April 2010 | Vol. VIII No. 8

One Civilized Reader Is Worth a Thousand Boneheads

Review ofGame Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Life-time By John Heilemann and Mark Halperin Harper, 2010, 448 pages including index

If you found the 2008 presidential prima-ries and debates as compelling as watching the Olympics, go to Amazon.com or your near-est bookstore and purchase Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann, journal-ist, author, and col-umnist for New York magazine, and Mark Halperin, author and senior political analyst for Time. The account of the 2008 presidential election by these seasoned political writers reads like a thriller, and brings to mind the wonderful series of presidential campaign books covering the elections of 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972 by political journalist Theodore H. White. This engaging narrative opens with the Democrats’ three-ring circus of United States senators who would be president and recounts how they reacted to what happened in the Iowa caucuses – a senator from New York who was former First Lady and successful corpora-tion lawyer (Hillary Clinton), a senator from

Illinois who was a former law professor and community organizer (Barack Obama), and a former senator from North Carolina who was a successful trial attorney (John Edwards). No novelist could have invented a more extraor-dinary cast of characters, complete with flaws and virtues. Iowa was the beginning of the end for all three.

Through revealing anecdotes Game Change shows how and why Barack Obama

won the Democratic nomination and the Oval Office and, more importantly, why his rivals lost: Obama seemed conciliatory but clever and stra-tegic while his main rivals, Hillary Clinton

and Republican nominee John McCain, saw themselves as fighters and seemed at times pugnacious and desperate. Obama’s campaign valued competence; Clinton and McCain prized loyalty, the drug of choice for most politicians. Ironically, Clinton’s and Mc-Cain’s campaign organizations not only were dysfunctional but, with all the post-election recriminations, were lacking in loyalty as well. Heilemann and Halperin character-ize Obama as possessing “overweening” and “otherworldly” self-confidence, yet this did not estrange him from voters. His demeanor seemed reassuring rather than off-putting

visit our blog site at http://cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu/pubs/blog.htm

The Center for the Humanities Advisory Board 2009–2010Nancy BergProfessor of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and LiteraturesKen BotnickAssociate Professor of ArtGene Dobbs BradfordExecutive Director Jazz St. LouisLingchei (Letty) Chen Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Language and LiteratureElizabeth ChildsAssociate Professor and Chair of Department of Art History and ArchaeologyMary-Jean Cowell Associate Professor of Performing ArtsPhyllis GrossmanRetired Financial ExecutiveMichael A. KahnAuthor and Partner Bryan Cave LLP Zurab KarumidzeTbilisi, Republic of GeorgiaChris King Editorial Director The St. Louis American Newspaper

Olivia Lahs-GonzalesDirector Sheldon Art GalleriesPaula Lupkin Assistant Professor of Architecture Sam Fox School of Design & Visual ArtsErin McGlothlinAssociate Professor of GermanSteven MeyerAssociate Professor of EnglishJoe Pollack Film and Theater Critic for KWMU, WriterAnne PosegaHead of Special Collections, Olin LibraryQiu XiaolongNovelist and PoetHenry SchveyProfessor of DramaWang Ning Professor of English, Tsinghua UniversityJames Wertsch Marshall S. Snow Professor of Arts and Sciences Director of International and Area StudiesEx Officio

Edward S. MaciasProvost & Exec VC for Academic AffairsGary S. WihlDean of Arts & Sciences

Tales From The War Rooms

(Jian Leng’s column will return next month.)

Through revealing anecdotes Game Change shows how and why Barack Obama won the Democratic nomina-tion and the Oval Office and, more im-portantly, why his rivals lost...

because it inspired the public. And who would ever vote for a candidate who lacked confidence?

Obama was punctual. He schmoozed delegates constantly, posed for photos with volunteers, brought his organizers on stage at rallies. Most of this is a page from the playbooks of Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy, just as his rhetoric about changing the tone in Washington and reaching out across the aisle was from the playbook of George W. Bush in 2000, but it all worked wonderfully well. Successful politics is mostly pouring old wine into a new bottle.

Clinton, on the other hand, was socially tone deaf, surprisingly so, for someone with her political experience. She had to be pushed into thanking donors and volun-teers. She declined to phone super delegates herself and had a staffer call Caroline Kennedy to come to Iowa to campaign for her (Kennedy ducked the call). Clinton wanted so badly to succeed yet seemed to lack the leadership skills to focus her campaign and rally her troops. She took her loss in Iowa badly, and she never quite recov-ered her poise in the months that followed, although she did not lack determination.

Like the surprises in a Cracker Jack box, perspec-tives on three marriages have been tucked inside Game Change: Bill and Hill, Barack and Michelle, and John and Cindy. (There is the account of dissolution of mar-riage as well: John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth. Ed-wards impregnated his mistress, Rielle Hunter. This was not a major story during the primary season of 2008, although it should have been.) The authors portray the Clintons as in awe of each other’s intelligence and drive. Because her husband hates quitters, Hillary refused to drop out, even when the math was clearly against her. Some thought this courageous—others thought her simply stubborn. It was unclear during the campaign if Bill helped or hurt Hillary, but they stuck to each other in such a way as to

make it seem for the first time in American politics that a couple was running for the presidency. But

was Bill really comfortable with Hillary running for the presidency?

