Wisconsin Book Festival 2009

Here are some events I hope to make at the upcoming 2009 Wisconsin Book Festival.

Here's the full schedule.

Unless otherwise noted, all text is cribbed from the festival's web site:


Arthur & Ursula Rathburn
Wednesday, October 7
6:30 - 7:30 PM
Venue: Presented by the Sun Prairie Public Library
Wisconsin authors, Dr. Arthur and Ursula Rathburn, present their latest book, No more tears left behind / Faced with being "transported" by the Nazis because they were Jews, Eva and Martin Deutschkron chose to disappear into the underground in 1942. For the remainder of the war, they worked and lived in the Berlin area right under the nose of the dreaded Gestapo. This story of a Madison resident is one that must be read and retold again and again.

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Matt Rothschild: Democracy in Print: The Best of the Progressive Magazine, 1909-2009
Thursday, October 8 5:30 - 7:00 PM
Venue: Promenade Hall/Overture
Presented by University of Wisconsin Press
Presenter(s): Matt Rothschild

Lorrie Moore & Michael Perry: WI Book Festival Party with Michael Perry & the Long Beds
Thursday, October 8 7:30 - 11:00 PM
Venue: Orpheum Theatre: Main
Presented by the Wisconsin Humanities Council.
Presenter(s): Lorrie Moore & Michael Perry

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Jonah Lehrer: From Marshmallows to Metacognition: What Can Science Teach Us About Decision-Making?
Friday, October 9 5:30 - 7:00 PM
Venue: Promenade Hall/Overture
Presented by the Center for the Humanities at UW-Madison
Presenter(s): Jonah Lehrer
From Bookmarks Magazine "Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide holds its own with Gladwell, Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and the host of science writers increasingly focused on the complexities of the human brain....Lehrer illuminates the many processes involved in even the simplest decisions."

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Harvey Pekar & Paul Buhle: Studs Terkel’s Working, A Graphic Adaptation
Saturday, October 10 10:00 - 11:30 AM
Venue: Promenade Hall/Overture
Presenter(s): Harvey Pekar & Paul Buhle
This graphic adaptation, the first effort to translate Terkel’s work into comic art, is the work of the inimitable Harvey Pekar.

Robert Whitaker & Adam Schrager: The Principled Politician and On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919
Saturday, October 10 12:00 - 1:30 PM
Venue: Wisconsin Studio/Overture
Presenter(s): Robert Whitaker & Adam Schrager
Amazon: On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation by Robert Whitaker
From Publishers Weekly: On September 30, 1919, a group of white planters tried to shut down a black sharecroppers' meeting in Arkansas; a sheriff was killed in the melee, and the next day hordes of whites traveled to the county....Whitaker (The Mapmaker's Wife) reconstructs the killing fields where by October 3, five white men and over 100 black men, women and children were killed. Hundreds of black sharecroppers were arrested; after torture-obtained confessions, 74 men were convicted and 12 received the death penalty. Whitaker examines the trial, the ensuing appeals and the heroic—ultimately successful—efforts of the lawyer and former slave, Scipio Africanus Jones and the 12 defendants who were finally set free in 1925.

Amazon: The Principled Politician: The Story of Ralph Carr by Adam Schrager



And the highlight of the Festival:
The Enduring Relevance of the Wisconsin School: What William Appleman Williams Got Right and Where He Went Wrong: Andrew Bacevich on the 50th Anniversary of Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Saturday, October 10 5:30 - 7:00 PM
Venue: Promenade Hall/Overture
Presented in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History, Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, and Wisconsin Veterans Museum
Presenter(s): Paul Buhle, Andrew Bacevich, & Alfred McCoy

Amazon: The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (50th Anniversary Edition) by William Appleman Williams, Andrew J. Bacevich, and Lloyd C. Gardner
“A brilliant book on foreign affairs.”—Adolf A. Berle Jr., New York Times Book Review

Product Description: This incisive interpretation of American foreign policy ranks as a classic in American thought. First published in 1959, the book offered an analysis of the wellsprings of American foreign policy that shed light on the tensions of the Cold War and the deeper impulses leading to the American intervention in Vietnam. William Appleman Williams brilliantly explores the ways in which ideology and political economy intertwined over time to propel American expansion and empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The powerful relevance of Williams’s interpretation to world politics has only been strengthened by recent events in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. Williams allows us to see that the interests and beliefs that once sent American troops into Texas and California, or Latin America and East Asia, also propelled American forces into Iraq.



From around the Internets:

The intro to a Counterpunch interview with Paul Buhle states "probably no one in the world that knows more about the history of American radicalism than Paul Buhle."


A Nation article on William Appleman Williams.:"'Why William Appleman Williams, for God's sake?" asked Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1999 when he learned that Williams's The Contours of American History had been voted one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library.

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And don't forget the Friends of the UW-Madison Library: Book Sales