Produced and hosted by Larry Davidson

An interview series-taking place Sundays in
July and August from 11:30am- 1:00pm
Palmer Vineyards in Aquebogue
The series explores the art and craft of story telling.
For tickets contact Edana Cichanowicz
Brentwood Public Library
Second Ave & 4th Street
Brentwood, NY 11717
631-273-7883 ext 340
$8.00 per ticket
Send Stamped-Self-Addressed Envelope.
You may use your ticket for any Sunday.
$2.00 of each ticket price supports SCLA fund raising.
SCLS tickets are not valid on 6/26/2005.

Sunday, July 10 “Strange but True”

Guests

Julian Rubinstein
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

It’s one of those stories you can’t believe is true. An inept professional hockey goalie turns to bank robbery to make ends meet, and becomes a national folk hero in a country newly liberated from the Soviet Union’s iron grip. Julian has made a career finding and bringing unforgettable characters to life and breaking bizarre and often dangerous stories from faraway places. Whether with a fleeing Indian tribe in Brazil, with the Hells’ Angels in Canada, or with John McEnroe in his art gallery in SoHo. Julian has consistently proven able to get the story no else could.

Tom Reiss
The Orientalist: Solving The Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, The Orientalist traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best-selling author in Nazi Germany.

Born in 1905 to a wealthy family in the oil-boom city of Baku, at the edge of the czarist empire, Lev escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan. He found refuge in Germany, where, writing under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, his remarkable books about Islam, desert adventures, and global revolution, became celebrated across fascist Europe.

Mr. Reiss has written about politics and culture for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughters in New York City.

Sunday July 17 The Family Tree

Guests

Kaylie Jones
Speak Now

Clara Sverdlow has been stalked by Niko Kamenski, her high-school lover, for almost twenty years. A recently sober alcoholic in her mid thirties, she has found happiness in a tenuous new marriage to Mark. Yet the past lurks over them like a great shadow, always encroaching on their happiness.

“Although we’ve gotten used to second-generation actors equaling or surpassing the accomplishments of their parents, the same hasn’t happened with second-generation novelists. Nonetheless there are a few . . . and added to their small number ought to be Kaylie Jones.”
NEW YORK TIMES

Ms. Jones was born in Paris, France and attended French schools until she returned with her family to the U.S. in 1974. Her father was the novelist James Jones.

Nancy Geary
Being Mrs. Alcott

Near a white-sand beach on Cape Cod stands the beautiful home that Grace and Bainbridge Alcott have owned for decades—a time during which Grace has deferred her own opinions and dreams to try to be the perfect mother and the perfect “Mrs. Alcott.” But with her husband’s premature retirement and their fortune dwindling, Bain’s solitary decision to put the house up for sale threatens to destroy the fabric of Grace’s life. Now, as she silently battles a terrible illness, Grace must find the courage to confront her husband and family, come to terms with the choices she has made, and salvage what she holds dear.

Nancy Geary was a distinguished prosecutor in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office. Following the success of her debut novel, MISFORTUNE, she left her law career to devote herself full-time to writing.

Sunday July 24 Witness to History

Guests

Irmgard Hunt
On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood

On Hitler’s Mountain is a powerful, intimate, riveting, and revealing account of a seemingly halcyon life lived mere paces from a center of evil and madness; a remarkable memoir of an “ordinary” childhood spent in an extraordinary time and place.

Irmgard A. Hunt has been an executive at a number of environmental organizations, including the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Partnership for Central Europe, a project of the German Marshall Fund. After years as a consultant to several international not-for-profit organizations, she retired and began to write her memoirs. She holds a B.A. from Columbia University (which she earned at age fifty-two) and an M.P.A. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She lives in Washington, D.C., and has two children and two grandchildren.

Joseph Kanon
Alibi : A Novel

It is 1946, and a stunned Europe is beginning its slow recovery from the ravages of World War II. Adam Miller has come to Venice to visit his widowed mother and try to forget the horrors he has witnessed as a U.S. Army war crimes investigator in Germany. Nothing has changed in Venice-not the beautiful palazzi, not the violins at Florian’s, not the shifting water that makes the city, untouched by bombs, still seem a dream.
Using the piazzas and canals of Venice as an enthralling but sinister backdrop, Joseph Kanon has again written a gripping historical thriller. Alibi is at once a murder mystery, a love story, and a superbly crafted novel about the nature of moral responsibility.
Joseph Kanon was educated at Harvard and at Trinity College, Cambridge. While still an undergraduate, he began a career in publishing as a reader for The Atlantic Monthly, and went on to a series of editorial and managerial positions, including President and CEO of E. P. Dutton, and Executive Vice-President at Houghton Mifflin as head of Trade and Reference Publishing.

Sunday July 31 Story Tellers

Guests

Laura Lippman
To the Power of Three

A locked high school toilet reveals three shot girls, a story that doesn’t pan out, and clues of a fourth witness in this “realistic” crime thriller.