Obama appeared so besotted with Michelle that he made it clear to those around him he would rather be with her and their girls than with anyone else. He became emotional when talking about them. He wept

at Valerie Jarrett’s book party for Audacity of Hope when describing how difficult the campaign would be on his family. They seemed the perfect “power couple,” and his “family man” image was greatly appealing to voters. “Mr. Cool,” as he was sometimes called among partisans and pundits, openly cried before a crowd of tens of thousands as he announced that his beloved grandmother, Toot, who reared him, had died two days before Elec-tion Day. A politician, of course, has to be careful about seeming to try too hard to get sympathy for family sacrifices. After all, no one is being forced to run for the office. Obama, it should go without saying, is far from perfect. The book reveals him to have a potty mouth in private

and an aloofness that has made it easy for his political enemies to characterize him as elitist. And the syco-phantic belief by some of his staff like David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett in the transformational nature of his candidacy (they called him “the black Jesus”) is not likely to prevent a swollen ego. “[Michelle’s] confidence in Barack was profound and unshakable,” write Heile-mann and Halperin, “[But she] has always been a gut-level skeptic about the gaga-ness around her husband.”

According to Heilemann and Halperin, “[the] Mc-Cains fought in front of others, during small meetings and before large events, to the amazement and discom-fort of the staff. . . . She cursed him; he cursed her.” Cindy had never wanted McCain to run for president and felt particularly scarred by the Bush campaign of 2000, which depicted her as a pill-popping “rich bitch” drug addict and the couple’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter as John’s illegitimate offspring from a liaison with a black prostitute. When told that his wife, who has lived in Phoenix for decades, has apparently had

a boyfriend for several years, John McCain told his staff to talk to her about it. McCain stalwart John Weaver told McCain that he had to handle the matter. McCain called his wife. She denied having an affair. He told her that she would have to make more public appearances with him to quash any rumors. She duti-fully did so. But she felt his run for the presidency was selfishness.

With a black candidate mount-ing a serious challenge for the presidency, race naturally played a role in the campaign. “McCain was on a hair trigger over accusations or imputations of racism,” writes Heilemann and Halperin. “He had warned his team to steer clear of anything that might open him up to that charge.” Yet McCain feared Obama’s smearing him as a racist, as McCain felt Obama had done successfully with the Clintons. Of course, after Obama won the South Carolina primary, it was Bill Clinton who belittled the victory, saying Jesse Jackson, the black activist minister, had won the state when he ran for the Democratic nomination in 1984. When Obama spoke in Missouri on July 30, saying that the Republicans would try to portray him as “too risky” and that “he [didn’t] look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills,” McCain’s campaign manager Steve Schmidt angrily told McCain, “We gotta call bullshit on this.” Of course, Obama felt he had to protect himself from the possibil-ity that the Republicans would use a “southern strategy” of reminding white voters that Obama was not truly one of them.

The most telling comparison between the two nominees is in the selection of a running mate. Obama

picked Delaware senator Joe Biden, an experienced old pol who had run for president himself more than once (never getting within sniff-ing distance of the nomination) and who could counter the charge about Obama’s lack of experience with his own resume. Obama was efficient and careful in his selection. His campaign employed a vigorous screening process with focus groups and a selection committee. His aides ran a stealth ad lab to find which po-tential Republican attack ads would be most lethal and how to combat them and which vice presidential candidate would do the least harm.

A week before the GOP Con-vention, McCain had yet to pick a running mate. He hoped “to shock the world with” his choice. He wanted his close friend, Connecticut Independent senator Joe Lieber-man, but after overeager Republican Senator Lindsay Graham leaked the decision, conservative radio com-mentator Rush Limbaugh, who never liked McCain, considering him too moderate, and former Bush campaign manager Karl Rove, who favored Mitt Romney, condemned the choice. Both Limbaugh and Rove, probably correctly, thought McCain would never win the Re-publican base—already only luke-warm about him—with Lieberman, a former Democrat who ran for the vice presidency on the ticket with Al Gore in 2000, conservative by Democratic standards but not in the least by orthodox conservative stan-dards. Advisors scrounged around for another candidate, and over bur-ritos one of them told McCain, “We need to have a transformative, elec-trifying moment in this campaign.” Campaign manager Steve Schmidt

vetted and recommended Alaska governor Sarah Palin, a forty-four year old former beauty queen and devout Christian with five children and considerable expertise on the Alaskan energy industry, who at the time had an eighty percent approval rating.

