Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Ave.), 7:30pm

The Reading Series is very pleased to present Allan Gregg, host and contributing editor to Studio 2’s interview segments Gregg and Company, as our interviewer for:

David Remnick, praised for the exuberance of his style as well as his powers of observation, analysis, compassion, and wit; a foreign correspondent and writer of political narratives, the editor of The New Yorker, and author of several books, including King of the World and Lenin’s Tomb, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994, brings us his latest book Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker.

Here are masterful stories of people obsessed with altering or recording the history of their time by one of the most gifted and most widely read writers at work today.

Get the scoop on Vladamir Putin, Alekssandr Solzhenitsyn, Sari Nusseibeh, Benjamin Netanyahu, Amos Oz, Philip Roth, Don Delillo, Katharin Graham, Mike Tyson, Tony Blair, Al Gore, George W. Bush and many more!

Monday, May 15, 2006
Hart House Library (7 Hart House Circle), 7:30pm

In a night that is certain to be an incredible voyage through history, widely published journalist, translator, and author of the highly acclaimed Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I, and best-selling Perfect Heresy: The Life and Death of Cathars, Stephen O’Shea brings us his magnificent work of the 1,000-year struggle which stretches from Syria and Israel to France and Morocco, a popular history and timely reminder of our shared past, Sea of Faith: Christianity and Islam in the Medieval World.

Also joining us is the author of several books, including The Return of Martin Guerre and Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Natalie Zemon Davis is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University and Adjunct Professor of History and Senior Fellow in the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Natalie brings us an engrossing study of Leo Africanus and his famous book, which introduced Africa to European readers, in her new book Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds.

Thursday, May 25, 2006
Hart House Library (7 Hart House Circle), 7:30pm

Alvin Toffler, co-author with Heidi Toffler, of The Third Wave, Powershift, The Culture Consumers, War and Anti-War and Creating a New Civilization, bring us the new book Revolutionary Wealth.

Revolutionary Wealth is about how tomorrow’s wealth will be created, and who will get it and how. But twenty-first-century wealth, according to the Tofflers, is not just about money, and cannot be understood in terms of industrial-age economics. Thus they write here about everything from education and child rearing to Hollywood and China, from everyday truth and misconceptions to what they call our “third job”—the unnoticed work we do without pay for some of the biggest corporations in our country.

They show the hidden connections between extreme sports, chocolate chip cookies, Linux software and the “surplus complexity” in our lives as society wobbles back and forth between depressing decadence and a hopeful post-decadence.

In their earlier work, the Tofflers coined the word “prosumer” for people who consume what they themselves produce. In Revolutionary Wealth they expand the concept to reveal how many of our activities—whether parenting or volunteering, blogging, painting our house, improving our diet, organizing a neighborhood council or even “mashing” music—pump “free lunch” from the “hidden” non-money economy into the money economy that economists track. Prosuming, they forecast, is about to explode and compel radical changes in the way we measure, make and manipulate wealth.

Blazing with fresh ideas, Revolutionary Wealth provides readers with powerful new tools for thinking about—and preparing for—their future.