Literati is pleased to be on-hand as the official bookseller as the Detroit Public Library welcomes David Maraniss to their Spring Author Series, in support of his latest, A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father.
Official details can be found here, including RSVPs.
“Drawing on Elliott’s essays, letters, and FBI files, Maraniss explores his family history…to show how politics molded individual lives…Maraniss also weaves in insightful studies of other figures in the post-war Red Scare…Clear-eyed and empathetic, Maraniss’s engrossing portrait of a patriotic, baseball-loving red reveals the complex human motivations underneath the era’s clashing dogmas.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“an absorbing history of American political and cultural life in the 1940s and ‘50s… A cleareyed, highly personal view of a dark chapter in American history.”—Kirkus Reviews
David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History). A Good American Family is his twelfth book. Visit him at www.DavidMaraniss.com.
Award-winning journalist and writer Elaine Weiss discusses the battle for the 19th Amendment and her book The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight To Win The Vote.
A record number of women have been elected to Congress and statehouses in the recent elections, and several women have announced runs for the White House in 2020. None of this would be possible if not for the brave grass-roots activists of yesterday – the suffragists – who disrupted the political establishment as they fought for American women’s right to vote. The Woman’s Hour describes how the seven-decade crusade to win the ballot came down to a pitched battle in Nashville Tennessee to gain the final state needed to ratify the 19th Amendment.
For six weeks in the summer of 1920, the dauntless suffragists confronted the bribery, misogyny, and dirty tricks of their powerful opponents: politicians with careers at stake, corporate interests that viewed women voters as a threat to business, and racists who didn’t want black women voting. They also faced the “Antis” –women vehemently opposed to their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage would bring about the moral collapse of the nation. The outcome remained in doubt until the very last moment, decided by a single vote of conscience.
Following a handful of remarkable women, both white and black, who led their respective forces into battle, and featuring appearances by Frederick Douglass, Woodrow Wilson, Ida B. Wells and Eleanor Roosevelt, this book is an inspiring story of women fighting for equality. It is also a cautionary tale of moral compromises made in the name of political expediency, and the book’s themes—voting rights, women’s rights, culture wars, and racism—are especially resonant today.
Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times, and The Christian Science Monitor, as well as in reports and documentaries for National Public Radio and Voice of America. A MacDowell Colony Fellow and Pushcart Prize Editor’s Choice honoree, she is also the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army in the Great War.
This event includes a book signing and books will be on sale.
This event will be recorded
Join us for an evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning author, David Maraniss. In his new book David captures the pervasive fear and paranoia that gripped America during the Red Scare of the 1950s through the chilling yet affirming story of his family’s ordeal, from blacklisting to vindication. With A Good American Family, he turns the lens on his own family to examine the politics of the 1950s McCarthy era.
Ticket Information:
No tickets.
Event Details
Seating at the event will be first-come first-served. This event will be a standing-room crowd, so if you require a seat for medical reasons, please contact us in advance to make arrangements.
About the Book
In a riveting book with powerful resonance today, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss captures the pervasive fear and paranoia that gripped America during the Red Scare of the 1950s through the chilling yet affirming story of his family’s ordeal, from blacklisting to vindication.
Elliott Maraniss, David’s father, a WWII veteran who had commanded an all-black company in the Pacific, was spied on by the FBI, named as a communist by an informant, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, fired from his newspaper job, and blacklisted for five years. Yet he never lost faith in America and emerged on the other side with his family and optimism intact.
In a sweeping drama that moves from the Depression and Spanish Civil War to the HUAC hearings and end of the McCarthy era, Maraniss weaves his father’s story through the lives of his inquisitors and defenders as they struggle with the vital twentieth-century issues of race, fascism, communism, and first amendment freedoms. A Good American Family powerfully evokes the political dysfunctions of the 1950s while underscoring what it really means to be an American. It is an unsparing yet moving tribute from a brilliant writer to his father and the family he protected in dangerous times.
“Clear-eyed and empathetic, Maraniss’s engrossing portrait of a patriotic, baseball-loving red reveals the complex human motivations underneath the era’s clashing dogmas.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“An absorbing history of American political and cultural life in the 1940s and ’50s… A clear-eyed, highly personal view of a dark chapter in American history.”—Kirkus
About the Author
David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s – Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History). A Good American Family is his twelfth book.
