A guy walks into a bar car and…

From here the story could take many turns. When this guy is David Sedaris, the possibilities are endless, but the result is always the same: he will both delight you with twists of humor and intelligence and leave you deeply moved.

From the unique perspective of David Sedaris comes a new book of essays taking his readers on a bizarre and stimulating world tour. From the perils of French dentistry to the eating habits of the Australian kookaburra, from the squat-style toilets of Beijing to the particular wilderness of a North Carolina Costco, we learn about the absurdity and delight of a curious traveler’s experiences. Whether railing against the habits of litterers in the English countryside or marveling over a disembodied human arm in a taxidermist’s shop, his father’s dinnertime attire (shirtsleeves and underpants), his first colonoscopy (remarkably pleasant), and the time he considered buying the skeleton of a murdered Pygmy. Sedaris takes us on side-splitting adventures that are not to be forgotten.

A new collection of essays from the #1 New York Times bestselling author who has been called “the preeminent humorist of his generation” (Entertainment Weekly).

With Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, David Sedaris shows once again why his work has been called “hilarious, elegant, and surprisingly moving” (Washington Post).

In this spellbinding account of the real facts of the Central Park jogger case, Sarah Burns powerfully reexamines one of New York City’s most notorious crimes and its aftermath.

On April 20th, 1989, two passersby discovered the body of the “Central Park jogger” crumpled in a ravine. She’d been raped and severely beaten. Within days five black and Latino teenagers were apprehended, all five confessing to the crime. The staggering torrent of media coverage that ensued, coupled with fierce public outcry, exposed the deep-seated race and class divisions in New York City at the time. The minors were tried and convicted as adults despite no evidence linking them to the victim. Over a decade later, when DNA tests connected serial rapist Matias Reyes to the crime, the government, law enforcement, social institutions and media of New York were exposed as having undermined the individuals they were designed to protect. Here, Sarah Burns recounts this historic case for the first time since the young men’s convictions were overturned, telling, at last, the full story of one of New York’s most legendary crimes.

Susan Rimby's "Mira Lloyd Dock and the Progressive Era Conservation Movement"

For her time, Mira Lloyd Dock was an exceptional woman: a university-trained botanist, lecturer, women's club leader, activist in the City Beautiful movement, and public official - the first woman to be appointed to Pennsylvania's state government. In her twelve years on the Pennsylvania Forest Commission, she allied with the likes of J. T. Rothrock, Gifford Pinchot, and Dietrich Brandeis to help bring about a new era in American forestry. She was also an integral force in founding and fostering the Pennsylvania State Forest Academy in Mont Alto, which produced generations of Pennsylvania foresters before becoming Penn State Mont Alto campus.

Though much has been written about her male counterparts, Mira Lloyd Dock and the Progressive Era Conservation Movement is the first book dedicated to Mira Lloyd Dock and her work. Shippensburg University's Professor Susan Rimby weaves these layers of Dock's story together with the greater historic context of the era to create a vivid and accessible picture of Progressive Era conservation in the eastern United States, and Dock's important role and legacy in that movement.

A free podcast of Professor Rimby's keynote talk at the 2012 Harrisburg Book Festival is available online here.

Copies of the book are available at Harrisburg’s Midtown Scholar Bookstore Café and online at MidtownScholar.com.

Kenneth Mack’s "Representing the Race"

“Ken Mack brings to this monumental work not only a profound understanding of law, biography, history and racial relations but also an engaging narrative style that brings each of his subjects dynamically alive. It is a truly wonderful book.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

About the Book (Harvard University Press, 2012):

A native of Central Pennsylvania who earned his Ph.D. at Princeton, Harvard Law Professor Kenneth W. Mack has earned accolades as “a renowned scholar of race and the law.” His new book, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer, tells the story of an enduring paradox of American race relations, through the prism of a collective biography of African American lawyers who worked in the era of segregation. Practicing the law and seeking justice for diverse clients, they confronted a tension between their racial identity as black men and women and their professional identity as lawyers. Both blacks and whites demanded that these attorneys stand apart from their racial community as members of the legal fraternity. Yet, at the same time, they were expected to be “authentic”—that is, in sympathy with the black masses. This conundrum, as Mack shows, continues to reverberate through American politics today.

Mack reorients what we thought we knew about famous figures such as Thurgood Marshall, who rose to prominence by convincing local blacks and prominent whites that he was—as nearly as possible—one of them. But he also introduces a little-known cast of characters to the American racial narrative. These include Loren Miller, the biracial Los Angeles lawyer who, after learning in college that he was black, became a Marxist critic of his fellow black attorneys and ultimately a leading civil rights advocate; and Pauli Murray, a black woman who seemed neither black nor white, neither man nor woman, who helped invent sex discrimination as a category of law. The stories of these lawyers pose the unsettling question: what, ultimately, does it mean to “represent” a minority group in the give-and-take of American law and politics?

