Wednesday February 15, 7pm – Non-Fiction

Alondra Nelson author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination ($24.95 University of Minnesota Press)

The legacy of the Black Panther Party’s commitment to community health care, a central aspect of its fight for social justice

Alondra Nelson recovers a lesser-known aspect of The Black Panther Party’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. Nelson argues that the Party’s focus on health care was practical and ideological and that their understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race.

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party’s health activism—its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination—was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms.

Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, Nelson argues that the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological. Building on a long tradition of medical self-sufficiency among African Americans, the Panthers’ People’s Free Medical Clinics administered basic preventive care, tested for lead poisoning and hypertension, and helped with housing, employment, and social services. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent.

The Black Panther Party’s understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race. That legacy—and that struggle—continues today in the commitment of health activists and the fight for universal health care.

Alondra Nelson is associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she also holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is coeditor of Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life and Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision between DNA, Race, and History.

In Body and Soul, Alondra Nelson combines careful research, deep political insight, and passionate commitment to tell the little-known story of the Black Panther Party’s health activism in the late 1960s. In doing so, and in showing how the problems of poverty, discrimination, and access to medical care remain hauntingly similar more than forty years later, Nelson reminds us that the struggle continues, particularly for African Americans, and that social policies have profound moral implications. — Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

This book is a revelation. Alondra Nelson uncovers two remarkable histories in Body and Soul. First, she provides the deep context for our current conversation about the health disparities that plague the African-American community and that are, as she puts it, ‘quite literally sickening.’ Second, she adds immeasurably to our knowledge of the Black Panther Party, complicating its commonplace designation as a radical, militant organization to unearth its dedication and hard work in advocating for and providing equal and quality health care for even the most underserved African Americans. Nelson is the first scholar I know of to bring these two histories into dialogue with each other, and she does so with spectacular results. This is a tremendously important book. —Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

The activities of the Black Panther Party have long been reduced to stories of violent police confrontations and empty propaganda. By taking seriously the claims and the practices of the Black Panthers with respect to the health of Black people, Alondra Nelson has provided a critical corrective to earlier studies. More importantly, this is a brilliant analysis of a significant moment in the long tradition of health advocacy on the part of African Americans. Body and Soul is a major achievement. — Evelynn Hammonds, Harvard University

Sunday, November 27, 4pm – Fiction
Amina Gautier
author of At-Risk ($24.95 University of Georgia Press)

In Amina Gautier’s Brooklyn, some kids make it and some kids don’t, but not in simple ways or for stereotypical reasons. Gautier’s stories explore the lives of young African Americans who might all be classified as “at-risk,” yet who encounter different opportunities and dangers in their particular neighborhoods and schools and who see life through the lens of different family experiences.

Gautier’s focus is on quiet daily moments, even in extraordinary lives; her characters do not stand as emblems of a subculture but live and breathe as people. In “The Ease of Living,” the young teen Jason is sent down south to spend the summer with his grandfather after witnessing the double murder of his two best friends, and he is not happy about it. A season of sneaking into as many movies as possible on one ticket or dunking girls at the pool promises to turn into a summer of shower chairs and the smell of Ben-Gay in the unimaginably backwoods town of Tallahassee. In “Pan Is Dead,” two half-siblings watch as the heroin-addicted father of the older one works his way back into their mother’s life; in “Dance for Me,” a girl on scholarship at a posh Manhattan school teaches white girls to dance in the bathroom in order to be invited to a party.

As teenagers in complicated circumstances, each of Gautier’s characters is pushed in many directions. To succeed may entail unforgiveable compro­mises, and to follow their desires may lead to catastrophe. Yet within these stories they exist and can be seen as they are, in the moment of choosing.

Amina Gautier is an assistant professor of English at DePaul University. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Best African American Fiction and New Stories from the South and in numerous literary journals including Antioch Review, North American Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, and Southern Review.