Come with questions, a work in progress, or an empty notebook. All writers are welcome in this casual, supportive environment. Authors Bethany Neal and Alex Kourvo will be on hand to answer questions and give encouragement. Bethany and Alex will also provide private, one-on-one critiques if you choose to have them read your work. Sharing your writing with other attendees is not required and is completely voluntary.
This is an excellent opportunity to meet your fellow Ann Arbor writers as well as get feedback from published authors. This is a monthly meet-up that welcomes all writers to ask questions, connect with other writers, or simply have a dedicated time and place to work on their projects. Do you have a completed manuscript? Consider submitting it to the library’s new imprint, Fifth Avenue Press.
Literati is pleased to welcome Paul Vachon who will be sharing his new book Detroit: An Illustrated Timeline.
About Detroit: An Illustrated Timeline
Let’s talk a walk a long walk, back over three centuries. At the dawn of the eighteenth century Detroit was established as simply an outpost for the French to take advantage of the fur trade while keeping the British at bay. Over the subsequent 300 plus years this small settlement advanced to become a regional hub of commerce, a focal point of nineteenth century industrial strength, and ultimately the nexus of the auto business–the industry that redefined mobility and in doing so changed the course of world history.
Detroit’s long evolution occurred along an often rocky path, marked by a devastating fire, military conquests, conflicts with southern slave hunters, a burgeoning population, all while enduring persistent racial tensions and insurrection. As the Arsenal of Democracy the city proved essential to the allied victory in World War II; but the following decades proved ruinous. As the city bled people and resources, whole areas were decimated–yet nonetheless poised for a rousing comeback.
This book points out many of the seminal events and noteworthy turning points of Detroit’s long journey, some little known: the city’s fall to the British during the War of 1812, the existence of slavery in Detroit as late as the 1820s, and Mayor Hazen Pingree’s aggressive advocacy for the everyday citizen against corporate interests.
Chapters devoted to the twentieth century highlight Detroit’s underappreciated architectural heritage, the development of its notable cultural institutions, as well as the exploits of assorted scoundrels, such as the Black Legion, the Purple Gang, Harry Bennett and Father Charles Coughlin.
Triumphant sports teams, the contributions of religious leaders, and courage of civil rights leaders are all brought to life, completing this chronological sketch of America’s city of the straits.
A lifelong resident of the Detroit area, Paul Vachon is an author, freelance writer and public speaker. He possesses a strong interest in Detroit history, and has written four previous books devoted to the subject. He’s also written guidebooks on Michigan travel. Paul is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. In his spare time, Paul enjoys traveling and nature photography. He also thinks having a map of the state on the back of his left hand is pretty cool.
For this event, Richards will be in conversation with Sherlonya Turner, Public Experience and Desk Service Manager at AADL.
Cecile Richards has been an activist since she was taken to the principal’s office in seventh grade for wearing an armband in protest of the Vietnam War. Richards had an extraordinary childhood in ultra-conservative Texas, where her civil rights attorney father and activist mother taught their kids to be troublemakers. She had a front-row seat to observe the rise of women in American politics and watched her mother, Ann, transform from a housewife to an electrifying force in the Democratic party.
As a young woman, Richards worked as a labor organizer alongside women earning minimum wage, and learned that those in power don’t give it up without a fight. She experienced first-hand the misogyny, sexism, fake news, and the ever-looming threat of violence that constantly confront women who challenge authority.
Now, after years of advocacy, resistance, and progressive leadership, she shares her “truly inspiring” (Redbook) story for the first time—from the joy and heartbreak of activism to the challenges of raising kids, having a life, and making change, all the while garnering a reputation as “the most badass feminist EVER” (Teen Vogue).
In the “powerful and infinitely readable” (Gloria Steinem) Make Trouble: Stand up, Speak Out, and Find the Courage to Lead, Richards reflects on the people and lessons that have gotten her through good times and bad, and encourages the rest of us to take risks, make mistakes, and make trouble along the way.
This event includes a signing and books will be for sale.
Literati is thrilled to welcome novelist Jessica Francis Kane who will be sharing her new book Rules for Visiting.
About Rules for Visiting:
A beautifully observed and deeply funny novel of May Attaway, a university gardener who sets out on an odyssey to reconnect with four old friends over the course of a year.
At forty, May Attaway is more at home with plants than people. Over the years, she’s turned inward, finding pleasure in language, her work as a gardener, and keeping her neighbors at arm’s length while keenly observing them. But when she is unexpectedly granted some leave from her job, May is inspired to reconnect with four once close friends. She knows they will never have a proper reunion, so she goes, one-by-one, to each of them. A student of the classics, May considers her journey a female Odyssey. What might the world have had if, instead of waiting, Penelope had set out on an adventure of her own?
