Friday, November 11, 2016

Supporting Diversity, Civil Discourse, and Good Reading!

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In response to the recent political unpleasantness...
...we at The Regulator rededicate ourselves to supporting diversity and sustaining civil discourse in our community.

We hope you will continue to think of us when you are looking for a safe place to share ideas and to evaluate options. A place where you can let your curiosity roam free. A place to escape through books if needed. A place to find empathy within pages. A place to further discover what defines our community.

As we approach The Regulator's 40th Anniversary in December, we especially want to thank all of you who continue to support our endeavors. Our founding goal was to create a space where everyone can feel comfortable to thoughtfully explore their lives and the world around them. We hope you will join with us in carrying this ideal forward.

And, as the saying goes--don't anybody mess with our first amendment rights!

(Thanks to our compatriots at Aaron's Books in Lititz, PA and Bookshop Santa Cruz in California for some of the above wording)
But are there not still books to read and authors to meet?
Are there not holidays coming up in December that need our attention? Well heck yes...

Our upcoming author events include visits from Dr. Ralph Snyderman, Chancellor Emeritus of the Duke Health System, and from Dan (Predictably Irrational) Ariely. See our complete events listing just below.

As for books for the holidays, we're making our lists and checking them twice. The only problem is that there are too many good books out this year! (A problem we should have, right?). To get us started, here are a few suggestions for nature lovers/tree huggers:

--The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben. Scientists are learning that trees sense their environments, communicate with each other, help each other out... Every chapter here is filled with marvelous and amazing stuff.

--Common Ground: Encounters with Nature at the Edges of Life by Rob Cowen. A beautifully written, heartfelt meditation on the author's encounters with a square mile of "waste ground" at the edge of his town in Northern England, over an eventful year in his life. Nature and humans are not two separate things.

--The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman. This marvelous book has genius of birds been out since April, but for anyone who has yet to read it, here are some of the things it tells us about birds: They deceive and manipulate. They eavesdrop. They display a strong sense of fairness. They give gifts. They play keep-away and tug-of-war. They tease. They share. They cultivate social networks. They vie for status. They kiss to console one another. They teach their young. They blackmail their parents. They alert one another to danger. They summon witnesses to the death of a peer. They may even grieve.

Lots more book recommendations to come!
 Upcoming Events--Monsters in Appalachia tomorrow (Saturday) at 6:00!    

(You can also see our complete events calendar on our website)      
 
SHERYL MONKS
Saturday, November 12, 6:00pm
Sheryl Monks will read from her new collection of stories, Monsters in Appalachia. From gritty realism to the gothic, surreal and sometimes humorous, Monsters in Appalachia plumbs the hearts of a haunted landscape. We come upon them in the mountains of West Virginia, in the backyards of rural North Carolina, and at tourist traps along Route 66, where they smolder with hidden desires and struggle to resist the temptations that plague them. A master of Appalachian dialect and colloquial speech, Monks writes prose that is dark, taut, and muscular, but also beguiling and playful. Monsters in Appalachia is a powerful work of fiction.
 
Sheryl Monks holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte. She is a past winner of the Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, recipient of a North Carolina Regional Artist's Project Grant, and a previous finalist for the Hudson Prize, sponsored by Black Lawrence Press. She lives in Winston-Salem.
 
APS CAT ADOPTION EVENT
Sunday, November 13, 2016 2:00 pm
Durham Animal Protection Society will hold a monthly cat adoption event at the Regulator. Come visit our furry friends from 2:00 - 3:30. Note the time and date.
 
MARCIA ZUG
Monday, November 14, 7:00pm
Law professor Marcia Zug will be at The Regulator to discuss her new book, Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail Order Matches. There have always been mail-order brides in America-but we haven't always thought about them in the same ways. In Buying a Bride, Marcia A. Zug starts with the so-called "Tobacco Wives" of the Jamestown colony and moves all the way forward to today's modern same-sex mail-order grooms to explore the advantages and disadvantages of mail-order marriage from a social, historical, and legal context.
Marcia A. Zug is Associate Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina.
 
RALPH SNYDERMAN
Tuesday, November 15, 7:00pm
Ralph Snyderman, MD, comes to The Regulator to discuss his new book, A Chancellor's Tale: Transforming Academic Medicine. During his chancellor's tale fifteen years as chancellor, Dr. Snyderman helped create new paradigms for academic medicine while guiding the Duke University Medical Center through periods of great challenge and transformation. Under his leadership the medical center became internationally known for its innovations in medicine, including the creation of the Duke University Health System-which became a model for integrated healthcare delivery-and the development of personalized health care based on a rational and compassionate model of care.

