Page 15 - Program 2018
P. 15

Hamilton v. Burr                                                                What If You Had to Spend the Rest of Your Life in a
      H.W. Brands, Elizabeth                                                          Luxury Hotel?
      Cobbs and Nancy Isenberg                                                        Amor Towles
      Wednesday 1–1:45 pm                                                             Wednesday 1–1:45 pm
      Walt Disney Room                                                                Joan Didion Room

      The duel between former Secretary                                               In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a
      of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton                                              Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel
      and  Vice President Aaron Burr is                                               across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and
      the most famous duel in American                                                wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while
      history. On July 11, 1804, the two                                              some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside
      political rivals met on a dueling                                               the hotel’s doors. Join Amor Towles, author of the best-selling novel A Gentleman
      ground in Weehawken, New Jersey.                                                in Moscow, as he shares his inspiration for Count Rostov’s extraordinary story.
      The rest, as they say, is history. Our
      esteemed panelists  H.W. Brands,
      Elizabeth  Cobbs   and   Nancy
      Isenberg will revisit that infamous
      day in our nation’s young history and
      take a closer look at that event from
      a 21st century historian’s perspective.

                                        I’m Down
                                        Mishna Wolff
                                        Wednesday 1–1:45 pm
                                        Anne Rice Room

                                        Mishna Wolff grew up in a poor black
                                        neighborhood with her single father, a white
                                        man who truly believed he was black. “He
                                        strutted around with a short perm, gold
                                        chains and a Kangol—telling jokes like Redd
                                        Fox, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson. You                                 “Fate would not have
                                        couldn’t tell my father he was white. Believe                                  the reputation it has if it
                                        me, I tried,” writes Wolff. And so from early                                  simply did what it seemed
                                        childhood on, her father began his crusade
                                        to make his white daughter  down. Wolff’s                                      it would do.”
                                        story is both hysterical and poignant. It                                      — Amor Towles,
                                        will have you howling with laughter, and                                       A Gentleman in Moscow
                                        questioning what it means to be black and
                                        white in America.
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