ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

From the author of Freethinkers, a dazzlingly insightful-and occasionally hilarious-analysis of the anti-rationalism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-scientism that increasingly characterizes the cultural and intellectual life of this country.

The two-term mayor of San Francisco and longest-serving speaker of the California Assembly lays down some candid rules about surviving and manipulating Big Money and Big Media in today's politics.

The acclaimed poet and columnist for The Nation discusses her new book of essays dealing with sex, death, ex-lovers, politics, motherhood, aging, and learning to drive.

From one of this country's most original voices comes a masterful new novel about a young Mexican-American who falls in love while sweeping the decks of an apartment building named The Flowers. In the midst of exploding racial violence, he must decide what he values and what he can do about it.

The author of the national bestseller The Omnivore's Dilemma returns with a manifesto for our times: what to eat, what not to eat, and how to think about health.

The author of Reservation Road sets his mesmerizing new novel in 1959 Japan when Haruko, a non-aristocratic woman, marries the Crown Prince and enters the sealed-off and mysterious Japanese monarchy.

The author's mother, Susan Sontag, died of a particularly acute form of leukemia in 2004. \"This,\" he writes, \"is a book of questions about what we know and, perhaps more importantly, what we can take in when confronted by the death of a loved one.\"

The award-winning historian offers a new intellectual biography of the twentieth century's greatest experimental physicist, whose revolutionary discoveries included the orbital structure of the atom.

Drawing on more than 6,000 pages of Leonardo's surviving notebooks, Capra reveals Leonardo-whose studies ranged from the flight patterns of birds to the mechanics of light-as the unacknowledged \"father of science.\"

Key voices in the development of downtown Los Angeles discuss their visions for the future.