A. B. Culvahouse, another McCain advisor, warned that Palin would bring more potential land mines than other candidates (although he was impressed with how Palin went though the vetting interview). “High risk, high reward,” Culvahouse told McCain. McCain liked the gamble. This was the final game change in an electric campaign that was full of them. McCain lost with Palin, who became a divisive and controversial figure, uninformed about foreign policy and completely inexperienced on the national politi-cal scene. Yet she possessed a cha-risma and presence that attracted huge crowds. As Steve Schmidt and other politicos have pointed out: Mc-Cain would have lost by more had he selected anyone else.

Whether Game Change will become a classic like Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960 (1961) or Joe McGinniss’s The Selling of the President (1969) re-mains to be seen, but it is a cracking good read. Ellen Harris, a free-lance St. Louis writer, has written several reviews for Belles Lettres, the literary review of the Center for the Humanities.

book of the month by Gerald Early

Review of Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places By Bill Streever Little, Brown, & Company, 2009, with index, notes, maps, and spot illustrations

But science is closer to absolute zero than to the speed of light. Science is within billionths of a degree of absolute zero, within spitting distance of ultima Thule.

--Bill Streever, Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places

I. Ultima Thule as the Inferno

It is called the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard because so many children died that day, died going home from school, never making it. It was the blizzard of January 12, 1888, that rushed violently and without warning across Montana and North Dakota. The sky did not change color as it does with a tornado. There was no rising wind, no herald or sign from disturbed or fleeing animals. One minute it was a warm thaw-like day on the prairie. The next minute ice crystals filled the air with such ferocity that people’s eyelids were sealed shut, their mouths clogged; farmers who were only a short distance from their homes were hopelessly disoriented and could not discern a familiar path. An eyewitness described the crystals as being “as fine as sifted flour.” Gale force winds at 40 miles per hour whipped the crystals about as if they were buckshot blasted from a shotgun. Within three minutes, the temperature dropped by 18

Fahrenheit degrees. It dropped forty Fahrenheit degrees in less

than five hours. By the end of the afternoon, a mild morning on the Plains had become an evening with wind chills of 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Imagine the sandstorm in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia lasting for hours, not minutes, and accompanied by unbridled air pres-sure change—the devil as columns of rapidly freezing sand. In this blizzard, ice behaved as if it were columns of furiously agitated sand,

pulverizing and freezing everything it touched. Children and cattle were frozen in place, bewildered and helpless. Three boys, brothers, were found after the storm frozen to death, holding hands. They could not be buried until they were thawed and separated. Many of the chil-dren stood no chance, as they were lightly dressed because the day had been warm. David Laskin provides a book-length account of this terrible storm in his The Children’s Blizzard (2004). Dakota and Montana may not have been ultima Thule, the scientific imaginary of a place of ab-solute zero. No place on earth could be. But on January 12 and 13, 1888,

the people who were affected by this storm knew about the only kind of absolute zero that human beings could know and possibly survive. Cold that kills is what most humans understand as some kind of absolute zero, cold as a sort of inferno, cold as mythic in its destructive power. This storm represented cold on that scale.

Bill Streever, in Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places, discusses the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard in two different chapters, in two different contexts: In his opening chapter on hypothermia and frostbite, he exam-ines how many of the victims died, including the sad story of nineteen-year-old schoolteacher Etta Shattuck, trapped for three days in a haystack without food or water. Her exposed feet and legs were frozen. As Streev-er reminds his readers, frostbite is painless: “By the time the flesh reaches a temperature of forty-five degrees, nerve synapses no longer fire. All feeling is gone. And then the tissue freezes. Ice crystals form first between the cells. Because ice excludes salts, the remaining liquid between the cells becomes increas-ingly salty. Osmosis draws water from within the cells toward the salt-ier fluid outside the cell walls. The cells become dehydrated. Proteins begin to break down. . . . The flesh dies. . . .” This is what happened to Shattuck’s feet and legs. She did not begin to feel pain until her flesh began to thaw when she was placed in a heated room. The pain of her thawing flesh was unbearable. She died from infection as a result of two rounds of amputation. Streever tells this story to distinguish between frostbite, which attacks the extremi-ties, and hypothermia, which attacks the body’s inner core. “At windchills

of minus forty degrees, with ser-viceable clothing, it is reasonable to expect the core temperature to drop at something like one degree every thirty minutes. When the core drops to ninety-five, . . . [people] shiver uncontrollably. They become argumentative. They feel detached from their surroundings. . . .

“At ninety-one degrees, apathy settles in. Muscles by now are stiff and nonresponsive. . . .

“It is possible to survive core temperatures as low as eighty-seven degrees, but only with rescue and rewarming. At this temperature, self-rescue is impossible. Halluci-nations are common. The mind imagines warm food and dry sleep-ing bags.”

Many of the dead children who died of hypothermia were found half-dressed. In their final mo-ments, they thought they were experiencing unbearable heat.