Copies of Representing the Race, the WITF-MidtownScholar “Pick of the Month” for January 2013, are available at Harrisburg’s Midtown Scholar Bookstore Café and online at MidtownScholar.com.

Awards

A Washington Post Best Nonfiction Book of 2012

Author Interviews

YouTube

The Browser

Leading Reviews

David G. Garrow for The Washington Post

Emily Newburger for the Harvard Law Bulletin

Other commentators’ reviews.

In Pennsylvania Wine: A History, veteran wine journalists Hudson Cattell and Linda Jones McKee offer more than just a taste of the complex story of the Pennsylvania wine industry.

From the Delaware River to Lake Erie, Pennsylvania’s fields and hillsides are home to a rich tradition of winemaking. Though both William Penn and Benjamin Franklin advocated for the production of wine, not until 1787 did Pierre Legaux found the first commercial vineyard in the state and the nation. Cattell and McKee trace the industry’s development from its humble beginnings to the Alexander grape’s discovery, from the 19th-century boom of Erie County wineries to Prohibition’s challenges, and from the 1970s new farm wineries to the present day.

McKee is co-owner of Tamanend Winery in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and has judged professionally in national and international wine competitions.  Cattell has written extensively on the history of wine and the wine industry in eastern North America.

At 2012’s 3rd Annual Harrisburg Book Festival, Cattell and McKee discussed the Keystone State’s distinctive wine regions before a live studio audience at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore. Their interview with PCN-tv’s Brian Lockman will air on “PA Books” this winter.

Signed copies of their paperback book, just published by The History Press, are available at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore and online at MidtownScholar.com.

Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania Edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple

“A poem is like a photograph: It’s one bright, revealing snapshot of the subject, amplified and able to be studied and enjoyed over and over. And Common Wealth, a book in which contemporary poets delve into memories about Pennsylvania, is full of them.” —Noreen Livoti, Central PA Magazine

Over the years, Pennsylvania has been graced with an abundance of writers whose work draws imaginatively on the state’s history and culture. Penn State University Press’s Common Wealth sings the essence of Pennsylvania through contemporary poetry. Whether Pennsylvania is their point of origin or their destination, the featured poets ultimately find what matters: heritage, pride, work, inventiveness, struggle, faith, beauty, hope.

Keystone poets Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple celebrate Pennsylvania with this wide range of new and veteran poets, including former state poet Samuel Hazo, National Book Award winner Gerald Stern, Pulitzer Prize winners Maxine Kumin, W. S. Merwin, and W. D. Snodgrass, and Reading-born master John Updike. The book’s 103 poets also include such noted authors as Diane Ackerman, Maggie Anderson, Jan Beatty, Robin Becker, Jim Daniels, Toi Derricotte, Gary Fincke, Harry Humes, Julia Kasdorf, Ed Ochester, Jay Parini, Len Roberts, Sonia Sanchez, Betsy Sholl, and Judith Vollmer.

In these pages, poems sketch the landscapes and cultural terrain of the state, delving into the history, traditions, and people of Philadelphia, “Dutch” country, the coal-mining region, the Poconos, and the Lehigh Valley; the Three Rivers region; the Laurel Highlands; and Erie and the Allegheny National Forest. Theirs is a complex narrative cultivated for centuries in coal mines, kitchens, elevated trains, and hometowns, a tale that illuminates the sanctity of the commonplace—the daily chores of a Mennonite housewife, a polka dance in Coaldale, the late shift at a steel factory, the macadam of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. With its panoramic vision of Pennsylvania, its culture, and its thriving literary heritage, Common Wealth is a collection of remembrance for a state that continues to inspire countless contributions to American literature.

Co-editor Marjorie Maddox is Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Lock Haven University. A resident of central Pennsylvania since 1990, she has published several award-winning poetry collections, including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (2004), When the Wood Clacks Out Your Name: Baseball Poems (2001), and Perpendicular as I (1994).

Co-editor Jerry Wemple is Associate Professor of English at Bloomsburg University. He is the author of You Can See It from Here (2000), which won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, and The Civil War in Baltimore (2005). He grew up in the Susquehanna Valley.

Meet the editors and contributing poets, and hear them read from their work!

Thursday, October 11^th, from 12:00 noon to 1:30 p.m., in the State Capitol’s East Wing. Free and open to the public, followed by a book-signing.

