LibraryThing Local

Called “engrossing and thought provoking” by Schwartz Buyer Catherine Wallberg, Beside a Burning Sea, a paperback original, finds the World War II hospital ship Benevolence at one moment cruising safely through the Pacific, and in an instant it is split in two by a torpedo. A small band of survivors ... (more)is able to make it to the shore of a nearby island. There, the group—including a wounded Japanese solder and the nurse he saved from death—must confront their passion and their demons. John Shors is also the author of Beneath a Marble Sky.

Meet the author of the bestselling Warriors series! In the latest addition to the feline adventure, Firestar’s three grandchildren have just learned that they hold the destiny of the Clans in their paws. Now they begin to discover what their power means. Meanwhile, a dark prophecy might spell disaster ... (more)for the Clans. Eclipse is filled with the action, mystery, thrilling battles, betrayal and drama you’ve come to expect from this series. For middle readers

In David Rosenfelt’s first standalone thriller, Tim Wallace is placed in a terrible position. A stranger bumps into him at a bar and tells him the details of a murder committed months before. Tim soon learns that the body is right where the stranger said it was. Now Tim, already a suspect in his wife’s ... (more)very mysterious death less than a year ago, is between a rock and a hard place. He escaped conviction before but the cops don’t believe in coincidences and aren’t going to quit until Tim is behind bars. Tim knows he’s innocent and he realizes he’s the only person capable of connecting the murder to a larger crime looming on the horizon. Don’t Tell a Soul is the story of an ordinary man, catapulted by uncanny circumstances to the other side of the law, who must single-handedly unearth a deadly plot.

If you or a family member has Multiple Sclerosis, take advantage of this opportunity to learn about strategies for keeping the mind sharp and engaged. Though the disease clearly affects a patient’s body, recent studies show that 65 percent of MS patients will also experience cognitive difficulties. ... (more)Milwaukee author and volunteer peer supporter with the Wisconsin Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society Jeffrey Gingold offers valuable cognitive strength-training techniques and strategies for patients, interviews with patients and support and advice for caregivers in his new book.

You might know Haven Kimmel best for her memoirs, A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch, but she’s also the author of several works of fiction including her latest, Iodine. Here she explores the psychological effects of trauma through the eyes of college student Trace Pennington. After surviving ... (more)a terrible childhood, Trace managed to become a successful student and assume a new identity as a girl without a past. When she falls in love, she is forced to confront her past anew, but her recovered memories do as much to obscure her story as reveal it.

If only your philosophy course in school was as hilarious as Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein’s Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar. It’s a not-so-reverent crash course through the great philosophical thinkers and traditions, from Existentialism (What do Hegel and Bette Midler have in common?) to ... (more)Logic (Sherlock Holmes never deduced anything). If you like to take the heavy stuff lightly, you’ll enjoy an evening of philosophy 101 with Cathcart and Klein.

Follow Abraham Lincoln on his historic journey—the whistle stops, his growing number of supporters, the backroom Party wheeling and dealing—to his unlikely Republican presidential nomination in May 1860 with Lincoln scholar Gary Ecelbarger. He brings a historian’s flair for detail to Lincoln’s ... (more)story from the aftermath of his 1858 senatorial defeat, to a man taking his first steps toward becoming one of America’s most respected presidents.

The creator, writer and executive producer of the television series Cold Case Files follows up his acclaimed debut with The Fifth Floor. Private investigator Michael Kelly is back in this mystery that revives a tantalizing case buried in Chicago’s past. The trail leads Kelly to an old house on the ... (more)city’s North Side where he finds a body and perhaps the answer to the question, who started the Great Chicago Fire, and why? In the ensuing investigation takes Kelly to City Hall’s fabled fifth floor where the mayor’s feeling the heat. What’s more—Kelly’s been framed for murder

Wisconsin author Isabel Sharpe tells the story of Ann Reading, successful corporate executive, who finds herself completely out of place at a women’s retreat designed to help heartbroken women overcome failed relationships and begin life anew. Ann wants nothing to do with sitting around the campfire ... (more)singing “I Am Woman,” but when she befriends two fellow inmates she begins to see that the camp may have its benefits after all. The three strangers are about to bond on an adventure they didn’t ask for and discover that lives they thought were as good as it got suddenly get a lot better.

Go behind the scenes as Duck and his barnyard friends prepare for the annual corn maze festival. It’s going to be a lot of work, but the animals are more interested in giving Farmer Brown a hard time than a helping hand. He agrees to let the chickens use the hammers and lets the cows use the paintbrushes, ... (more)and they are excited. Duck is not. No work means no special-order organic duck feed, but Duck has a plan. As Farmer Brown designs his Statue of Liberty maze, Duck does some designing of his own. Someone’s in for a big surprise!

