Tommy Orange’s There There is an extraordinary portrait of America like we’ve never seen before. Orange, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma who grew up in Oakland, brings an exhilaratingly fresh, urgent, and poetic voice to the disorienting experiences of urban Indians who struggle with the paradoxes of inhabiting traditions in the absence of a homeland, living both inside and outside of history. In his debut bestselling novel, a cast of 12 Native American characte...
Sep 21, 2018•59 min
Miriam Pawel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of the definitive biography, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, continues to chronicle the fascinating history of California and the exceptional people who have shaped our state. In Pawel’s newest work, she demystifies transformative moments of California history—from the Gold Rush to Silicon Valley—as she considers the significant impact of one family dynasty. Beginning with Pat Brown, the beloved father who presided over California duri...
Sep 18, 2018•56 min
On the centenary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, comes a new portrait of one of the most inspiring historical figures of the twentieth century. Arrested in 1962 as South Africa’s apartheid regime intensified its brutal campaign against political opponents, forty-four-year-old lawyer and African National Congress activist Nelson Mandela had no idea that he would spend the next twenty-seven years in jail. During his 10,052 days of incarceration, Mandela wrote hundreds of letters to unyielding prison au...
Jul 25, 2018•1 hr 16 min
In the 1970’s Bruce Lee captivated African American audiences with his stylish and philosophical kung fu movies. Lee was a rarity—a non-white leading man fighting oppression, crime, and racism at a time when there were still signs that read: “No dogs or Chinese Allowed” and “Whites Only.” Through the physical, mental, and spiritual embodiment of martial arts, Lee modeled an intense pride in his own cultural heritage that was an inspiration to all people of color—especially young African American...
Jul 18, 2018•1 hr 28 min
The dramatic story of the Flint water crisis is one of the signature environmental disasters of our time—and at the heart of this tragedy is an inspiring tale of scientific resistance by a relentless physician and whistleblower who stood up to power. What the Eyes Don’t See is the personal story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha—accompanied by an idiosyncratic team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders—proved that Flint’s kids were exposed to lead despite the state’s assurance that...
Jul 12, 2018•1 hr 10 min
The New York Times bestselling memoir Heart Berries is the powerful, poetic meditation of a woman’s coming-of-age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailh...
Jun 29, 2018•1 hr 19 min
For most of the twentieth century, politics and sports were as separate as church and state. Today, with the transformation of a fueled American patriotism, sports and politics have become increasingly more entwined. However, as sports journalist Howard Bryant explores in his new book, this has always been more complicated for black athletes, who from the start, were committing a political act simply by being on the field. Bryant’s new book The Heritage traces the influences of the radical polit...
Jun 20, 2018•1 hr 20 min
Between his tenure as the director of the FBI from 2013 to 2017 under the appointment of President Obama, to his roles as the U.S Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the United States Deputy Attorney General in the administration of President George W. Bush, James Comey has been involved in some of the most consequential cases and policies of recent history. On the occasion of his new book following his highly contentious firing, Comey will take the ALOUD stage and share for the f...
May 25, 2018•1 hr 6 min
From the author of several collections of poetry and memoirs, including the New York Times "Notable Book of the Year" Planet of the Blind, Stephen Kuusisto discusses his latest book, Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey, a lyrical love letter and "a dog-driven invitation to living full forward." Born legally blind, Kuusisto was raised in the 1950s before the Americans with Disability Act and was taught to deny his blindness in order to "pass" as sighted. For most of his life, he coped with hi...
May 25, 2018•1 hr 8 min
What happens when you take on the establishment? Renowned economist and former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis gives a blistering account of his momentous clash with the mightiest economic and political forces on earth when he attempted to re-negotiate Greece’s relationship with the EU in 2015, sparking a spectacular battle with global implications. In a special lunchtime talk, Varoufakis offers an inside look at an extraordinary story fueled by hypocrisy and betrayal that shook the...
May 18, 2018•1 hr 1 min
Greece’s former finance minister, international bestselling author, and an activist working for the revival of democracy in Europe, Yanis Varoufakis pens a series of letters to his young daughter, educating her about the business, politics, and corruption of world economics. In this intimate new book, written to his teenage daughter, Varoufakis uses clear language and vivid examples to explain heady economic theories, the historical origins of inequality, and our rising global instability. Join ...