Thursday, October 11^th, at 7:00 p.m., at Harrisburg’s Midtown Scholar Bookstore, hosted by the Almost Uptown Poetry Cartel, followed by a book-signing and open mic poetry reading.

Hear witf interviews with some of the poets involved, and also listen to recordings of poets reading some of their own pieces.

Watch the INDEPENDENT LENS production inspired by this critically acclaimed book, airing on witf TV on October 1 & 2, 2012 at 9pm.

HALF THE SKY: TURNING OPPRESSION INTO OPPORTUNITY FOR WOMEN WORLDWIDE became a Political Science best-seller in 2009 but it is a very human story.  It is a collection of moving biographical portraits written with the perceptiveness of anthropologists. Yet its authors eschew academic distance in favor of fervent non-partisan, celebrity-endorsed demands for social justice and civic engagement.

Their extremely compelling book is a call to action for all who read it, to understand the transformative power of our acting as global citizens. This is not the old plea to aid the underprivileged but rather an earnest challenge for readers to react to a still pressing global need in new social ways – to stand firmly against the flagrant violence and deeply-engrained injustice that millions of women suffer daily, around the world.

Reading this book will remind you to appreciate how fundamental Americans’ “first-world” privileges are to our lives. Literacy, democracy, industrialization, laws that hold all governing authorities (from school boards and police officers to senators and presidents) accountable to the citizenry, not to mention basic notions of human, racial, and gender equality – the tenets that we take for granted every day are woefully lacking, if not perversely corrupted, in the experience of women and children in many parts of Africa and Asia (and elsewhere).

Kristof and WuDunn relate numerous individual stories in vivid detail, with unsettling conclusions. The writers are honest about how deeply invested they are in the girls’ and women’s fates – literally invested, for on occasion they bought young women from brothel owners to save them from sexual slavery.  So, too, do they hope readers not remain mere spectators, but find purpose and take action in the cause of global gender equity.

Yet at its core this is not a liberal tome, however much it has spurred feminist groups since its publication. Kristof and WuDunn frame their discussion in surprisingly conservative ways. Online promotional materials tout WuDunn’s appearances on conservative television networks and talk shows. In HALF THE SKY they call up on “Western” nations to assist the “developing world” – old-fashioned tropes, to progressive-minded readers – though their admirable cause extends far beyond traditional “third-world” nations to castigate economic powerhouses like China and India, and democracies from South Africa to Eastern Europe.

The authors also express a deep appreciation for the transformative work of numerous faith-based charities in the cause of improving women’s and girls’ daily lives, from Heifer International to Catholic Relief Services, from Hindu groups in India to Muslim reformers in Pakistan.

Any historical critique of Western European colonialism – or of the cultural imperialism practiced by past generations of American and European missionaries – is notably absent. Postcolonial political scientists from Africa and Asia also receive scant consideration. However much the authors’ concerns might overlap with contemporary liberal reformers, their approaches notably differ, and in some cases they diverge dramatically. For instance, Kristof and WuDunn would like their new social reformers to take up a “big stick” to stem South Asian sex-trafficking of young girls and improve the situation of adult sex workers. In this, they adopt a term that critics of 19^th and early 20^th-century western imperialism explicitly disavow – because they want today’s Westerners to take strong, unified, dramatic action, and to put the weight of our governments, Departments of State, and foreign ministries into global service.

Perhaps this is more challenging to conservative thinking that such language implies. Asking American and European governments to pressure other nations – our second- and third-world economic partners – in order to improve the lives of girls and women! Not just to track pirated music and films, or forestall terrorist arms smuggling, but stop the too-common abduction of young peasant girls into the urban sex trade. That requires a dramatic shift in the status quo of what State Departments are all about, and what foreign-government intervention can mean.

At the same time, Kristof and WuDunn discount the reach of such bureaucracies ever to effect real and lasting cultural change. And their lofty, vigorously argued goal is profound cultural change: vanquishing engrained notions of sexism and misogyny.

This is not to suggest that Americans have successfully ended misogyny ourselves. Yet however violent the images on roadside placards lamenting "killing babies" in American towns, HALF THE SKY calls us instead to consider the great tragedies happening daily around the world, in the extraordinarily widespread killing, mutilation, and psychological destruction of women and girls of all ages.

Kristof and WuDunn touch on social contexts like endemic poverty in drought-starved nations, multi-generational civil wars (part of colonialism’s aftermath), and a world-wide economic expansion that has created workhouses of forced prostitution, far more dire than the oppressive factory-labor conditions on which tech-industry critics have lately trained a watchful eye.

But there are not enough eyes looking hard at the tragic, disturbing facts of violence and inequity against women, the authors tell us.  We must SEE for ourselves.