Milwaukee native Daphne Beal marks her fiction debut with a novel that finds Alex, a young American student who is spending the year in Nepal, placed in a difficult position after agreeing to help a friend. She has agreed to seek out a young Nepali woman desperate to flee to Kathmandu. But helping her ... (more)has unforeseen consequences and soon Alex is embroiled in a strange triangle with her friend and the young woman where the lines between friendship, love and lust grow more tangled each day. Slowly, Alex begins to understand the pitfalls of trying to be both adventurer and savior in an unfamiliar world.

Redletter is a reading series featuring local and regional poets and writers on the third Friday of each month, and is curated by Chuck Stebelton. The program begins at 7pm with an open mic, followed by a featured reader. The cost is $3, or $2 for open mic readers. September 19, 2008 - Anne-Marie ... (more)Cusac Anne-Marie Cusac's poetry has appeared in Poetry, Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, The American Scholar, The Madison Review, and Crab Orchard Review. Her first poetry book, The Mean Days (2001) was published by Tia Chucha Press and won the Posner Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and a Wisconsin Arts Board Individual Artist's grant, Cusac was for ten years an editor and investigative reporter for The Progressive magazine. Her investigative reporting there won several awards, including the prestigious George Polk Award. She is a professor in Communication at Roosevelt University and a contributing writer for The Progressive. Her nonfiction book, Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in Spring 2009.

Meet Newbery Medal-winning author Lois Lowry and celebrate the adaptation of her novel, Gossamer, for the stage. Littlest One is a tiny creature slowly learning how to give dreams to humans with a touch as light as gossamer. Each night, she and her teacher visit an old woman’s home where she gathers ... (more)happy memories and drops of old scents and sounds to turn into pleasant dreams. When the old woman takes in John, an angry foster child with a troubled past, Littlest One must learn to use her powers to protect his heart and soul against the dreaded nightmare-giving Sinisteeds. Gossamer is being adapted by Lowis Lowry for First Stage Children’s Theater (in collaboration with Oregon Children’s Theatre of Portland, Oregon). The First Stage production begins on September 19 and runs through October 5. For more information about the performances, visit First Stage Children’s Theater’s website.

Elizabeth Arnold grew up in northeast Florida and attended Oberlin College, the University of Chicago, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is the author of two books of poems, Civilization (Flood Editions, 2006) and The Reef (University of Chicago, 1999). She now teaches at ... (more)the University of Maryland and Warren Wilson College. She lives outside Washington, D.C. Anselm Hollo, poet and literary translator, is a Professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His most recent books are Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965-2000 (Coffee House Press) which won the San Francisco Poetry Center's Best Book Award for 2001, and Guests of Space, also from Coffee House Press 2007. Hollo's translations from Finnish, Swedish, German and French include works by Paavo Haavikko, Pentti Saarikoski, Gunnar Harding, Bertolt Brecht, Blaise Cendrars and others. Tom Pickard lives at the edge of Fiend's Fell in the North Penine Hills on the English-Scottish border. He is the author of ten books of poetry and prose, including The Dark Months of May (Flood Editions, 2004) and Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood Editions, 2007). A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ballad of Jamie Allan was written as a libretto for the composer John Harle and performed at the Sage Gateshead in Durham, England (and recently released as a CD). It concerns an eighteenth-century gypsy musician who died in Durham jail where he was serving a life sentence for stealing a horse at the age of seventy. His reputation as a great musician was matched by his reputation as an outlaw, or to quote Walter Scott, "a desperate reprobate."

Find out what happened when Guardian columnist Benjamin Mee decided to uproot his family and move them to a dilapidated zoo in the English countryside. There was lots of work and things didn’t always go well—like the time the tigers broke loose, or the monkeys who wouldn’t stop fighting. On top ... (more)of that, during the course of refurbishing the zoo Mee’s wife had a recurrence of cancer and passed away. He and their children resolved to continue work on the zoo in her memory. He’ll share more details from his family’s moving and unexpected journey to their new home.

Milwaukee author Mordecai Lee will discuss a largely forgotten chapter of American urban history, the creation of Bureaus of Efficiency as part of the civic reform agenda during the Progressive era at the beginning of the twentieth century. The goal of the bureaus was to fight political corruption and ... (more)sought to professionalize local government through civil service systems, open competitive bidding, separation of public administration from politics and reorganizing departments to reduce duplication. Lee compares and contrasts the bureaus in Milwaukee and Chicago, and discusses why efficiency in government is likely to remain a viable and powerful concept well into the twenty-first century.

