This event has passed
Sarah Ignatius — The Kaleidoscope of Destiny - with David Ignatius — at Conn Ave
Past event
About This Event
It’s 1915. War rages in Europe while Armenians in the Ottoman Empire find themselves unfairly blamed for a major military defeat. Cooped up at home, fourteen-year-old Arakel tries to ignore rumors of arrests and beatings of Armenians by focusing on the journey with his two best friends, one Turkish and the other Armenian, on the Silk Road to China in two years, after high school, certain war will be over by then. His life is torn apart when Turkish officials order nearly every Armenian into exile in the desert. Tormented by armed guards, Arakel doesn’t grasp what’s happening until they strip his family of food, water, and their meagre possessions and force them across the Euphrates River where bloated corpses float by. He has crossed into the land of the dead. In a desperate attempt to survive, he must reach out to people of different faiths and backgrounds–Bedouins, Kurds, Arab camel drivers, Turks, Germans, and even a wandering dervish, people he considers enemies, but can he trust them? In a barbaric world, he confronts what lies deep within the human heart. With an elegance reaffirming our collective humanity, The Kaleidoscope of Destiny reveals the courage, hope, and ingenuity to survive the darkest of times during an overlooked part of history and will resonate in today’s challenges.Before publishing her debut novel, The Kaleidoscope of Destiny, Sarah Ignatius worked for many years as a human rights lawyer and as a nonprofit executive director. She also taught immigration and asylum law at Boston College Law School for several years and is the co-author of Immigration Law and the Family. Previously, she authored a detailed report on the U.S. asylum system for Harvard Law School’s National Asylum Study Project, and her legal articles have appeared in the Harvard Human Rights Journal, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Benders Immigration Bulletin, and Immigration Briefings. She has received recognition from the New England Society of Children’s Books Writers & Illustrators and the National League of American Pen Women as well as Glimmer Train, and was selected as a Somerville Arts Council Literature Artist Fellow. She graduated from Stanford University and Georgetown University Law Center. She is half-Armenian and lives in Massachusetts with her family.Ignatius will be joined in conversation with David Ignatius, a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for four decades. He has written several New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Washington, DC.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
About the Venue
Politics and Prose
Politics and Prose is a beloved and award-winning staple for book lovers around the nation's capital and the world. So Many Books, So Little Time.
Visit store pageMore at Politics and Prose
Sy Montgomery - with Scientist Michel Guerrero and Photographer Patrick Joyce - at Conn Ave
About the Event:Come and meet the scientific team behind Sy Montgomery's exciting newest book! Hear from the author, the scientist, and the photographer to learn about underwater explorations and the Oceanic Manta Ray.About the Author: Sy Montgomery is an American naturalist, scriptwriter, and bestselling author who writes for children as well as adults. She has been awarded the Children’s Book Guild of Washington, D.C.’s Nonfiction Award for her distinguished body of work.She is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in journalism, French, and psychology. She lives in Hancock New Hampshire with her husband, and of course, lots of animal friends.
Marcia Chatelain — How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington - with Ashley Preston — at Conn Ave
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise comes the untold story of the pioneering Black women artists and activists who were seen, but barely heard, at the 1963 March on Washington“Chatelain teaches us how to tell fuller, truer stories. This is the model for recovering what we have been quick to forget.”—Caleb Gayle, author of Black MosesThere is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day's headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.In How Bright the Path Grows, Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker, civil rights activist Rosa Parks, gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program; and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before.Marcia Chatelain is a Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of South Side Girls (Duke University Press, 2015) and Franchise (Liveright, 2020), which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the James Beard Foundation Book Award, the Hagley Medal for Business History, and the Lawrence Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians. An active public speaker and educational consultant, Chatelain has received awards and honors from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States.Chatelain will be in conversation with Ashley Preston, an author and tenured Associate Professor of History at Howard University. Her past positions include serving as director of the Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation-National Historic Landmark at Bethune-Cookman University while she also was an archives technician for the National Archives for Black Women’s History at the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House-National Historic Site. She is the author of Mary McLeod Bethune in Florida: Bringing Social Justice to the Sunshine State and Mary McLeod Bethune the Pan-Africanist. Dr. Preston's research interests focus on the activism of Black women during the early twentieth century and the ways in which they uplifted their communities, created institutions, and stood against systemic racism.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Michael Lewis and Jacob Weisberg — Blockers and Profiles in Cowardice - with Andrew Sullivan — at St. Paul's
Join us for an evening in conversation with Michael Lewis and Jacob Weisberg for the release of their new books, Blockers and Profiles in Cowardice. Blockers. It wasn’t a compliment. In the new Washington, it was the worst thing you could be—especially if you worked in the federal government and wanted to keep your job. A Blocker was a holdover, an impediment, someone who didn't get the message—and, most of all, someone who didn't belong.Michael Lewis found seven of them.Blockers is the story of people who believed they had a calling, who were convinced they were doing something the country couldn’t do without, and then discovered they were no longer wanted. One kept Americans’ most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands and another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods, another helped uncover the mysteries of cystic fibrosis.There was also a security guard.It should come as no surprise that the writer who made subprime mortgages gripping (The Big Short) and who turned baseball statistics into poetry (Moneyball) could transform the first two years of the second Trump administration into a thriller about federal employees. But he does.And he does something else. He puts before us a clear question: If these public servants can’t survive in government today, then what does that say about us?New York Times best-selling author Michael Lewis has published many books on subjects ranging from politics to Wall Street to sports. Lewis’s most recent book, the #1 New York Times bestseller Going Infinite, told the story of FTX’s collapse and the enigmatic founder at its center, Sam Bankman-Fried. More recently, Lewis edited Who Is Government?, an anthology by an all-star team of writers exploring the consequential work of government workers. Lewis is the creator and host of Apple’s #1-rated podcast Against the Rules, a searing look at what’s happened to fairness in American life through the lens of people who depend on public trust. He grew up in New Orleans and lives in Berkeley, California, with his family. It may be scant solace, but history will be particularly harsh to a subset of Trump enablers with a few key things in common: They have money and power. They represent intuitions that are central in determining whether America remains a free, functioning democracy or not. And they absolutely know better. History starts now.In Profiles in Cowardice, Jacob Weisberg has written one of the first defining books of the Trump Era—how this pitch-black political moment happened, why so few resisted, and what it reveals about the character of American leadership.Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and Big Tech. Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone, and Wall Street. Brad Karp, Paul, Weiss, and Big Law. Mitch McConnell and the United States Senate. Eight individuals in all, together forming an entwined network of power in America, and a new way to understand how authoritarianism can take root in an open society—not by overthrowing institutions, but by bending and bullying them into submission.The book is a masterful study of the ways people create rationalizations to justify basic human instincts such as greed, vanity and fear—above all fear. Fear is the great enemy of democracy, and the book illuminates how it operates, how it disguises itself, and how it spreads. The book is timeless: its profiles are case studies, but they are also mirrors. They ask readers to examine their own instincts, their own silences, their own thresholds for action. This is not a morality tale with easy villains. It is an attempt to describe the moral mechanics of democratic failure. By studying that failure up close, we may better understand what courage truly requires—and why it is so rarely summoned when it matters most.Jacob Weisberg is the author of books including Ronald Reagan (2016), The Bush Tragedy (2008), and In an Uncertain World (2003), co-written with former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin. A native of Chicago, he is the former longtime editor of Slate and the co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries. He serves as Chair of The Committee to Protect Journalists and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. Lewis and Weisberg will be in conversation with Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is the founder and editor of The Weekly Dish, a site launched in 2000, and former editor of both Michael Lewis and Jacob Weisberg at The New Republic.