In a later chapter Streever consid-ers the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard from the perspective of weather forecasting. Why were the me-teorologists of the day unable to predict this terrible storm? Partly, weather forecasting was still a bit primitive in some respects in the late 19th century, but at the time the US government supported the na-tional weather service in the United States well. There was a large net-work of weather reporters, a consid-erable number of weather maps, and a telegraph that moved information quickly. The bad weather of Janu-ary 12 had, in fact, been predicted but timidly, not as a warning but rather simply that bad weather was coming. The people of the Plains were used to bad weather. They

were not expecting something that was going to give the apocalypse a run for its money.

Of course, the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard occurred back in the day when we all thought the weather—heat and cold--was an act of God. Today, we think of temperatures as the creation of mankind, the expression of our economic system, the result of our capitalistic greed, our mad-scientist-like mania for fossil fuels. It is the code of the Marxist to politicize everything, and I suppose our ancestors of the 19th century might be surprised at the extent to which we have politi-cized hot and cold. If the Plains people of 1888 lacked warning of the coming natural catastrophe, we today are all Cassandras and oracles, giving warning each hot day that the end is near or that it is here as we live on a feverish earth. Well, I suppose dying by cold or heat is as good as going by fire or flood, but the Ancients had the right imagina-tive touch: better to go as rebellious sinners in the hands of an angry, capricious God than as ciphers clutching to the steering wheel of a

car. That’s not tragic or biblical; it’s pathetic. What a declension!

II. Cold: Rare and Common

On the whole, the earth without the greenhouse effect would be only marginally more tropical than Mars.

--Bill Streever, Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places

Streever is a biologist who lives in Alaska and who has spent time in some of the coldest places in the world. His book is about his travels to some of those places (he also goes to warm and temperate places too; much of the book centers, naturally, in Alaska) and what those places are like, how animals and plants survive in the cold, and people as well. But his book is, more remark-ably, a lyrical hymn to cold, a year’s journey through the life cycle of our planet’s cold. Cold is something most of us want to avoid and largely complain about. But how much do we understand the sheer miracle of cold, of being cold, of experiencing where and when the world is cold, of seeing, and understanding it ef-fects. “We fail to see cold for what it is,” writes Streever, “the absence of heat, the slowing of molecular motion, a sensation, a perception, a driving force.” Streever’s book will put some readers in the mind of Thoreau’s Walden (1854), but in-stead of extracting the cosmos from a place as Thoreau did, he extracts it from a climatic condition. Cold is one of God’s wonders.

One of the paradoxes of our planet is that it is warm, apparently getting warmer, yet large swaths of it are quite cold. And the planet, for a good deal of its history, has been far more cold than warm. In a way, earth is Janus-like, a

Bill Streever, author, chairs the North Slope Science Initiative’s Sci-ence Technical Advisory Panel in Alaska and serves on many related committees, including a climate change advisory panel.

book of the month continued

two-faced residence, offering both warmth and cold and the collision of the two that seems to be the dynamic that makes our climate work as it does. Critters are always trying to stay warm, but we find it easier to produce heat than cold. It fact, we cannot reach absolute zero in a lab because of the heat it takes to produce it.

Streever tells us the story of hypothermia, frostbite, the School-children’s Blizzard; he also tells us about overwintering: hibernating bears, shivering squirrels, cud-chewing moose, and frogs that freeze themselves in winter. Did you know that otters have more hair per square body inch than any other animal? That’s why they can swim in freezing water. It’s all in the enzymes why these critters can survive extreme cold. We learn of the Arctic expeditions: Scott, Amundsen, Greely, how extraor-dinary and perhaps somewhat deranged these men were to live in murderously cold conditions, man-hauling sleds, whacking off frostbit-ten toes, and sleeping in thawed,

wet sleeping bags. We are warned not to wear cotton in extreme cold and instructed how to build igloos. We learn why Westminster Abbey is not air-conditioned (it is indeed very hot in the summer) and how entrepreneur Frederic Tudor made money shipping ice from Walden pond to India. Streever tells us about finding frozen mammoths and the story of our three ways of measuring temperature: Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Kelvin. There is the topic of refrigeration and Clarence Birdeye’s idea of selling frozen foods to the masses. (Comedian and food faddist Dick Gregory once spoke out against frozen food by asking what your hand would be like if you froze it, then thawed it. It would, of course, be unusable as a normal hand, but I would not think this to be a good analogy to the nutri-tional worth of frozen food unless I wanted to eat my hand after I had thawed it. Streever discusses Cry-onics, the freezing of dead people with the hope of resuscitating them; it does not seem that freezing people and freezing food are quite

the same thing; certainly there is not the same objective.) Subjects are revisited, examined in different contexts, but never repeated during the course of the book.

Cold is a wonderfully informa-tive book and a delight to read. So much does Streever care for his subject that, after reading his book, I wanted to outfit an Arctic expedi-tion, while there was still an Arctic, so much does Streever make cold seem an almost elegiac topic. In the end, he convinced this reader that cold is pretty cool.

