Our Fall 2014 schedule is under way and we have some amazing authors coming to the Free Library soon including broadcaster and television host Tavis Smiley, philosopher Slavoj Zizek, educator and philosopher Dr. Cornel West, groudnbreaking television writer and producer Norman Lear, queen of the vampire novel, Anne Rice, Academy Award-winning actress Anjelica Huston, and performer and artist extraordinaire Alan Cumming!

View and listen to the Top 10 Author Event Podcasts Downloaded in August 2014.

	"The Best Day of My Life So Far..." Recorded 11/14/2010 Listen to MP3 audio What happens when Philadelphia seniors open up by sharing stories from their lives? On Seniors' Storytelling Day, be ready to smile, laugh and even cry as our city's seniors take the stage to read stories that they have written, and answer questions from the audience. Inspired by her friendship with her grandma, Benita Cooper launched The Best Day of My Life (So Far), a multimedia storytelling project to connect seniors with younger generations. Find out more about the project @ www.thebestdayofmylifesofar.blogspot.com and view a short video of a class in action: www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3ZAb8o0FAg
	Jared Diamond | The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Recorded 1/13/2013 Listen to MP3 audio A globally renowned scholar and recipient of a National Science Medal, Jared Diamond is the author of the bestselling book Guns, Germs and Steel, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. An ecologist and evolutionary biologist, Diamond is a professor of geography and physiology at UCLA and a founding member of the board of the Society of Conservation Biology. His other works include Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Why is Sex Fun?, and The Third Chimpanzee. Informed by his decades of fieldwork around the globe, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, and Kalahari San people, The World Until Yesterday offers a comprehensive depiction of traditional human societies and the practices we can learn from them.
	Richard Dawkins | The God Delusion Recorded 11/2/2006 Listen to MP3 audio The preeminent scientist Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Discover magazine recently dubbed him "Darwin's Rottweiler" for his fierce defense of evolution and Prospect magazine placed him among the top three public intellectuals (with Noam Chomsky and Umberto Eco) worldwide. His award-winning books include The Selfish Gene, in which he first introduced the concept of the "meme," and The Blind Watchmaker, a convincing account of neo-Darwinian theory. In The God Delusion, Dawkins asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has done society, from the Crusades to 9/11.
	Bill Bryson | A Short History of Nearly Everything Recorded 5/20/2003 Listen to MP3 audio Bill Bryson is the bestselling author of wiseacre travelogues A Walk in the Woods and I’m a Stranger Here Myself, as well as excursions into the English language including Mother Tongue and Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words. A Short History of Nearly Everything is an inviting exposition of some of the most difficult ideas designed.
	Rick Perlstein | The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Recorded 8/5/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Rick Perlstein’s bestselling Nixonland, the “sprawling, rollicking” and “fervid” (New York Times Book Review) second volume in a trilogy mapping the political history of conservatism in America, was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2009 by more than a dozen publications. The “hypercaffeinated Herodotus of the American century” (The Nation), Perlstein has written for The New Republic, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, the Washington Post, and many other magazines and newspapers. The Invisible Bridge, the highly anticipated third volume in his trilogy, chronicles the downfall of Nixon and the ascension of Ronald Reagan to the national political arena.
	John Dean | The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It Recorded 7/31/2014 Listen to MP3 audio In The Nixon Defense, former White House Counsel John W. Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate and the chief whistleblower that brought down Nixon’s presidency, draws on his own transcripts of nearly a thousand conversations, a raft of Nixon’s secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to tell the full story of President Nixon’s involvement in Watergate. Dean is the New York Times bestselling author of Blind Ambition, Broken Government, Conservatives Without Conscience, and Worse Than Watergate. In 2006, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating George W. Bush’s NSA warrantless wiretap program.
	Christopher Paolini | Eldest Recorded 8/26/2005 Listen to MP3 audio Christopher Paolini, a precocious, home-schooled teenager from Montana made headline news in 2003 with his debut fantasy novel Eragon. Book one of a planned trilogy, Eragon tells the tale of a fifteen-year-old boy, his blue dragon, Saphira, and their adventures. A #1 New York Times bestseller, the book has been translated into at least 30 languages; the film version of Eragon was released in 2006. Eldest, the second book in the series, follows Eragon and Saphira to Ellesmera, the land of the elves, for further Dragon Rider training.
	Hampton Sides | In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the U.S.S. Jeannette Recorded 8/7/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Hampton Sides is an award-winning editor of Outside and the New York Times bestselling author of the historical books Ghost Soldiers, a World War II story that was the basis for the film The Great Raid; Blood and Thunder, about controversial frontiersman Kit Carson; and Hellhound On His Trail, about the manhunt for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassin, James Earl Ray. His new book In the Kingdom of Ice is a suspenseful Gilded Age story of seafaring, exploration, in the race to the North Pole, the most unforgiving territory on Earth.
	Brando Skyhorse | Take This Man: A Memoir Recorded 7/29/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Determined to give her son everything but the truth of his father or Mexican ancestry, Brando Skyhorse’s mother took the last name of a stranger in prison for armed robbery and created a new identity for her young child as the Native American son of an incarcerated political activist. Acclaimed for his “indelible storytelling” (O, The Oprah Magazine), Skyhorse recounts his turbulent childhood growing up with five stepfathers in his memoir Take This Man. Skyhorse’s debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
	Jennifer Weiner | All Fall Down Recorded 6/19/2014 Listen to MP3 audio This podcast contains explicit content.) Jennifer Weiner is the beloved no. 1 New York Times bestselling author of 10 books, including Good in Bed; In Her Shoes, which was made into a major motion picture starring Cameron Diaz, Shirley MacLaine, and the city of Philadelphia; and The Next Best Thing. Crafted with humor and heart, her novels plumb life’s messiness with witty, relatable characters that face real issues— relationships, careers, family dynamics, and motherhood. In All Fall Down, a successful mother and wife struggles to free herself from addiction and rebuild her family.

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