Previous Special Events

This modern-dress version starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert DeNiro, and Chris Cooper is the centerpiece of a Read It / Watch It discussion group.

Leading the discussion is the Library’s Kaite Stover, a “book doctor” on KCUR-FM’s Up to Date show. Participants are encouraged (but not required) to read the source novel before attending the film screening.

This event is co-sponsored by Kansas City Repertory Theatre, the Unicorn Theatre, and the Kansas City Actors Theatre.

Benjamin Franklin was an inventor, author, politician, postmaster, and civic activist.

But noted economist and Franklin biographer Mark Skousen reminds us that Franklin was also a businessman and an entrepreneur whose autobiography is often considered to be the first “rags to riches” account in American history.

Everyone can – and probably should – write their life story to pass on to their family and friends. In this two-hour workshop led by writer Charley Kempthorne, participants will learn to write and share their histories.

The workshop – which Kempthorne strives to make fun as well as educational – features sections on story structure, writing, and publishing your memoir.

Kempthorne holds an MFA in narrative writing from the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has given hundreds of writing workshops.

Twenty Films Essential to Cinema Literacy

Think you’re film literate? Not until you’ve experienced the masterpieces of world cinema presented as part of this new series. Former Kansas City Star film critic Robert W. Butler (now a member of the Library’s Public Affairs staff) provides opening and closing remarks.

With his thick spectacles, big teeth, and boundless energy, President Theodore Roosevelt was a cartoonist’s dream subject. Rick Marschall, author of Bully! The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt: Illustrated with More than 200 Vintage Political Cartoons discusses this most dynamic of chief executives.

Marschall is a former political cartoonist. Bostonia magazine calls him “perhaps America’s foremost authority on popular culture.”

Think you know Charles Dickens? Help celebrate the bicentennial of the great Victorian novelist’s birth with a special performance by members of Kansas City’s acting community. In The Dickens You Hardly Know they will perform five scenes from five Dickens books in just 50 minutes.

The evening kicks off What the Dickens? a fall-long series of Dickens-themed events that include book discussion groups, a film series and a new dramatic interpretation of A Christmas Carol created and performed by area teens.

In the waning days of the 2012 political campaign, KCUR-FM and the Library join forces to present a live surrogate Presidential debate.

Steve Kraske will broadcast a live episode of his Up to Date program.

For his latest book Thomas Frank, the best-selling author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, went looking for public discontent in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown.

Instead, as Frank reports in Pity the Billionaire, he found loud demands that the system be made even harsher on the recession’s victims and that society’s traditional winners receive even grander prizes.

Twenty Films Essential to Cinema Literacy

Think you’re film literate? Not until you’ve experienced the masterpieces of world cinema presented as part of this new series. Former Kansas City Star film critic Robert W. Butler (now a member of the Library’s Public Affairs staff) provides opening and closing remarks.

For all his accomplishments and advanced thinking, Thomas Jefferson could not get beyond his own limited perspective in matters of race. Drawing from new archaeological work and previously overlooked evidence, historian Henry Wiencek examines the factors that led Jefferson, once an emancipationist, to keep some of his own children as slaves.