HOWARD MARKEL, M.D., Ph.D., is the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan, and editor in chief of The Milbank Quarterly. His books include Quarantine!, When Germs Travel, and An Anatomy of Addiction. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The New England Journal of Medicine. Markel is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Book: The Kelloggs: Battling Brothers of Battle Creek
From the much admired medical historian (“Markel shows just how compelling the medical history can be”–Andrea Barrett) and author of An Anatomy of Addiction (“Absorbing, vivid”–Sherwin Nuland, The New York Times Book Review, front page)–the story of America’s empire builders: John and Will Kellogg. John Harvey Kellogg was one of America’s most beloved physicians; a best-selling author, lecturer, and health-magazine publisher; founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium; and patron saint of the pursuit of wellness. His youngest brother, Will, was the founder of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which revolutionized the mass production of food and what we eat for breakfast. In The Kelloggs, Howard Markel tells the sweeping saga of these two extraordinary men, whose lifelong competition and enmity toward one another changed America’s notion of health and wellness from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and who helped change the course of American medicine, nutrition, wellness, and diet.
Part of the 30th Annual Jewish Book and Arts Festival, $
This nationally recognized advocate for people with disabilities reads from What Matters: Reflections on Disability, Community, and Love, her new book that offers strategies for ensuring intellectually disabled individuals full social inclusion and chronicles the challenges faced by her son, a disability rights advocate who in 2009 successfully sued Oakland University for refusing to let him live on campus. Hosted by Crazy Wisdom owner Bill Zirinsky.
7 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757.
We are thrilled to welcome three wonderful poets to Literati as part of our Poetry at Literati series! Donald Dunbar, Christine Hume, and Becky Winn will be reading poems for their latest collections.
About Safe Word:
Safe Word, Donald Dunbar’s second collection of poetry, acts as a tonic against spiritual death. This book is the kompromat of the undersoul, the blotter paper in the plea deal, a crystal jutting out of the center of an otherwise-innocent forehead. Dunbar chops, screws, solders, and sutures forms of thought and feeling into abominations you might just fall in love with, and be consumed by. Never be bored again.
About Shot:
In alternating currents of prose and verse, SHOT reaches beyond the tradition of the nocturne to illuminate contradictory impulses and intensities of night. SHOT inhabits the sinister, visionary, intimate, haunted, erotic capacities to see and hear things at night, in the fertile void containing our own psychological and physical darkness. Via Levinas who locates self-knowledge and ethical contract in insomnia, this darkness is one “stuck full of eyes.” Here the insomniac falls into a Beckettian pattern of waiting, in an inextricable dialogue with a selfhood that cannot settle down. In a perpetual play between empirical and abstract knowledge, tantrum and meditation, SHOT creates torque that drives beyond material experience.
Donald Dunbar lives in Portland, OR, and is the author of SAFE WORD and EYELID LICK, winner of the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series prize, as well as a number of chapbooks. In 2016 he co-founded Eyedrop, a virtual reality design studio. He has helped run If Not For Kidnap: a PDX Poetry Concern, The Poetry Data Project, and has contributed to a number of other worthy projects.
Christine Hume is the author of Shot (Counterpath Press, 2010); Alaskaphrenia (New Issues, 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award and Small Press Traffic’s 2005 Best Book of the Year Award; and Musca Domestica (Beacon Press, 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She currently serves as the coordinator of the creative writing program at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she also lives. Her latest collection of poetry is entitled Questions Like a Face.
Becky Winn is a poet and designer living in Portland, Oregon. She is a contributing editor for Gramma Poetry and the founder of ĐIỆN, an artist collective and clothing brand.
Readings by U-M creative writing grad students, including fiction writers Michelle Cheever and poet Colin Walker.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 764-6330
The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
Readings by 9 authors being published by the AADL’s new imprint. Books and authors include Rebecca G. Biber’s Technical Solace (poetry), Virginia Ford’s Ginger Stands Her Ground (memoir), R.J Fox’s Tales From the Dork Side (memoir), Meg Gower’s Michigan Moon (picture book), Jeff Kass’s Takedown (murder mystery), Carolyn Nowak’s Chad Agamemnon (locally set graphic novel), Rich Retyi’s The Book of Ann Arbor: An Extremely Serious History Book, Emily Siwek’s A Monster on Main Street (locally set picture book), and Judy Patterson Wenzel’s Light from the Cage: 25 Years in a Prison Classroom.
1-3 p.m., AADL 3rd floor, 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free. 327-4555.
Performance by this Spokane-based spoken word poet, a 2017 grad of Eastern Washington University with a B.A. in theatre, who has published 2 chapbooks. His stage persona is easygoing, and his poems are humorous and self-deprecating. Preceded by a poetry open mike.
7 p.m. Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.
Literati is excited to host a discussion of German author Siegfried Kracauer’s novel Georg. We will be joined by the translator Carl Skoggard, publisher Patrick KIley, and Chair of the Department of German Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan, Johannes von Moltke
About Georg:
Best remembered today for his brilliant study of early German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film, and for his involvement with the Frankfurt School (he mentored Theodor Adorno), Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was the editor for cultural affairs at Germany’s leading liberal newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, during the Weimar Republic until its disastrous end.
His novel Georg is a panorama of those years, as seen through the eyes of a rookie reporter working for the fictional Morgenbote (Morning Herald). In a defeated nation seething with extremism right and left, young Georg is looking for something to believe in. For him, the past has become unusable; for nearly everyone he meets, paradise seems just around the corner. But which paradise? Kracauer’s grimly funny novel takes on a confused and dangerous time which may remind us of our own.
