This Week at Boswell: Lauren Fox, Donna Stoneham, Sarah Anne Carter.

Here's what's happening at Boswell this week.

Tuesday, August 4, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Lauren Fox, author of Days of Awe.
(Photo credit by Amanada Schlicher)

Can you believe it? Days of Awe comes out tomorrow. You all know how we feel about the book, and if not, read last week's blog post. You also probably read Jim Higgins' review in the Journal Sentinel, but if not, here that is as well. He writes: "She takes women who are falling apart and pulls wit, snark, pith, and occasional insight out of them. No contemporary novelist makes me stop as often to mark or admire one of her sentences. Plenty of people can write limpid or fancy prose, but Fox ladles out one flavorful reduction of human angst and misery after another."

From the starred Kirkus Review: "What makes the book so special is Isabel’s smart, acerbic voice and her way of seeing everything from a sharp angle. Fox studs Izzy's narration with surprising metaphors, turning ordinary domestic items into dangerous beasts ('the herd of wild minivans') and Josie’s fatal accident into something almost domestic ('Her rusty 11-year-old Toyota skidded off the slick road like a can of soup rolling across a supermarket aisle'). Isabel (and Fox) has such an offbeat way of looking at things that you’ll eagerly keep reading just to see what she’s going to say next."

And Jan Stuart writes in The Boston Globe: "The hands of time stop for no one, not even Lauren Fox. With each new novel, the characters of this irrepressibly comedic chronicler of friendship, marriage, and romantic foibles among white Milwaukeean Generation X-ers advance and mature in concert with their author. And yet her prose remains as fresh as if it spritzed from the wordsmith’s fountain of youth."

Wednesday, August 5, 7 pm, at Boswell
Donna Stoneham, author of The Thriver's Edge: Seven Keys to Transform the Way You Live, Love, and Lead.

For the past twenty-five years, Donna Stoneham has worked as an executive coach, transformational leadership consultant, and educator, helping both for-profit and not-for-profit leaders, teams, and organizations, including Gilead Sciences, Hewlett-Packard, Comcast, The American Medical Association, and UC Berkeley, unleash their power to thrive through her company, Positive Impact, LLC. Dr. Stoneham has written for the International Journal of Coaches in Organizations and Presence, is a certified Integral Coach.

At her event, Stoneham is going to talk about The Thriver's Edge: Seven Keys to Transform the Way you Live, Love and Lead. Her thesis is that a major reason why people aren't thriving is that they are focused on the wrong things, or as she calls it, keeping up instead of waking up. Her mission is to help people uncover the beliefs and fears that hold clients back from more fulling expressing their gifts and unleasing potential. Using a model developed by Stoneham, a master executive coach and transformational leadership expert, folks can explore their relationship to the seven keys that lead to thriving - trust, humility, resilience, inner direction, vision, expansiveness, and responsibility. Powerful reflection questions and practices guide the journey to taking the risks to thrive and pay it forward. Stoneham has lots of personal stories, anecdotes from clients, and examples of people who have discovered the secrets of thriving, with the end result of unleashing potential, living with purpose, and making a difference in the lives of others.

Thursday, August 6, 7 pm, at Boswell: Sarah Anne Carter, coauthor of Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects.

Tonight's evening features Sarah Carter, Curator and Director of Research at Milwaukee's Chipstone Foundation. Of her work, Mary Louise Schmacher wrote in the Journal Sentinel, when the curatorship was announced: "Sarah Anne Carter, a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University, was selected because of her innovative teaching practice and for the cutting-edge technology that she brings to the study of objects, Chipstone officials say. At Harvard, Carter teaches a course called 'Storied Structures,' an exploration of the New England home, both culturally and as a material object, from 1600 to 1900. She also adapted augmented-reality software so her students could annotate objects using 3-D modeling and smart devices. Carter has been involved in organizing untraditional exhibitions, such as last year's Tangible Things, which drew from Harvard's massive collections and created interesting swaps, integrating art into the context of a science museum, for instance."

In Tangible Things, coauthor Sarah Anne Carter (along with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, Sara Schecner, and Samantha van Gebig) invite readers to look closely at dozens of objects used in a recent Harvard University Collection exhibit, including ancient gaming pieces from the Iron Age made of sheep or goat knucklebones, cracked, heated bones fromm the Henan Province of China, as evidence of ancient divination, and a bronze cast of Abraham Lincoln's life mask and hands.

Tangible Things discusses these objects and more, inviting readers to reassess objects of all kinds, including those that reside in people’s drawers and attics. It interrogates the nineteenth-century categories that still divide art museums from science museums and historical collections from anthropological displays and that assume history is made only from written documents. Although it builds on a larger discussion among specialists, it makes its arguments through case studies, hoping to simultaneously entertain and inspire, arguing that almost any material thing, when examined closely, can be a link between the present and past.


Sunday, August 9, 11 am, at Boswell:
Storytime with Jannis

It’s Story Time with Boswellian Jannis, reading Melissa’s Octopus and Other Unsuitable Pets, by Charlotte Voake. Boswellian Jannis will read Voake's delightful picture book as well as more selections about pets (suitable or otherwise!). Perfect for ages 18 months and up, this month’s Story Time will be a frisky fun time. No reservation required.