2018)

With an artist's eye and a ground-level view of people in extremis across the world, writer Anna Badkhen offers ''rich and lucid prose [that] illustrates her journey as vividly as might a series of photographs'' (Christian Science Monitor). Her immersive investigations of the world's iniquities have yielded six books of nonfiction, most recently The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village and Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah. A contributor to Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and The New Republic, she won the Joel R. Seldin Award for documenting the lives of civilians in warzones. In Fisherman's Blues, Badkhen documents the cultural, economic, and environmental turmoil in a centuries-old Senegalese fishing village.  

Min Jin Lee is the author of the ''accomplished and engrossing'' (New York Times Book Review) novel Free Food for Millionaires, a story of culture clash and identity that was named to a number of 2007's ''best of the year'' lists. She is a former columnist for the Chosun Ilbo, South Korea's leading newspaper, and her fiction, essays, and articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and Food & Wine. A National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller, Lee's newest novel tells the generation-spanning story of a Korean family's fight for purchase in 20th-century Japan.

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(recorded 3/22/2018)

A writer who ''luxuriates in language'' (San Francisco Chronicle), Peter Carey is the author of 15 quirky and daring novels, including Parrot and Olivier in America, Bliss, Oscar and Lucinda, and The True History of the Kelly Gang, the latter two of which won the Man Booker Prize. Frequently posited as Australia's next Nobel Laureate in Literature, he is also the author of two story collections and four works of nonfiction, and he has collaborated on two screenplays. A Long Way from Home follows three intrepid contestants in a grueling 10,000-mile road race across 1950s Australia.

''A novelist with a particular genius for inhabiting the past'' (The London Review of Books), Alan Hollinghurst is the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty, an elegiac account of cash, cars, cocaine, and coming out in 1980s London. Infused with wit, sweeping jumps in time, and eroticism, his other achievements in fiction include The Swimming-Pool Library, The Spell, and The Stranger's Child. The Sparsholt Affair mines the complex depths of a charismatic man's legacy across three generations of a unique English family.

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(recorded 3/27/2018)

In conversation with Tamala Edwards, anchor, 6ABC Action News morning edition

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu made waves in 2017 with a ''stunningly eloquent'' speech about race in America (CNN) in which he explained his decision to remove four Confederate statues from his city, arguing that ''there is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence for it.'' The president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and a former lieutenant governor of Louisiana, Landrieu is the son of a legendary progressive Louisiana state senator and Crescent City mayor. Part memoir, part history, and part prescription for change, In the Shadows of Statues tackles the larger legacy of slavery and institutional inequality that continues to plague America in a time of resurgent racism.

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(recorded 3/28/2018)