Kentucky Author Forum

Pat Conroy was the featured guest at the Kentucky Author Forum on Oct. 30, 2013, concurrent with the release of his new memoir, The Death of Santini. He was interviewed by Maureen Corrigan, critic-in-residence and lecturer at Georgetown University, and book critic for NPR's Fresh Air. The new book delves into Conroy's past, furthering the account of family struggle, expanding on the story of his father, the inspiration for his novel, The Great Santini. In the forward, he states, “I’ve been writing the story of my own life for over forty years. My own stormy autobiography has been my theme, my dilemma, my obsession, and the fly-by-night dread I bring to the art of fiction.” With both his parents now deceased, Conroy is able to view them with a bit more detachment, appreciating some redeeming qualities in his father, Marine Corps Colonel Don Conroy, and mother, Peg Conroy Egan.

Rick Pitino, coach of the 2013 NCAA men's basketball champs, author of "The One Day Contract," interviewed by Joe Nocera, opinion and business columnist for the New York Times on Oct 9, 2013.

Jared Diamond spoke in Louisville on January 9, 2013 as featured guest at the Kentucky Author Forum, discussing in detail his latest book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies. Diamond is an author, physiologist, evolutionary biologist and bio-geographer, as well as a medical researcher and professor of geography at UCLA. Diamond argues that developed, Western cultures can learn much from small-scale, traditional societies, like those of the New Guinea Highlanders. In evolutionary time it has only been a very short while since traditional cultures and so-called "modern" cultures diverged, and Diamond asserts we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional conditions. His research for the book draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by

"The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible. It's the most controversial. It doesn't have any stories, moral teaching. It only has visions, dreams and nightmares. Not many people say they understand it, but for 2000 years, this book has been wildly popular." So says scholar Elaine Pagels, who was in Louisville recently as featured guest at the Kentucky Author Forum. Pagels discussed in depth her latest book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, in a sprawling interview conducted by Gustav Nieburh, a professor of religion at Syracuse University. Pagels tracks The Book of Revelation back to its historical origin, written as its author John of Patmos took aim at the Roman Empire after what is now known as "the Jewish War," in 66 CE. Militant Jews in Jerusalem, fired with religious fervor, waged an all-out war against Rome's occupation of Judea and their defeat resulted in the desecration of Jerusalem and its Great Temple. Pagels interprets Rev

Ray Kurzweil, arguably today’s most influential—and often controversial—futurist, is one of the leading inventors of our time and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. Among his inventions, Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition device, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. In his book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the limitless potential of reverse engineering the human brain. He examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness, while envisioning the radical possibilities of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating. Kurzweil was the featured guest at the University of

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker was the guest at the Kentucky Author Forum on Oct. 2, 2012, interviewed by NPR's Neal Conan. Pinker is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on language and cognition and is the author of numerous books, including The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, and most recently, The Better Angels of Our Nature. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker examines human violence through the centuries. We’ve all had the experience of reading about a bloody war or shocking crime and asking, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In the book, Pinker argues that violence in the past was actually much worse than now. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous execut