Events

Established as America's first foreign naval base following the Spanish-American War, Guantanamo is now more often thought of as our Devil's Island, the gulag of our times. Guantanamo, USA by Stephen Schwab takes readers beyond the orange-jumpsuited detainees of today's headlines to provide the first comprehensive history of Guantanamo from its origins to the present. Stephen Schwab is a former senior analyst for the CIA's South America Division and now teaches history at the University of Alabama. 

Frank and Cindy Meyer had the American dream--until the day a professional robbery crew invaded their home and murdered everyone inside. Before his family, business, and oh-so-normal life, a younger Frank Meyer worked as a professional mercenary… with a man named Joe Pike. The police believe Frank was a criminal, robbed for large stashes of cash or drugs, but Pike does not, and with the help of Elvis Cole, he sets out to clear his friend… and punish the people who murdered him. They are about to learn the first rule. Don't make Pike mad. Robert Crais is the author of the best-selling Elvis Cole novels. Previously, he wrote scripts for such major television series as "Hill Street Blues," "Cagney & Lacey," and "Miami Vice," and is most pround of his four-hour NBC miniseries, "Cross of Fire." 

River Styx at Duff's presents contemporary writers Benjamin Percy (author of Refresh, Refresh) and Mitchell L. H. Douglas (author of Cooling Board).

Is empathy the key to the climate and energy crises? Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis marks the return of "one of the leading big-picture thinkers of our day" (Utne Reader). Rifkin's first book in six years explores how interconnected empathy, energy and the climate are--and how dependent we are on them for global survival in the 21st century. By examining empathy's role in shaping our civilization and by highlighting innovators in the field of energy use, Rifkin--an advisor to several European heads of state and the best-selling author of The Hydrogen Economy and The European Dream--offers a provocative rethinking of human history and a concrete plan for the future. 

Join us for our semi-annual Reading Group Appreciation Night! At this special event, publishing representatives will discuss great reading group picks; Jayne Anne Phillips will discuss and sign her acclaimed novel, Lark & Termite; Companion will provide coffee and cookies (yum); and we'll do give-aways of tote bags, gift cards, advance reading copies of books, and more. Lark & Termite, a National Book Award finalist, is a rich, wonderfully alive novel from admired author Jayne Anne Phillips. It is set during the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea. At its center, two children: Lark, on the verge of adulthood, and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but filled with radiance. According to the New York Times, "Jayne Anne Phillips's intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr's war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original."

The event is free, but you must register to attend. RSVP to Danielle Borsch, danielle@left-bank.com, 314.367.6731. LBB and library registered reading groups get first dibs. Also, registering your reading group with Left Bank Books is easy and free--and you get 20% off your club's selection each month!