Literati is pleased to welcome Jon M. Sweeney in support of his most recent title,The Enthusiast: How the Best Friend of Francis of Assisi Almost Destroyed What He Started.
Popular historian and award-winning author Jon M. Sweeney relates the untold story of St. Francis’s friendship with Elias of Cortona, the man who helped him build the Franciscan movement. Sweeney uses the complexities of their relationship in a gripping narrative of how their efforts changed the world and how Elias’s enthusiasm betrayed the ideals of his friend.
Blending history and biography, Sweeney reveals how Francis and Elias rebuilt churches, aided lepers, and entertained as “God’s troubadours” to the delight of everyday people who had grown tired of a remote and tumultuous Church. At the height of their spiritual renaissance, however, Elias became “the devil” to many of the other friars; they believed him to be a traitor to their ideals. After Francis’s premature death, the movement fractured. Scorned by most of the Franciscan leadership, Elias followed a path that would leave him a lonely, broken man. Sweeney shows how Elias’s undoing was rooted in his attempts to honor his old friend.
Jon M. Sweeney is an independent scholar and one of religion’s most respected writers. His work has been hailed by everyone from PBS and James Martin, S.J., to Fox News and Dan Savage. He’s been interviewed on CBS Saturday Morning, Fox News, CBS-TV Chicago, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, and on the popular program Chicago Tonight. Several of his books have become Book-of-the-Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club selections. His popular medieval history, The Pope Who Quit, was published by Image/Random House and optioned by HBO. It was a selection of the History Book Club and received a starred review in Booklist. His book, When Saint Francis Saved the Church, received a 2015 award for excellence in history from the Catholic Press Association. His other words include Inventing Hell, The Complete Francis of Assisi, and The St. Francis Prayer Book. Sweeney writes regularly for America and The Tablet, and is also the editorial director at Franciscan Media. He is married, the father of three, and lives in Vermont.
Ray Robertson is the author of Lives of the Poets (with Guitars): Thirteen Outsiders Who Changed Modern Music, and the novels Home Movies, Heroes, Moody Food, Gently Down the Stream, What Happened Later, and David, as well as a collection of non-fiction, Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing. He is a contributing book reviewer to the Globe and Mail.
A twenty-year editor for Guitar Player and the founding editor of Pure Guitar magazine, Jas Obrecht has been writing about music since the mid 1970s. His current book is Early Blues: The First Stars of Blues Guitar. He wrote the first nationally published cover stories on Eddie Van Halen, Eric Johnson, Steve Lukather, Steve Morse, Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai, and Joe Satriani. His other Guitar Player cover stories include Mick Ralphs, Pat Travers, Jeff Beck, Jeff Baxter, Billy Gibbons, Duane Allman, Craig Chaquico, Charlie Christian, Steve Morse, Andy Summers, Randy Rhoads, Brian May, Muddy Waters, Brian Setzer, Jimi Hendrix, Angus Young, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Neil Young, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Ry Cooder, Keith Richards, Albert Collins, and John Lennon. He written for all of the major blues magazines, as well as for scholarly journals, fanzines, and websites. His books include Masters of Heavy Metal, Blues Guitar: The Men Who Made the Music, Rollin’ & Tumblin’: The Postwar Blues Guitarists, and My Son Jimi, co-authored with James A. Hendrix. He wrote the liners for Robert Johnson’s King of Delta Blues, Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, and John Lee Hooker’s 50 Years: John Lee Hooker Anthology, and produced DVDs and CDs for Buckethead. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and can be reached at jasobr@earthlink.net .
Literati is pleased to welcome Sarah D. Wald in support of her book The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl.
The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America’s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in what ways they are allowed to belong. In The Nature of California, Sarah Wald analyzes this legacy and its consequences by examining the paradoxical representations of California farmers and farmworkers from the Dust Bowl migration to present-day movements for food justice and immigrant rights.
Analyzing fiction, nonfiction, news coverage, activist literature, memoirs, and more, Wald gives us a new way of thinking through questions of national belonging by probing the relationships among race, labor, and landownership. Bringing together ecocriticism and critical race theory, she pays special attention to marginalized groups, examining how Japanese American journalists, Filipino workers, United Farm Workers members, and contemporary immigrants-rights activists, among others, pushed back against the standard narratives of landownership and citizenship.
Sarah D. Wald is assistant professor of English and environmental studies at the University of Oregon.
Pulitzer Prize winning author David Maraniss joins us to discuss his latest book, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story, which is one of the Library of Michigan’s 2016 Michigan Notable Books. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion; books will be available for purchase. This program is made possible thanks to support from the Michigan Humanities Council, the Library of Michigan, the Library of Michigan Foundation, Meijer, and the Michigan Center for the Book.
Saline District Library, 555 N. Maple Road, Saline, MI 48176, Saline. Free. 734-429-5450. www.salinelibrary.org
Jane Hilberry is the author and editor of several books, including Still the Animals Enter (2016), and the poetry collection Body Painting (Red Hen Press, 2005), which won the Colorado Book Award and got Hilberry banned from speaking at a Colorado Springs high school. One of the first editors of the Indiana Review, she has also facilitated arts-based leadership development programs at The Banff Centre in Canada and now teaches Creative Writing, Creativity, and Literature at Colorado College.
