Free Library Podcast

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)

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''His generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power'' (Los Angeles Times), Colm Tóibín is the author of an impressive list of novels, short stories, essays, plays, poetry, and criticism. His novels The Master (2004) and The Testament of Mary (2013) were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Brooklyn (2009) was adapted into the popular BAFTA Award-winning film of the same name. The Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, in 2011 Toibin received an Irish PEN Award. In House of Names, Tóibín brings a modern sensibility and sympathy to the story of Clytemnestra, the vengeful wife of Ancient Greece's King Agamemnon. 

(recorded 5/17/2017)

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In conversation with longtime broadcaster and journalist, Tracey Matisak

Gabourey Sidibe received a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her debut role in the 2009 film Precious, based on the novel Push by Sapphire. Sidibe won instant fame for her heartbreaking portrayal of the movie's title character. Since then she has appeared on three seasons of American Horror Story, was a cast member of the Showtime series The Big C, has hosted Saturday Night Live, and has appeared in several films. She currently plays Becky on Fox's popular musical drama series Empire. This Is Just My Face tells the behind-the-scenes story of Sidibe's Bed-Stuy upbringing and rise to fame while proffering sensible dispatches on celebrity, depression, friendship, and self-image.  (recorded 5/4/2017)

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.

David Grossman won the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for his novel A Horse Walks into a Bar, a ''magnificently comic and sucker-punch-tragic excursion into brilliance'' (New York Times). Born in Jerusalem, Grossman is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature, including To the End of the Land, a meditation on war, family, and loss, praised as ''one of those few novels that feel as though they have made a difference to the world'' (New York Times) His many international honors include the French Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Israel's Emet Prize, and the just announced 2018 Israel Prize.

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(recorded 4/13/2018)

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.

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(recorded 2/15/2018)

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.

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(recorded 2/20/2018)

''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.

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(recorded 2/27/2018)