Architect David Martin discusses his book Joy Ride: An Architect’s Journey to Mexico’s Ancient and Colonial Places. A journal of his travels filled with sketches, photographs, and observations, Joy Ride celebrates the timeless sophistication of Mexico’s architecture and offers fresh insights into the country’s history and culture. Recorded July 27, 2017.

Authors on Their Books

Joy Ride

Based on the acclaimed science fiction novel Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, a new graphic adaptation by Damian Duffy and illustrator John Jennings gives fresh form to Butler’s powerful tale of slavery, time travel, and the inexorable pull of the past. Duffy and Jennings discuss the continuing relevance of Butler’s writings and how it has influenced their own work. Recorded July 24, 2017.

Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation

Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell was described by an eminent historian as “not biographable.” Faced with an intractable puzzle, can a novelist do better? Hilary Mantel, two-time Booker Prize–winning author of “Wolf Hall” and its sequel “Bring Up the Bodies,” describes her 10-year effort to pin her compelling and elusive subject to the page. Mantel is currently working on the third book in the trilogy. Her papers are archived at The Huntington. This talk is part of the Ridge Lecture Series at The Huntington. Recorded May 11, 2017.

Hilary Mantel: “I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There”

David Mas Masumoto, organic farmer and acclaimed author of Epitaph for a Peach and Harvest Son, is joined by his wife, Marcy Masumoto, for a lively talk about life on their Central California farm. Through stories that offer a personal perspective on growing organic crops, the Masumotos share their reflections on the vision required of artisan farmers in today’s food world. This talk is part of the Brody Lecture series at The Huntington. Recorded May 7, 2017.

The Art of Farming: How a Farmer Sees the Future

Long before recipes were shared on the Internet, they were passed among friends and compiled into community cookbooks published as charity fundraisers. Drawing on The Huntington’s Anne M. Cranston American Regional and Charitable Cookbook Collection, food writer Patric Kuh discusses what these shared recipes can tell us, not just about food and community but about the changes that shaped the way Americans cook. Kuh is the author of Finding the Flavors We Lost: From Bread to Bourbon, How Artisans Reclaimed American Food. Recorded Mar. 29, 2017.

A Recipe is More than a Recipe

Terry Masear, hummingbird rehabilitator, presents a lecture about nature’s tiny “flying jewels” and the work of the dedicated volunteers of the Los Angeles Hummingbird Rescue. Since its inception in 2007, the group has rehabilitated and released back into the wild 10,000 orphaned or injured birds. Masear also has also written a book on the subject titled Fastest Things on Wings: Rescuing Hummingbirds in Hollywood. This talk is part of the Southern California Gardener Lecture series at The Huntington. Recorded Mar. 5, 2017.

Remarkable New Discoveries from Hummingbird Rescue

John Mack Faragher, the Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of History and American Studies at Yale University, discusses the spatial pattern of homicide in Southern California in the 19th century. This talk is part of the Billington Lecture series at The Huntington. Recorded Feb. 8, 2017.

“The Theater of Many Deeds of Blood”: The Geography of Violence in Frontier Los Angeles

Printmaker and book artist Richard Wagener discusses how the visually striking plants in The Huntington’s Desert Garden have inspired his recent work. A series of his wood engravings are reproduced in a new limited edition, fine-press publication titled Exoticum: Twenty-five Desert Plants from the Huntington Gardens. Recorded Jan. 29, 2017.

Desert Plants and the Making of a Fine Press Book

Landscape architect Edmund Hollander, author of “The Good Garden,” discusses how the design process for a residential landscape is informed by the interaction of natural site ecology, architectural ecology, and human ecology. Recorded Oct. 2, 2016.

The Good Garden

Karl Jacoby, professor of history at Columbia University, uses the story of the remarkable Gilded Age border crosser William Ellis to discuss the shifting relationship between the United States and Mexico in the late 19th century. This talk is part of the Billington Lecture series at The Huntington. Recorded Sept. 14, 2016.

The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire

Geoffrey Cowan, president of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, discusses his book "Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary". Using a trove of newly discovered documents, Cowan offers a glimpse at the raucous and often mean-spirited political machinations of the 1912 campaign, which changed American politics forever by creating the system of primaries by which presidential nominees are selected today.

Let the People Rule

Considered the worst civil engineering failure in the history of California and the state’s second-worst disaster in terms of lives lost, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam ended the storied career of William Mulholland, the man who earlier had masterminded construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. To contextualize Mulholland’s responsibility for the dam’s failure, historians Norris Hundley, Jr. and Donald C. Jackson relied extensively on items in The Huntington’s collections for their book titled "Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster." In addition, roughly a third of the book’s illustrations are drawn from The Huntington’s collection.

The St. Francis Dam Collapse of 1928

Landscape architect Kelly Comras, author of the biography Ruth Shellhorn, examines Shellhorn’s legacy in a lecture and short film screening.

Ruth Patricia Shellhorn: Mid-Century Landscape Architecture & the Southern California Look

Amina Hassan, biographer and award-winning public radio documentarian discusses her new book, “Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist.” Miller, one of the nation’s most prominent civil rights attorneys from the 1940s through the early 1960, argued two landmark housing cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. This biography—based extensively on research from the Loren Miller Papers at The Huntington—recovers this remarkable figure from the margins of history and reveals how he changed American law forever.

Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist

Author and filmmaker Liz Goldwyn discusses her book "Sporting Guide", a series of interlinked stories that evoke a lost world on the margins of Los Angeles society in the 1890s.

In Conversation with Liz Goldwyn

As part of its regular program of public lectures, The Huntington hosts a variety of authors speaking about their own books on themes related to The Huntington’s collections.

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Authors on Their Books

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