Carl Skoggard was trained as a musicologist and for many years served as an editor for the music bibliography Repértoire International de la Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York, where he was responsible for German materials. His translation of Ein Jahr in Arkadien, an 1805 gay fiction by Duke August of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg, appeared in 1999 as Year in Arcadia. More recently he was also the staff writer for Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, an award-winning magazine created by his partner Joseph Holtzman. Over the last decade Skoggard has prepared translations with extensive commentary for the three major autobiographically-oriented writings of the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. These include Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood circa 1900), Berliner Chronik (The ‘Berlin Chronicle’ Notices), and a bilingual edition of Benjamin’s Sonnets, which has made this little-known but important body of poetry available to readers of English for the first time. Skoggard’s latest project, is a translation of Siegfried Kracauer’s Weimar novel Georg. This is a brilliantly cinematic, darkly comic evocation of that troubled era. Skoggard lives in Valatie, New York, with Holtzman and assorted animals.
Patrick Kiley is a UofM Grad (English, ’02) and has served as a research curator and writer for books and exhibitions at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the New York Public Library. In 2014 he opened Publication Studio Hudson, one of several in a network of on-demand book publishers in the Americas and Europe. PS Hudson focuses especially on prose, poetry, artist books and translation. PS Hudson and Patrick have since moved slightly north to Troy, New York.
Johannes von Moltke is the Chair of the German Department at U-M and the author, most recently, of The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America.
Alexandra Zapruder reads from Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, her new book which traces the personal trials of her grandfather, Abraham Zapruder, who made the notorious home movie of the Kennedy assassination and his descendents. “Zapruder is a gifted writer and storyteller who delicately unravels a minor mystery few people know or care about, but that she makes human, complex and quite interesting,” notes the New York Times review. 7-8:30 p.m., AADL 4th-floor meeting room, 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free.
We are excited to welcome author Helen Benedict who will be reading and discussing her new novel Wolf Season
About Wolf Season
After a hurricane devastates a small town in upstate New York, the lives of three women and their young children are irrevocably changed. Rin, an Iraq War veteran, tries to protect her blind daughter and the three wolves under her care. Naema, a widowed doctor who fled Iraq with her wounded son, faces life-threatening injuries. Beth, who is raising a troubled son, waits out her Marine husband’s deployment in Afghanistan, equally afraid of him coming home and of him never returning at all. As they struggle to maintain their humanity and find hope, their war-torn lives collide in a way that will affect their entire community.
“No one writes with more authority or cool-eyed compassion about the experience of women in war both on and off the battlefield than Helen Benedict. In Wolf Season, she shows us the complicated ways in which the lives of those who serve and those who don’t intertwine and how—regardless of whether you are a soldier, the family of a soldier, or a refugee—the war follows you and your children for generations. Wolf Season is more than a novel for our times; it should be required reading.” —Elissa Schappell, author of Use Me and Blueprints for Building Better Girls
Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, writes frequently about justice, women, soldiers, and war. She is the author of seven novels, including Wolf Season (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press) and Sand Queen, a Publishers Weekly “Best Contemporary War Novel.” A recipient of both the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Benedict is also the author of five works of nonfiction and the play The Lonely Soldier Monologues: Women at War in Iraq. She lives in New York.
Literati is thrilled to launch the latest book from New York Times-betselling author John U. Bacon, The Great Halifax Explosion. This event, on November 7th, 2017, at 7pm in Rackham Audiotorium, is free and open to the public. Literati Bookstore will be on hand to sell copies of the book, which is releasing the day of the event. Following the book talk will be a Q&A and signing. There are no tickets associated with this free event, but we encourage you to RSVP on Facebook.
About the Book: On Monday, December 3, 1917, the French freighter SS Mont-Blanc set sail from Brooklyn carrying the largest cache of explosives ever loaded onto a ship, including 2,300 tons of picric acid, an unstable, poisonous chemical more powerful than TNT. The U.S. had just recently entered World War I, and the ordnance was bound for the battlefields of France, to help the Allies break the grueling stalemate that had protracted the fighting for nearly four demoralizing years. The explosives were so dangerous that Captain Aimé Le Medec took unprecedented safety measures, including banning the crew from smoking, lighting matches, or even touching a drop of liquor.
Sailing north, the Mont-Blanc faced deadly danger, enduring a terrifying snowstorm off the coast of Maine and evading stealthy enemy U-boats hunting the waters of the Atlantic. But it was in Nova Scotia that an extraordinary disaster awaited. As the Mont-Blanc waited to dock in Halifax, it was struck by a Norwegian relief ship, the Imo, charging out of port. A small fire on the freighter’s deck caused by the impact ignited the explosives below, resulting in a horrific blast that, in one fifteenth of a second, leveled 325 acres of Halifax—killing more than 1,000 people and wounding 9,000 more.
In this definitive account, Bacon combines research and eyewitness accounts to re-create the tragedy and its aftermath, including the international effort to rebuild the devastated port city. As he brings to light one of the most dramatic incidents of the twentieth century, Bacon explores the long shadow this first “weapon of mass destruction” would cast on the future of nuclear warfare— crucial insights and understanding relevant to us today.
About John U. Bacon: John U. Bacon is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Three and Out (“An epic piece of reporting” — New York magazine); Fourth and Long (“Wonderfully reported, engagingly written, and utterly persuasive.”— Daniel Okrent), and Endzone. He appears often on NPR and national TV, and teaches at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan. He lives in Ann Arbor, with his wife and son.
