Zinn And Gladwell Are The Only Celebrites Still In Town, From That Thing Last Month
'Sup, readers? So many lectures and books this week, it's like the platonic ideal of college before college actually started all over again. And speaking of late-adolescent fixations: there's Malcolm Gladwell and also Howard Zinn talking about his new documentary, A People's History of Howard Zinn , a stunning expose in which we, America, find out Zinn cruelly inflected all of the world's First Peoples with bird flu, for laughs. Ninth grade AP US History will never be the same.
Monday, Feb. 2: William Cristenberry will discuss his new book Working from Memory , a collection of photographs from Ye Olde Southe and stories about how good we had it then, back when Americans had houses and jobs at the Confederate money printing factory. 7 PM. [ Politics & Prose ]
High school's intellectual crush Howard Zinn will be at the 14th Street Busboys and Poets. He has a new documentary! 6: 30 PM. [ Busboys & Poets ]
Tuesday, Feb. 3: The Tyranny of Dead Ideas is an exciting new book about how every idea produced in the 20th century is misguided, especially those that would in any way result in "progress." Go and see author Matt Miller tell you why. 7 PM. [ Politics & Prose ]
Daniel Mark Epstein will talk about his new book Lincoln's Men , presumably a fanfiction account of the life and times of Roland Burris. [ Hooks Book Events]
Wednesday, Feb. 4: Former Washington Post managing editor Robert G. Kaiser takes issue with this whole "lobbying thing" in his new book So Damn Much Money . Money has gotten in the way of our politics -- it's true! 7 PM. [ Politics & Prose ]
2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus comes to GWU to talk about microcredit, a subject for which he won that very Nobel. His new book is about a "world without poverty" -- it's called Creating a World Without Poverty , but he will probably work microcredit in there somehow anyway. GWU Lisner Auditorium; 730 21st Street, NW. 7 PM. [ Hooks Book Events ]
Thursday, Feb. 5: Be-afro'ed self-parody Malcolm Gladwell stops by DC to talk about oh, let's see, probably things you've always sort of wondered about but turn out to actually have quite logical -- almost insultingly, deceptively so -- explanations. [ Hooks Book Events ]
Activist Jaclyn Friedman will talk about rape, specifically how it is outlined in her new-ish book, Yes Means Yes . 6: 30 PM. [ Busboys and Poets ]
Friday, Feb. 6: Grey Gundaker, an American Studies professor at the College of William and Mary, will be talking about the Hirshhorn's collection, at the Hirshhorn. Meta, etc. 12:30 PM. [ Hirshhorn ]
If you have not had your fill of Lincoln, go to Politics & Prose to see Lincoln scholar Roland C. White, Jr. talk about the guy. 7 PM. [ Politics & Prose ]
Saturday, Feb. 7: Fakers is a book about deceitful mean people who swindle others out of their hopes, dreams, actual dollars, etc. It was published in January 2009, so it is the last book of its kind not to include your early 2009 all-American con artist, Rod "Blaggy" Blagsdiofslkdjfvjy. Go see author Paul Maliszewski (umm... "Mally"), talk about it. 1 PM. [ Politics & Prose ]
Ha ha P.W. Singer works at the Brookings Institute and just wrote a book about how our immediate future can best be expressed with the movie Terminator Salvation . 6 PM. [ Politics & Prose ]