Authors on Their Books

Architect David Martin discusses his book Joy Ride: An Architect’s Journey to Mexico’s Ancient and Colonial Places. A journal of his travels filled with sketches, photographs, and observations, Joy Ride celebrates the timeless sophistication of Mexico’s architecture and offers fresh insights into the country’s history and culture. Recorded July 27, 2017.

Based on the acclaimed science fiction novel Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, a new graphic adaptation by Damian Duffy and illustrator John Jennings gives fresh form to Butler’s powerful tale of slavery, time travel, and the inexorable pull of the past. Duffy and Jennings discuss the continuing relevance of Butler’s writings and how it has influenced their own work. Recorded July 24, 2017.

Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell was described by an eminent historian as “not biographable.” Faced with an intractable puzzle, can a novelist do better? Hilary Mantel, two-time Booker Prize–winning author of “Wolf Hall” and its sequel “Bring Up the Bodies,” describes her 10-year effort to pin her compelling and elusive subject to the page. Mantel is currently working on the third book in the trilogy. Her papers are archived at The Huntington. This talk is part of the Ridge Lecture Series at The Huntington. Recorded May 11, 2017.

David Mas Masumoto, organic farmer and acclaimed author of Epitaph for a Peach and Harvest Son, is joined by his wife, Marcy Masumoto, for a lively talk about life on their Central California farm. Through stories that offer a personal perspective on growing organic crops, the Masumotos share their reflections on the vision required of artisan farmers in today’s food world. This talk is part of the Brody Lecture series at The Huntington. Recorded May 7, 2017.

Long before recipes were shared on the Internet, they were passed among friends and compiled into community cookbooks published as charity fundraisers. Drawing on The Huntington’s Anne M. Cranston American Regional and Charitable Cookbook Collection, food writer Patric Kuh discusses what these shared recipes can tell us, not just about food and community but about the changes that shaped the way Americans cook. Kuh is the author of Finding the Flavors We Lost: From Bread to Bourbon, How Artisans Reclaimed American Food. Recorded Mar. 29, 2017.

Terry Masear, hummingbird rehabilitator, presents a lecture about nature’s tiny “flying jewels” and the work of the dedicated volunteers of the Los Angeles Hummingbird Rescue. Since its inception in 2007, the group has rehabilitated and released back into the wild 10,000 orphaned or injured birds. Masear also has also written a book on the subject titled Fastest Things on Wings: Rescuing Hummingbirds in Hollywood. This talk is part of the Southern California Gardener Lecture series at The Huntington. Recorded Mar. 5, 2017.

John Mack Faragher, the Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of History and American Studies at Yale University, discusses the spatial pattern of homicide in Southern California in the 19th century. This talk is part of the Billington Lecture series at The Huntington. Recorded Feb. 8, 2017.

Printmaker and book artist Richard Wagener discusses how the visually striking plants in The Huntington’s Desert Garden have inspired his recent work. A series of his wood engravings are reproduced in a new limited edition, fine-press publication titled Exoticum: Twenty-five Desert Plants from the Huntington Gardens. Recorded Jan. 29, 2017.

Landscape architect Edmund Hollander, author of “The Good Garden,” discusses how the design process for a residential landscape is informed by the interaction of natural site ecology, architectural ecology, and human ecology. Recorded Oct. 2, 2016.

Karl Jacoby, professor of history at Columbia University, uses the story of the remarkable Gilded Age border crosser William Ellis to discuss the shifting relationship between the United States and Mexico in the late 19th century. This talk is part of the Billington Lecture series at The Huntington. Recorded Sept. 14, 2016.

Geoffrey Cowan, president of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, discusses his book "Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary". Using a trove of newly discovered documents, Cowan offers a glimpse at the raucous and often mean-spirited political machinations of the 1912 campaign, which changed American politics forever by creating the system of primaries by which presidential nominees are selected today.

Considered the worst civil engineering failure in the history of California and the state’s second-worst disaster in terms of lives lost, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam ended the storied career of William Mulholland, the man who earlier had masterminded construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. To contextualize Mulholland’s responsibility for the dam’s failure, historians Norris Hundley, Jr. and Donald C. Jackson relied extensively on items in The Huntington’s collections for their book titled "Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster." In addition, roughly a third of the book’s illustrations are drawn from The Huntington’s collection.

Landscape architect Kelly Comras, author of the biography Ruth Shellhorn, examines Shellhorn’s legacy in a lecture and short film screening.

Amina Hassan, biographer and award-winning public radio documentarian discusses her new book, “Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist.” Miller, one of the nation’s most prominent civil rights attorneys from the 1940s through the early 1960, argued two landmark housing cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. This biography—based extensively on research from the Loren Miller Papers at The Huntington—recovers this remarkable figure from the margins of history and reveals how he changed American law forever.

Author and filmmaker Liz Goldwyn discusses her book "Sporting Guide", a series of interlinked stories that evoke a lost world on the margins of Los Angeles society in the 1890s.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer speaks about the many ways in which American judges, when interpreting American law, must take ever greater account of foreign events, law and practices—the subject of his new book, "The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities."

Peter Blodgett,discusses his book, Motoring West: Automobile Pioneers, 1900–1909. Travel back in time to the the turn of the 20th century when Americans were hitting the road to explore the West by automobile. Blodgett is the H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts at The Huntington.

Peter Westwick discusses his new book, “The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing” (2013, Random House), co-authored with Peter Neushul. His Dibner Lecture covers the high-tech aspects of the history of surfing, including how surfboards and wetsuits derive from military technology and how coastlines and even waves are increasingly engineered. In 2013–14 Westwick was the Searle Visiting Professor in the History of Science at Caltech and The Huntington. He is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California.

Judith Freeman talks about her latest book “The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved” (2007). Chandler drew on many real events and people to create his iconic Los Angeles mystery novels. Freeman discusses Chandler’s real-life sources, including a 1922 celebrity murder case that became the inspiration for much of Chandler’s work.

Philip Connors discusses his book Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout with William Deverell, professor of history at USC and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. The event was part of AxS Festival 2011—Fire and Water, organized by the Pasadena Arts Council.