Legendary 100-year-old activist and historian Timuel Black discusses his new book, Sacred Ground: The Chicago Streets of Timuel Black, which chronicles the life and times of this Chicago icon. Bart Schultz, editor of the book, and Bennett Johnson, activist and publisher of Path Press, will talk with Black about his life in this event co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Department of African-American Studies. Evanston civil rights legend Bennett Johnnson will also join the discussion. Register to reserve a seat at https://evanston.libnet.info/event/1971364

About the Speakers:

Timuel D. Black, Jr. has spent his life furthering the cause of social justice, and his two volumes of oral histories, Bridges of Memory: Chicago's First Wave of Black Migration and Bridges of Memory: Chicago's Second Generation of Black Migration, published by Northwestern University Press, chronicle black Chicago history from the 1920s to the present.

Bennett Johnson is a legendary civil rights activist and publisher in Evanston. He helped found Evanston’s branch of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Chicago League of Negro Voters. He has worked for Urban Consulting Inc. and as the president of the Evanston Minority Business Consortium He co-founded Path Press, which began publishing books in 1969 as one of the first black-owned publishers, and continues to this day.

Bart Schultz is a senior lecturer in humanities and director of the Civic Knowledge Project at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many works, including Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe.

Rebecca Sive's Vote Her In: Your Guide to Electing Our First Woman President addresses the unrealized dream of millions of American women: electing our first woman President. It makes the case for the urgency of women attaining equal executive political power at all levels, including the presidency, and offers a comprehensive strategy for every woman to be a part of this campaign—the most important of our lifetimes. Sive speaks with Michele Weldon, the editorial director of Take the Lead and author of Escape Points. This event is cosponsored by Take the Lead.

About Vote Her In: “inspiring, savvy and persuasive on why America needs more female leadership now. Rebecca offers not just the analysis, but the practical steps every woman and man can take to help get women into the C-suite and the Oval Office. And argues that the time to do it is now.”--Jessica Yellin, former CNN White House correspondent

About the Author: Rebecca Sive’s career has spanned executive positions − in business, government, philanthropy, academia, and the not-for-profit sector − where she has earned a reputation as a smart and inspirational women’s leadership and politics strategist, writer, speaker, and teacher. At the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy, Sive was the founding Program and Academic Director of its Women in Public Leadership executive education initiative, and was a lecturer. Sive has received distinguished achievement awards from her undergraduate alma mater, Carleton College, and from the University of Illinois (from which she received an M.A. in American History), and leadership awards from the United Negro College Fund, the Jaycees, and the YWCA, among others. Sive was among the national leaders who developed women's issues agendas for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. She was a gubernatorial appointee to the Illinois Human Rights Commission; a mayoral appointee as a commissioner of the Chicago Park District; a founding board member of the Chicago Foundation for Women; is in Feminists Who Changed America, University of Illinois Press (2006), and has served as a director of many other organizations and foundations.

About the Interlocutor: Michele Weldon is editorial director of Take the Lead, and is emerita faculty in journalism at Northwestern University, where she taught on the graduate and undergraduate levels for 18 years. She is director of the Northwestern Public Voices Fellowship through The OpEd Project, where she is a senior leader. Weldon is the author of four nonfiction books, I Closed My Eyes (1999); Writing To Save Your Life (2001); Everyman News (2008); and her latest, Escape Points: A Memoir (2015) was named one of the best books of 2015 by Booklist of the American Library Association and was a finalist in the Society of Midland Authors Literary Awards for 2015. She has contributed chapters in seven other books and anthologies. Her commentary appears regularly in outlets such as New York Times, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, CNN, Cosmopolitan, Washington Post, Huffington Post, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Medium, Pacific Standard, Quartz, Slate and hundreds more. Weldon co-directed TEDX NorthwesternU 2014 and competed in the 2012 Moth Story Chicago GrandSlam in 2012. She is a frequent guest on radio, TV and digital sites.

The City of Light. For many, these four words instantly conjure late nineteenth-century Paris and the garish colors of Toulouse-Lautrec’s iconic posters. More recently, the Eiffel Tower’s nightly show of sparkling electric lights has come to exemplify our fantasies of Parisian nightlife. Though we reflect longingly on such scenes, in Illuminated Paris, Hollis Clayson shows that there’s more to these clichés than meets the eye. In this richly illustrated book, she traces the dramatic evolution of lighting in Paris and how artists responded to the shifting visual and cultural scenes that resulted from these technologies. While older gas lighting produced a haze of orange, new electric lighting was hardly an improvement: the glare of experimental arc lights—themselves dangerous—left figures looking pale and ghoulish. As Clayson shows, artists’ representations of these new colors and shapes reveal turn-of-the-century concerns about modernization as electric lighting came to represent the harsh glare of rapidly accelerating social change. At the same time, in part thanks to American artists visiting the city, these works of art also produced our enduring romantic view of Parisian glamour and its Belle Époque.