This event is a must-attend for anyone who is concerned about our city’s environment. A river can be the lifeblood of a city, standing as a symbol of economic prosperity, harmony with nature, and communal life. The Menomonee River is such an anchor for the Milwaukee area. Eddee Daniel will guide you ... (more)down its course to reveal how preserving urban rivers is key to modern-day city life. Learn more about the preservation efforts in place to rescue the river from pollution and neglect, and see how parks and nature are crucial to Milwaukee’s quality of life and economic success. Daniel is a photographer and works with Friends of Milwaukee’s Rivers.

Acedia is an ancient word meaning “soul weariness,” a feeling author Kathleen Norris (The Cloister Walk; Amazing Grace) had experienced at different times in her life since she was a teenager. In Acedia & Me she explores the concept not only as it relates to her own life—in her marriage and the ... (more)challenges of grave illness; in her interest in the monastic tradition—but also as it relates to society as a whole, which Norris contends seems to be suffering from “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia and enervating despair.”

The grandson of Ludwig Bemelmans, author of the original Madeline books, John Bemelman’s Marciano offers the first new Madeline book in nearly fifty years, Madeline and the Cats of Rome. The Paris skies are gray, so Miss Clavel and the twelve little girls are leaving for brighter weather—spring in ... (more)Rome. There are wonderful sights and delicious things to eat, but Madeline also finds unexpected adventure involving a thief, a chase, and many, many cats. For kids!

Charlotte Hug (born 1965) musician, composer, visual artist, lives in Zurich and London. She studied music and viola with Henrik Crafoord at the SMPV Berne and Paul Silverthorne in London, and received training in "scenic design" at the University of Art and Design Zurich. In addition to numerous ... (more)solo performances at international music festivals and in theatres and museums, Hug also collaborates with other artists and often seeks out unusual venues for her performances, places that lend surprising acoustic, visual or emotional accents to her playing. She has appeared in the icy caverns of the Rhône Glacier in the Upper Valais in Switzerland as well as in the labyrinthine subterranean passageways of the "House of Detention", a 250-year-old former dungeon in the London neighborhood of Farringdon. Charlotte Hug is a member of the London Improvisers Orchestra. She collaborates with other composers both freely and conceptually, including John Butcher, John Edwards, Phil Minton, Maggie Nicols, Evan Parker, Elliott Sharp and Phil Wachsmann. Her domain encompasses the most diverse fields, including composition, improvisation, electro-acoustics, performance, music for film and musical theatre as well as in visual art and sound installations. Charlotte Hug's appearance is sponsored in part by Pro Helvetia and Suisa. Chicago based cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm has played and studied music in a variety of situations from the Juilliard School to beyond. A former student of Anthony Braxton, Morton Feldman, Bunita Marcus and Pauline Oliveros, his primary projects are his Valentine Trio and The Lightbox Orchestra. He is also a member of a number of ongoing collective projects (The Boxhead Ensemble, The Friction Brothers with Michael Zerang and Colligan, Keefe Jackson's Fast Citizens) as well as participating in numerous one off "ad-hoc" or in frequently convening ensembles. He also currently plays in groups led by Joe McPhee (Survival Unit III), Peter Brotzmann (Chicago 10tet), and Ken Vandermark (Vandermark 5, Frame Quartet, Territory Ensemble). Improvisors he has worked with include Jim Baker, John Butcher, Axel Doerner, Mats Gustafsson, Charlotte Hug, Glenn Kotche, Peter Kowald, Nicole Mitchell, Torsten Muller, Jim O'Rourke, Jeff Parker, David Stakenas, and Michael Zerang, He has contributed cello sounds to numerous recording projects by rock groups including Califone, Freakwater, God-is-my-co-pilot, Super Chunk, US Maple, Wilco and many others. This concert is brought to you by the Alternating Currents Live series, broadcast on WMSE (91.7) FM, Milwaukee.

The author of the landmark bestseller What’s The Matter With Kansas? examines conservative misrule and the blundering and corrupt Washington it has brought us. Casting back to the early days of the conservative revolution, Thomas Frank describes the rise of a ruling coalition dedicated to dismantling ... (more)government. But rather than cutting down the big government they claim to hate, conservatives have simply sold it off, deregulating some industries, defrauding others, but always turning public policy into a private sector bidding war. Frank offers a forceful argument that resurrecting equitable intelligent government starts with understanding how the present plutocracy came about. Tickets are required for this event. An admission ticket is included with Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew only when the book is purchased from Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops or online. One ticket will grant admission for up to two (2) people. Attendees are encouraged to arrive early, as seating is limited. Due to this special event, our Downer Ave. location will close to the general public at 6 p.m. on the day of this event.