Saturday, November 19, 7pm
Christina Shea author of Smuggled ($14.00 Black Cat)

Sweeping from post–WWII rural Romania to the cosmopolitan Budapest of 1990, Christina Shea’s Smuggled is the story of Eva Farkas, who loses her identity, quite literally, as a young child when she is smuggled in a flour sack across the Hungarian border to escape the Nazis. Five-year-old Eva is trafficked from Hungary to Romania at the end of the war, arriving in the fictional border town of Crisu, given the name Anca Balaj by her aunt and uncle and instructed never to speak another word of Hungarian again. “Eva is dead,” she is told. As the years pass, Anca proves an unquenchable spirit, with a lust for life even when political forces threaten to derail her at every turn. Time is layered in this quest for self, culminating in the end of the Iron Curtain and Anca’s reclaiming of the name her mother gave her. When Eva returns to Hungary in 1990, a country changing as fast as the price of bread, she meets Martin, an American teacher, and Eva’s lifelong search for family and identity comes full circle as her cross-cultural relationship with Martin deepens through their endeavor to rescue the boy downstairs from abuse.

Tuesday, November 15, 7pm – Non-Fiction
Gregory Summer author of Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels ($24.95 Seven Stories Press)

In Unstuck in Time, Gregory Sumner guides us, with insight and passion, through a biography of fifteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s best known works, his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano (1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005), to illustrate the quintessential American writer’s profound engagement with the “American Dream” in its various forms. Sumner gives us a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American Dream: grandiose ambition, unbridled material success, rugged individualism, and “winners” over “losers.” Instead of a celebration of these values, we read and share Vonnegut’s outrage, his brokenhearted empathy for those who struggle under the ethos of survival-of-the-fittest in the frontier mentality—something he once memorably described as “an impossibly tough-minded experiment in loneliness.” Heroic and tragic, Vonnegut’s novels reflect the pain of his own life’s experiences, relieved by small acts of kindness, friendship, and love that exemplify another way of living, another sort of human utopia, an alternative American Dream, and the reason we always return to his books.

GREGORY D. SUMNER, JD, PhD, is chair of history at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he has taught since 1993. He holds a doctorate in American history from Indiana University and is the author of Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle. Sumner has been awarded summer fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has twice been William J. Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Université di Roma Tre.

“Like so many of America’s great vernacular spokespersons—Abraham Lincoln, Will Rogers, Frank Lloyd Wright—Kurth Vonnegut knew that he’d be most convincing when telling his own story with simple, plain honesty. Gregory D. Sumner has perceived that directness in Vonnegut’s novels, and correlates the author’s life and works in an engaging, almost spellbinding manner. The Grand Old Man would have liked this book, and I can sense his blessing on it.” —Professor Jerome Klinkowitz, author of Vonnegut in Fact, The Vonnegut Effect, and Kurt Vonnegut’s America

“Gregory D. Sumner celebrates what he playfully identifies as the ‘Kurt Vonnegut road show’ with a tribute that is enlightening and entertaining. I read with wonder and delight the biographical sketches so gracefully fused with a montage of Vonnegut stories and the ideas they dramatize. Unstuck in Time is an achievement of scholarship illuminated by a fan’s contagious enthusiasm.”—Sidney Offit, Curator-emeritus George Polk Journalism Awards

“Gregory D. Sumner’s Unstuck in Time is a wonderful primer to Kurt Vonnegut’s work. Every page brims with analytic insight, biographical revelation, and old-fashioned storytelling. Reading Sumner reminds us about how astoundingly right Vonnegut was about the planetary condition. Highly recommended!” —Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University

Monday, October 10, 7pm – Non-Fiction
Bob Edwards
author of A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio ($21.95 University of Kentucky Press)

The host of The Bob Edwards Show and Bob Edwards Weekend on Sirius XM Radio, Bob Edwards became the first radio personality with a large national audience to take his chances in the new field of satellite radio. The programs’ mix of long-form interviews and news documentaries has won many prestigious awards.