Ralph Snyderman, MD, is Chancellor Emeritus, Duke University, James B. Duke Professor of Medicine, and Director of the Center for Research in Personalized Health Care at the Duke University School of Medicine. He previously served as Chancellor for Health Affairs at Duke University and as the founding President and CEO of the Duke University Health System; Dean of the School of Medicine at Duke University; Chair of the Association of American Medical Colleges; Senior Vice President, Medical Research and Development, Genentech, Inc.; Director, Laboratory of Immune Effector Function, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Chief, Division of Rheumatology and Immunology at Duke; and Senior Investigator, National Institutes of Health. He has authored almost 400 manuscripts and is the editor or coeditor of several books. Dr. Snyderman lives in Durham.

NONFICTION AUTHORS ASSOCIATION (NFAA)
Wednesday, November 16, 6:15PM -- 7:45PM
For more info: http://www.meetup.com/Durham-Chapel-Hill-Chapter-Nonfiction-Authors-Association/

JUAN FELIPE HERRERA--U.S. Poet Laureate
Thursday, November 17, 4:30 PM
OFFSITE: The Gothic Reading Room, Perkins Library, Duke West Campus.
The Regulator will be selling books for an event sponsored by the Duke Program in Latino/a Studies
Herrera's most recent book is Notes on the Assemblage.
 
ROY SCRANTON -- War Porn: A Conversation
Friday, November 18, 7:00PM
Join author Roy Scranton, author of the Iraq war novel, War Porn, in conversation with Duke University Professor, author and literary scholar, Abdul Sattar Jawad. This event is co-hosted by The Regulator Bookshop and the Duke University Forum for Scholars and Publics.
In War Porn, three lives fit inside one another like nesting dolls: a restless young woman at an end-of-summer barbecue in Utah; an American soldier in occupied Baghdad; and Qasim al-Zabadi, an Iraqi math professor, who faces the US invasion of his country with fear, denial, and perseverance. As War Porn cuts from America to Iraq and back again, we come to see America through the eyes of the occupied. Scranton reveals the fragile humanity that connects Americans and Iraqis, torturers and the tortured, victors and their victims.
 
Roy Scranton is the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization, co-editor of Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. His essays, articles, and reviews have been published in Rolling Stone, the New York Times, The Nation, and elsewhere.

Abdul Sattar Jawad is an Iraqi-born Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He received a Ph.D in English Literature and Journalism, London's City University (UK).  Before coming to Duke, he was Dean of College of Arts Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and edited the Baghdad Mirror. Apart from teaching Arabic and English Literature, he is an expert on the works of T. S. Eliot and William Shakespeare.
 
DANIEL ARIELY
Saturday, November 19 at 4:00PM (note the time) 
Bestselling author Dan Ariely returns to The Regulator for a lively discussion and book signing of his new book, Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations.
  ariely
Ariely reveals fascinating new insights into motivation-showing that the subject is far more complex than we ever imagined. Payoff investigates the true nature of motivation, our partial blindness to the way it works, and how we can bridge this gap. With studies that range from Intel to a kindergarten classroom, Ariely digs deep to find the root of motivation-how it works and how we can use this knowledge to approach important choices in our own lives. Along the way, he explores intriguing questions such as: Can giving employees bonuses harm productivity? Why is trust so crucial for successful motivation? What are our misconceptions about how we value our work? How does your sense of your mortality impact your motivation?
 
Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, is a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He is the author of Payoff and the New York Times bestsellers Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.
 
TAMARA SAVIANO in conversation with Tom Rankin
Saturday, November 19 at 7:00PM
Author Tamara Saviano joins comes to the bookshop for an evening celebrating the release of her biography of Guy Clark, Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark. Saviano traces the life of music pioneer Guy Clark, who, with his wife Susanna, shaped the contemporary folk and American roots music scene much like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald fashioned the jazz age in Paris. TheNew York Times once described Clark as "a king of the Texas troubadours", declaring his body of work "was as indelible as that of anyone working in the Americana idiom in the last decades of the 20th century" Artists such as Johnny Cash, David Allan Coe, Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, Steve Wariner, Brad Paisley, John Denver, Alan Jackson, Rodney Crowell, The Highwaymen, and Kenny Chesney have recorded Clark's songs. For more info.:: http://nodepression.com/article/without-being-killed-or-caught-life-and-music-guy-clark
 
Tamara Saviano is a Grammy and Americana award-winning producer, a music business consultant, artist manager, publicist and author. Saviano has been curious about the lives of songwriters since she first discovered Guy Clark at the age of 14. A business woman and entrepreneur, Saviano directs a full service creative agency serving folk and Americana artists.
Tom Rankin is the Director of Duke's Masters of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts.
 
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Tom Campbell
Regulator Bookshop
720 Ninth St.
Durham, NC 27705
(919) 286-2700
http://www.regulatorbookshop.com/

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