Join us on April 5 at 11:30 AM EDT, when we welcome Joshua Hammer ’79 and Gary Krist ’79 to our latest Authors & Artists webinar, Bringing Archives to Life. Joshua and Gary are both releasing books this month. They will discuss their new releases, and the process of writing historical non-fiction. Their 1-hour discussion will be followed by a half-hour Q&A.
Gary’s latest is Trespassers at the Golden Gate, the sensational true story of Laura Fair, a woman who murdered her married lover in Gilded Age San Francisco, and the trial that epitomized the city’s transformation from raucous frontier town into modern metropolis. Her trial shone an early and uncomfortable spotlight on social issues like the role of women, the sanctity of the family, and acceptable expressions of gender. Trespassers at the Golden Gate also brings us to a place where – for a brief period – otherwise marginalized communities found unique opportunities. In addition, familiar figures like Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony were swept up in the drama of the Laura Fair affair.
The Mesopotamian Riddle, Joshua’s most recent book, is a rollicking adventure about the twenty-year quest to decipher cuneiform, the oldest writing in the world. The story begins in the 1840s, when mysterious, inscription-covered palaces emerging from the desert sands of the Near East captured the Victorian public's imagination. Three free-spirited Victorians – a swashbuckling archaeologist, a suave British military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector – vied for glory in a race to decipher a script that would enable them to peek farther back into human history than ever before.
Gary Krist is the author of four previous narrative non-fiction books: The White Cascade, City of Scoundrels, Empire of Sin, and The Mirage Factory. He has also written three novels and two short story collections. A widely published journalist and book reviewer, Krist has been the recipient of the Stephen Crane Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lowell Thomas gold medal for travel journalism, a fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Joshua Hammer is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous books, including The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, and The Falcon Thief. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Outside. Joshua had a long tenure with Newsweek, where he did stints as the Bureau Chief in Nairobi, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Cape Town. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and a winner of the National Magazine Award for best reporting in 2016. He lives in Berlin.
Join us on April 5 at 11:30 AM EDT, when we welcome Joshua Hammer ’79 and Gary Krist ’79 to our latest Authors & Artists webinar, Bringing Archives to Life. Joshua and Gary are both releasing books this month. They will discuss their new releases, and the process of writing historical non-fiction. Their 1-hour discussion will be followed by a half-hour Q&A.
Gary’s latest is Trespassers at …
