Look familiar? It's our upcoming event page. One doesn't think there should be that much to do for an event programmer after Thanksgiving. I'll have a post with the books that were talked about on Wisconsin Public Radio's Larry Meiller Show later today.
Tuesday, December 3, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Boswell presents Jim Biever, former Packers Team Photographer, for a celebration of more than seventy years of one family’s quintessential Green Bay football photography. Register for this free event bievermke.bpt.me by 2 pm, but don't worry, we've got plenty of space for walk-ups.
The name Biever is synonymous with Green Bay Packers football. For the better part of eight decades, the late Vernon Biever and his son Jim were there on the sidelines at Lambeau and beyond, capturing the most iconic moments in team history.
In celebration of the Packers' 100th season, 100 Years in Titletown is a stunning showcase of the finest work from the Biever archives, sourced from thousands of film rolls and including rare, never-before-seen images shot by the first family of Packers photography. Jim Biever was the official team photographer of the Packers until his retirement in 2016.
Wednesday, December 4, 6 pm, at UWM Student Union Wisconsin Room, 2200 E Kenwood Blvd:
The UW-Milwaukee Alumni Association presents Master Chats, an evening with bestselling author Seth M Siegel in a conversation with WUWM’s Environmental Reporter Susan Bence, who together will explore how our drinking water got contaminated, what it may be doing to us, and what we must do to make it safe.
If you thought America's drinking water problems started and ended in Flint and Milwaukee, think again. From big cities and suburbs to the rural heartland, chemicals linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, birth defects, and lowered IQ routinely spill from our taps. Many are to blame, from the EPA and Congress to chemical companies and water utilities. And bottled water is often no safer.
The tragedy is that existing technologies could launch a new age of clean, healthy, and safe tap water for only a few dollars a week per person. Siegel shares shocking stories about contaminated water, the everyday heroes that have pushed for change, and what we must do to reverse years of neglect and inaction.
This event is free. Doors open 5:30 pm. Light refreshments will be served. More information and registration can be found at uwm.edu/alumni/event/mcdec2019/.
Seth M Seigel is a lawyer, activist, serial entrepreneur, and author of Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. Siegel is currently Senior Water Policy Fellow at the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences.
Wednesday, December 4, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Boswell hosts an evening with essayist and small town undertaker Thomas Lynch, the National Book Award finalist for The Undertaking.
For nearly four decades, Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts. His life’s work with the dead and the bereaved has informed his exploration of identity and humanity, to which he brings a signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision.
The Depositions provides an essential selection of essays on fatherhood, Irish heritage, funeral rites, and the perils of bodiless obsequies. The space between Lynch’s hyphenated identities as an Irish American and undertaker-poet is narrowed by the deaths of poets, the funerals of friends, the loss of neighbors, intimate estrangements, and the slow demise of a beloved dog. The press of the author’s own mortality animates the new essays, sharpening a curiosity about where we come from, where we go, and what it means.
Thomas Lynch is author of five collections of poetry, one of stories, and four books of essays. His first, The Undertaking, won the Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times, among other publications. He works as a funeral director in Milford, Michigan, and teaches at the Bear River Writer's Conference.
Thursday, December 5, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Edgar finalist and author of The Shadows We Hide returns to Boswell with his latest novel, a coming-of-age story set in a small town in the Missouri Ozarks.
After fifteen years of growing up in the Ozark hills with his widowed mother, high-school freshman Boady dreams of glass towers and cityscapes. When a black family moves in across the road, in a community where notions of "us" and "them" carry the weight of history, Boady must rethink his understanding of the world. Secrets hidden in plain sight begin to unfold: a mother who wraps herself in the loss of her husband, a neighbor who carries the wounds of a mysterious past that he holds close, and a quiet boss who is fighting his own hidden battle. Boady begins to see the stark lines of race and class that both bind and divide this small town - and he will be forced to choose sides.
Library Journal’s starred review of Nothing More Dangerous says, “This powerful, unforgettable crime novel is a coming-of-age book to rival some of the best, such as William Kent Krueger's Ordinary Grace or Larry Watson's Montana 1948…A must-read.”
Allen Eskens is the bestselling author of The Guise of Another, The Heavens May Fall, and The Life We Bury, currently in development for a feature film. He is a practicing criminal defense attorney.
Thursday, December 5, 7 pm, at Harry and Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, 6255 N Santa Monica Blvd
Samson Family JCC present Girls Night In with Lisa Barr, award-winning author and journalist, who will chat about her latest novel about a woman who, after her husband’s affair, jets off to France to rediscover her own joie de vivre. Tickets are $10 for admission, $25 for admission and a copy of The Unbreakables. Details and tickets available at jccmilwaukee.org/events/books-blogs-besties/.
When the Ashley Madison data breach exposes her husband as the top cheater in town, Sophie Bloom is humiliated and directionless. So she jumps into the unknown, fleeing France to meet up with her teenage daughter, who is studying abroad and nursing her own heartbreak. As she sheds her past and travels an obstacle-filled road-less-travelled, Sophie is determined to blossom. Allowing her true self to emerge in the postcard beauty of Provence, Sophie must decide what is broken forever, and what it means to be truly unbreakable.