There are not enough voices speaking out against this in the Western world – either among diplomats and politicians, or among ordinary citizens. We must SPEAK about these matters with each other and to the leaders of nations where such injustices have too long gone unremarked and unpunished.

There are, to date, only the beginnings of a new global reform-minded commitment to teaching indigenous women how to speak out for themselves. We must TEACH girls to imagine better lives.

Read. Care. Become involved.

This is purposeful writing, indeed. The stories are challenging, daunting, haunting, often heart-wrenching – though Kristof and WuDunn have consciously crafted them with as optimistic an arc as the facts allow, for they know Americans act most concertedly when inspired by hope.

In relating the tribulations and successes of individual women from Cambodia to the Congo, the authors emphasize reformers’ ability to create opportunities. They advocate an approach that does not so much solve problems, or ameliorate difficult circumstances, but rather uses that “big stick” to build new structures of support in women’s lives, to improve their education, their health, and their economic status – on the smallest of scales. Support local transformations, they advise, and pour your heart into it.

After reading this book, you’ll recognize that as global citizens we face issues far greater than what language our congressional representatives use in their account of sexual assault (as disturbing as it may be). Mass rape in modern wars is shockingly common. During Liberia’s recent conflict, as many as 90% of women and girls over age three may have been sexually abused (HALF THE SKY, 83).  In South Africa, rape is still so endemic that gynecologists have invented a zipper-like insertable device women can use to maul those who assault them.

Violence against women, worldwide, is not just a matter of brutally offensive language, but of repeated, culturally accepted, horrifying and vicious cruelty enacted on a daily basis – in war, yes; and in brothels; and in households and kitchens and shacks and slums and public streets.

READ. WATCH. Join the social media conversation before, during, and after the PBS documentary airs on witf-TV.

WATCH. READ. Read more, like this New York Times Magazine special issue devoted to the book and the issues it raises.

Then you’ll have to find a way to act.

The transformation of our world can be grander than we imagine.

The book is available in hardcover (Knopf) and paperback (Vintage) at Harrisburg’s Midtown Scholar Bookstore-Café and online at MidtownScholar.com.

During Third in the Burg – Harrisburg’s monthly Artswalk every Third Friday– you’ll find Bean at 1320 North 3rd Street exhibiting his own work, along with the work of other illustrators.  Stop by then, when opens his studio to the public!  

Bean will also appear at witf’s Ready Set Go Kindergarten event on Saturday, August 11, 2012 from 9a-1p.  He’ll be available for meet and greets and book signings.

Meet Jonathan Bean and get your booked signed at witf’s Ready Set Go Kindergarten
Saturday, August 11th 9a-1p
witf Public Media Center
4801 Lindle RoadHarrisburg, PA 17111

RSVP today at witf.org/readysetgo

Signed copies of AT NIGHT are available for purchase at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore.

Though Coopey has moved a half-continent away from her native Altoona, Western Pennsylvania still holds primacy in her imagination.  Her critically acclaimed earlier novel, Redfield Farm, offers an intimate portrait of a Quaker family who participates in the Underground Railroad in Bedford County, PA.

Now, in Waterproof, Coopey celebrates those women and men who refuse to migrate after Johnstown’s cataclysmic storm-incited dam-bursting flood of May 31, 1889.  Across three generations, the results are the same.  The closer to home flood victims stay, the safer and more emotionally satisfying their lives prove to be.  This is despite the wide-ranging tragedy of many hundreds of people killed, the destruction of homes and businesses, and the uprooting of civic life.  Those who choose to remain are able to thrive again because of the courage they find within themselves. 

This fascinating moral geography holds true throughout heroine (and narrator) Pamela McRae’s family.  Her younger sibling tragically drowns in the flood waters after venturing just a few blocks from his home.  Her elder son’s choice of far-off Bucknell for college, instead of Pitt, presages a later fatal trek further East to the battlefields of World War One.

Time and again, the characters in this novel have opportunities either to dissolve into overwhelming grief, to seek restitution in vengeful anger, or to act courageously and redemptively.  Those who abandon Johnstown, or even simply wander away, are held culpable here; they may earn worldly riches or receive public accolades, but they lead empty, embittered lives.  By contrast, the heroine, the man she marries, her housemate, and her younger son all eventually make hard, morally grounded choices.  In doing so, they actively reshape their personal circumstances.  They prove themselves devoted to their families.  They are outspoken in advocating the reconciliation of their fractured community, deeply riven by social unrest and marred by racial bigotry at the turn of the century.  In both their private lives and their professional endeavors, they are steadfast in their commitment to Johnstown’s revitalization.  And they reap the dual rewards of satisfying work and companionate marriages.  

