Previous Special Events

Unions have been blamed for budget deficits and for pampering workers with high pay and cushy benefits. Labor leader Bill Fletcher, Jr. tackles those accusations in his book “They’re Bankrupting Us!” He traces the roots of anti-union myths, examines the movement’s missteps and lists significant labor contributions like the minimum wage and 40-hour work week.

This annual film series returns for an examination of Kansas City’s own home-grown cinema auteur, Robert Altman.

The mutually supportive but tortured relationship between the troubled artist Vincent Van Gogh (Tim Roth) and his brother Theo (Paul Rhys) is the subject of this drama, which according to critic Roger Ebert “generates the feeling that we are in the presence of a man in the act of creation.”

Rated PG-13; 138 minutes.

Children and parents are invited to be part of monthly interactive story times presented by the Coterie Theatre. Coterie Theatre artists read from favorite children's books while audience members enjoy an opportunity to "jump into the story" and then participate in an improvised story of their own making.

Despite some outrageous humor, this is a sincere and ultimately heart-wrenching drama from Pedro Almodova that won an Oscar for best foreign language film.
A Madrid nurse (Cecilia Roth), devastated by the death of her teenage son, becomes surrogate mother to an extended family of misfit women: a pregnant nun (Penelope Cruz), a transsexual prostitute (Antonia San Juan), and a lesbian actress (Marisa Paredes).

Come out and enjoy a concert by one of Kansas City’s leading family entertainers.

Jim Cosgrove, local kid rocker and Library favorite, gives a high-energy performance that carries the message that resonates with people young and old: “Hang on to the wonder of youth and love yourself, your neighbor, and the earth.”

Appropriate for all ages.

Swiss architect Beat Kämpfen doesn’t just design self-sustained, solar-powered buildings. In the 2013 Regnier Lecture he takes that idea a step further, describing plus-energy buildings that not only meet the needs of their owners and operators but generate surplus energy that can be returned to the grid.

Kämpfen, this year’s Regnier Distinguished Visiting Chair at Kansas State University, is principal of Büro für Architektur (Office for Architecture) in Zürich, Switzerland.

As 1862 began the U.S. government was overwhelmed, the Treasury was broke, and the Confederacy was winning on the battlefield. A year later, under the leadership of an unschooled country lawyer, the tide had turned.

Drawing from his book Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year, journalist/historian David Von Drehle explains how Lincoln fashioned a victory and set the blueprint for modern America.

Von Drehle has written for the Washington Post and Time magazine; among his books is Why They Fought: The Real Reason for the Civil War.

In his new book Who Stole the American Dream?, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith shows how over the last 40 years seismic changes, sparked by a sequence of landmark political and economic decisions, have all but eliminated the idea of shared prosperity, with America losing the title of “Land of Opportunity.”

Smith is a former reporter and editor for The New York Times and an Emmy Award-winning producer/correspondent for the PBS show Frontline. Among his books are The Russians, The New Russians, The Media and the Gulf War, and Rethinking America.

From the work of former commercial artist and window display designer Andy Warhol to billboard painter James Rosenquist, the American advertising world helped to inform and inspire the Pop Art movement. Arts educator Carol Inge Hockett explores the painting, sculpture, and printmaking of Warhol, Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, and Claes Oldenburg, as well as the work of pop poet Ronald Gross.

Hockett is coordinator of the School and Family Programs at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and formerly worked at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Pat O’Neill looks at the colorful history of the Irish in Kansas City – particularly as it played out on both sides of the law – in this presentation designed to augment the Library’s current exhibit about the Kansas City Police Department, Kansas City’s Finest.

O’Neill is a proud son of Erin whose father created the local St. Patrick’s Day Parade. He is the owner of O’Neill Marketing & Event Management, and the author of From the Bottom Up: The Story of the Irish in Kansas City.