April 2010 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Rise and Fall of Jazz as Popular Music

Thursday, April 1st , 4 p.m.Hurst Lounge, Duncker 201Session Nine: What Jazz Is and Its Context of American Life and CultureBy Scott DeVeaux, Associate Profes-sor of Musicology in the McIntire

Department of Music at the Uni-versity of Virginia.

Thursday, April 15th, 4 p.m.Hurst Lounge, Duncker 201Session Ten: The Origins of Cool in Postwar Jazz CultureBy Joel Dinerstein, Associate Pro-fessor in the Department of English at Tulane University.

Jazz Study GroupFriday, April 9th, 12 noonHurst Lounge, Duncker 201Discussion: Amiri Baraka’s Blues People Led by Jerome Camal, Dissertation Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar

Events in April

All events are free unless otherwise indi-cated. Author events generally followed by signings. All phone numbers have 314 pre-fix unless otherwise indicated.

Thursday, April 1Walter Bargen, Missouri’s first Poet Laure-ate and author of Days Like This Are Nec-essary: New & Selected Poems, will read from his work. Free and open to the pub-lic. 1:30pm, Webster University’s Pearson House, 8260 Big Bend Blvd., 968-7170.

Friday, April 2Poets Howard Schwartz, Eve Jones, Amy Debrecht, Robert Lowes, Nancy Powers, and Eric Schramm will read from their work at 7:30pm, the Regional Arts Com-mission, 6128 Delmar Blvd. in St. Louis. Admission is free.

Saturday, April 3St. Louis Writers Guild invites you to the workshop “The Story Behind the Story: Conducting Background Research for a Book” by Jeffrey Copeland. 10am, Kirk-wood Community Center, 2nd floor, 111 S. Geyer Rd., www.stlwritersguild.org. You are invited to the Saturday Afternoon Book Club as they discuss Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Jerome K. Jerome. 2pm, Webster Groves Public Library, 301 E. Lockwood, 961-3784.

Monday, April 5Main Street Books invites you to a discus-sion of Cutting for Stone by Abraham Ver-ghese. 7pm, 307 S. Main St., St. Charles, 636-949-0105.

Tuesday, April 6Join the Machacek Book Discussion Group for their discussion. 10am, SLPL-Machacek Branch, 6424 Scanlan Ave. Call 781-2948 for the current selection. Webster Groves Public Library Book Discussion Group will discuss The

Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien. 6pm, 301 E. Lockwood, 961-3784. Left Bank Books is pleased to present author Elisa Glick as she discusses and signs her book Materializing Queer Desire: Oscar Wilde to Andy Warhol. 7pm, LBB, 399 N. Euclid, 367-6731.

Wednesday, April 7The St. Louis Public Library invites you to a workshop with SIUE emeritus profes-sor of English Eugene B. Redmond, who will present a writers’ workshop on the “kwansaba” (a poetic form he created) fol-lowed by a poetry reading. His books and CDs will be available for purchase, includ-ing Eighty Moods of Maya. 6pm, SLPL-Schlafly Branch, 225 N. Euclid, 367-4120. Borders Book Club will meet in the Sun-set Hills Cafe to discuss Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman. 7pm, Borders - Sunset Hills, 10990 Sunset Hills Plaza, 909-0300. The St. Louis Jewish Book Festival in-vites you to join author Stephen Fried as he discusses and signs his book Appetite For America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire that Civilized the Wild West. 7:30pm, Jew-ish Community Center, #2 Millstone Cam-pus Dr., 442-3152. To purchase tickets visit the website: www.stljewishbookfestival.org.

Thursday, April 8St. Louis Public Library invites you to join the author of The World is Mine, Lyah Beth LeFlore, for a reading and signing. 6pm, SLPL-Carpenter Branch, 3009 S. Grand Blvd., 772-6586. Left Bank Books will have books available to purchase. Public Contemplation, a philosophy and religion book discussion group, will meet to discuss And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Cul-ture by Bill Wasik. 7pm, SLPL-Carpen-ter Branch, 3309 S. Grand Blvd. To re-serve a copy, call Michael at 772-6586. Left Bank Books and BellaSpark Pro-ductions Extraordinary People Series presents Don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements. 7pm, 560 Music Center, 560 Trinity Ave., 367-6731.

St. Louis Poetry Center invites you to Ob-servable Readings, which will feature poets Mary Ruth Donnelly, Seido Ray Ronci and James Arthur. 8pm, Schlafly Bot-tleworks in Maplewood, 7260 Southwest Ave., 973-0616.

Saturday, April 10Join Thomas Dunn Memorials and the St. Louis Scottish Rite for discus-sion of Dan Brown’s The Lost Sym-bol. 10am, 3113 Gasconade, 353-3050. Left Bank Books invites you to a reading and signing with Anne Lamott, the author of Imperfect Birds. 7pm, Christ Church Ca-thedral, 1210 Locust. For more information, call 367-6731.