May 18, 2018•1 hr 16 min
From the twice National Book Award–nominated and bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner offers a heart-stopping new novel, The Mars Room, that straddles the inside—and outside—of protagonist Romy Hall’s reality: an inmate beginning two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley, where “you do not see a single star.” With great humor and precision, Kushner moves between Hall’s polar worlds: the severed world of her p...
May 11, 2018•1 hr 3 min
Two of the world’s greatest living poets come together for a rare Los Angeles reading and conversation. The work of Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet Laureate and long-time translator of Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz, speaks to us of love and loss, of the hopefulness and the limitations of intimacy, of our humanness laid bare in the midst of art, the natural world, and each other. His most recent essay collection, A Little Book on Form, illuminates the impulses that underlie great poetry. Adam Zagaj...
Apr 25, 2018•1 hr 26 min
In a special Los Angeles visit, human rights activists Robert King and Albert Woodfox, the two surviving members of the Angola 3, known for having served the longest solitary confinement sentences in U.S. history, share their remarkable story of survival and advocacy. As comrades inside Louisiana State Penitentiary—the largest prison in the U.S. and former slave plantation known as "Angola"—they jointly established a chapter of the Black Panther Party within the prison and led peaceful non-viole...
Apr 10, 2018•1 hr 19 min
New York Times bestselling author Mohsin Hamid returns to ALOUD to discuss his latest novel Exit West, a visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands. Infusing the stark reality of a refugee narrative with the hopeful fantasy of a fairy tale, Exit West follows the journey of two young lovers who flee an unnamed country on the brink of civil war through a magical door that transports them to other places. A profo...
Apr 03, 2018•1 hr 17 min
During his long tenure on the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia—engaging as well as caustic and openly ideological—moved the Court to the right. In this eye-opening new book, legal scholar Richard L. Hasen analyzes Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s complex legacy as a conservative legal thinker and disruptive public intellectual who was crucial to reshaping jurisprudence on issues from abortion to gun rights to separation of powers. Hasen is joined by Erwin Chemerinsky in a special lunchtime co...
Mar 29, 2018•56 min
"What if, for once in history, a woman’s story could be untethered from what we need it to be in order to feel better about ourselves?" writes visionary author Lidia Yuknavitch in her latest work, The Book of Joan. In this provocatively reimagined Joan of Arc story set in the near future, the world is ravaged by war, violence, and greed, and it brings into question art, sex, gender, and what it means to be human. Amber Tamblyn, widely known for her work as a director and actress, including her r...
Mar 14, 2018•1 hr 2 min
In his new book, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler offers a revelatory portrait of how U.S. corporations have seized political power over time. He traces the 200-year effort of pro-business court decisions that give corporations the same rights as people and details the deep historical roots of recent landmark cases like Citizens United and Hobby Lobby. For a special lunchtime conversation, Winkler discusses with author Rick Wartzman of the Drucker Institute how businesses have transformed the Con...
Mar 09, 2018•58 min
For award-winning writer and former agent for the United States Border Patrol Francisco Cantú, the border is in his blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. His new book, The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches from the Border, is haunted by the stories he experienced both while working for the Border Patrol—where he hauled in the dead and delivered to detention those he found alive—and also as a civilian after he abandoned...
Feb 22, 2018•1 hr 13 min
What moved humans to create cultures—intelligent systems including the arts, morality, science, government, and technology? The answer to this question has typically been the human faculty of language, but preeminent neuroscientist, professor, and director of USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute Antonio Damasio argues that feelings―of pain and suffering or of anticipated pleasure―were the prime engines that stirred human intellect in the cultural direction. In his newest book The Strange Order o...
Feb 07, 2018•1 hr 9 min
Bassem Youssef, a satirist who rose to international fame in the middle of the Egyptian Revolution with his incendiary brand of comedy and his knack for unabashedly mocking dictators, has been dubbed “the Jon Stewart of the Arabic world.” In his new book, Revolution for Dummies: Laughing Through the Arab Spring, Youssef chronicles his transformation from a heart surgeon who filmed YouTube skits in the laundry room of his home to the host and creator of the popular Egyptian television show, AlBer...
