Famous Reading Cafe's Podcast

Harrisburg Hope community forum with Mayor LindaThompson

Occupy Harrisburg presents activist Bill Ayers for a free public lecture.

Occupy Harrisburg presents activist Bill Ayers for a free public lecture.

State Senator Jeffrey Piccola
Dauphin County Commissioner Michael Pries
City Council Attorney Mark Schwartz

Community Starts Here:
Harrisburg Hope a grassroots political organization that seeks to empower all voices within our community. We respect our neighbors’ concerns as much as our own, and seek to listen before we speak. We seek to facilitate civil discussion of our shared interests, and to translate those talks into practical policy recommendations. We may not always agree on the best way forward, but we will always seek to find common ground.

State Senator Jeffrey Piccola
Dauphin County Commissioner Michael Pries
City Council Attorney Mark Schwartz

Community Starts Here:
Harrisburg Hope a grassroots political organization that seeks to empower all voices within our community. We respect our neighbors’ concerns as much as our own, and seek to listen before we speak. We seek to facilitate civil discussion of our shared interests, and to translate those talks into practical policy recommendations. We may not always agree on the best way forward, but we will always seek to find common ground.

John Biewen and Joe Richman will share their own stories and lead a wide-ranging, interactive discussion. Their multimedia presentation will feature audio clips from the past fifteen years of “Radio Diaries,” a National Public Radio standout that works with teenagers, seniors, prison inmates and others whose voices are rarely heard to document their lives and share their powerful stories. The works of Ira Glass, Radio Lab, and other public radio storytellers will be examined and audience questions will, as always, be encouraged.

Christine Goldbeck discusses the best-selling 1949 novel A Rage to Live.
An award-winning writer and artist, Goldbeck is the author of a short-story collection entitled A Tribute to O’Hara and Other Stories (2000). She has lectured on how “All Writing is Regional” at centennial celebrations for John O’Hara, and she developed Pennsylvania high school curriculum materials on how “O’Hara Works Endure Time, Criticism.” The owner of Arts on Union in Middletown, PA, since 1989, Goldbeck received an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. As Executive Director of the PA House of Representatives’ Urban Affairs Committee, she daily tackles issues like land reform, blight, urban planning, housing, and poverty. She has extensively examined how living in Pennsylvania inspired John O’Hara’s stories:
"O’Hara did for northeastern Pennsylvania, and particularly the hard coal region, what writers before him, such as Sherwood Anderson, who wrote “Winesburg, Ohio” had done; he recorded the social history of a place and time. In addition to Schuylkill County, he also wrote New York City, Hollywood, and Pennsylvania’s Dauphin County, home to Harrisburg, the state capital, which O’Hara named Fort Penn, into his novels. His stories are social history lessons that chronicle the lives and times of people in the early part of the 20th century. To read O’Hara is to know, beyond doubt, what people wore, where they worked and how much they earned, to which clubs they belonged, what kinds of automobiles they drove and what games they played."

www.oboc.org

On Sunday, Nov. 13, Penn-State Harrisburg Professor Michael Barton, who transcribed and edited Beers’s original newspaper columns with his graduate students, will offer a keynote lecture in tribute to Paul Beers and his extraordinary contributions to our understanding of past and present, through a lifetime of lively and provocative reporting.

On Sunday, Nov. 13, as part of the 2nd Annual Harrisburg Book Festival, the newly-inaugurated Midtown Scholar Press celebrated the release of an exceptional book: City Contented, City Discontented: A History of Modern Harrisburg, in which award-winning journalist Paul Beers (1931-2011) reveals how contemporary Harrisburg came to be what it is.

In a masterful series of essays, Beers charts the capital’s development from a City Beautiful, with its celebrated public spaces and premier educational institutions, through the fractures of race riots and the catastrophic challenges of flood and near nuclear meltdown. Beers employs the well-honed skills of a veteran reporter to craft fascinating character sketches of prominent leaders and humble citizens alike – intertwining their dramatic personal stories with a compelling survey of the region’s society, politics, and culture in the twentieth century.

On Sunday, Nov. 13 – in recognition of what would have been Beers’s 80th birthday – a panel of distinguished historians, journalists and politicians will participate in a roundtable discussion on “Paul Beers’s Life and Legacy” at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore. Particpants will include Philadelphia Daily News political columnist John Baer, Patriot-News Executive Editor Cate Barron, the Hummelstown Sun’s Bill Jackson, acclaimed Harrisburg historian Calobe Jackson, the Dauphin County Historical Society’s Ken Frew (author of Building Harrisburg: The Architects and Builders 1791-1941), the Pennsylvania State Archives’ Linda Ries (author of Images of America: Harrisburg), longtime Harrisburg City Treasurer Paul P. Wambach, and other special guests.

Author Jackson Taylor in conversation at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore

Based on the life of the author's own grandmother and written after almost three hundred interviews with those involved in the real-life scandal, The Blue Orchard is as elegant and moving as it is exact and convincing. It is a dazzling portrayal of the changes America underwent in the first fifty years of the twentieth century. Readers will be swept into a time period that in many ways mirrors our own. Verna Krone's story is ultimately a story of the indomitable nature of the human spirit-and a reminder that determination and self-education can defy the deforming pressures that keep women and other disenfranchised groups down.

This is a lecture given by Dr. Bill Ayers at the Famous Reading Cafe, on Saturday February 27th. The talk is entitled "Education in and for Democracy: The Case for Social Justice in the Classroom."