Mark Pendergrast: INSIDE THE OUTBREAKS
Wednesday, 9/8, 7pm
Carter Presidential Library & Museum Theater
In Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, Mark Pendergrast takes readers on a riveting journey through the history of this remarkable organization, following EIS officers on their globetrotting quest to eliminate the most lethal and widespread threats to the world’s health. Over the years they have successfully battled polio, cholera, and smallpox, and in recent years have turned to the epidemics killing us now — smoking, obesity, and violence among them. Since its founding by Alexander Langmuir in 1951 as a Cold War measure against biological warfare, the Epidemic Intelligence Service has waged war against every imaginable human (and sometimes animal) ailment. Suitcases packed, vaccinations ready, the mantra “time-place-person” on their lips, these young doctors — and veterinarians, dentists, statisticians, nurses, microbiologists, academic epidemiologists, social scientists, lawyers — call themselves “shoe-leather epidemiologists.” Always on call, often working 18-hour days during their two-year EIS stint, they have occasionally caught the bugs they were studying, but, astonishingly, only one officer has thus far died in the line of duty – in an airline crash. The successful EIS model has spread internationally: former EIS officers on the staff of the Centers for Disease Control have helped to establish nearly thirty similar programs around the world. EIS veterans have gone on to become leaders in the world of public health in organizations such as the World Health Organization.
Inside the Outbreaks takes readers on a riveting journey through the history of this remarkable organization, following Epidemic Intelligence Service officers on their globetrotting quest to eliminate the most lethal and widespread threats to the world's health.
Aiken Lecture: Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Atlanta History Center
Friday, 9/10 8:00 PM
The Warmth of Other Suns chronicles a watershed event in American history--the decades-long migration of African-Americans from the South to the North and West, from World War I through the 1970s—through the stories of three individuals and their families.
In her book, Wilkerson traces the lives of Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster, from their difficult beginnings in the South, to their critical decisions to leave behind all they know and look for a better life in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.
Isabel Wilkerson is Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. In 1994 she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. This is her first book.
Admission is $5 members; $10 for nonmembers. Reservations are required for all lectures. Call 404.814.4150.
Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor: TRAVELING WITH POMEGRANATES: A Mother-Daughter Story
Porter Auditorium at Wesleyan College, Macon, GA
Monday 9/13 6:45pm
Bestselling author of THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES, made into a major motion picture starring Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Hudson, has co-written a unique and profound spiritual memoir with her daughter; set against the backdrop of Sue and Ann's travels together in Greece and France.
TRAVELING WITH POMEGRANATES offers distinct perspectives from two women at different stages in life –a fifty something and a twenty something – each at crossroads and each on a quest to redefine herself while rediscovering one another.
Between 1998 and 2000, Sue and Ann travel throughout Greece and France. Sue, coming to grips with aging, caught in a creative vacuum, longing to reconnect with her grown daughter, struggles to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a novel. Ann, just graduated from college, heartbroken and benumbed by the classic question about what to do with her life, grapples with a painful depression. As this modern-day Demeter and Persephone chronicle the richly symbolic and personal meaning of an array of inspiring figures and sites, they also each give voice to that most protean of connections: the bond of mother and daughter.
A wise and involving book about feminine thresholds, spiritual growth, and renewal, Traveling with Pomegranates is both a revealing self-portrait by a beloved author and her daughter, a writer in the making, and a momentous story that will resonate with women everywhere.
