Spring 2012
Eric alterman
diana butler bass
tim ryan
bryan sykes
timothy noah
michael sandel
christopher buckley
sara lawrence-lightfoot
Wednesday, June 13
7:30 PM
CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
THEY EAT PUPPIES, DON’T THEY?
Preeminent satirist Christopher Buckley, New York Times bestselling author of Supreme Courtship and Boomsday, returns with a hilarious and sure-to-be controversial novel about U.S.-China relations.
In an attempt to gain Congressional approval for a top-secret weapons system, Washington lobbyist “Bird” McIntyre and sexy Neo-Conwonkette Angel Templeton start a rumor that the Chinese secret service is trying to assassinate the Dalai Lama.Their outrageous scheme provokes a series of crises involving the White House, the CIA, and a strangely sympathetic andvulnerable Chinese president, with both countries veering perilously towards war.
With his most convincing and outrageous characters to date—Bird, a failed novelist of amusingly awful Clancyesque thrillers; Angel, a combination Ann Coulter and Ayn Rand; Bird’s feckless but endearing Civil War re-enactor brother; the mild-manneredChinese President Fa and his devoted aide Gang—Buckley’s THEY EAT PUPPIES, DON’T THEY? blends the skewering genius of Thank You For Smoking with Dr. Strangelove’s dark comedy, and has something to offend—and amuse—everyone.
Christopher Buckley was born in New York City in 1952. He was educated at Portsmouth Abbey, worked on a Norwegian tramp freighter and graduated cum laude from Yale. At age 24 he was managing editor of Esquire magazine; at 29, chief speechwriter to the Vice President of the United States, George H.W. Bush. He was the founding editor of Forbes FYI magazine (now ForbesLife), where he is now editor-at-large. Buckley has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, New York Magazine, The Washington Monthly, Forbes, Esquire, Vogue, Daily Beast and other publications. He is the author of fifteen books, including Steaming To Bamboola, The White House Mess, Wet Work, God Is My Broker, Little Green Men, No Way To Treat a First Lady, Florence of Arabia, and Losing Mum And Pup: A Memoir. He received the Washington Irving Prize for Literary Excellence and the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Hillside Club (2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley)
Tickets $12 ($6 students, OLLI, and Hillside members) in advance only at Brown Paper Tickets online or 800-838-3006; $15 at the door (all)
________________________________
Thursday, June 21
7:30 PM
SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT
EXIT: THE ENDINGS THAT SET US FREE
Acclaimed sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, MacArthur prize-winning Professor of Education at Harvard University, takes a serious look at the moments both large and small that define how we transition through our lives. EXIT asks whether there is a “new language and way of seeing that would encourage a different approach and attitude toward leave-taking.”
As Lawrence-Lightfoot notes, there are few examples in our culture to suggest how to approach exits with grace and understanding. We are focused instead on the idea of beginnings, the start of something rather than the acknowledgement of an ending. Questions of exiting are particularly timely as we live in a period when many people are leaving jobs, by choice or through circumstance, as well as a timewhen technology makes murkier the idea of final farewells.
EXIT explores the experiences of various people with stories of transition and exits, including an Iranian teenager who leaves the political strife of his native land to come alone to America; a middle-aged gay man who remembers his long exit from the closet; a nonprofit founder whose stepping down after 25 years makes for a confusing and difficult ending; an anthropologist whose exit from the field raises relational and ethical challenges; a boy who bullied for years until his parents take him out of school; a psychotherapist who discusses how she guides her patients through terminating therapy; the director of a hospital ICU who oversees patients making a recovery or facing death; an ex-priest whose protracted exit from the Catholic church leads to a new life in medicine; an man who exits his job as CEO of a major philanthropy with a big public leave-taking; a woman who reflects on her many vocational endings as she considers her next step in life; and a woman who promises her husband that his death, the final exit, will be both beautiful and triumphant.
Woven through all of these stories are ideas of home and voice, freedom and yearning, wounds and grace—and the concept that our developing the habit of small goodbyes and everyday transitions helps us “master and mark the larger farewells.” In this way, EXIT moves the idea of endings from the shadows to the light, “witnessing the ways in which exits can become moments for listening, storytelling, imagining, and creating choices that were unimaginable before.”
