A mystical history of NYC below Chambers Street… the link between our financial and environmental crises… the life and photographs of Ansel Adams… our always-on, simultaneous society… the government’s use of our personal information… parallels between art and food… cupcakes… the balance of power on the Supreme Court… Google-style rankings of history’s most significant people… fanaticism and the Civil War… the career of muckraker Seymour Hersh… New York’s year of anarchy… good and evil and babies...

Have you resolved to read more, get out more, or learn new things in 2014? Well, if you're interested in any of the topics above, then we've got an Author @ the Library talk for you in January at Mid-Manhattan! We hope you'll join us to hear these distinguished non-fiction authors from a wide variety of fields discuss their work and answer your questions. You can request the authors' books using the links to the catalog included below. Author talks take place at 6:30 p.m. on the 6th floor.

Thursday, January 2: Historian Ronald J. Brown, author of How New York Became the Empire City: A Mythical Tour of Lower Manhattan, tells the story of how a minor Dutch colonial outpost became the Empire City. 

   

  

Wednesday, January 22: With the Supreme Court just about evenly divided between conservatives and liberals, Professor Mark Tushnet of Harvard Law School, author of In the Balance: Law and Politics on the Roberts Court, explores how this balance has determined recent decisions, such as the Affordable Care Act, as well as how it functions as a balance of power among the individual justices.

 

Thursday, January 23: Computer scientist Steven Skiena, author of Who's Bigger: Where Historical Figures Really Rank, ranks and compares historical reputations of more than one thousand of history's most significant people by aggregating the traces of millions of opinions, just as Google ranks webpages.

 

Monday, January 27: In A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War, prolific historian and historical novelist Thomas Fleming argues that the real reason America became engaged the Civil War was fanaticism (on both sides—North and South) rather than the issue of slavery. 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, January 28: Award-winning author and journalist Robert Miraldi highlights some of Seymour Hersh’s major "scoops," paying particular attention to his time in New York City reporting for The New York Times, and describes his own time pursuing the controversial reporter while writing Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist.

 

Wednesday, January 29: In an illustrated lecture Thai Jones, American history curator at Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library and author of More Powerful than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives and New York’s Year of Anarchy, charts the dramatic struggle between anarchists, progressives, and plutocrats in New York City in 1914.

 

Thursday, January 30: In his most recent book, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, renowned psychologist Paul Bloom of Yale University argues that humans are in fact hardwired with a sense of morality. Join him for a fascinating discussion on the moral judgments and feelings of babies.

 

 

If you'd like to read any of the books presented at our past author talks, you can find book lists from our 2013 Author @ the Library programs in the Encore catalog.

 

 

The Author @ the Library posts include authors discussing their recent non-fiction books at the Mid-Manhattan Library. We also have many other interesting readings and talks on our program calendar, including art lectures and artist conversations, virtual tours, monthly panel discussions featuring authors from the Mystery Writers of America, New York Chapter, and short story readings at Story Time for Grown-ups.

 

Best wishes for a happy and healthy new year! We look forward to seeing you at the Mid-Manhattan Library in 2014.