We are currently accepting enrollment registrations for two classes which begin in January: British History in Fiction, taught by Virginia Newmyer and Susan Willens, and 20th century American Masters: William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, taught by Gigi Bradford. Please register early as these classes do fill up quickly!

British History in Fiction

Several contemporary British novelists look back four generations to explore the legacy of the World Wars in modern Britain. In five lecture/discussions with PowerPoint illustrations, Virginia Newmyer and Susan Willens study those violent events and the artistic representations given them by young writers in recent novels. This class will be held at Politics and Prose in two sections the second Tuesday OR Wednesday of each month, from 1-3 p.m. (please choose the day you prefer). The course will examine these works:

January 12 - 13 -- Regeneration by Pat Barker
February 9 - 10 -- The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
March 9 - 10 -- Atonement by Ian McEwan
April 13 -14 -- White Teeth by Zadie Smith
May 11 - 12 -- Small Island by Andrea Levy

 

20th century American Masters: William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens

Come join this poetry group as we read two early-to-mid 20th century masters. Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams were contemporaries but wrote in completely different styles. Stevens exalted the imagination while Williams celebrated experience. Stevens was a lawyer and insurance executive, and Williams was a doctor who delivered over 2000 babies. Both were makers and doers who extended the American idiom in the American century. This is an appreciation group, not a critical studies class, so no prior experience is necessary, just a love of words and the pleasure of others. Taught be Gigi Bradford, former NEA Literature Director and Chair of the Folger Poetry Board.

Six Tuesdays with a one-week hiatus, January 19, 26; February 2, 16, 23; March 2. 3-4:30 p.m.

For both of the above classes, the books are available at a 20% discount for class participants.
Class fees are: $80 (Current P&P Members), $100 (Class fee, plus a one-year P&P Membership)

Click the class title headings above to register online today!

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For the last seventeen years, Ken Auletta has written "Annals of Communications" for The New Yorker. Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (Penguin Press, $27.95) has just been released, and Auletta has been in Washington speaking at Walter Isaacson’s Aspen Institute, a sure sign that his book is being seriously mulled over by Washington’s thinking heads. I enjoyed it so much that I shared my copy with my techie daughter.  It is valuable as a general primer on the tremendous digital revolution that occurred in the '90s with the founding of Google, but I really enjoyed the book's account of the take-off and accelerating speed of this revolutionary company. For the most part, Google's rise was happening in full view yet so few of us realized the vast implications of a business with a mission to supply all knowledge to all human beings in the world.  Fifteen years ago, this idea seemed truly inconceivable, but now even latecomers to the revolution think of Google as a household word. Its growth is also fascinating due to the internal struggle at Google as a workplace - over democracy versus elitism, and open-sourced information versus the arrogance of Google's software engineers. Reading this whole account, you can’t help but wonder how many other tinkerers are out in their garages assembling another such concept.

Daniel Pink is an author who writes about the connections among cognition, creative thinking, and careers. His recent books include A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future and Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us (due in Dec.) He lives in Bethesda and shops here with his family. He recently gave a speech at the New England Independent Booksellers Association trade show. ShelfAwareness offered this excerpt,

To illustrate the importance of mastery, Pink mentioned Politics & Prose, Washington, D.C., his local bookstore, where his daughter, who is 13, goes to ask for recommendations. The children's bookseller with whom she and Pink often talk "has seemingly read every work on the shelf. She pulls things off and demonstrates mastery of the material. It's performance art and is exhilarating to watch. It makes her job so enjoyable--and she could make a lot more money doing something besides selling children's books."

What a nice shout-out for the Children and Teens' Department! Click here to read more of his comments.

 

 

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COMING NOW TO YOUR FAVORITE BOOKSTORE
If you can’t attend a talk, but would like to reserve a signed copy, or a recorded author talk,
click the title links to purchase online. Members save 20% off on these titles.

Thursday, November 5

Toby Lester - The Fourth Part Of The World
7 p.m. The first map to depict the world essentially as we know it today was the Waldseemuller Map, which dates from1507. Among its many cartographical breakthroughs, it represented the New World—labeled as America—as a separate continent, and suggested the existence of the Pacific Ocean. Lester’s narrative history chronicles how European mapmakers pieced together this new picture of the world from the earlier expeditions of Vespucci, Marco Polo, and the ancients.

Friday, November 6

Barbara Kingsolver - The Lacuna @ Wesley United Methodist Church
(see above)

Saturday, November 7

Linda Gordon - Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
1  p.m. Linda Gordon, a history professor at NYU, examines the life of an iconic photographer of the Depression. Lange began her career doing society portraits in San Francisco, but a growing radicalization led her to photograph the dispossessed, the unemployed, and the detainees in the Japanese-American internment camps. This biography is also a thoroughly researched cultural history of America from 1920s Bohemian California through the post-War period.

Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize Reading: Carrie Jerrell, Dora Malech & Bradford Gray Telford
6  p.m. Carrie Jerrell is the winner of the 2008 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2005.  Her new collection has been praised as "a book of rich, tightly-packed poems suffused with the grit, rueful humor and pain of American country music."   Carrie will be joined by finalists Dora Malech, Shore Ordered Ocean, and Bradford Gray Telford, Perfect Hurt.

Sunday, November 8

Sheilah Kast & Jim Rosapepe - Dracula Is Dead
1  p.m. The former U.S. Ambassador to Romania and his wife, a journalist, call today’s Romania the “New Italy.” Their comprehensive tour of the country shows that cutting-edge technology co-exists with centuries-old Orthodox practices, and Transylvania, an area long contested by Romanians and Hungarians, is now at peace. In addition they reflect on how Maramure, once home to large number of Jews (including Elie Wiesel), has come to terms with its Holocaust history. Drawing on conversations with a wide range of Romanians, the authors have painted a rich and warm portrait of an exciting nation.

Kati Marton - Enemies Of The People
5  p.m. Marton, award-winning former NPR and ABC News correspondent, used recently opened archives to investigate the imprisonment of her Hungarian parents during the Cold War. Her journalist parents survived the Nazis but then were arrested and imprisoned by the Communists. By poring over the secret police files as well as conducting dozens of interviews, Marton found that her family was spied on and betrayed by friends and colleagues—including a babysitter.

Monday, November 9

David Carter - White Noise
10:30 a.m. & 4:30 p.m. Join us for the final installment of David Carter's color series that began with One Red Dot. White Noise has been selected as one of the New York Times 10 best illustrated picture books of 2009. This elegant cut-paper design has a unique twist: each spread creates a sound. Demonstrations of the paper engineering will highlight the event. Snow Bugs, also by David Carter, has also just been published. Ages 3-8.

Hendrik Hertzberg - ¡Obámanos!
7 p.m. Senior editor at The New Yorker, Hertzberg is a trenchant observer of American politics, combining sharp observation with historical perspective and analytic power. This chronicle of one of the most exciting and surprising campaigns in the nation’s history unfolds through discrete essays. Part I, appropriately named “The Wreckage,” reminds readers of President Bush’s increasing befuddlement. The second section, “The Marathon,” begins with a devastating reflection on recent American political dynasties. Part III, which opens in June 2008 after Obama clinches the nomination, is called “The Spirit.”

Tuesday, November 10

Laura Elliott - A Troubled Peace
10:30 a.m. It’s March, 1945, and though Henry Forester is home in Virginia, he can't stop thinking about the people in the French Resistance who risked their lives to save him. In particular, he worries about eight-year-old Pierre and returns to France to search for him. Henry sees farmland destroyed by Allied bombers, meets survivors of concentration camps, and encounters innumerable displaced people looking for relatives. But the French authorities are xenophobic and do not want British, American, or Russian citizens in their country as the war ends. Will Henry be sent back to America before he finds Pierre? Ages 12-16.

Gordon S. Wood - Empire Of Liberty
7 p.m. The latest volume in Oxford’s History of the United States series chronicles the first 25 years of the American republic, between the start of national government in 1789 and the War of 1812. Gordon Wood, Professor of History Emeritus at Brown and winner of the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes, looks at these tumultuous years, when the notion of the common man gradually supplanted the well-educated intelligentsia that had led the revolution. As the high hopes and dreams of the revolutionaries met the exigencies of reality, a new country emerged that wasn’t quite what anyone had expected.

Wednesday, November 11

Stephen P. Cohen - Beyond America's Grasp
7 p.m. Stephen Cohen, director of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development, has written a comprehensive account of American Middle East diplomacy since the end of World War I. The product of forty years of work and study in the region, this volume begins with the idealism of Woodrow Wilson—which Cohen sees as the source of a confused legacy that plagues U.S. efforts in the region to this day—and moves through Egypt’s nationalism, British imperialism in Iran, and on to America’s alliance with the Saudis, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Cohen argues that a “one-size-fits-all” diplomacy will not work.

Thursday, November 12

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor - Faith, Hope, and Ivy June
10:30 a.m. Ivy June Mosely and Catherine Combs participate in a seventh-grade student exchange program in Kentucky. Ivy June lives a rustic life with her grandparents in the mountains. Catherine lives in the city in a large house with her own bedroom. When a natural disaster affects both families, the girls find they have more in common than they realized and become true friends. Ages 9-12

Haynes Johnson - Herblock
7 p.m. Johnson, who worked with Herblock at The Washington Post, will launch a new anthology celebrating Block’s life and career. The Post’s editorial cartoonist was a protean figure whose career spanned thirteen American Presidents. His cartoons mocked Senator McCarthy and Richard Nixon, and continued on into the 1980s to take on President Reagan. Block made no pretense of objectivity; he was a good liberal with a love of the political game. In 1984 Herblock was incredibly generous to a tiny new bookstore at 5010 Connecticut Avenue, appearing twice to sign his book.