For thirty years, Louisville native Edwards was the voice of National Public Radio’s daily newsmagazine programs, co-hosting All Things Considered before launching Morning Edition in 1979. These programs built NPR’s national audience while also bringing Edwards to national prominence. In 2004, however, NPR announced that it would be finding a replacement for Edwards, inciting protests from tens of thousands of his fans and controversy among his listeners and fellow broadcasters. Today, Edwards continues to inform the American public with a voice known for its sincerity, intelligence, and wit.

In A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio, Edwards recounts his career as one of the most important figures in modern broadcasting. He describes his road to success on the radio waves, from his early days knocking on station doors during college and working for American Forces Korea Network to his work at NPR and induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2004. Edwards tells the story of his exit from NPR and the launch of his new radio ventures on the XM Satellite Radio network. Throughout the book, his sharp observations about the people he interviewed and covered and the colleagues with whom he worked offer a window on forty years of American news and on the evolution of public journalism.

A Voice in the Box is an insider’s account of the world of American media and a fascinating, personal narrative from one of the most iconic personalities in radio history.

Bob Edwards is the author of Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism and Fridays with Red: A Radio Friendship. Edwards has been awarded the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for radio journalism, a George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting, and the Edward R. Murrow Award for outstanding contributions to public radio. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

“Bob Edwards has made me proud to be a colleague in a field that both of us consider a calling and for which he has set the highest of standards for all of us who look up to him…At last, Bob Edwards has told his story. With all the wit, candor, and courage that made his journalism on NPR a favorite of millions across the country and a role model for all of us in public media. This “voice in the box” is good news.”–Bill Moyers

“Bob Edwards came of age as radio did. Maybe not the much-romanticized golden era of the medium that preceded television, but the equally important period when radio news and public affairs reporting grew and matured into one of the most relevant American venues for information and serious discussion. His work at NPR and later, with satellite radio, is testament to his love of good journalism, great storytelling and, most of all, people. A Voice In The Box is his story to be sure, but it is also a worthy tale of high-end radio journalism itself–all the more important to us in these days when newspapers and television news have lost so much of their ambition.”–David Simon, producer, “The Wire” and “Treme” and author, Homicide and The Corner

“A Voice in the Box is a delight. Bob Edwards has told his story from inside the world of radio that has something for everybody—from the kid’s dream to be on radio to settling some adult’s scores with NPR and being happy now on Sirius XM Radio with many more hours on the radio still to come.”—Jim Lehrer

Wednesday, October 26, 7pm-Fiction
Nelson George author of The Plot Against Hip Hop ($15.95 Akashic Books)

“George is an ace at interlacing the real dramas of the world . . . the book’s slim length and flyweight depth could make it an artifact of this particular zeitgeist in American history. Playas and haters and celebrity cameos fuel a novel that is wickedly entertaining while being frozen in time.” –Kirkus Reviews

“This hard-boiled tale is jazzed up with authentic street slang and name-dropping (Biggie, Mary J. Blige, Lil Wayne, and Chuck D) . . . GeorgeÕs tightly packaged mystery pivots on a believable conspiracy . . . and his street cred shines in his descriptions of Harlem and Brownsville’s mean streets.”–Library Journal

“The Plot Against Hip Hop is a quick-moving murder mystery that educates its audience on Hip Hop’s pioneer generation along the way . . . it is a nostalgic look at a magical and manic moment in time.” –New York Journal of Books

“Nelson George comes from an older generation that still remembers Hip Hop as the vital and dangerous voice it once was. This feeling for the past carries throughout the novel, and manages to convey the weight and importance of this profound shift in values without being nostalgic . . . The Plot Against Hip Hop is a fine piece of ‘edutainment’ — both exciting and thought provoking . . . it’s great to finally have a novel about Hip Hop written by one of it’s original documentary journalists.”–ABORT Magazine

“There are few people who can put the past seventy years of urban reality into the perspective of the most recent hip minute like Nelson George. The Plot Against Hip Hop is no exception. Nelson George braids actual facts and fictional characters flawlessly into a time-tunneled walk along various developments in this now-megabusiness called hip hop. For those that say they love hip hop as well as the total legacy it evolved from, it bodes well for them to keep this very close to their head, heart, and attention.”–Chuck D, Public Enemy

