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Fatima Bhutto

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

A vast cultural movement is emerging from outside the Western world. Truly global in its range and allure, it is the biggest challenge yet to American mass-produced popular culture. New Kings of the World (Columbia Global Reports) is a book about the new arbiters of mass culture – India’s Bollywood films, Turkey's soap operas, or dizi, and South Korea's pop music. Fatima Bhutto's new book is an important dispatch from a new, multipolar order that is taking form before our eyes.

Free

Tamim Ansary

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Tamim Ansary’s The Invention of Yesterday (PublicAffairs) is a sweeping global human history that describes the separate beginnings of the world's major cultural movements – Confucianism, Islam, Judeo-Christianity, and Nomadism – and the dramatic, sometimes ruinous, sometimes transformative effects of their ever closer intertwinement that is the defining feature of our world today.

Free

Lily Bernheimer author of The Shaping of Us

Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660, Portland, OR, United States

Lily Bernheimer visits from the Bay Area to share with us her first book, The Shaping of Us, which explores how the built and natural worlds subtly influence our behavior, health, and personality. From caves to cathedrals to our current housing crisis and the dreaded open-plan office, Bernheimer demonstrates that for our well-being, we must reconnect with the power to shape the world around us. Only when people are involved in forming and nurturing our environments will they feel a greater sense of agency, community, and pride. Join us to learn more about how space makes us tick and how to fix the broken parts of our world. Lily Bernheimer is an environmental psychology author, consultant, and researcher. She is Founding Director of Space Works…

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Free

Shauna M. Ahern in Conversation With Lisa Congdon

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Gluten-Free Girl Shauna M. Ahern’s Enough (Sasquatch) is a collection of fierce and funny personal essays on finding enough. With candor, Ahern traces the arc of her life, starting with the feeling of “not good enough” which was sown in a traumatic childhood and dogged her well into adulthood. She writes about finding her rage, which led her to find her enduring motto: enough pretending. Ahern will be joined in conversation by Lisa Congdon, artist and author of Find Your Artistic Voice.

Free

Les AuCoin – CANCELLED

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

This event has been cancelled due to illness. We hope to reschedule it in 2020. Stay tuned. Former US Congressman Les AuCoin joins us to read from his memoir, Catch and Release: An Oregon Life in Politics. In 1974, at the age of thirty-two, Les AuCoin became the first Democrat to win a US House seat in Oregon’s First District. He was one of the post-Watergate reformers who shook up an insular, autocratic Congress and led fights for affordable housing, “trickle-up” economics, wilderness protection, abortion rights, and nuclear arms control. In the 1980s, the Oregonian called him “the most powerful congressman in Oregon.” In this compelling collection of life stories, AuCoin traces his unlikely rise from a fatherless childhood in Central Oregon to the top…

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Free

Clyde W. Ford at OMSI

Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) 1945 SE Water Avenue, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's is thrilled to sell copies of Clyde W. Ford's Think Black during his appearance at OMSI. Tickets to this event can be purchased through OMSI at this link: Tickets to Clyde W. Ford: Think Black. In this thought-provoking and heartbreaking memoir, an award-winning writer tells the story of his father, John Stanley Ford, the first black software engineer at IBM, revealing how racism insidiously affected his father’s view of himself and their relationship. In 1947, Thomas J. Watson set out to find the best and brightest minds for IBM. At City College he met young accounting student John Stanley Ford and hired him to become IBM’s first black software engineer. But not all of the company’s white employees refused to accept a black…

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Free

Michael Meade: Chaos, Climate, and Creation

First Unitarian Portland 1211 SW Main St, Portland, OR, United States

As the chaos in the world increases, most ideas of the future become fatalistic. Yet, the situation only seems “hopeless” when viewed from the narrow logic of a collapsing world view. Old ways of seeing the world are blocking more vital paths of imagination, vision and healing. The point is not simply evolution or progress, rather there needs to be a collective rite of passage that transforms our world view. Transformation is required to move us from despair and overwhelm to awakening and imagination. We are either on the way to transformation or on the road to greater tragedy. The agony of the earth calls for each of us to defeat the growing alienation and isolation of life in order to become more human and…

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$10 – $15

The Fire Is Upon Us

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

A remarkable story of race and the American dream, Nicholas Buccola’s The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America (Princeton) reveals the deep roots and lasting legacy of a conflict that continues to haunt our politics. The Fire Is Upon Us shows how the clash between the civil rights firebrand and the father of modern conservatism persists in illuminating America's racial divide.

Free

Enough Is Enough: How Students Can Join the Fight for Gun Safety

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

Michelle Roehm McCann’s Enough Is Enough (Simon Pulse/Beyond Words) is a young activist’s handbook to joining the fight against gun violence to make schools safer for everyone. McCann deftly explains America’s gun violence issues – myths and facts, causes and perpetrators, solutions and change-makers – and provides a road map for effective activism.

Free

Unleash the Dragon Within

Powell's Books on Hawthorne 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

In Unleash the Dragon Within (Blue Snake), psychology professor and respected kung-fu instructor Steven Macramalla introduces the six Animals of Ch’ien-lung, an 18th-century kung-fu practice based on the Animal archetypes of three great cats and three great snakes. Unleash the Dragon Within includes cutting-edge neuroscientific research on the mind-body relationship.

Free
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