About the Author: Hollis Clayson, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern, is a historian of modern art who specializes in 19th-century Europe, especially France, and transatlantic exchanges between France and the U.S. Her first book, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era, appeared in 1991 (Yale U. Press). Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870-71) was published in 2002 (U. of Chicago Press). In 2013, she curated the exhibition ELECTRIC PARIS at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA. An expanded version of the exhibition was at the Bruce Museum of Art in Greenwich, CT during the spring and summer of 2016. Her co-edited book (with André Dombrowski), Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850-1900, appeared in 2016 (Routledge). Her new book, Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque (U. of Chicago Press), will appear in spring 2019. Her current project is The Inescapability of the Eiffel Tower.

In 2016, when millions of Americans voted for Donald Trump, many believed his claims that personal wealth would free him from wealthy donors and allow him to “drain the swamp.” But then Trump appointed several billionaires and multimillionaires to high-level positions and pursued billionaire-friendly policies, such as cutting corporate income taxes. Why the change from his fiery campaign rhetoric and promises to the working class? This should not be surprising, argue Benjamin I. Page and Matthew J. Lacombe: As the gap between the wealthiest and the rest of us has widened, the few who hold one billion dollars or more in net worth have begun to play a more and more active part in politics—with serious consequences for democracy in the United States. Join them as they discuss their book Billionaires and Stealth Politics. with Tony Chen of the Political Science Department at Northwestern. Cosponsored by the Northwestern University College Democrats and the Democratic Party of Evanston.

Please join us for this discussion about how to tell the stories of refugees and asylum-seekers — in Chicago and the rest of the world — ethically and effectively. The award-winning journalists and artists of 90 Days, 90 Voices are producing a collaborative storytelling project called Asylum City to fill the gap in coverage about asylum seekers in Chicago and fight ignorance about why they are coming to the United States. Alex V. Hernandez, a reporter for Block Club Chicago and Engagement Director for 90 Days, 90 Voices, will discuss his reporting on refugees along with Northwestern professor Wendy Pearlman, author of We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, whose work focuses on telling the stories of Syrian refugees. Award-winning journalist Nissa Rhee, Executive Director of 90 Days, 90 Voices, will moderate the discussion. This event is co-presented by the Middle East and North African Studies Program at Northwestern, 90 Days, 90 Voices, Chicago City of Refuge, and the Chicago Network for Justice and Peace. This event is supported by PEN America. llustration by Dan Rowell for 90 Days, 90 Voices and the Chicago Reader.

To register for a seat, please go to the Evanston Public Library site.

When Lorene Cary's beloved grandmother comes to live with Cary near the end of her life, they are both forced to reconcile the ideas they had of each other. Facing the inevitable end raises tensions, with Cary drawing on her spirituality and Nana consoling herself with late-night sweets and the loyalty of caregivers. When Nana doubts Cary's dedication, Cary must go deeper into understanding this complicated woman. In Ladysitting, Cary captures the ruptures, love, and, perhaps, forgiveness that can occur in a family as she bears witness to her grandmother's 101 vibrant years of life.

About the Author: Lorene Cary was born in Philadelphia, PA, in 1956. In 11th grade, she enrolled in the formerly all-white, all-male St. Paul's School in New Hampshire. Cary tells the story in Black Ice, which reviewers have called “brutally honest” and “stunning.” Her first novel, The Price of a Child, fictionalized the story of a female fugitive from slavery and was selected in 2003 as the inaugural One Book, One Philadelphia choice. Cary’s other works include a girlfriend novel, Pride; FREE! Great Escapes from Slavery on the Underground Railroad, for young readers; and If Sons, Then Heirs, a family saga with love, land, and lynching at its center. The founder of Art Sanctuary and SafeKidsStories.com has twice received the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania where she teaches Creative Writing. Cary wrote scripts for the videos at President’s House memorial on Independence Mall; and she has received the Philadelphia Award and six honorary doctorates.

Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, won the Whiting Award in 2018, and is the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang.

Tell your story! We give you seven minutes and thunderous applause. You tell your story any way you want--off book, from paper, from your phone, from the signal from your fearless leader. Just want to listen? Sure, come and hear stories. You might get tempted to sign up...and we're ok with that. Sign up starts at 5:30. Stories start at 6:00. Hosts are David Barish and Melissa Perrin.

Unless you lived through the 1970s, it seems impossible to understand it at all. Drug delirium, groovy fashion, religious cults, mega corporations, glitzy glam, hard rock, global unrest—from our 2018 perspective, the seventies are often remembered as a bizarre blur of bohemianism and disco. With Pick Up the Pieces, John Corbett transports us back in time to this thrillingly tumultuous era through a playful exploration of its music. Song by song, album by album, he draws our imaginations back into one of the wildest decades in history. Co-sponsored by CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM.

About the Author: John Corbett is the author of several books, including A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation, Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium, and Microgroove: Forays into Other Music. He is co-owner of Corbett vs. Dempsey, an art gallery in Chicago. 

Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU, discusses her new book, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, with Geoffrey Stone, University of Chicago law professor and the author of Sex and the Constitution.

Everyone has a story to tell—learn how to tell it well in a workshop conducted by the former Ernest Hemingway Writer-in-Residence, award-winning author and memoirist, and WBBM Radio Reporter—David W. Berner.

Whether it’s a short personal essay, a mini-memoir, or a book length manuscript, writing the stories of our lives is a dream for many. This workshop is your chance to find that story and discover how best to tell it no matter where you are in the process. Whether you’re only thinking about the writing, just beginning the storytelling, or you’ve already put down words, this workshop will help you find your narrative.

The workshop will focus on styles of personal story, on the craft of storytelling, issues of privacy, and will offer exercises to help guide you toward your best writing.

The event is free but advance registration is required at this link.

Please help us welcome author/activists Amy and Dave Freeman who are stopping at the Bookends & Beginnings during their 1,750 mile book tour by bicycle from Ely, Minnesota to Washington, D.C. They are sharing their new book, A Year in the Wilderness: Bearing Witness in the Boundary Waters (Milkweed Editions), and continuing their efforts to protect the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness from the threat of proposed copper mining. They will arrive at the store around 5:30 pm, towing their canoe behind their bikes, and then give a presentation about the year they spent living in the Boundary Waters. From listening to a wolf pack run through their campsite as the lakes were freezing around them in the late fall, to watching the loons return as the ice melted in the spring, the Freemans’ engaging presentation is designed to transport audiences into the wilderness and inspire them to help protect this national treasure for future generations. Afterwards, attendees can sign the canoe, which is serving as a petition showing popular support for protecting the Boundary Waters!

The Freemans have delivered more than 700 presentations to a wide range of audiences. They've been featured on The Today Show, in Outside Magazine, NPR, Sierra Magazine, and in 2014 were named National Geographic Adventurers of the Year. A Year in the Wilderness was named one of 20 Big Indie Books of Fall 2017 by Publishers Weekly and was featured in the Wall Street Journal, Canoe & Kayak, Shelf Awareness, Los Angeles Review, City Pages, among other media outlets. This tour is a collaborative effort between the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters, the Freemans, and Milkweed Editions.

The election of Donald Trump showed how the American electoral system is clearly falling apart. In It’s Time To Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics, Roosevelt University political science professor David Faris offers accessible, actionable strategies for American institutional reform. Faris will discuss his ideas with John K. Wilson, author of President Trump Unveiled: Exposing the Bigoted Billionaire (trumpunveiled.com).

Presented in conjunction with the NU College Democrats.

A great notion about Female Empowerment is suddenly sweeping the publishing industry. The shelves at Bookends & Beginnings are swelling with books like Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, Rad Women Worldwide, Strong is the New Pretty, and Feminist Baby. Not since the 1970s has the country seen such an exuberant literature of female assertiveness—and yet, is really getting easier to be a girl? Are there downsides as well as upsides to all this exhortation to girls to be bad and rad and brazen? Join us for a spirited discussion of contemporary girls’ coming-of-age with Renee Engeln, author of Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women, and Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays. The conversation will be moderated by Bookends & Beginnings owner Nina Barrett, whose essay “Mind-Body Story,” about female coming-of-age, appears in the Great Books Foundation anthology Her Own Accord: American Women On Identity, Culture, and Community.

Law is based on narrative, and narratives come from the stories we tell ourselves. It is not surprising, therefore, that we live in a country where the highest court, the Supreme Court, still cites cases that declare American Indians to be racially inferior "heathens" and "savages" because our most prestigious theaters, on and off Broadway, still produce more plays that feature dehumanizing performances of redface than plays by actual Native playwrights. "Instead of Redface" is a movement created by Native artists to encourage American theaters to produce stories that are written by and feature actual Native artists. This event, sponsored by The Colloquium on Indigeneity and Native American Studies (CINAS) and One Book One Northwestern, features playwright and attorney Mary Kathryn Nagle.

Liam Heneghan (an Evanstonian and DePaul environmental science professor) talks with Betsy Bird, the Collection Development Manager at the Evanston Public Library, about his book Beasts at Bedtime: Revealing the Environmental Wisdom in Children’s Literature (University of Chicago Press).

Liam Heneghan is professor of environmental science and studies at DePaul University. He is a Dubliner, an occasional poet, a tin whistle player, and a father of two grown children to whom he read every night of their early years.

Betsy Bird is the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library, and the former Youth Materials Specialist of New York Public Library. She reviews for Kirkus, served on the 2007 Newbery Award committee, and her children's literature blog, A Fuse #8 Production, is hosted by School Library Journal. She is the author of the picture book Giant Dance Party (Greenwillow, 2013) illustrated by Brandon Dorman, and a co-author on the nonfiction book Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature (Candlewick, 2014) which she wrote with fellow bloggers Julie Danielson and Peter Sieruta.