RULES FOR VISITING is a woman’s exploration of friendship in the digital age. Deeply alert to the nobility and the ridiculousness of ordinary people, May savors the pleasures along the way–afternoon ice cream with a long-lost friend, surprise postcards from an unexpected crush, and a moving encounter with ancient beauty. Though she gets a taste of viral online fame, May chooses to bypass her friends’ perfectly cultivated online lives to instead meet them in their messy analog ones.
Ultimately, May learns that a best friend is someone who knows your story–and she inspires us all to master the art of visiting.
Jessica Francis Kane is the author of This Close, The Report, and Bending Heaven. This Close was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, and The Report was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection and a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Yale Review, A Public Space, and Granta.
We welcome award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren, in support of her debut novel Kickdown, as part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati series! Rebecca will be joined in conversation by Emily Strelow, author of The Wild Birds. The event is free and open to the public.
About Kickdown:
When Jackie Dunbar’s father dies, she takes a leave from medical school and goes back to the family cattle ranch in Colorado to set affairs in order. But what she finds derails her: the Dunbar ranch is bankrupt, her sister is having a nervous breakdown, and the oil and gas industry has changed the landscape of this small western town both literally and figuratively, tempting her to sell a gas lease to save the family land.
There is fencing to be repaired and calves to be born, and no one–except Jackie herself–to take control. But then a gas well explodes in the neighboring ranch, and the fallout sets off a chain of events that will strain trust, sever old relationships, and ignite new ones.
Rebecca Clarren’s Kickdown is a tautly written debut novel about two sisters and the Iraq war veteran who steps in to help. It is a timeless and timely meditation on the grief wrought by death, war, and environmental destruction. Kickdown, like Kent Haruf’s Plainsong or Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, weaves together the threads of land, family, failure, and perseverance to create a gritty tale about rural America.
Rebecca Clarren, an award-winning journalist, has been writing about the rural West for nearly twenty years. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize and an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, has appeared in such publications as Mother Jones, High Country News, the Nation, and Salon.com. Kickdown, shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, is her first novel. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two young sons.
Emily Strelow was born and raised in Oregon’s Willamette Valley but has lived all over the West and now, the Midwest. For the last decade she combined teaching writing with doing seasonal avian field biology with her husband. While doing field jobs she camped and wrote in remote areas in the desert, mountains and by the ocean. She is a mother to two boys, a naturalist, and writer. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI. The Wild Birds is her first novel.
Join local author Lisa A. Nichols to celebrate the release of her debut sci-fi thriller novel, Vessel.
About the Book
“A surprising page-turner…Compelling. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal (starred review), Debut of the Month
An astronaut returns to Earth after losing her entire crew to an inexplicable disaster, but is her version of what happened in space the truth? Or is there more to the story…A tense, psychological thriller perfect for fans of Dark Matter and The Martian.
After Catherine Wells’s ship experiences a deadly incident in deep space and loses contact with NASA, the entire world believes her dead. Miraculously—and mysteriously—she survived, but with little memory of what happened. Her reentry after a decade away is a turbulent one: her husband has moved on with another woman and the young daughter she left behind has grown into a teenager she barely recognizes. Catherine, too, is different. The long years alone changed her, and as she readjusts to being home, sometimes she feels disconnected and even, at times, deep rage toward her family and colleagues. There are periods of time she can’t account for, too, and she begins waking up in increasingly strange and worrisome locations, like restricted areas of NASA. Suddenly she’s questioning everything that happened up in space: how her crewmates died, how she survived, and now, what’s happening to her back on Earth.
Smart, gripping, and compelling, this page-turning sci-fi thriller will leave you breathless.
About the Author
Lisa A. Nichols has been a storyteller her entire life. The very first movie she fell in love with was Star Wars, and the very first books she read were the Little House books, so perhaps it’s inevitable that she’d wind up writing science fiction with a domestic twist. She lives in Michigan with a tiny ridiculous dog, too many cats, and a crush on Luke Skywalker that she should’ve outgrown thirty years ago.
Ticket Information:
No tickets.
Event Details
Seating at the event will be first-come first-served. This event will be a standing-room crowd, so if you require a seat for medical reasons, please contact us in advance to make arrangements.
