Tulsa Town Hall
78TH Season · Speaker Series
Opening Minds · Stirring Curiosities
"My Writing Life"
As the Boston Globe has noted, Pat Conroy is simply "grand". Considered one of America's greatest living authors, he has written over ten books, including such classics as The Water Is Wide (the basis for the film Conrack) and Beach Music. Two of his novels, The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, have also become major motion pictures. Most recently he has written My Reading Life, a memoir about his love for books and writing,passions he will be sharing with the Town Hall audience. He is currtently at work on a new novel, The Death of Santini.
In collaboration with Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers, OSU Tulsa
"Optimum Health: Maximizing the Body's Own Healing Systems"
Dr. Weil’s 12 books include bestsellers on healthy aging and optimum health. His complementary approach to mainstream and alternative medicine has changed how we age, what we eat and how we live. Weil’s Integrative Medicine Center, founded in 1994, stresses prevention over treatment and focuses on nutrition, botanical medicines and mind-body interventions to complement conventional drugs and surgery. Forty-two academic medical centers including the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical, Duke and Columbia, now offer integrative medicine. An international expert on healthy aging, Dr. Weil appears regularly on television and radio.
"Up Close and Very Personal"
Ann Compton has reported history as it happened from campaigns to scandals, through war and peace, from Gerald Ford through Barack Obama. She has traveled the world and all 50 states with Presidents, Vice Presidents and First Ladies and was the only broadcast reporter allowed to remain on-board Air Force One with President George W. Bush during the hours following the 9/11 attacks. An inductee into both the National Radio Hall of Fame and the Journalism Hall of Fame, Compton shares experiences that have given her an up-close and personal viewpoint of our country’s history as she lived it and reported it.
"Tangled Webs: How False Statements are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff"
Combining the skills of an investigative reporter with the style and sensibility of a novelist, James B. Stewart examines events in finance, law and politics that shape American Society. His work for Wall Street Journal on the 1987 stock market upheaval earned him the Pulitzer Prize and led to the best seller Den of Thieves. Stewart’s Common Sense column appears weekly in the Business Day section of the New York Times. His latest book, Tangled Web, examines the perjury epidemic in America, which he suggests is symptomatic of an alarming breakdown of ethics that compromises our judicial system as well as business, government, academia and medicine.
"In Full View: The True Story of Lewis and Clark"
Rex Ziak has a unique claim to fame: he uncovered a missing chapter in the history of Lewis & Clark’s arrival at the Pacific Ocean, an event that had confused historians for nearly two hundred years. Armed with passion, curiosity and the Lewis & Clark journals, he retraced sections of their route over and over on foot. The results of his six years of exhaustive research contradicted everything historians believed about the team’s arrival at the Pacific. His breakthrough findings were ultimately acknowledged and in 2004, the federal government honored his discovery by creating the Lewis & Clark National Historic Park, America’s newest national park.