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Winter-Early Spring 2016 Friends of the UNCG Libraries Events: A Preview

Monday, January 25: “The Impact of World War II on Segregation,” a lecture by Peter Golden, author of Wherever There is Light, which explores the rescue German–Jewish professors from the Nazis by traditionally African-American colleges and the birth of the modern civil rights movement.
4 p.m.  Hodges Reading Room, Second Floor Jackson Library. FREE.

Tuesday, February 9:  “Michelle Obama: First Lady, American Rhetor” presentation by UNCG faculty authors Jody Natalle and Jenni Simon.  4 p.m. Hodges Reading Room, Jackson Library 2nd floor, UNCG.  FREE.

Monday, February 22: Friends of the UNCG Libraries Book Discussion - Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley, led by Karen Weyler of the English Department.
7 p.m. Hodges Reading Room, Jackson Library 2nd floor, UNCG.  FREE.

Monday, March 14: Friends of the UNCG Libraries Book Discussion - Black Dogs by Ian McEwan, led by Keith Gorman of the University Libraries.
4 p.m. Hodges Reading Room, Jackson Library 2nd floor, UNCG.  FREE

Tuesday, March 22: Friends of the UNCG Libraries Annual Dinner, "An Evening with Author Chris Bohjalian."
6 p.m. Cone Ballroom, Elliott University Center, UNCG.  FEE.  Beginning December 1, tickets are on sale from Triad Stage by calling 336-272-0160.

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The upcoming events calendar of the Friends of the UNCG Libraries culminates with the March 22 visit of author Chris Bohjalian, who has published 18 books, most of which were New York Times bestsellers. Three became movies.  His newest novel, arriving in January, is The Guest Room, a story of human trafficking, a party gone horribly wrong, and a marriage in crisis.  The paperback of his most recent novel, Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, was published in May. He is perhaps best known for The Sandcastle Girls, a journey that travels the terrain of his Armenian heritage, making it his most personal novel to date.

Tickets for the Friends Dinner may be purchased by calling Triad Stage at 336-272-0160.  Sponsored tables are available for groups wishing to show their support for the University Libraries and must be reserved by March 1.  For individuals who want to attend the dinner and the program, reservations must be made by March 15.  Program only tickets will be available as long as they last.

Other events on the January-March Friends calendar are all free.  We inform local bookstores, including the UNCG Book Store, Barnes and Noble, and Scuppernong Books, of the books we are highlighting.

Visiting author Peter Golden will speak on the topic, ““The Impact of World War II on Segregation.” He will also promote his new book, Wherever There Is Light, which follows the intertwined lives of two families from the late 1930s until the mid-1960s—the Roses, who are Jewish and have fled Nazi Germany, and the Wakefields, a wealthy African American family that has founded a historically black college on the site of the former plantation where the maternal grandfather had been born a slave.

UNCG faculty members Jody Natalle and Jenni Simon will discuss their book, Michelle Obama: First Lady, American Rhetor, an edited anthology exploring the persona and speech-making of the country’s first African American first lady from a rhetorical and cultural point of view.

Book discussions will examine: 1) the autobiography of a woman born a slave who later worked for Mary Todd Lincoln in the White House; and 2) Ian McEwan’s novel Black Dogs, set in the aftermath of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall.  As a 1992 review in the NY Times put it: “The black dogs that give Ian McEwan's novel its evocative title come from the name that Winston Churchill once bestowed on his depressions. As used by Mr. McEwan's heroine, however, they signify something larger and more menacing: evil, darkness, irrationality, "civilization's worst moods." They give Mr. McEwan a metaphor by which he can turn a fictional family memoir into an elliptical meditation on Europe's past and future.”

For more information or to request  disability accommodations, please contact Barry Miller at 336-256-0112 or barry_miller@uncg.edu


We invite you to join the Friends of the UNCG Libraries today at http://tinyurl.com/qjdzc2v.


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