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The Free Library of Great Conversations

Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library

October 18, 2011

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A Conversation with Isabel Wilkerson - The Warmth of Other Suns
Tuesday, October 18 @ 7:30 pm

In 1994, Isabel Wilkerson became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, for her feature writing as Chicago bureau chief for the New York Times. Her award-winning articles for the Times have ranged from natural disasters and national politics to poignant individual portraits. Her 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, is an epic geographic and ethnographic narrative of the Great Migration—an exodus of African Americans from the segregated South to the North and West. With three journeys handpicked from her extensive interviews, Wilkerson traces the experiences of nearly six million people who were refugees in their own country, and who permanently changed the face of urban and American culture.

A Conversation with Steven Pinker - The Better Angels of Our Nature
Thursday, October 20 @ 7:30 pm

Named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of All Time, Harvard professor Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist whose thorough studies of language have led him to insights into the way humans form thoughts and engage the world. He has authored seven books, including the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate and the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist How the Mind Works. His new book, The Better Angels of our Nature charts the decline of global violence from Biblical times to the present. Pinker argues that, despite current warfare, our modern cultural institutions prove our progress over the course of history into altogether better people, now living in the most peaceful era humankind has experienced.

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