From royalty to refugee
Now that millions of people are seeking refuge from the war-torn Middle East, it’s instructive to read the memoir of a Hudson Valley resident who spent her early childhood in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II.
Books
Design*Sponge founder Grace Bonney and creative entrepreneurs to host book talk at Rhinecliff library
Featured speakers at the event include a graphic designer, two restaurateurs, an interior designer and an emerging-business consultant.
Back Rooms, a stark reminder of the days before legal abortion
“There’s an entirely new generation or two who have no idea what it was like in the days of the wire hangers and back-alley abortions.”
Woodstock attorney donates extraordinary book collection to Bard
Bard College librarian Helene Tieger’s hands, gloved in blue latex, place the 1556 copy of the Magna Carta on blocks that will support it with minimal stress on the spine. With infinite gentleness, she opens it to display a pair of pages. I can’t read the Latin, but my mind is boggled by the idea that I’m looking, in person, at a world-changing text printed four and half centuries ago.
Book Review: The Fall Guy
The Fall Guy is a thriller that belongs on the literary top shelf with Graham Greene and Charles McCarry, a thriller in the way Henry James’s “The Turn Of The Screw” is a ghost story. The thrills it offers are those of narrative and philosophy.
Joe Donahue interviews Alan Cumming onstage at Bard this Sunday
The legendary actor/singer/ writer Alan Cumming will talk with WAMC’s Joe Donahue about his new collection of photographs accompanied by autobiographical essays, You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams: My Life in Stories and Pictures.
Slide lecture on Borscht Belt history at SUNY-New Paltz
Photographer Marisa Scheinfeld, who grew up in the Catskills, has been haunting what remains of the Borscht Belt – resorts that lie in ruins, are abandoned, converted into something else or in a few cases still operating – capturing large-scale color images of lobbies, pools, dining rooms, guestrooms, showrooms and stages.
New Paltz communally reads $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
One Book/One New Paltz, the annual joint community reading and discussion experience, returns to town with a week’s worth of activities from November 13 to 20. But this year it’s going to be a little different: Instead of the usual novel, the book selected by the One Book/One New Paltz Committee is a sobering non-fictional account of the lives of people living in extreme poverty.
Elizabeth Lesser discusses Marrow: A Love Story in Woodstock & Rhinebeck
When Elizabeth Lesser learned that she was the only person who could offer life-saving bone marrow to her sister Maggie, she didn’t hesitate. The story of their experience is chronicled in her latest memoir.
New book by local historians tracks slavery in the Hudson Valley
“Ulster County was one of the worst [counties] in the state. There’s only one person so far in this county that I’ve been able to identify as an abolitionist. Even the Quakers didn’t want to let go of their slaves.”