An Evening of Readings and Conversation with EDUARDO GALEANO and ARUNDHATI ROY
Hi all...in lieu of our conversation at our last book club meeting, I thought this evening of readings may be interesting! I will be out of town, otherwise I would have loved to have gone!
An Evening of Readings and Conversation with
EDUARDO GALEANO and ARUNDHATI ROYPresented by the
Center for Economic Research and Social ChangeSunday, May 21, 2006
7:00 pm
The Town Hall
123 West 43rd Street, New York
Between 6th Avenue & Broadway
Doors open at 6:15 pm
Eduardo Galeano, one of Latin America's most admired writers, and Arundhati Roy, who won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel,
The God of Small Things, in a rare joint appearance for an evening of readings and conversation.
Galeano and Roy are both recipients of the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, in 1998 and 2002 respectively.
Voices of Time: A Life in Stories (Metropolitan Books) is Galeano's latest book and he is also the author of the
Memory of Fire trilogy (for which he won the 1989 American Book Award) and
Open Veins of Latin America. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay. In addition to her novel, Roy has also published several collections of essays, including
Power Politics,
War Talk and most recently,
An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, all from South End Press. She lives in New Delhi, India.
TICKETS
All seats $15.00
Tickets on sale in person at the Town Hall Box Office at 123 West 43rd Street, open 12 noon to 6:00 pm Monday through Saturday. Cash and credit cards accepted. All sales $1.50 fee. More info at:
http://www.the-townhall-nyc.org or call 212.840.2824. Or buy tickets online at
http://www.ticketmaster.com.
Pre-signed copies of books by Eduardo Galeano, including his new book,
Voices of Time: A Life in Stories (Metropolitan Books), and by Arundhati Roy, including
An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (South End Press), will be available at The Town Hall before and after the event.
Reporters take to books...
Sticking with the idea of a theme to our book choices, thought we could read one of the many books written by reporters. The blurbs for the choices below are courtesy
Amazon.com:
The Emperor by Ryszard KapuscinskiHaile Selassie, His Most Puissant Majesty and Distinguished Highness the Emperor of Ethiopia, enjoyed a 44-year reign until his own army gave him the boot in 1974. In the days following the coup, the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski traveled to Ethiopia and sought out members of the imperial court for interviews.
His composite portrait of Selassie's crumbling imperium is an astonishing, wildly funny creation. Elsewhere, the interviewees venture into tragic or grotesque or downright unbelievable terrain. Kapuscinski has shaped their testimonies into an eloquent whole, and while he never alludes to the totalitarian regime that ruled his native Poland during the same period, the analogy is impossible to ignore.The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. FriedmanThomas L. Friedman is not so much a futurist, which he is sometimes called, as a presentist. His aim, in his new book, The World Is Flat, is not to give you a speculative preview of the wonders that are sure to come in your lifetime, but rather to get you caught up on the wonders that are already here. The world isn't going to be flat, it is flat, which gives Friedman's breathless narrative much of its urgency.
What Friedman means by "flat" is "connected": the lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution have made it possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet. This in itself should not be news to anyone. But the news that Friedman has to deliver is that just when we stopped paying attention to these developments is when they actually began to accelerate. Globalization 3.0, as he calls it, is driven not by major corporations or giant trade organizations like the World Bank, but by individuals: desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world (but especially in India and China) who can compete--and win--not just for low-wage manufacturing and information labor but, increasingly, for the highest-end research and design work as well. Friedman tells his eye-opening story with the catchy slogans and globe-hopping anecdotes that readers of his earlier books and his New York Times columns will know well, and also with a stern sort of optimism. Treasure Hunt: A New York Times Reporter Tracks the Quedlinburg Hoard by William H. HonanA kleptomaniacal American soldier with a taste for high art, a relentless German sleuth hot on the trail of missing German treasures, and a priceless 9th-century gospel about to disappear forever into the shadowy world of private art collectors--the stuff of fiction? Hardly. In Treasure Hunt William H. Honan, a reporter for the New York Times, chronicles the amazing true story of the Quedlinburg Hoard, a cache of medieval treasures stolen from its hiding place in Germany's Harz Mountains at the end of World War II, only to resurface 40 years later in a small Texas town. How it got there and how the German government retrieved it is at the heart of Honan's tale.
