Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is indisputably one of the "great American novels," yet its length and esoteric subject matter often keep readers at bay. With his trademark enthusiasm, Nathaniel Philbrick skillfully navigates Melville's world and illuminates the book's humor and unforgettable characters, finding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time, and to all times.A great guide for those who've thought about reading Moby-Dick but never have, or for those who can read it multiple times and find something new with each reading, Why Read Moby-Dick? will start conversations, inspire arguments, and bring new readers to a classic tale. Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of numerous bestsellers about American history, including In the Heart of the Sea, winner of the National Book Award, and Mayflower, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the founding director of the Egan Maritime Institute on Nantucket Island and a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association.www.nathanielphilbrick.com 

An annual seminar sponsored by Congressman Elijah E. Cummings.  For parents and teens: sessions include information on various financial assistance programs and scholarship opportunities, the college admissions process, and preparation for the SAT and other assessment tests.Recorded On: Monday, October 17, 2011

1861: The Civil War Awakening chronicles courage and heroism beyond the battlefields and introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes. Adam Goodheart takes us from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the mouth of the Chesapeake to the Nevada deserts, from Boston Commons to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at this moment of ultimate crisis and decision.Adam Goodheart is a historian, essayist, and journalist. He is a regular columnist for the New York Times'  acclaimed Civil War series, "Disunion." He serves as director of the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College. Recorded On: Sunday, October 9, 2011

The Johns Hopkins Center to Reduce Cancer Disparities hosts a symposium, including a panel discussion featuring Augustus A. White, III, M.D. and leaders from Johns Hopkins Disparities Centers. The panel discussion is the beginning of an ongoing dialogue between community members and academic faculty on how to improve cultural competence in health care and eliminate health disparities.Dr. Augustus A. White, III, is the author of Seeing Patients: Unconscious Bias in Health Care. He is Professor of Medical Education and Orthopaedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School and the first African American department chief at Harvard's teaching hospitals. Recorded On: Monday, October 3, 2011

It's time for all of us to consider how we are individually and collectively hindering the achievement of young girls and women. Miss Representation shows how mainstream media outlets contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America. The film challenges the media's limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls, making it difficult for women to achieve leadership positions.Miss Representation includes stories from teenage girls and provocative interviews with politicians, journalists, entertainers, activists and academics. It offers startling facts and statistics that will leave audiences shaken and armed with a new perspective.Panelists include: Rhonda English, My Sister's Place; Lorna Hanley, Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women; Byron Hurt, award-winning filmmaker and anti-sexist activist; Molly McGrath Tierney, Baltimore City Dept. of Social Services; Paula Monopoli, University of Maryland School of Law, Women, Leadership, and Equality Prog

In July 1942, American prisoners of war were performing Julius Caesar on a makeshift stage in Burma at the same time that the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra played the Hippodrome Theatre on Eutaw Street. In June 1944, more than 3,000 U.S. Marines died capturing the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean while fans back in Baltimore were cheering the International League Orioles in their successful bid for a championship.These are just two of the startling juxtapositions that Gilbert Sandler writes about in his account of life on the home front in Baltimore during World War II. Rarely seen photographs from the Baltimore Sun, the News-American, and the Afro-American bring to life the rich, personal anecdotes of wartime Baltimoreans and transport readers back to an indelible era of Baltimore history.Born and raised in Baltimore, and a service member in the Navy during WWII, Gilbert Sandler is author of Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album and the award-winning Small Town Baltimore: An Album of Memories. Sandler hosts

In The Lion of Judah in the New World, Ted Vestal relates how Emperor Haile Selassie helped shape America's image of Africa and how that image continues to evolve in the United States today. Haile Selassie was the first African head of state to be honored with a tickertape parade in New York City and the first to spend the night at the White House. What was it about this charismatic emperor that so captivated Americans and how did he become a symbol of all Africa?Theodore Vestal is professor emeritus of political science at Oklahomas State University, the American university with the longest continual relationship with Ethiopia. He went to Ethiopia as a Peace Corps executive in 1964 and has maintained a scholarly interest in the country and its people ever since. Vestal is the author of International Education: Its History and Promise for Today; Ethiopia: A Post-Cold War African State; and The Eisenhower Court and Civil Liberties. Recorded On: Monday, September 26, 2011