Sunday, April 11The BookClub will hold its 411th discus-sion on The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hun-dred Days and the Triumph of Hope by Jon-athan Alter. For more information, venue and time, email lloydk@klinedinst.com, or call 636-451-3232.

Monday, April 12The Central Book Discussion Too! invites you to discuss Pygmy by Chuck Palahn-iuk. 6pm, SLPL-Central Library, Meeting Room 1, 1301 Olive St. Call Popular Library at 539-0396 for details.

Tuesday, April 13The Foreign Literature Group will meet to discuss The Beginning of Spring by P. Fitzgerald. 7:30pm, WU West Cam-pus Building, 7425 Forsyth, 727-6118. Saul Brodsky Jewish Community Li-brary invites you to an Author Lecture by Laurie Strongin on her new book Saving Henry – A Mother’s Journey. Ad-mission is $7. 7:30pm, Kopolow Bldg., 12 Millstone Campus Dr., 442-3720. St. Louis Writers Guild invites you to Open Mic Night at Wired Coffee, a family-friendly event that offers readings of poetry and prose and an occasional musical per-formance. 7pm, WIRED COFFEE, 3860 S. Lindbergh Blvd., 974-2395.

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The Center for the HumanitiesCampus Box 1071Old McMillan Hall, Rm S101One Brookings DriveSt. Louis, MO 63130-4899Phone: (314) 935-5576email: cenhum@artsci.wustl.eduhttp://cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu

Financial assistance for this project has been provided by the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency, and the Regional Arts Commission.

Non-Profit Org.U.S. Postage

PAIDSt. Louis, MO

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Tuesday, April 13th, 4 p.m. Hurst Lounge, Duncker 201 Faculty Fellow Lecture: Thinking Dialectically: Home and Homeless between the Wars By Angela Miller, Professor of Art History and Archaeology in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis.

Thursday, April 22nd, 3 p.m. Hurst Lounge, Duncker 201Guest Faculty Lecture: The Politics of Early IslamBy Chase Robinson (invited by 2010 Faculty Fellow Asad Q. Ahmed). Chase Robinson is Provost, Senior Vice President, and Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York.

Friday, April 23rd, 10 a.m. Hurst Lounge, Duncker 201Guest Faculty Workshop: Reconstructing Early IslamBy Chase Robinson (invited by 2010 Faculty Fellow Asad Q. Ahmed). Chase Robinson is Provost, Senior Vice President, and Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York.

Tuesday, April 27th, 4 p.m. Hurst Lounge, Duncker 201Guest Faculty Lecture: A Long View of the U.S. Radical Left Since 1945By Howard Brick (invited by 2010 Faculty Fellow Angela Miller). Howard Brick is Professor and Louis Evans Chair in US History at the University of

Michigan and a highly respected cultural historian in American studies.

Wednesday, April 28th, 12 noonHurst Lounge, Duncker 201Guest Faculty Workshop: Margin and Mainstream: The Radical Left in the United States, 1945-2005 By Howard Brick (invited by 2010 Faculty Fellow Angela Miller). Howard Brick is Professor and Louis Evans Chair in US History at the University of Michigan and a highly respected cultural historian in American studies.

April 2010 Faculty Fellows’ Lecture and Workshop Series

Wednesday, April 14Enjoy Wordstock: Short Stories from Steve Moiles and Matt McCarter during the Southwestern Illinois College Fine Arts Festival. Moiles and McCarter will de-light audience members as they read their own fiction. 4pm, SWIC Belleville Campus Schmidt Art Center, 2500 Carlyle Ave. 618-235-2700, ext. 5585.

Thursday, April 15The Bernard Becker Medical Library in-vites you to the lecture “Diagnosing Sex: The Theories and Contributions of Paracelsus (1493-1541) to Pharmacological Literature” by Amy Eisen Cislo, PhD. 5:30pm, Ken-ton King Center, Bernard Becker Library, 7th floor, 660 S. Euclid Ave., 362-7080. St. Louis Public Library and Left Bank Books invite you to an evening with au-thor Ridley Pearson as he reads from and signs his new book, Kingdom Keepers 3. 7pm, SLPL-Schlafly Branch, 225 N. Eu-clid. Books available for purchase. LBB, 367-6731.

Friday, April 16St. Charles Community College welcomes creative writers and guests to share their po-etry or prose at SCC Open Mic Night. 7pm, Daniel J. Conoyer Social Sciences Audito-rium, 4601 Mid Rivers Mall, 636-922-8407. Dr. George Frein, Mark Twain scholar and historic interpreter, will present “An Evening with Mark Twain.” Dr. Frein appears cour-tesy of the Missouri Humanities Council. 7pm, Fine Arts Theatre at Jefferson College in Hillsboro, 636-677-8689.

