Neela Vaswani, the author of the acclaimed memoir You Have Given Me a Country, will read from her work on Thursday, March 17, at 7:30 pm, at the Scarsdale Public Library, Post and Olmsted Roads.
You Have Given Me a Country follows the paths of Vaswani’s Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey towards each other and the bi-racial child they create. The Louisville Courier-Journal praised the book, noting, “Hope, humor and an indomitable spirit fill these pages, and by book’s end, three heroes have emerged: Vaswani’s parents, who defied the cultural, religious and societal norms of their time and instilled in Vaswani a love and appreciation of story; and Vaswani herself, brave enough to ‘pledge allegiance to the in-between’.”
Vaswani’s first published book, Where the Long Grass Bends, is a collection of short stories that, like the works of Garcia Marquez, subvert conventional narrative forms, grounding the magical in the details of everyday life.
She was a recipient of the 2006 O. Henry Prize, which recognizes the best in American short story writing. Her work has been widely anthologized and published in journals such as Epoch, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner.
Vaswani is the founder of the Storylines Project with the New York Public Library, and is an education activist in both the United States and India. She teaches at Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program in Louisville, Kentucky. In addition, she has been an artist in residence at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, the Jimenez-Porter House at the University of Maryland, the Whitney Museum in New York City, and other institutions.
For more information contact the library at (914)-722-1300.
Alan Schwarz, a graduate of Scarsdale High School, returns to Scarsdale to present: “Knocken’ em Straight: Football’s Collision with Head Injuries”, on Sunday March 20 at the Scarsdale Woman’s Club. A reporter for The New York Times, Schwarz has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his dozens of high-profile articles that have exposed the epidemic of sports-related concussions. His stories have helped uncover the high rates of dementia among retired National Football League players, unsafe conditions on high school fields, and concussion-related disorders among female youth athletes in soccer and basketball. His 2010 investigation into the dark cave of football helmets led immediately to ongoing investigations by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Schwarz will take questions from the audience following his talk.
Dan Senor, co-author of the book, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, will be the guest speaker at Westchester Reform Temple (WRT) on Thursday, March 10, at 7:00 p.m., in a program co-sponsored by WRT with the American Jewish Committee Westchester and StandWithUs.
Seventh-grade students from Westchester Reform Temple’s Religious School have co-authored and published a new children’s chapter book. The Chase: A Modern-Day Midrash. Part mystery, part fantasy, and part coming-of-age story, The Chase follows a group of 12-year-olds as they track down several characters that have fled from the Torah, or Jewish Bible. The missing characters include Noah, who has abandoned his ark, along with his wife, his sons, and all the animals, as well as the Biblical patriarch and matriarch Abraham and Sarah. The children must figure out where the characters went and convince them to come back – and do all this in time for their friend’s Bat Mitzvah service just a few days away.
A unique group of Scarsdale woman celebrated reading and friendship at the Ritz on Friday night February 4, 2011. The book club of nine local women arranged a pajama party for themselves to mark their centennial of ten years and 100 books together.