Laura Lippman was a newspaper reporter at the Baltimore Sun for twelve years. Her Tess Monaghan novels—THE LAST PLACE, THE SUGAR HOUSE, BALTIMORE BLUES, CHARM CITY, BUTCHERS HILL, AND IN BIG TROUBLE—have won the Edgar, Agatha, Shamus, Anthony, and Nero Wolfe Awards, and IN A STRANGE CITY was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel EVERY SECRET THING. Lippman lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

John Searles
Strange But True

After a mysterious fall from his New York City apartment, Philip Chase has moved back home with his mother, Charlene, a bitter woman who has never fully accepted the death of her younger son, Ronnie, five years earlier. Numb from watching too much television, rereading a tragic biography, and trading snipes with his mother, Philip is in stasis. But everything changes late one windy February night when Ronnie’s high school girlfriend shows up on their doorstep. A sad young woman who still bears the scars of the accident that took Ronnie’s life on the night of their prom, Melissa has unexpectedly found hope. She is nine months pregnant. And the father, she claims, is Ronnie.

John Searles is the Deputy Editor at Cosmopolitan where he oversees all book excerpts and reviews for the magazine. His essays, articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and other national newspapers and magazines. He lives in New York City.

Sunday August 7

John Feinstein
Let Me Tell You A Story: A Lifetime In The Game

America’s favorite sportswriter teams up with Red Auerbach, the most successful and admired coach in basketball history, to tell the best stories of a legendary life. Living legend Arnold “Red” Auerbach led the Boston Celtics to nine NBA championships—eight of them consecutive—during his 17-year tenure in Boston from 1950 to 1966. The fiery coach is a unique personality—brash, opinionated, and unfailingly accurate. As a coach he never stood still along the sidelines, and in retirement he remains a lively part of the game, still consulted by coaches, players, and general managers at age 86.

John Feinstein graduated from Duke University in 1977. He worked at the Washington Post for eleven years as both a political and sports reporter. He has also worked at Sports Illustrated and at the National Sports Daily. He is the author of a number of bestselling sports books, including A Season on the Brink, A Good Walk Spoiled, A Civil War, The Last Amateurs, and The Punch.

August 14 Page Turners

Guests

James Siegel
Detour

Paul Breidbart is the actuary; he and his wife, Joanna, want nothing more than to have a child. They have been trying to conceive for years, without success. When they open their hearts to the possibility of adoption they find that the quickest way to be matched with a child is to travel to Colombia. Travel --- and life --- in Colombia is fraught with danger, yet everything happens on schedule. They receive a baby girl who is perfect in every way. The adoption proceeds without any problem. That is, until the Breidbarts leave their new infant daughter alone for a few hours with their new nanny.
James Siegel is Senior Creative Director and Vice President of the BBDO advertising agency in New York and he has won numerous awards including three Gold Lions at Cannes. He lives on Long Island.

Adam Fawer
Improbable

After nightfall, David Caine inhabits a world of risk, obsession, rich rewards, and sudden, destructive downfalls. A compulsive gambler possessing a brilliant mathematical mind—and an uncanny ability to calculate odds in the blink of an eye—he prowls the underground poker clubs of Manhattan, winning more than he loses. But Caine is a man prone to crippling epileptic incidents—and one night he makes a costly miscalculation, suffering the most intense seizure he has ever experienced. And his life spins madly out of control.

Adam Fawer holds undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and received an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. During his corporate career, Fawer worked for a variety of companies including Sony Music, J.P. Morgan, and most recently, About.com, where he was the chief operating officer.



August 21

Alan Zweibel
The Other Shulman – A Novel

An original Saturday Night Live lead writer, Zweibel has won numerous Emmy and Writers Guild awards for his work in television, which includes It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (which he co-created and produced), PBS’s Great Performances, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. His many critically
acclaimed theater credits include Bunny Bunny: A Sort of Romantic Comedy, which he adapted from his own book, as well as Billy Crystal’s one-man Broadway smash hit, 700 Sundays. He recently published a children’s book, A Tree Named Steve and has written for Esquire, The
Atlantic Monthly, and Los Angeles magazine.

August 28

Sir Harold Evans
They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine

If you wear a bra, listen to a radio, have a bank account, or use any of 67 other technologies or business practices that Evans writes about, know that they were commercialized by “innovators,” as the author dubs their creators. Biography provides the backbone of Evans’ profiles and is well supported by his grasp of the business and social environments operated in by these historical entrepreneurs, who span from steamboat pioneers John Fitch and Robert Fulton to MRI inventor Raymond Damadian, who exemplifies the type Evans extols here.
Harold Evans is the author of the New York Times bestseller The American Century. He was the founding editor of Conde Nast Traveler, editorial director of U.S. News & World Report, and president and publisher of Random House, where he published a record number of bestsellers. He was editor of the London Sunday Times and of The Times, and his account of those years, Good Times, Bad Times, was a #1 bestseller in Britain. He lives in New York.