Friday, November 13

Mary Gordon - Reading Jesus
7 p.m. Mary Gordon, the author of six novels, last visited us to talk about Circling My Mother, her memoir of her deeply religious parent. In her new book she seeks a deeper understanding of the Gospels by reading them as literature and studying Jesus as a character. Her questions and reflections on the parables and mysteries lead her to a fresh and personal experience of Christianity.

Saturday, November 14

Jennifer Kaplan - Greening Your Small Business
1 p.m. For companies too small to hire a consultant to implement green policies and practices, this is an affordable, comprehensive guide. Designed to address every aspect of going green, the manual assists in basics such as recycling, reducing waste, energy efficiency, and reducing the IT footprint, as well as considering wider concerns such as green marketing and communications, green business travel, and green employee benefits.

Mark Andersen & Mark Jenkins - Dance Of Days
3 p.m. First published in 2003, this classic look at D.C.’s underground punk scene of the 1980s and ’90s charted the careers of artists like Bad Brains, Henry Rollins, Minor Threat, Rites of Spring, Fugazi, and Bikini Kill. This updated edition widens the scope of the original survey and includes fresh material on the artists and their work.

Woody Holton - Abigail Adams
6 p.m. In his new biography, Holton, a professor of history at the University of Richmond, reveals the second First Lady as an extraordinary woman and fine writer who championed women’s education as well as financial independence for women. Using previously undiscovered documents, Holton constructs a portrait of Adams that reinterprets the more modest figure of earlier histories, showing her as witty, charismatic, and savvy enough to amass a fortune in her own name.

Sunday, November 15

Hank Stuever - Tinsel
5 p.m. Stuever, a Washington Post journalist, starts with the crowds of shoppers on Black Friday and moves through the rituals of lights and decorations to chronicle how three suburban Dallas households have celebrated Christmas over three holiday seasons. Steuver says of his new book that “I wanted this story to be about Christmas but also everything else: our weird economy, our modern sense of home, our oft-broken hearts, and our notions of God."

To see the complete schedule and to purchase any of the above books, click here.

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Politics & Prose supplies books to the following book signing events.
Reservations and tickets should be acquired from the hosting organization.
If you can’t attend a talk, but would like to purchase a signed book, call
202-364-1919 or 1-800-722-0790 or click the title links below.

Thursday, November 5, 6:00 p.m.

Letelier Theater
3251 Prospect Street, NW
HANNAH PAKULA
THE LAST EMPRESS: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China (Simon & Schuster, $35)
The beautiful, powerful, and sexy Madame Chiang Kai-shek was at the center of one of the great dramas of the twentieth century, starting with a revolution that swept away more than 2,000 years of monarchy, followed by World War II, and ending in the eventual loss to the Communists and finally exile in Taiwan. Seating is limited. $12 tickets and more information at hooksbookevents.com.

Thursday, November 5, 7:30 p.m.

Friendship Heights Village Center
4433 S. Park Avenue
Chevy Chase, MD
HAYNES JOHNSON AND DAN BALZ
THE BATTLE FOR AMERICA 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election (Viking, $29.95)
Pulitzer Prize winner Haynes Johnson and Washington Post lead political writer Dan Balz followed the campaign from the candidates' first forays into Iowa and New Hampshire to Obama's victory celebration. Please sign up in advance for this FREE event by calling the Village Center at 301-656-2797.

Saturday, November 7, 3:30 p.m. 

Washington Convention Center
801 Mount Vernon Place, Mezzanine
Curator's Talk with MADELEINE ALBRIGHT
READ MY PINS: Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box (HarperCollins, $40)
David Revere McFadden, chief curator of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, which hosted the first major exhibition of her brooches, will have a conversation with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about how her accessories signaled her moods and views on the diplomatic situation at hand. Download a coupon here for $12 admission to the Washington Craft Show.

Tuesday, November 10, 7 p.m.

The Arts Club of Washington
2017 I Street, NW
CHRISTOPHER WHITE
SKIPJACK (St. Martin's, $25.99)
Skipjack is the saga of three unforgettable men who captain oyster boats in Chesapeake Bay—the only wind-powered fishing fleet in America. Their traditions have been jeopardized by trends in overfishing and mismanagement. The event is FREE with a reception following the talk.

Wednesday, November 11, 7:30 p.m.

National Geographic Society
1600 M Street, N.W.
PAUL NICKLEN
POLAR OBSESSION (Focal Point, $50)
Since 2003, Paul Nicklen shares images from his new book, showcasing the beauty of the Arctic and Antarctic and capturing the impact of climate change. Tickets are available here. Also visit the exhibition, Polar Obsession, Sept. 24 – Feb. 15.

