Maybe More Mercantile Events Than Members Can Manage

February 7th, 2012

March Madness at the Mercantils begins with the Library’s turn in the 6@6 series of programs featuring the deep academic bench at Northern Kentucky University.  On the first of the month Department of Mathematics and Science professor Chris Christensen, coincidentally a longtime Mercantile member, will present a program about the WWII effort to break the Axis forces’ Enigma code.

Four days later the Amy Waldman will appear in the reading room as one of the central activities in On the Same Page, the Public Library’s hugely popular program that turns the attention of the city’s thousands of readers to a single title.  This year the title is The Submission, Amy Waldman’s intelligent and provocative best selling novel about the competition for a 9/11 memorial.  The Submission will also be the topic at the March First Wednesday book discussion on the seventh of the month. 

On March 6, Dale Brown, author of Brilliance and Balderdash, will be the featured speaker at the launch of her new book Literary Cincinnati:  The Missing Chapter.  Written with the same charm and deep research that distinguished the history of the first hundred years of lectures at the Library, Literary Cincinnati brings to light the surprisingly rich history of Cincinnati literature from the earliest frontier days to the modern era.  Published by Ohio University Press, Literary Cincinnati will, of course, be available for purchase at the event.

March 8, the Betts House and the Mercantile Library will present a program about the New Madrid (Missouri) earthquake, a tremor that toppled bookcases as far away as Baltimore.  The speaker will be Susan Hough.

Finally, on March 26, author Stephanie Deutsch will read from and speak about You Need a Schoolhouse, her new book about the historic partnership between educator Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears Roebuck & Co. who underwrote the construction of more than 5000 schoolhouses for the descendents of enslaved Africans in the American south, one of the greatest and most effective acts of philanthropy in American history, but one that was nearly forgotten with the dismantling of de facto and de jure apartheid.  You Need a Schoolhouse will be available for purchase.

Whew!