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Acclaimed Author and Illustrator
Kadir Nelson
discusses his new book WE ARE THE SHIP
The Story of Negro League Baseball
Introduced by noted
baseball historian Bill Swank
Special appearance by Negro League Pitcher Walter McCoy
Saturday, May 24, 7pm

The story of Negro League baseball is the story of gifted
athletes and determined owners; of racial discrimination and international sportsmanship; of fortunes won and lost; of triumphs
and defeats on and off the field. It is a perfect mirror for the social and political history of black America
in the first half of the twentieth century. But most of all, the story of the Negro Leagues is about hundreds of unsung heroes
who overcame segregation, hatred, terrible conditions, and low pay to do the one thing they loved more than anything else
in the world: play ball.
Using
an "Everyman" player as his narrator, Kadir Nelson tells the story of Negro League baseball from its beginnings
in the 1920s through its decline after Jackie Robinson crossed over to the majors in 1947. The voice is so authentic, you
will feel as if you are sitting on dusty bleachers listening intently to the memories of a man who has known the great ballplayers
of that time and shared their experiences. But what makes this book so outstanding are the dozens of full-page and double-page
oil paintings, breathtaking in their perspectives, rich in emotion, and created with understanding and affection for these
lost heroes of our national game.
Kadir
Nelson’s commissions from publishers and production studios include Dreamworks, where he served as the lead conceptual artist for Steven Spielberg’s Amistad
and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,
Sports Illustrated, Coca-Cola, The United States Postal Service and Major League
Baseball, among others. In 1999, Nelson began to collaborate with several notable authors on a series of picture books. Presently,
almost twenty illustrated books are in print, including Debbie Allen's Dancing in the
Wings, Ntozake Shange’s Coretta Scott King Award-winning book, Ellington
Was Not a Street, Deloris and Roslyn Jordan's best-seller Salt in his Shoes: Michael
Jordan in Pursuit of a Dream, Spike and Tonya Lee’s Please, Baby, Please,
and Carol Boston Weatherford’s Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom,
for which Nelson won a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, a Caldecott Honor and an NAACP Image Award.
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UCSD Professor of Music
Jann Pasler
will discuss her critically acclaimed book Writing
Through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics
Saturday, May 31 , 7pm

Drawing on a passion for music, a remarkably diverse interdisciplinary toolbox,
and a gift for accessible language that speaks equally to scholars and the general public, Jann Pasler invites us to read
as she writes "through" music, unveiling the forces that affect our sonic encounters. In an extraordinary collection of historical
and critical essays, some appearing for the first time in English, Pasler deconstructs the social, moral, and political preoccupations
lurking behind aesthetic taste. Arguing that learning from musical experience is vital to our understanding of past, present,
and future, Pasler's work trenchantly reasserts the role of music as a crucial contributor to important public debates about
who we can be as individuals, communities, and nations. The author's wide-ranging and perceptive approaches to musical biography
and history challenge us to rethink our assumptions about important cultural and philosophical issues including national identity
and postmodern musical hybridity, material culture, the economics of power, and the relationship between classical and popular
music. Her work uncovers the self-fashioning of modernists such as Vincent d'Indy, Augusta Holmes, Jean Cocteau, and John
Cage, and addresses categories such as race, gender, and class in the early 20th century in ways that resonate with experiences
today. She also explores how music uses time and constructs narrative. Pasler's innovative and influential methodological
approaches, such as her notion of "question-spaces," open up the complex cultural and political networks in which music participates.
This provides us with the reasons and tools to engage with music in fresh and exciting ways.
In
these thoughtful essays, music--whether beautiful or cacophonous, reassuring or seemingly incomprehensible--comes alive as
a bearer of ideas and practices that offers deep insights into how we negotiate the world. Here, Jann Pasler's Writing Through Music brilliantly demonstrates how music can be a critical
lens to focus the contemporary critical, cultural, historical, and social issues of our time.
Jann Pasler , music scholar, documentary filmmaker, and pianist,
is Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego where she founded the graduate program, Critical Studies and Experimental Practices
(CSEP). She has published widely on French music, contemporary American music, modernism, and postmodernism. She recently
completed Music as Public Utility, the first volume of her trilogy, Useful Music, or Why Music Mattered in Third
Republic France forthcoming
from University of California Press, and
is currently working on Music, Race, and Colonialism in Fin-de-siècle
France
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Judge Norbert Ehrenfreund
will discuss his critically acclaimed book
The Nuremberg Legacy:
How the Nazi War Crimes Trials
Changed the Course of History
Saturday , June 14, 7pm