Thursday, November 12, 6:00 p.m.

Zola Wine & Kitchen
505 9th Street, NW
LUCINDA SCALA QUINN
MAD HUNGRY: Feeding Men and Boys (Artisan, $27.95)
The author (Lucinda's Rustic Italian Cooking, Lucinda's Authentic Jamaican Cooking) will share winning strategies for how she gets the men in her life, a husband and three sons, into the kitchen. Seating is limited. $75 tickets and more information at hooksbookevents.com.

Thursday, November 12, 7:30 p.m.

Friendship Heights Village Center
4433 S. Park Avenue
Chevy Chase, MD
RONALD KESSLER
IN THE PRESIDENT’S SECRET SERVICE: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect (Crown, $26)
After conducting exclusive interviews with more than 100 current and former Secret Service agents, award-winning reporter Kessler reveals their secrets for the first time. Please sign up for this FREE event by calling the Village Center at 301-656-2797.

Sunday, November 15, 3:30 p.m.

Lisner Auditorium
George Washington University
21st & H St., NW
SESAME STREET: A Celebration of Forty Years of Life on the Street (Black Dog and Leventhal, $40)
Sesame Street’s 40th Birthday Party
Meet Grover, Elmo, Abby Cadabby and their Muppeteers Kevin Clash, Leslie Cararra-Rudolph, and Eric Jacobson, who will join Executive Producer Carol-Lyn Parente to talk about the show’s 40 years and share clips from the first season in 1969 as well as scenes from brand new episodes. For tickets, call 202.633.8700: $15 for Smithsonian Resident Associate Members, $18 for Non-Members. All Ages.

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Our top twelve hardcover FICTION and NON-FICTION bestsellers are always 20% off for P&P members. For our complete lists, click on the titles below.

#1 FICTION:  WAR DANCES by Sherman Alexie

#1 NONFICTION: TOO BIG TO FAIL: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System -- And Themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin

 

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Click FICTION or NON-FICTION  to browse a complete list of recent paperback releases.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton

 

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BOOK OF THE WEEK
(20% off through 11/11)

Who started out playing church fundraising tours in the South, traveled from ballroom to ballroom across the United States under "the unsleeping eye of Jim Crow"?  And who eventually performed to sold-out and standing-room-only crowds and then traveled to Europe to play swing for the US troops during WWII?  The International Sweethearts of Rhythm was the world's first integrated all-female band, and they performed throughout the 1940s.  Award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson brings the era back to life with SWEETHEARTS OF RHYTHM: The Story of the Greatest All-Girl Swing Band in the World (Dial, $21.99) as musical instruments tell about the band members with poetry.  Superimposing collage over his watercolors and drawings, award-winning artist Jerry Pinkney brings the sound and magic of music to the page.  Together, Nelson and Pinkney convey the importance of swing to the nation and to the world during the turbulent war years.  Ages 10 and up -  Heidi Powell
Please come to the Children and Teens' Department to see our wide selection of books about autumn and Thanksgiving.

Lisa Chaplin-Hobbs hosts story time for young children every Monday morning at 10:30 a.m.

25 Years of Children's Favorites
Winnowing down this list was a very difficult process.  Each of us in the department could name at
least 25 more beloved books that are not on this list. You can visit our display in the store or click here to browse our list online!

For upcoming events and more from the Children and Teens' Department, click here.

 

 

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AMERICAN EARTH: Environmental Writing since Thoreau is a true treasure. Edited by Bill McKibben and with a foreword by Al Gore, this important, comprehensive anthology contains essays and excerpts from larger works by John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and dozens of others. All the classic works and thinkers about nature and conservation are here, along with pieces by people, such as P.T. Barnum and Alice Walker, whom you may not have associated with ecology. A chronology starting circa 15,000 BCE traces the effect homo sapiens have had on America. Available in hardcover, $18.98.

One of this country’s consistently strongest poets is Louise Gluck, the former Poet Laureate. All her strengths are evident in AVERNO, a collection of linked lyrics that explore the myth of Persephone—and much else. While the book has the weight of a spare narrative, each poem is a gem of perfectly-crafted lyricism. Gluck weaves wit, humor, and poignancy tightly into the language, making reading her work a rich, deeply rewarding experience. Available in hardcover, $6.98.

Click here to browse more recently arrived remainders.

•  Laurie Greer

 

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New: Linn Barnes & Allison Hampton; Natalie Dessay; Rickie Lee Jones
Music Books: William Ferris; Best Music Writing 2009; Johnny Mercer
Music/Concerts: Lionel Louke; François Frédéric Guy; Sara Tavares

Click here for András’s reviews and Music News and to buy these albums.

 

• András Goldinger