Pam Jenoff, author of The Orphan’s Tale, says, “Readers will delight in this effervescent cocktail of second chances, female strength, mother-daughter bonding and the truths that set us free. Smart, sure, and sexy, The Unbreakables is unforgettable.”
Lisa Barr has been an editor at The Jerusalem Post and an editor/reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. Lisa is also the creator and editor of the popular parenting blog, GIRLilla Warfare.
Friday, December 6, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Carol Sklenicka, author of the biography of Raymond Carver named a New York Times Book Review Best Book, visits with her latest work, a portrait of writer Alice Adams. She’ll be in conversation with area author Martha Bergland, and the evening will feature a dramatic reading by area actor Flora Coker.
With the same meticulous research and vivid storytelling she brought to Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, Sklenicka integrates the drama of Adams’s deeply felt, elegantly fierce life with a cascade of events - the civil rights and women’s movements, the sixties counterculture, and sexual freedom.
This biography’s revealing analyses of Adams’s stories and novels from Careless Love to Superior Women to The Last Lovely City, and her extensive interviews with Adams’s family and friends, among them Mary Gaitskill, Diane Johnson, Anne Lamott, and Alison Lurie, give us the definitive story of a writer often dubbed “America’s Colette.” Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer captures not just a beloved woman’s life in full, but a crucial span of American history.
Carol Sklenicka is the author of Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, which was named of one of the 10 Best Books of 2009 by The New York Times Book Review. Martha Bergland is author of the novels A Farm Under a Lake and Idle Curiosity as well as the biography Studying Wisconsin: The Life of Increase Lapham, Early Chronicler of Plants, Rocks, Rivers, Mounds and All Things Wisconsin. Flora Coker is a Riverwest based actor and was a founder of Milwaukee’s Theater X. She has appeared in productions at the Milwaukee Rep, First Stage, Next Act Theater, and more.
Saturday, December 7, 11 am, at Shorewood Public Library, 3920 N Murray Ave:
A Holiday Book Talk with Daniel Goldin
The Friends of Shorewood Public Library present Boswell Book Company's proprietor Daniel Goldin for a presentation on the best books to look for during the holiday season. Daniel is known for giving interesting and varied suggestions, perfect for discerning readers.
Books will be available for purchase, with a portion of sales supporting the Friends of the Shorewood Public Library. This is the perfect opportunity to shop for book lovers on your list - including yourself. Photo by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Monday, December 9, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Goldie Goldbloom, author and Chasidic mother of eight, in conversation with Marquette Professor CJ Hribal about her latest work, a deeply affecting novel of one woman's life at a moment of change, set in the world of Brooklyn's Chasidim. Cosponsored by the Harry and Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center and UWM Sam and Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies.
In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Surie Eckstein is soon to be a great-grandmother. Her in-laws live on the first floor of their house, her daughter lives on the second. Into this life of counted blessings comes a surprise. Surie is pregnant at 57. It is an aberration, a shift in the proper order of things, and a public display of private life. Exposed, ashamed, she is unable to share the news, even with her husband. But deeper within is another secret, about her son, who died by suicide several years before. And these secrets slowly separate her from her community.
From Lily Meyer in The Chicago Reader: "In Jewish American literature, struggling not to believe is unusual. From Chaim Potok to Philip Roth to Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Jewish novelists in this country have tended to depict secular or nonpracticing Jews, some of whom reject their religion completely. Chicago writer Goldie Goldbloom, who's Hasidic and queer, takes a different approach in her quietly exceptional second novel, On Division... Her protagonist, Surie Eckstein, is a Hasidic Jew for whom there is no lapsing from faith. Surie loves God. What she struggles on are God's rules."
Goldie Goldbloom’s first novel, The Paperbark Shoe, won the AWP Prize, was named the Literary Novel of the Year by Forward magazine, and is an NEA Big Reads selection. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and has received multiple grants and awards, including fellowships from Warren Wilson, Northwestern University, the Brown Foundation, the City of Chicago, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. CJ Hribal is Professor of English at Marquette University and author of The Company Car and other works of fiction.
What a great week!
Monday, December 16, 7:00 pm, at Boswell:
From Jason Heller on the NPR website: “Every page is infused not only with Basinger's knowledge, but her overwhelming adoration for the tuneful, silver-screen tales that changed her own life. The book is a passion project, organically rendered, and shot through with longing for an age where sophistication was as subtle as it was scintillating. The Movie Musical! is more than a love letter to a great American artform; it's a symphony
Thursday, December 19, 8 pm, at Boswell:
David Luhrssen, Bruce Cole, and Phillip Naylor, editors of Milwaukee Rock and Roll, 1950-2000: A Reflective History, with a special performance by Lil Rev and Friends
Spanning the beginning of Milwaukee’s rock and roll scene in the 1950s to the turn of the century, this fascinating anthology of written, vocal, and visual reflections evokes memories for those who experienced the music and the era as well as introducing area musicians to a new generation. The editors present this enthralling, generously illustrated, multifaceted cultural history of Milwaukee and rock music, highlighted by a multiplicity of voices - musicians, promoters, DJs, photographers, artists, and audience members - collectively committed to the sounds of a great city.
