View and listen to the Top 10 Author Event Podcasts Downloaded in December 2013.

Don't forget to view our schedule for upcoming Winter and Spring 2014 author events!

	Blaine Harden | Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West Recorded 4/2/2013 Listen to MP3 audio An author and journalist who reports for PBS’s Frontline and contributes to The Economist, Blaine Harden has worked for The Washington Post as a correspondent in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia, and as a national correspondent for the New York Times. An international bestseller, Escape from Camp 14 is “a riveting nightmare that bears witness to the worst inhumanity, an unbearable tragedy magnified by the fact that the horror continues at this very moment without an end in sight” (Christian Science Monitor). The book illuminates the world’s most repressive totalitarian state through the shocking story of Shin Dong-hyuk, one of the few people born in a North Korean prison camp to escape and survive.
	Ross King | The Judgement of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism Recorded 4/20/2006 Listen to MP3 audio Ross King is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michaelangelo & the Pope’s Ceiling, as well as the novels Ex-Libris and Domino. The Judgment of Paris chronicles the dramatic decade between two famous exhibitions: the scandalous Salon des Refusés in 1863 and the first Impressionist showing in 1874, where the artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amidst scorn and derision from the French artistic establishment.
	Lester Brown | Breaking New Ground: A Personal History Recorded 12/12/2013 Listen to MP3 audio “One of the world’s most influential thinkers” (The Washington Post), Lester Brown is the founder of the Earth Policy and Worldwatch Institutes, two nonprofit research organizations dedicated to analyzing environmental issues on a global basis and planning a sustainable future. His many honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and the United Nations Environmental Prize, and in 1986 the Library of Congress requested his personal papers, noting that his writings “have already strongly affected thinking about problems of world population and resources.” He is the author of more than 50 books, including Full Planet, Empty Plates and Plan B. His new memoir traces his life from a small-farm New Jersey childhood to leadership as a global environmental activist.
	Alan Greenspan | The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting Recorded 12/6/2013 Listen to MP3 audio "One of the nation’s most astute economic observers” and “as famous as any pop star” (New York Times), Alan Greenspan served as head of the Federal Reserve System from 1987-2006—a tenure spanning 18 years and four presidents—and prior to that as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Ford. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, in 2005. He is the author of the no. 1 New York Times bestselling memoir The Age of Turbulence. His new book The Map and the Territory is a “model of expositional clarity” (Wall Street Journal) that addresses—in light of the financial crisis—fundamental assumptions about risk management and economic forecasting.  In conversation with Mark Zandi, Chief Economist, Moody’s Analytics.
	Garrison Keillor | O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound Recorded 12/10/2013 Listen to MP3 audio A champion of the simple life, Garrison Keillor is a consummate storyteller, gifted with the rare ability—in print and in person—to hold an audience spellbound with his tales of ordinary people whose lives contain extraordinary moments of humor, tenderness, and grace. Deemed a “storytelling genius” by the Washington Post, Keillor is the familiar, soothing voice behind the much-loved radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, which is heard by more than 3 million listeners each week on more than 450 National Public Radio stations nationwide. He was honored with the National Humanities Medal in 1999. O What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound is his first poetry collection, written—with characteristic insight and warmth—in light verse.  Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Endowed Lecture.
	Leading Voices: Debora Spar | Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection Recorded 12/12/2013 Listen to MP3 audio Current President of Barnard College, former professor at Harvard Business School, member of the Board of Directors at Goldman Sachs, and mother of three, Debora Spar understands how difficult it can be for women to achieve professionally while balancing the concerns of family and the pursuit of ideal personal life. She is the author of six books, including Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Invention, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet, and numerous articles. In Wonder Women, Spar takes a “wise, worthy” (Kirkus Reviews) look at how American women’s lives have and have not changed over the last 50 years. “Tactfully navigating heated debates” while also narrating the story of her own successes and roadblocks over the years, Spar confronts the new issues that confront women and provides a roadmap for the future. In conversation with Tamala Edwards, anchor, 6ABC Action News morning edition. Sponsored by Brandywine Realty Trust and Shechtman, Marks, Devor PC.
	Deborah Solomon | American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Recorded 12/3/2013 Listen to MP3 audio As the celebrated illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post for nearly half a century, Norman Rockwell portrayed a fantasy of American togetherness. In her new biography American Mirror, art critic Deborah Solomon trains her eye on the art and the artist who articulated the yearnings and aspirations of a country united by fear. Solomon is the author of two previous biographies of American artists: Jackson Pollock: A Biography and the “perfectly composed, richly nuanced and quietly surprising (Chicago Tribune) Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell. She writes about art and culture for many publications, and “Questions For,” her weekly interview column, appeared in The New York Times Magazine from 2003 to 2011.
	Deepak Chopra | What Are You Hungry For?: The Chopra Solution to Permanent Weight Loss, Well-Being, and Lightness of Soul Recorded 11/18/2013 Listen to MP3 audio “The poet-prophet of alternative medicine” (Time), Deepak Chopra is the author of more than 70 books on mind-body health, spirituality, and peace, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. One of Time’s top 100 heroes and icons of this century, he is the founder of the Chopra Foundation and the Chopra Center for Well Being. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, a Distinguished Executive Scholar at Columbia Business School, and a Senior Scientist at the Gallup organization. In his new book What Are You Hungry For?, Chopra reveals how overeating is often a symptom of hunger for love and happiness, and outlines an approach to eating that will lead to permanent weight loss and spiritual well-being.
	John Heilemann and Mark Halperin | Double Down: Game Change 2012 Recorded 11/26/2013 Listen to MP3 audio Veteran political reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin set the national conversation with their no. 1 New York Times bestselling account of the 2008 presidential campaign, Game Change. Halperin, editor-at-large and senior political analyst for TIME and senior political analyst for MSNBC, and Heilemann, national affairs editor for New York Magazine and political analyst for MSNBC, provide a colorful portrait of the candidates and spouses who aimed to occupy the White House, leaving the reader with a “vivid, visceral sense of the campaign and a keen understanding of the paradoxes and contingencies of history” (New York Times). The HBO adaptation of the book received five Emmy Awards. Double Down: Game Change 2012 is a compelling account of the 2012 presidential election. In conversation with Dick Polman, "Writer in Residence" at the University of Pennsylvania, and national political columnist at WHYY's Newsworks.org.
	Alice McDermott | Someone with Lauren Grodstein | The Explanation for Everything Recorded 12/5/2013 Listen to MP3 audio Acclaimed writer Alice McDermott explores themes close to her heart: love and the loss of innocence, the interlocking stories of family, Irish-American culture and assimilation, and children who must grow beyond the safe-keeping of their parents in “work that revels in a rich, discursive prose style that belongs entirely to Alice McDermott” (New York Times). Her prismatic novels include Charming Billy—winner of the 1998 National Book Award—and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This—all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. The transformative moments of joy, heartbreak, clarity, and confusion of a life lived by an ordinary woman are the subject of her new novel Someone.  A master of quiet domestic worlds and “suspense worthy of Hitchcock” (The New York Times Book Review), Lauren Grodstein is the author of the New York Times Editor’s Pick A Friend of the Family, a novel with “such an incisive diagnosis of aspirational America that someone should hand out copies at Little League games and ballet recitals” (The Washington Post). Her other works include the novel Reproduction is the Flaw of Love and The Best of Animals, a short story collection in which urban 20-somethings reconcile their ambivalent feelings for each other. Grodstein is a professor of creative writing at Rutgers-Camden. In The Explanation for Everything, an evolutionary biologist searches for meaning and moral position when he directs a young evangelist’s independent study.

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