 A few years ago, journalist McKay Jenkins had surgery for a baseball-sized tumor in his abdomen. Before the operation, researchers asked him about his exposure to toxic chemicals like formaldehyde, weed killers, glues, dry cleaning fluids, and plastic meat wraps. He realized he had no idea what he was inadvertently absorbing every day and set out to find out.In What's Gotten Into Us?, Jenkins looks at the dangers of the chemicals present in our daily lives, the way everyday things may be making us sick, and how we can protect ourselves by making wiser, healthier choices.McKay Jenkins is the Tilgman Professor of English and Director of Journalism at the University of Delaware. His previous books include: The Last Ridge, The White Death, and Bloody Falls of the Coppermine. Recorded On: Wednesday, September 21, 2011

In 1826, visionary leader John H. B. Latrobe founded the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts to help meet pressing skilled labor demands of the Industrial Revolution and to provide a cultural center featuring scientific and fine arts exhibitions and Lyceum lectures for Baltimore, the nation's fastest growing urban center at that time. Making History/Making Art: MICA chronicles the people, the events and the turning points in the evolution of this new experiment in education into a premiere college of art internationally and an invaluable community and cultural resource known today simply as MICA.A graduate of Trinity College (CT), Doug Frost joined the senior administration of Maryland Institute College of Art in 1966 after obtaining an MA in HIstory from Yale. When he became Vice President for Development, Emeritus in 2006, he began researching and writing the College's history.Presented in partnership with the Maryland Historical Society.   Recorded On: Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Dr. Michelle Gourdine, physician and author of Reclaiming Our Health: A Guide to African American Wellness, and Dr. Thomas LaVeist, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Disparities Solutions, discuss the inequities that exist in our current medical care system and offer solutions for change.Dr. Gourdine is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and senior associate faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.Dr. LaVeist is the William C. and Nancy F. Richardson Professor in Health Policy and Director of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Recorded On: Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The 2011 Mencken Memorial Lecture,  "The Literary Journalist in the Era of H. L. Mencken: Vincent Starrett, Christopher Morley, and Clifton Fadiman," is presented by Michael Dirda, book columnist for the Washington Post.Michael Dirda received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. A graduate of Oberlin College, he received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell University. Dirda is the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book and Classics for Pleasure. His latest book, On Conan Doyle, will be published this fall by Princeton University Press. Recorded On: Saturday, September 10, 2011

Barack Obama, father of the American president, was part of Africa's "independence generation." In 1959 it seemed his star would shine brightly: he came to the U.S. from Kenya on a university scholarship. In Hawaii, he met Ann Dunham and his son Barack was born. He left his young family to study for a Master's degree from Harvard.Obama was a brilliant economist, yet never held the coveted government job he felt should have been his. He was a polygamist, an alcoholic, and an ardent African nationalist unafraid to tell truth to power at a time when that could get you killed. Father of eight, nurturer of none, he was an unlikely person to father the first African American president of the United States. Yet he was, like that son, a man moved by the dream of a better world. Through dozens of exclusive new interviews, prodigious research, and determined investigation, Sally Jacobs tells his story.Sally Jacobs has been a reporter for more than three decades, most recently with The Boston Globe.  Recorded On: Monday

As part of the Mencken Society annual meeting, Peter Mallios, associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, presents "H. L. Mencken, 'Foreign' Literature, and the Invention of Free Speech in Modern America."   He is the author of Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity. Recorded On: Saturday, September 10, 2011

Emerging from the funky blue-collar Baltimore that gave rise to Edgar Allan Poe, H. L. Mencken, Frank Zappa, and John Waters, Gus Russo nurtured an endless curiosity by inserting himself into the worlds of music, tennis, politics, and filmmaking. Boomer Days chronicles his memories of  the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, the golden ages of tennis and music, and the rise of the counterculture. Gus Russo is a veteran investigative reporter, musician, and author. He has written six books, including Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder (coauthor: Stephen Molton), which won the 2008 History Prize at the New York Book Festival. Recorded On: Thursday, September 8, 2011