Sixty years have passed since the Nuremberg trials of the major Nazi war criminals, but that
event still stands as the foundation of international justice. Nuremberg
not only ignited a revolution in international law but affected domestic law as well with its simple but profound principle
that every individual accused of crime is entitled to a full and fair hearing. This book reveals how the precedents set at
Nuremberg have affected human rights, race relations, medical practice, big business and even
Germany's post-war development. It also
examines the Nuremberg trials' influence on the modern war
crimes trials of tyrants like Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.
Norbert
Ehrenfreund has served as a judge for thirty years in the Superior Court of California. He served as a correspondent for
The Stars and Stripes during the Nuremberg
trials.
"The Nuremberg
trials hold many lessons in justice and human rights that resonate today. From his unique vantage point as an eyewitness to
the trials and as a judge, Norbert Ehrenfreund sets out a clear warning about the direction our nation is taking but gives
us hope with this refreshing new take on the founding principles of justice as we know it."
--Senator Christopher J. Dodd
"Most Americans today don’t even know the
difference between the Nuremberg laws (Nazi racist legislation enacted before WWII) and the
Nuremberg principles (the rules that emerged from the trials
of Nazi war criminals after WWII). This readable eyewitness account – combining fascinating anecdotes with brilliant
insights – will educate and inspire. It is as relevant today, as we confront a new form of totalitarian terrorism and
can only hope that we are able to bring its perpetrators to justice under the Nuremberg
principle." --Alan
M. Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard
Law School
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Noted Zen Buddhist priest
Zoketsu Norman Fischer
will discuss his new book
Sailing Home:
Using Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls
Thursday, July 31, 7pm

We all sail across the wine-dark sea, and Sailing Home
gives humane, wise instruction for our voyage. In these pages, Zen master and poet Norman Fischer, beloved for his forthright
honesty and kind heart, guides us to understand our own odyssey, our own hard-earned, vulnerable, mysterious life journey,
with genuine compassion and newfound understanding. -- Jack Kornfield, author
of The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings
of Buddhist Psychology and A Path with Heart
This book reminds us that the great literature of the world
and the great religions of the world share something in common. They each reveal us to ourselves. Fischer focuses on the actual
experience of our life as an odyssey -- a journey toward our unknown fulfillment, which is welling up in the ground beneath
our feet. -- James Finley, author of Merton's
Palace of Nowhere and The Contemplative Heart
Homer's Odyssey has a timeless allure. It is an ancient story that is significant for every generation: the struggle of
a homesick, battle-weary man longing to return to love and family. Odysseus's strivings to overcome divine and earthly obstacles
and to control his own impulsive nature hold valuable lessons for people facing their own metaphorical battles and everyday
conflicts -- people who are, like Odysseus, "heartsick on the open sea," whether from dealing with daily skirmishes at the
office or from fighting in an international war. Sailing Home breathes fresh air
into a classic we thought we knew, revealing its profound guidance for navigating life's pitfalls, perils, and spiritual challenges.
Norman Fischer deftly incorporates Buddhist, Judaic, Christian, and popular thought,
as well as his own unique and sympathetic understanding of life, in his reinterpretation of Odysseus's familiar wanderings
as lessons that everyone can use.
Zoketsu Norman Fischer
is a poet and Zen Buddhist priest. For many years he has taught at the San Francisco Zen Center,
the oldest and largest of the new Buddhist organizations in the West, where he served as Co-abbot from 1995-2000. He is presently
a Senior Dharma Teacher there as well as the founder and spiritual director of the Everyday Zen Foundation, an organization
dedicated to adapting Zen Buddhist teachings to Western culture. He has taught extensively with his old friend Rabbi Alan
Lew on the relationship between Buddhist and Jewish practice; has taught Buddhist principles to business people, Buddhist
compassion-in-action to lawyers and conflict resolvers; led workshops at Esalen Institute in California, the Open Center in
New York City, and Hollyhock Farm in British Columbia; teaches Zen regularly at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California,
as well as in Canada, Mexico, and Europe; and has participated with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in conferences on Buddhist
Christian dialogue and non-violence. His many books include I Was Blown Back, Slowly But Dearly, Like a Walk Through a
Park, On Whether or Not To Believe in Your
Mind, The Devices, Turn Left in Order
to Go Right, The Narrow Roads of Japan
and Success.
Previous Events at D.G.Wills Books

Christopher Hitchens

Director Oliver Stone

Historian and Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert

Francoise Gilot

Vogue magazine photo of Francoise Gilot
at the original store

Michael McClure

Poet Jerome Rothenberg

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, Director of the Neurosciences
Institute, with U.C. Berkeley philosopher John Searle with Mrs. Searle

Nobel Laureate Manfred Eigen

Quincy Troupe

Iris Chang

Gerry Spence

Noted editor Robert Weil, editing a Patricia
Highsmith manuscript for W.W. Norton & Co.
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