Saturday, April 17You are invited to join The Mystery Lovers Book Club as they discuss The Bone Garden by Tess Gerritsen. 10am, SLCL-Caronde-let Branch, 6800 Michigan Ave., 752-9224. Join the Buder Branch Book Discus-sion Group as they discuss Read-ing the OED by Ammon Shea. Groups of 5+ call ahead. 1 pm, SLPL-Buder Branch, 4401 Hampton Ave., 352-2900. River Styx invites you to a poetry read-ing with Richard Newman and Adri-

an Matejka, who will be featured

in Webster Groves Public Library’s N a t i o n a l P o e t r y M o n t h R e a d -ing. 2pm, Webster Groves Public Li-brary, 301 E. Lockwood, 961-3784. L e f t B a n k B o o k s w e l c o m e s Derek Blasberg for a reading from his book Classy . 2pm, LBB-Down-town, 321 North 10th St., 436-3049. You are invited to a Whitman Scholars Poetry Reading with Ruth Bohan, Jes-sica DeSpain, Benjy Kahan, Carl Phil-lips, Vivian Pollak, Jeffrey Skoblow and Jason Stacy. 4pm, Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid, 367-6731.

Monday, April 19Main Street Books invites you to a discussion of Picking Cotton by Jen-nifer Thompson-Caninno. 7pm, 307 S. Main St., St. Charles, 636-949-0105. River Styx welcomes Karen Salyer McElmurray and Erin Keane for a reading. Admission is $5 or $4 for seniors, students and members. 7:30pm, Duff’s Restaurant, 392 N. Euclid, 533-4541.

Tuesday, April 20St. Louis Public Library invites you to a book discussion group. Call for cur-rent selection. 10am, SLPL-Machacek Branch, 6424 Scanlan Ave., 781-2948. St. Louis Public Library invites you to a discussion of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and Annie Barrows. 6:45pm, SLPL-Kingshighway Branch, 2260 S. Vandeventer Ave., 771-5450. Left Bank Books invites you to a reading and signing with Rosemary Neidel-Green-lee, author of A Few Good Women. 7pm, Left Bank Books CWE, 399 N. Euclid, 367-6731. St. Louis Writers Guild invites you to Loud Mouth Open Mic Night. This event is for writers and attendees 18+. 8pm, The Mack, 4615 Macklind Ave., 974-2395.

Wednesday, April 21Left Bank Books invites you to a read-ing and signing with Angie O’Gorman, the author of The Book of Sins. 6pm, LBB Downtown, 321 N. 10th St., 436-3049.

Join the Urban Book Discussion Group for their discussion of Resurrecting Mid-night by Eric Jerome Dickey. 7pm, SLPL-Carpenter Branch, 3309 S. Grand Blvd., 772-6586.

Thursday, April 22You are invited to an evening with William Iseminger, the author of Cahokia Mounds: America’s First City. 6pm, Left Bank Books Downtown, 321 N. 10th St., 436-3049. St. Louis Public Library invites you to a discussion of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chi-mamanda Adichie. 7pm, SLPL-Schlafly Branch, 225 N. Euclid Ave., 367-4120.

Friday, April 23Left Bank Books welcomes Jeffrey Cope-land for a reading and signing of his book Olivia’s Story. 7pm, LBB Downtown, 321 N. 10th St., 436-3049.

Saturday, April 24Join the Cabanne Book Group to dis-cuss what you are currently read-ing. 1 pm, SLPL-Cabanne Branch, 11 0 6 U n i o n B l v d . , 3 6 7 - 0 7 1 7 . Dianna and Don Graveman will sign their newest local history book, Missouri Wine Country, St. Charles to Hermann. 1pm, 307 S. Main St., St. Charles, 636-949-0105.

Sunday, April 25St. Louis Poetry Center presents a benefit reading, “Published and Perished,” featur-ing work by ten poets associated with St. Louis but no longer with us. Readers in-clude Joe Adams, Christine Brewer, Wil-liam Gass, Jan Greenberg and Bill Mc-Clellan. 4pm, Blueberry Hill, 6504 Delmar, 973-0616. $50 admission, $25 tax deduct-ible.

Tuesday, April 27Left Bank Books invites you to a read-ing and signing with Karen Tack and Alan Richardson, authors of What’s New, Cupcake? 7pm, Left Bank Books CWE, 399 N. Euclid, 367-6731. The St. Louis Poetry Center presents Mis-souri’s first Poet Laureate, Walter Bargen, and poet Charles Sweetman reading for Poetry @ the Point. 7:30pm, Focal Point, 2720 Sutton in Maplewood, 973-0616.

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Wednesday, April 28You are invited to join the Central Book Discussion Group for their discussion of any book by Rafael Sabatini. 4 pm, SL-PL-Central Library, 1301 Olive St. Call Popular Library at 539-0396 for details. You are invited to a reading and signing with Michael Harvey, the author of The Third Rail. 7pm, Left Bank Books CWE, 399 N. Euclid, 367-6731.