Feb 01, 2018•59 min
Because of its similar celebration of the beauty of the natural world and focus on compactness, contemporary Zapotec-language poetry shares much in common with the Japanese haiku. Poet Víctor Terán—who’s performed his work from Oaxaca to London—will share some of his translations of the Japanese masters of the form alongside his own original Zapotec haiku, and American poet Jane Hirshfield will discuss both the haiku form and the way that the natural world informs her own work. The program will ...
Jan 24, 2018•1 hr 32 min
Winner of a 2017 Pulitzer Prize, historian Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on the infamous 1971 Attica Prison riot as one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century. Chronicling the horrific conditions that led to 1,300 prisoners taking over the upstate New York correctional facility and how the state violently retook the prison—killing thirty-nine men and severely wounding more than a hundred others—Blood in the Water also confronts the gruesome aftermath. From brutal r...
Jan 19, 2018•1 hr 10 min
Last fall’s presidential election brought a range of impassioned voices to the national stage, but one of the most captivating speakers rose above petty politics with a deeply personal and very different view of what it means to be American. You may recall the Muslim parent Khizr Khan from the DNC when he spoke about his son, a U.S. Army Captain who was killed while protecting his base camp in Iraq. In Khan’s inspiring new book, An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice, he reflects on ...
Dec 08, 2017•1 hr 13 min
What lies at the heart of humanity’s ability―and drive―to create? New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientist David Eagleman teams up with internationally acclaimed composer and Associate Professor at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music Anthony Brandt in a wide-ranging exploration of human creativity. In their new book, The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, the pair studies hundreds of examples of human creativity from landing on the moon to paintings by Pi...
Dec 06, 2017•55 min
Why has our society become so punitive? In recent years, critics have assailed the rise of mass incarceration, emphasizing its disproportionate impact on people of color. However, many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers supported the war on crime that began in the 1970s. James Forman, Jr., a professor of law at Yale Law School and former D.C. public defender, wrestles with the complexities of race and the criminal justice system in his new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and ...
Nov 30, 2017•1 hr 20 min
L.A.’s own Janet Fitch, the mega-bestselling author of White Oleander and Paint It Black, returns to ALOUD with her newest work, a sweeping historical saga of the Russian Revolution. Beginning on New Year’s Eve in 1916 St. Petersburg, The Revolution of Marina M. follows the mesmerizing coming-of-age story of a young woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life, a life about to be violently upended by the vast forces of history. Joining Fitch to discuss this e...
Nov 17, 2017•50 min
The program is conducted in both Spanish and English. Anthropologists have traced the Meso-American acceptance of people of mixed gender back to pre-Columbian Mexico accounts of Aztec priests and Mayan gods who cross-dressed and were considered both male and female. In the shifting landscape of gender identity, what might we learn from the indigenous Zapotec people of Oaxaca’s isthmus region, who embrace a third gender—the muxe—within their communities? Zackary Drucker, transgender multimedia ar...
Nov 15, 2017•1 hr 9 min
Join us for an evening celebrating indigenous poetry from the United States and Mexico with three major poets—Natalie Diaz (member of the Mojave and Pima Indian tribes, winner of the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, language activist, and educator), Layli Long Soldier (an Oglala Lakota poet, writer, and artist whose debut poetry collection Whereas is short-listed for the National Book Award), and Natalia Toledo (a Mexican poet and translator who writes in Spanish and Zapotec and won...
Nov 10, 2017•1 hr 13 min
Caitlin Doughty, a mortician, best-selling author, blogger, YouTube personality, and director of the nonprofit funeral home, Undertaking LA, has long been fascinated by death, what it means to treat the dead with dignity, and why we are so afraid of dead bodies. Her new book, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, sets out on a global journey to discover how other cultures care for their dead. With curiosity and morbid humor, Doughty encounters a range of rituals from...
Nov 02, 2017•1 hr 7 min