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard University, where she has been on the facultysince 1972. Educator, researcher, author, and public intellectual, Lawrence-Lightfoot is the author of Worlds Apart: Relationships Between Families and Schools, Beyond Bias: Perspectives on Classrooms, The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture, Balm In Gilead: Journey of A Healer, I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation, The Art and Science of Portraiture, Respect: An Exploration, The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn From Each Other, and most recently The Third Chapter: Risk, Passion, and Adventure in the Twenty-Five Years After 50
Hillside Club (2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley)
Tickets $12 ($6 students, OLLI, and Hillside members) in advance only at Brown Paper Tickets online or 800-838-3006; $15 at the door (all)
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
Join us on Facebook
Join us on Twitter
QUESTIONS?
Our independent bookstore partners are
Past Berkeley Arts & Letters' speakers:
2012:
Meredith Maran and Terry McMillan / February 22
Eric Alterman / April 19
Diana Butler Bass / May 1
Tim Ryan / May 2
Bryan Sykes / May 3
Timothy Noah / May 8
Michael Sandel / May 15
2011:
Izzeldin Abuelaish, MD / January 13
Scott McLennan / February 22
Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly / March 9
James Carroll / March 30
Susan Griffin, Karin Lofthus Carrington, Daniel Ellsberg,
George Lakoff, Joan Miura, Howard Teich / May 12
Eli Pariser / May 18
David Sirota / June 9
Neil Gaiman with Adam Savage / June 27
Robert Bellah / September 14
David Kennedy / October 3
John Lithgow / October 4
Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow / October 12
Alice Hoffman / October 18
Lawrence Lessig / October 26
Steven Pinker / October 27
Lawrence Weschler and Walter Murch / November 10
Luis Alberto Urrea / December 6
2010:
Chris Farrell / January 21
Jaron Lanier / January 27
Ethan Watters with Todd Oppenheimer / February 4
Garry Wills / February 11
Chris Cleave / February 16
Joel Kotkin / February 18
Mark Vernon and Astra Taylor / March 1
Sam Keen / March 11
Tim O'Brien / March 16
Harry Kreisler / March 24
PEN World Voices: Christo Tsilokis and Tommy Weiringa with Oscar Villalon/ April 21
Roxana Saberi / April 22
Peter Carey / May 5
Dan Ariely / June 3
Nicole Hollander / August 20
Meredith Maran and John McMurtrie / September 22
Elizabeth Rosner and Linda Gray Sexton / September 29
Miriam Pawel, Peter Schrag, Larry Tramutola, and Tom Dalzell / October 7
Robert Scheer / October 14
Houshang Asadi / October 21
Sam Harris / November 13
2009:
William Iggiagruk Nelson / January 14
Dacher Keltner and Michael Lewis / January 21
Dalton Conley / January 27
Luke Bergmann / January 28
Stephen Hinshaw / February 17
David Thomson / February 19
Pratap Chatterjee / February 20
Alva Noe / February 26
Xinran / February 27
Peter Singer / March 2
Stephen Mitchell / March 3
Alan Boss / March 13
Tom Davis and Dennis McNally / March 18
Elaine Showalter / March 19
Germaine Greer / March 31
Paul McGeough / April 7
Mahmood Mamdani / April 10
Judith Orloff / April 15
Michelle Goldberg / April 16
Donald Richie / April 21
Tamim Ansary / May 5
Ruth Reichl / May 10
Reza Aslan / May 12
Colson Whitehead / May 19
Luis Alberto Urrea / June 11
Eduardo Galeano / June 12
Lac Su / June 15
Novella Carpenter and Michael Pollan / June 18
Scott Rosenberg / July 29
Lang Lang / September 8
Rebecca Solnit / September 17
Michael Sandel / September 23
Robert Scheer & Peter Richardson / September 24
Max Blumenthal / September 29
Diane Ackerman / September 30
Po Bronson / October 6
Richard Dawkins / October 7
Sherman Alexie / October 8
Stewart Brand / October 16
Leonard Pitt / October 17
Kay Redfield Jamison / October 22
Deepak Chopra / October 23
Gary Vaynerchuk / October 25
Irene Khan / October 29
Orhan Pamuk / November 6
Liza Dalby / November 10
Susan Halpern / November 12
Mary Karr / November 16