Thursday, April 29The Southwestern Illinois College Fine Arts Festival invites you to enjoy Four Voices Poetry Reading, a gathering of four eclectic poets sharing their unique per-spectives. Featured poets include: Tess Farnham, Melody Gee, Wayne Lanter and Treasure Williams. 7pm, SWIC Bel-leville Campus Schmidt Art Center, 2500 Carlyle Ave. 618-235-2700, ext. 5413. Left Bank Books invites you to a read-ing and signing with Areva Martin, who will read from and sign her book The Everyday Advocate. 7pm, Left Bank Books CWE, 399 N. Euclid, 367-6731. Kirkwood Public Library invites you to an evening with Christopher Limber, Education Director for the Shakespeare Festival, as he discusses how actors draw their characterization from Shake-speare’s text. 7pm, Kirkwood Commu-nity Center, 111 S. Geyer Rd., 821-5770, http://www.kirkwoodpublicl ibrary.org. The St. Louis Jewish Book Festival in-vites you to join author Neil Bascomb as he discusses and signs his book Hunt-ing Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors & a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi. 7:30pm, Jew-ish Community Center, #2 Millstone Cam-pus Dr., 442-3152. To purchase tickets visit the website: www.stljewishbookfestival.org.

Upcoming Events and Notices

95th Annual Missouri Writers Guild Con-ference, April 16 – 18, 2010. Drury Plaza Hotel, 355 Chesterfield Center East. For registration information and cost, please visit: http://www.missouriwritersguild.

org or http://www.mwgconference.org. Washington University Performing Arts Department is pleased to pres-ent Metamorphoses, based on the myths of Ovid. 8pm, April 23-24 & April 30-May 1; 2pm, April 25 & May 2. Edison The-ater, WU Danforth Campus, 935-5858. 61st Annual Greater St. Louis Book Fair, April 29-May 2, 2010. Free admis-sion Friday, Saturday and Sunday, $10 admission on Thursday, opening night. West County Center lower level of Ma-cy’s East parking garage. More informa-tion is available by calling 993-1995 or at the website www.StLouisBookFair.org. Dave Carkeet, May 4, Gallery 210, UMSL. This event is free and open to the public. David Carkeet is the author of five novels, including three New York Times Notable Books—Double Negative, The Full Ca-tastrophe, and The Error of Our Ways, all featuring linguist-protagonist Jeremy Cook. 7pm, 44 East Dr., One University Blvd., 516-5590. For more information, see Da-vid’s web site at www.davidcarkeet.com. A reading by poet Randall Mann, May 6, Gallery 210, UMSL. This event is free and open to the public. Randall Mann, an American poet, is the author of Break-fast with Thom Gunn, Complaint in the Garden (winner of the 2003 Kenyon Re-view Prize in Poetry), and co-author of the textbook Writing Poems. 7pm, 44 East Dr., One University Blvd., 516-5590. The 15th annual Washington University Summer Writers Institute will be held in St. Louis June 14-25, 2010. Workshops will include fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and the Young Writers Institute (for high-school sophomores, juniors and seniors). Held each June, The Summer Writers Institute consists of two weeks of daily, intensive writing workshops. There are also personal conferences, read-ings by guest faculty, craft talks, and panel discussions with writers and edi-tors. See the website: http://swi.ucollege.wustl.edu, or telephone (314) 935-6720. River Styx magazine sponsors a poetry contest for high school students in the St.

Louis metro area. Students should send up to five poems to River Styx Found-ers Award, 3547 Olive, Suite 107, St. Louis, MO 63103. Deadline is April 23, 2010. Poems should be anonymous, but make sure to include a cover letter with name, phone number, email, school, and poem titles. Winner receives $150 plus the opportunity to read at the River Styx Literary Feast on May 3rd, 2010. River Styx magazine is sponsoring its 15th annual International Poetry Contest. First prize will receive $1500 and publication in the fall issue. All entries will be considered for publication. This year’s judge is Maxine Kumin, a former U.S. Poet Laureate. En-trants should send up to three poems, total-ing no more than 14 pages, to River Styx Poetry Contest, 3547 Olive, Suite 107, St. Louis, MO 63103. Deadline is May 31, 2010. All entrants will be notified by S.A.S.E., and there is a required $20 reading fee that in-cludes a one-year subscription (3 issues). On the cover letter, please include contact information, but do not place this informa-tion on your poetry submission.

AbbreviationsSTL: Saint Louis; B&N: Barnes & Noble; LBB: Left Bank Books; SLCL: St. Louis County Library; SLPL: St. Louis Public Library; SCCCL: St. Charles City Coun-ty Library; UCPL: University City Pub-lic Library; WU: Washington University; WGPL: Webster Groves Public Library. Check the online calendar at cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu for more events and ad-ditional details. To advertise, send event details to litcal@artsci.wustl.edu, fax 935-4889, or call 935-5576.

st. louis literary calendar