Now in his 11th season in the NFL, Dhani Jones has had an unusually long career for a football player. Just a few years ago, however, Dhani thought his playing days were over. Cut by the Eagles and the Saints, he was at a professional crossroads. When the Bengals called, though, he was more than ready and in the best shape of his life. And for that, he credits his off-season.The Sportsman follows Dhani's discovery that the parts of his life that, to many, seemed to be distractions -- including an off-season TV show that sent him around the world to learn and compete in other sports -- actually served to cross-train him in ways he'd never imagined. It made him more grounded, globally aware and, most surprisingly, a much better football player. Part travelogue, part workout guide, The Sportsman is an invigorating account of Dhani's global sporting adventures and the lessons he has learned along the way. From dragon boat racing in Singapore to carrying 300-pound rocks in Iceland to biking in Italy, Dhani's adven

Thad Roberts, a fellow in NASA's prestigious Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, had a romantic, albeit crazy, idea: he wanted to give his girlfriend the moon. Roberts convinced his girlfriend, also a NASA fellow, and another female accomplice to break into an impregnable lab at NASA's headquarters and help him steal the most precious objects in the world: the moon rocks.To get to the lunar vault, Thad and his accomplices would have to go through the high-security entrance of Building 31, the most protected structure at the Johnson Space Center, wind their way past a half dozen additional checkpoints until they came to an electronically-locked steel door with cipher security codes and monitored by a camera-lined hallway. The safe where the moon rocks were stored was labeled "Trash" and was something out of a Swiss bank: three-feet thick made out of steel with an enormous combination wheel that took at least two people to turn.Against all odds, the team made a clean get-away (at 5 mph no less, the compound's inflexib

After World War I, black Americans fervently hoped for a new epoch of peace, prosperity, and equality. Black soldiers believed their participation in the fight to make the world safe for democracy finally earned them rights they had been promised since the close of the Civil War.Instead, an unprecedented wave of anti-black riots and lynchings swept the country. From April to November of 1919, the racial unrest rolled across the South into the North and the Midwest, even to the nation's capital. Millions of lives were disrupted, and hundreds of lives were lost. Blacks responded by fighting back with an intensity and determination never seen before.Red Summer is the first narrative history written about this epic encounter. Focusing on the worst riots and lynchings -- including those in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Charleston, Omaha and Knoxville -- Cameron McWhirter chronicles the mayhem, while also exploring the first stirrings of a civil rights movement that would transform American society 40 years later.Came

In 2008, Elizabeth Warren took leave from her job teaching bankruptcy at Harvard Law School to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street banks. In 2010 Congress passed legislation to overhaul how the financial industry is regulated, and President Obama named Warren to a special position helping set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.Professor Warren has most recently served as the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard. She was the Chief Adviser to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission and was appointed by Chief Justice Rehnquist as the first academic member of the Federal Judicial Education Committee. She has served as a member of the Commission on Economic Inclusion established by the FDIC. She served as Vice-President of the American Law Institute and has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Warren has written nine books and more than a hundred scholarly articles dealing with credit and economic stress. He

Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon 's two families -- the public one and the secret one. When the two teenage daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered.Tayari Jones is the author of two award-winning novels, Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling. She holds degrees from Spelman College, Arizona State University, and the University of Iowa. She is on the MFA faculty at Rutgers.www.tayarijones.com Recorded On: Monday, June 27, 2011

Following his award-winning work on inner-city violence, Code of the Street, sociologist Elijah Anderson introduces the concept of the "cosmopolitan canopy" -- the urban island of civility that exists amidst the ghettos, suburbs, and ethnic enclaves where segregation is the norm. Under the cosmopolitan canopy, diverse peoples come together, and for the most part practice getting along. Anderson's study of this setting provides a new understanding of the complexities of present-day race relations and reveals the unique opportunities here for cross-cultural interaction.With compelling, meticulous descriptions of public spaces in Philadelphia -- 30th Street Station, Reading Terminal Market, Rittenhouse Square -- and quasi-public places like the modern-day workplace, Anderson provides a rich narrative account of how blacks and whites relate and redefine the color line in everyday public life.Elijah Anderson holds the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professorship in Sociology at Yale University, where he teaches and direct