Book Notes

By The Daily Progress Staff

Published: September 14, 2008

Weston brings bus to New Dominion

New Dominion Bookshop will host a reading and book-signing by Kath Weston at 5:30 p.m. Thursday.

Weston will present selections from her new book “Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor.”

For five years, Weston rode a bus through northeastern cities buried under layoffs, an immigration raid in the Southwest, an antiwar rally in the capitol, and the path traced by Hurricane Katrina. She traveled across country via bus, from Montgomery to Missoula, Boston to Oakland and beyond, to explore what it means to live and travel poor in the world’s wealthiest nation.

She found the bus was a place where unexpected generosity coexists with pickup lines and scams, where civic debates thrive and injustice finds some of its most acute analysts.

“Kath Weston’s ‘Traveling Light’ is a bold book-compassionate and even heroic. It looks at the America we ignore as we speed past on our way to the shopping mall and the family vacation. But, it argues, this too is America,” wrote Luis Alberto Urrea, author of “The Devil’s Highway.”

Weston begins a joint appointment in women’s studies and anthropology at the University of Virginia this fall.

She has taught at Arizona State, Harvard, Wellesley, Brandeis and Tokyo University.

Her previous books include “Families We Choose,” “Long Slow Burn,” “Render Me, Gender Me,” “Gender in Real Time” and “The Apprenticeship and Blue-Collar System.”

New Dominion Bookshop is at 404 E. Main St. For more information, call 295-2552.

Best-selling couple speak at O’Mansky

Joe and Terry Graedon — newspaper columnists, radio personalities and best-selling authors — will speak at the opening fall meeting of the Charlottesville Hadassah in Congregation Beth Israel’s O’Mansky Hall at 7:30 p.m. Monday, following a 7 p.m. reception.

The Graedons’ syndicated newspaper column, the People’s Pharmacy, which runs in nearly 100 papers, has been published for more than 25 years.

The column provides consumer information on prescription and over-the-counter medications.

The couple also co-hosts a weekly radio talk show about health issues that is broadcast by more than 500 stations in the United States and overseas, including public radio stations in 17 locations throughout southwest and Central Virginia.

The well-known consumer health experts will address the audience in an interactive format similar to their public radio show.

Their book, “The People’s Pharmacy,” was a New York Times best seller. Their other books include “The People’s Pharmacy II,” “The New People’s Pharmacy III: Drug Breakthroughs of the 80s,” “Deadly Drug Interactions” and “The People’s Pharmacy Guide to Home and Herbal Remedies.”

More than 2 million copies of their books are in print.

The reception and talk are open to the public and free of charge.

The event is at 301 E. Jefferson St.

For more information, call 971-6812.

From staff reports

Books Sandwiched In will meet noon Friday at Northside Library. Jane S. Foy, co-host of the Morning News with Rick and Jane on radio station WINA, will lead a discussion on Roger Mudd’s “Place to be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News.”

Other book events at branches of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library include:

l The Wednesday Night Book Group will meet at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Northside Library to discuss “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith.

l Brown Baggers Book Group will meet noon Thursday at the Central Library to discuss “Water For Elephants” by Sara Gruen.

l The Literary Masterpiece Book Group will meet 10 a.m. Friday at Gordon Avenue Library to discuss “Song of Myself” and “Democratic Vistas” from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”

For more information, call

From staff reports