THE PLOT AGAINST HIP HOP is a noir novel set in the world of hip hop culture. The stabbing murder of esteemed music critic Dwayne Robinson in a Soho office building is dismissed by the NYPD as a gang initiation. But his old friend, bodyguard/security expert D Hunter, suspects there’s much more to his death. An old cassette tape, the theft of a manuscript Robinson was working on, and some veiled threats suggest there are larger forces at work. D HUNTER’S INVESTIGATION into his mentor’s murder leads into a parallel history of hip hop, a place where renegade government agents, behind-the-scenes power brokers, and paranoid journalists know a truth that only a few hard core fans suspect. This rewrite of hip hop history mixes real-life figures including Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Russell Simmons with characters pulled from the culture’s hidden world, as the Illuminati, FBI agents, and West Coast gangstas roam the hard streets D Hunter walks down.       D HUNTER IS A TOUGH, BLACK-CLAD product of crime-ridden Brownsville, Brooklyn, a man whose family has been devastated by violence and who has dedicated himself to protecting people in an age of insecurity. Hunter has his own secrets, his own vulnerabilities, which he fights to overcome as he becomes a reluctant private eye. After reading The Plot Against Hip Hop, you’ll never hear the music the same way. NELSON GEORGE is one of the first writers to document hip hop culture and is the author of several award-winning books on the subject, including Hip Hop America and The Death of Rhythm & Blues; he also coauthored (with Simmons) Russell Simmons’s autobiography Life and Def. He directed Queen Latifah in the HBO film Life Support, and is an executive producer of VH1′s long-running Hip Hop Honors broadcast.

Friday, September 30, 7pm – Author Event

Alan Boris author of

Philadelphia Radio ($21.99 Arcadia Publishing)

Philadelphia Radio is the first book devoted to the history of radio broadcasting in Philadelphia. Written by [a] life-long Philadelphian, the book features over 200 photos (many rarely seen) designed to entertain as well as educate. Philadelphia radio broadcasting began in 1922, when the city’s first officially licensed stations went on the air. Within a few years, what had begun as a small, experimental medium became a full-fledged craze as families listened to live news, sports, and entertainment for the first time. In 1932, the first building designed for radio broadcasting opened on Chestnut Street, coinciding with the golden age of radio that featured live orchestras, soap operas, and imaginative dramas. In the 1950′s, a few stations began playing rock and roll, and Philadelphia became known as a city that not only produced hit music but also consistently broke new acts. By the 1970s, FM radio began to grab the majority of listeners, and once again Philadelphia stations were responsible for breaking new artists, such as Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen.

Alan Boris is a local radio historian and the founder/director of the Philadelphia Radio Archives. In Philadelphia Radio, he has compiled a collection of rarely seen images from a variety of sources, including Philadelphia radio personalities, listeners, stations, and historical societies.

Philadelphia Radio Personalities, Photos include: Hy Lit, Ed Sciaky, Georgie Woods, Bill Wright, Jerry Blavat, Joe Niagara, Jerry Stevens, Jim O’Brien, Sid Mark, Perry Johnson, Louise Williams, Pierre Robert, Michael Tearson and many more!

The history of Philadelphia Radio is also the history of Philadelphia: its people, locations businesses, and interests. In addition to well-known radio personalities, here are some of the Philadelphia icons you’ll see in this book: Walter Annenberg, Frank Palumbo, Richardson Dilworth, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Cecil Moore, Frank Rizzo.

• Philadelphia radio broadcasting just celebrated the 89th year anniversary of the city’s first broadcast on March 1.
• Some of the city’s well-known buildings were built by and used as radio stations, including the Art Institute at 1622 Chestnut (formerly WCAU_ and the 1619 Walnut building (formerly KYW).
• Philadelphia was one of the first cities to originate teen dance radio shows, starting with the 950 club on WPEN in 1946 and later on WFIL’s American Bandstand.