Big Read

In a discussion of his new book, Mark Bowden (author of the best-seller Black Hawk Down) details one of the most pivotal battles in the Vietnam War. Fought during the Tet Offensive launched by the North Vietnamese in January 1968, the Battle of Hue lasted nearly 24 days, co...

The Vietnam War still has the power to divide Americans between those for and against it—and just as surely, between those who remember the era firsthand and those not yet born when the troops returned home. There may be no better bridge across those twin divisions than Tim O'Brien's The...

As part of the multi-library Big Read initiative revolving around The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s seminal book about the Vietnam War, area novelists Matthew Eck and Whitney Terrell and poet H.C. Palmer share their wartime experiences and how they shaped...

Is True Grit’s Mattie Ross a genuine feminist hero or a merely a woman who mimics traditional masculinity? Panelists Brenda Bethman, Adrianne Russell, and Crystal Gorham Doss — led by moderator Jane Wood — discuss the conc...

The gruff U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn, the central male character in Charles Portis’ True Grit, has been immortalized on film by both John Wayne and Jeff Bridges....

For nearly 50 years Josephine Marcus Earp was the common-law wife of Wyatt Earp, the legendary hero of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. As an independent 19th-century woman she was a real-life forerunner of True Grit’s fictional Mattie Ross. Author Ann Kirschner explores the life of...

Renowned stage and screen actor Hal Holbrook visits the Kansas City Public Library on Wednesday, November 9, 2011 for a public conversation about his beautifully moving new memoir, Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain at 6:30 p.m. at the...

The Big Read brings author Marilynne Robinson to Kansas City on Wednesday, May 12, at 6:30 p.m. at the Plaza Branch, 4801 Main St., for a discussion of Housekeeping and her literary career with Angela Elam of New Letters on t...

Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda introduces Kansas City’s 2010 Big Read selection—Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping—on Tuesday, April 6, at 6:30 p.m. at the Central Library, 14 W. 1...

The Kansas City Public Library hosts A Conversation with Tobias Wolff, author of the Kansas City Big Read selection Old School, on Tuesday, May 12, at 6:30 p.m. in the Truman Forum at the Plaza Branch, 4...