Brooklyn Public Library

Rebecca Solnit talks individuality w/ with Anand Giridharadas at Brooklyn Public Library 👈 Check out the full talk on our Youtube! #author #book #library #reading

Rebecca Solnit talks Hope w/ with Anand Giridharadas at Brooklyn Public Library 👈 Check out the full talk on our Youtube! #author #book #library #reading

BPL Presents welcomes Rebecca Solnit back to our stage, whose The Beginning Comes After the End offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century. In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability. The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world. Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including Orwell’s Roses, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act. Her newsletter of essays and analyses can be found at meditationsinanemergency.com. Anand Giridharadas is a writer. He is the author of The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (2022), Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018), The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014), and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (2011). A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and he is the publisher of the newsletter The Ink.

BPL Presents, in conjunction with the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, is honored to welcome award-winning author and journalist Wil Haygood whose latest work explores how the Vietnam War became a mirror for the struggle of Black Americans—fighting for freedom abroad while demanding equality at home—and a powerful lens through which to understand the racial and political divides that continue to shape American life. Drawing on the lives of soldiers and officers, doctors and nurses, journalists and activists, artists and politicians, Haygood illuminates a generation caught between two battles: one on the front lines in Vietnam and another for justice and dignity in America. Among those at the heart of the story are Air Force pilot Fred Cherry, the first Black officer captured by the North Vietnamese and a hero to millions back home; Dr. Elbert Nelson, a doctor who came to Vietnam after watching TV footage of the Watts riots in Los Angeles and soon found himself amid rising Black soldier protests overseas; Wallace Terry, a groundbreaking Black reporter determined to expose the dynamics of race and war to the American public and Philippa Schuyler, a biracial concert pianist who traveled to Vietnam to rescue mixed-race orphans, many fathered by Black soldiers, and died trying to bring them to safety. Surrounding their experiences are the cultural and political forces of the era, including Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Berry Gordy, and Lyndon Johnson, whose voices and actions shaped a decade of turbulence and transformation. The War Within a War is both sweeping history and intimate revelation, capturing the tragedies and triumphs, the honor and hypocrisies, the courage and cowardice that shaped an era and whose repercussions resonate today. Wil Haygood is the author of ten nonfiction books. His biography of Thurgood Marshall, Showdown, and his biography of White House butler Eugene Allen, The Butler, were New York Times bestsellers. The Butler was adapted into a film directed by Lee Daniels and starring, among others, Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker. Haygood’s longtime journalism career - which took him around the world and into several war zones including Somalia and Liberia - was spent largely at The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the Washington Post, where he won numerous awards. A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow, Haygood was the recipient of the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, an international prize bestowed by the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation. Wil Haygood serves as Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Miami University, in Ohio. David Rohde is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a senior national security reporter for MS NOW and the author of five books. He previously worked as the national security editor for NBC News, an executive editor of The New Yorker website and as a foreign correspondent and investigative reporter for the New York Times, Reuters and the Christian Science Monitor. He covered the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Bosnia and lives in New York.

BPL Presents welcomes Robert Polito whose After the Flood asks of Bob Dylan, “If your dreams are fulfilled at twenty, what do you do with the rest of your life?” in conversation with The New Yorker's Amanda Petrusich. A prevailing narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of Sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s, then released arguably the worst music of his career in the 1980s—only to be resurrected in 2016, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan’s concerts once began with an announcer intoning a deadpan version of just such a narrative. That is not this story. Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, After the Flood reveals Dylan’s output during the last three decades as his most ambitious yet. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since the early 1990s, celebrated poet and biographer Robert Polito shows how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has embodied and resisted its era—interweaving Ovid and Americana, film noir and the Civil War. Imaginatively researched, After the Flood is both an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga. Robert Polito served as president of the Poetry Foundation from 2013 to 2015. The founding director of the Graduate Writing and Writing and Democracy Programs at the New School, Polito teaches writing and literature. For his book Savage Art, he was awarded the NBCC Award in Biography. Photo credit Kristine Harris Moderator Amanda Petrusich is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of three books. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction and has been nominated for a Grammy Award. Her criticism and features have appeared in the New York Times, the Oxford American, Spin, Pitchfork, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She is the writer-in-residence at New York University’s Gallatin School.