Tom Stanton is author of several nonfiction books, among them the critically acclaimed Tiger Stadium memoir “The Final Season” and the Quill Award finalist “Ty and The Babe.” A journalist for more than thirty years, he co-founded The Voice Newspapers in suburban Detroit and served as editor for 16 years, winning numerous press awards, including a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan. His new book is Terror in the City of Champions.
Stanton is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Detroit Mercy and a longtime member of the Detroit board of the Society of Professional Journalists. He also edited The Detroit Tigers Reader and is a past recipient of the Michigan Library Association’s Author of the Year award.
He lives in New Baltimore, Michigan, with his wife, Beth, and their four feral cats.
Literat is thrilled to host the launch of Julie Lawson Timmer’s second novel,Untethered!
When Char Hawthorn’s husband dies unexpectedly, she is left questioning everything she once knew to be true: from the cozy small town life they built together to her relationship with her stepdaughter, who is suddenly not bound to Char in any real way. Untethered explores what bonds truly form a family and how, sometimes, love knows no bounds.
Char Hawthorn, college professor, wife and stepmother to a spirited fifteen-year-old daughter, loves her family and the joyful rhythms of work and parenting. But when her husband dies in a car accident, the “step” in Char’s title suddenly matters a great deal. In the eyes of the law, all rights to daughter Allie belong to Lindy, Allie’s self-absorbed biological mother, who wants to girl to move to her home in California.
While Allie begins to struggle in school and tensions mount between her and Char, Allie’s connection to young Morgan, a ten-year-old-girl she tutors, seems to keep her grounded. But then Morgan, who was adopted out of foster care, suddenly disappears, and Char is left to wonder about a possible future without Allie and what to do about Morgan, a child caught up in a terrible crack in the system.
Julie Lawson Timmer grew up in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband, their four teenage children and two rescued dogs. By turns, she is a writer, lawyer, mom/stepmom, and dreadful cook. Five Days Left (Putnam 2014) is her first novel. Her second book, Untethered, will be available June 7, 2016.
Literati is delighted to welcome Nathan Bomey in support of Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back.
In Detroit Resurrected, Nathan Bomey delivers the inside story of the fight to save Detroit against impossible odds. Bomey, who covered the bankruptcy for the Detroit Free Press, provides a gripping account of the tremendous clash between lawyers, judges, bankers, union leaders, politicians, philanthropists, and the people of Detroit themselves.
The battle to rescue this iconic city pulled together those who believed in its future—despite their differences. Help came in the form of Republican governor Rick Snyder, a technocrat who famously called himself “one tough nerd”; emergency manager Kevyn Orr, a sharp-shooting lawyer and “yellow-dog Democrat”; and judges Steven Rhodes and Gerald Rosen, the key architects of the grand bargain that would give the city a second chance at life.
Detroit had a long way to go. Facing a legacy of broken promises, the city had to seek unprecedented sacrifices from retirees and union leaders, who fought for their pensions and benefits. It had to confront the consequences of years of municipal corruption while warding off Wall Street bond insurers who demanded their money back. And it had to consider liquidating the Detroit Institute of Arts, whose world-class collection became an object of desire for the city’s numerous creditors. In a tight, suspenseful narrative, Detroit Resurrected reveals the tricky path to rescuing the city from $18 billion in debt and giving new hope to its citizens.
Based on hundreds of exclusive interviews, insider sources, and thousands of records, Detroit Resurrected gives a sweeping account of financial ruin, backroom intrigue, and political rebirth in the struggle to reinvent one of America’s iconic cities.
Nathan Bomey, a journalist at USA Today, was the lead reporter on Detroit’s bankruptcy and General Motors for the Detroit Free Press. He lives in the Washington, DC, area.
All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share. Hosted by local poets and former college English teachers Joe Kelty and Ed Morin.
Literati is pleased to welcome Gloria Whelan back to the store in support of the anthology Bob Seger’s House and Other Stories.
Bob Seger’s House and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by some of Michigan’s most well-known fiction writers. This collection of twenty-two short stories serves as a celebration not only of the tenth anniversary of the Made in Michigan Writers Series in 2016 but also of the rich history of writing and storytelling in the region. As series editors Michael Delp and M. L. Leibler state in their preface, “The stories contained in this anthology are a way to stay connected to each other. Think of them as messages sent from all over the map, stitching readers and writers together through stories that continue to honor the ancient art of the fire tale, the hunting epic, and all of the ways language feeds the blood of imagination.”
Gloria Whelan is the bestselling author of many novels for young readers, includingHomeless Bird, winner of the National Book Award; Fruitlands: Louisa May Alcott Made Perfect; Angel on the Square; Burying the Sun; Once on This Island, winner of the Great Lakes Book Award; and Return to the Island. Her books for adults includeLiving Together. She lives in the woods of northern Michigan.
