ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

What causes a child to grow up gay or straight or bisexual? Neuroscientist LeVay summarizes where the quest for a biological explanation of sexual orientation stands today, taking us on a tour of laboratories that specialize in genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology and more.

Join us for a mind-boggling multi-media tour through the early days of an institution whose alumni left their fingerprints all over popular culture: Animal House, Caddyshack, Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, SCTV, Spinal Tap, In Living Color, Ren & Stimpy, and The Simpsons. Long before there was The Onion and Comedy Central, there was the National Lampoon.

More than half of the worlds' 1.3 billion Muslims live along the tenth parallel, as do roughly sixty percent of the world's 2 billion Christians. Griswold, award-winning poet and investigative journalist, traveled for seven years on the tenth parallel, examining the complex relationship of religion, land, oil; local conflicts and global ideology; politics and contemporary martyrdom, both Islamic and Christian.

Join us for an illuminating journey through history, geopolitics, and religion to investigate whether Islam is indeed the cause of some of today's most important international crises and how we might move conversations beyond religious and ideological divides.

Hyde--MacArthur Fellow and author of the ground breaking study of art and commerce The Gift--offers a stirring defense of our cultural commons, that vast store of art and ideas we inherited from the past which continues to enrich the present.

A Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter chronicles a watershed event in American history-- the decades-long migration of African Americans from the South to the North and West--through the stories of three individuals and their families.

The new novel by the celebrated author of Anywhere But Here tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood.

In Freedom, his first novel since The Corrections Franzen comically and tragically captures the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the temptations and burdens of liberty, and the heavy weight of empire.

Fascinating stories of key Supreme Court decisions, told from a unique perspective, illuminate this original and accessible theory of the United States Supreme Court's responsibility and integrity.

Trombley, the preeminent Twain scholar at work today (and the president of Pitzer College), cracks open the enduring mystery of Mark Twain's final decade to reveal the true story of Isabel Lyon, the \"forgotten woman\" who haunts the official Twain narrative.