Such happy conclusions do not make Waterproof a romance.  Indeed, Coopey’s narrative consistently opposes any easy solutions to the novel’s several interwoven romantic stories.  Women typically find disappointment rather than fulfillment from their lovers.  This is not the story of couples who unite.  It is not about anything so commonplace, or commonly misunderstood – the narrator would have us believe – as falling in love.  Rather, it is about love’s manifold consequences, both the costs of selfish love, and the benefits of loving others more than oneself. 

By alternating between the heroine Pamela’s recollections of the 1889 flood and the immediate aftermath, and Pamela’s almost-grandmotherly perspective in 1939 as the fiftieth anniversary nears, Waterproof sweeps readers up in its dramatic story lines.  There are riots, courtroom trials, tea shops, hunting shacks, wagon rides, snowball fights, porch conversations, graveyard trysts, mountain picnics, and terrorist bombings.  Coopey frames these fictional aspects in well-researched history.  The novel will inspire readers to visit the Johnstown Flood Museum and National Memorial, and to delve into other accounts like David McCullough’s award-winning narrative history, The Johnstown Flood (1987).

Waterproof is an especially appropriate choice for June 2012’s “Pick of the Month” because this June marks the 40^th Anniversary of Central Pennsylvania’s own infamous, record-setting flood, caused by Hurricane Agnes in 1972.  With 18 inches of rain in a matter of days, $14.3 billion in damage state-wide (in today’s dollars), and even the governor’s needing to be rescued by boat, Agnes still ranks as the worst natural disaster in Pennsylvania’s history, with the Susquehanna River’s highest recorded flood levels.  [Click here to read USA Today’s report about it 2002.]  [Read more about flooding in our region here.]

Harrisburg’s Midtown Scholar Bookstore-Café will host a series of free public programs commemorating the 1972 Agnes Flood on Saturday, June 16, 2012. 

Children’s Storytime that morning at 10 a.m. will feature stories and crafts about rain. 

In a Panel Discussion from 3 to 4:30 p.m., three prominent speakers will compare urban communities’ experiences of floods from the nineteenth century to the present day.  Waterproof author Judith Redline Coopey will discuss the historical circumstances of the 1889 Johnstown Flood.  Harrisburg historian Jeb Stuart will recount the transformation of the capital region in the aftermath of 1972’s Agnes Flood.  Eminent playwright and cultural scholar Lenwood Sloan will examine the legacies of race and migration in New Orleans after 2004’s Hurricane Katrina.  Audience members will be encouraged to ask questions, participate in the discussion, and share their own flood memories. 

A Public Reception will honor Coopey at 4:30 p.m., with free refreshments.

At 5 p.m., Coopey will give a “Book Salon” style talk on Waterproof.  She will read selections from the novel, share her experiences researching life in 1880s-1930s Johnstown, discuss the challenges of writing historical fiction, and answer audience members’ questions.  Afterwards, Coopey will be available to sign copies of her novels.

Listen to Radio Smart Talk’s Scott LaMar interview Coopey at the WITF podcast.

The Pick of the Month for April 2012 is Silver Like Dust by Kimi Cunningham Grant.

Description:

Shopping for rice flour pastries in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. Braving the snowstorms of harsh Wyoming winters. Finding a mate, birthing children, raising a family. Watching the sunrise from Florida’s sandy beaches. Jostling for used books at Friends of the Library sales. Surviving cancer. Packing up photo albums and resettling in Central Pennsylvania.

Kimi Cunningham Grant’s Silver Like Dust (Pegasus Books, 2012) is an eloquent memoir of a Japanese-American family from the early twentieth century to the present day. In an evocative series of conversations with her grandmother, Grant peels back the years to uncover the devotion, anguish, and resilience that have marked her grandmother’s eventful life.

The core of this compelling story is Grant’s reconstruction of the challenges and heartaches of her immigrant family’s imprisonment in war-time internment camps in Pomona, California, and Heart Mountain, Wyoming.

Combining the descriptive powers of a gifted writer with engaging historical and personal reflections, Grant expands our contemporary understandings as she reflects on the past. By moving seamlessly between her grandmother’s dramatic reminiscences and the quotidian experiences of modern suburban life, she explores how families make sense of their histories.

Grant grew up in rural Central PA, graduated from Messiah College, and received a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Fellowship in creative nonfiction. She is an English Instructor at Penn State - State College.

Meet the author:

Join Kimi Cunningham Grant at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore on Saturday, April 28th at 3 PM, for a conversation about Silver Like Dust in a book salon hosted by Central PA poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State - State College.

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