1C: James Hogue, Frank Abagnale, Clark Rockefeller and . . . [1C students: see Rockefeller links to read]

When we discuss The Runner by David Samuels we will we will turn to specific examples from the book.  Here are some questions we might consider. Those underlined and in bold would be good ones to study in preparation for the in-class essay.

1. Consider the book's title and the first paragraph of the narrative and note that James Hogue's story is not told in chronological order.  Why do you think Samuels opened his book (with that first paragraph and) with that scene?

2.  We think of liars as the ones telling the lie, but Samuels says Hogue preferred to let "other people do the talking" (4).  Why would this be an important feature of his persona?  Later, Samuels claims, "Hogue didn't care much for telling stories about himself" (36).  What is beginning to emerge regarding Hogue or liars, at least from the point of view of Samuels?

3. David Eckley says that "[Hogue] was a sweetheart, but dangerous in his own way. . . .He just can't seem to come to reality" (5)  Do you agree with Eckley or not?

4. Samuels says that "[Hogue] only fooled people who wanted to be fooled" (6).  This sounds like something Ricky Jay might have said when he was speaking with Errol Morris.  (Find where Jay says this.)  How might Jay's remarks help us understand someone like Hogue?  You may also want to see Samuels's remarks about Dr. Alaia as "a sucker" (24).

5. I am trying to find the reason that Samuels wrote The Runner.  What is his purpose?  See what Samuels says on page 9: "Hogue also did what all liars do, which is to diminish the universal store of truthfulness . . . and establish meaningful connections to others" (9).  Do you think that this is the book's heart, or is it something else?  Explain.

6. "Cindy's habit of telling tall tales is familiar," Samuels writes (13). Why does he tell us this?  

7.  Samuels wonders "Perhaps one reason that James Hogue has held my interest the past ten years is that I still can't figure out exactly what he was up to, at the same time as he reminded me strongly of myself." (14).  Do you see a connection, or a similarity, between the two men?  Explain.   

8.  Let's look at Hogue's family life.  What was his relationship with his sister?  What were his mother's habits?  How do all of these things tell us about Hogue--if anything?

9. Let's stop and take some time with Chapter V. "The Escape Artist."  I think of this as Samuels's "big idea" for the book.  Do you think he is overreaching? Or does he hit the right note and successfully make his story about Hogue serve a larger purpose?  Explain.

10.What is the theme of The Runner?  Offer several examples from the book in support of your position.

11. Is The Runner a story of class consciousness?  Would someone from the upper class engage in the same conduct as Hogue did?  Or to look at this question from another angle: would Hogue have lived his life as he did--falsifying his academic record, his name, and stealing--if he was wealthy?  Explain.

12.  Was Hogue's greatest crime against himself or others?  Or his harm was equal to both?  Explain. 

13.  Samuels identifies with Hogue.  (See question #7, above.)  Does this cause him to lose his objectivity in telling Hogue's story?  Or does it allow him to better explain who Hogue is?

14.  Is The Runner principally a story about one man, that is, Hogue, or is it about the American characteristic of remaking or redefining or self-invention?  Explain.

15. Come up with three questions of your own--not one raised above--about The Runner. Then, each group must come up with three questions that they will put on the board for further discussion. 

16. Samuels claims, "In a meritocratic society, acceptance to a university like Princeton is not simply a validation of the person you were when you applied. Rather, it means that you are free to become someone new. In turn, the university will testify to the social legitimacy of your actions by putting its name on your diploma. Your troubled or unworthy old self can be safely discarded in favor of the aura conferred by the institution and by the collective achievements of its well-placed graduates around the globe. Later on, if you wish, you can reveal yourself as you were, and share the embarrassing details of your origins and upbringing." (128)  Has Samuels made a successful argument in The Runner for this claim? Explain with specific examples from the book.

17. Do you trust Samuels reporting of Hogue's penchant to lie? Explain with specific examples from the book.

18. What does Errol Morris have to say about the nature of lying? Are his observations pertinent to the story of James Hogue? Explain with evidence from Morris's columns and The Runner.

And here's the trailer for  Con Man, a film about Hogue. Maybe we should watch it.  What do you think? (An earlier viewer, Gerardo of English 1C, spots news reader Kent Manahan. A tip of the hat to Gerardo for his careful observation.) 

And the trailer for Catch Me if You Can, the film about Frank Abagnale, Jr.:

Can't leave out the opening credits for it:

Anyone find other stories like James Hogue's or Frank Abagnale, Jr.'s out there?  Yes, I did.  I have been following the Christian Karl "Clark Rockefeller" Gerhartsreiter story, a tale much darker than either Hogue's or Abagnale's.  Gerhartsreiter, pictured below, lived in a guest house behind a large home in San Marino and convicted in August 2013 of murdering his landlord, and then burying the body in the backyard.  The whereabouts of the victim's wife is unknown.

[***]1C STUDENTS: Read, Listen & Watch links marked with [***] re: CLARK ROCKEFELLER

"From left: Christian Gerhartsreiter, high-school student, late 70s; Christopher Chichester, U.S.C.-campus denizen, mid-80s; Christopher Crowe, Wall Street executive, late 80s or early 90s; Clark Rockefeller, divorcé and father, 2008. Left, from TZ Munich; second from right, courtesy of Cosgrove/Meurer Productions, Inc.; right, by Essdras M. Suarez/The Boston Globe." -- from Vanity Fair, January 2009

[***]NPR: 30 year Con from German Kid to Rockefeller Scion," July 10, 2011[Radio broadcast is about 10. Listen to the broadcast and read the page.]

Book Review: The Man in the Rockefeller Suit" by Mark Seal. Review by Denise Hamilton.  Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2011

"The Man in the Rockefeller Suit" by Mark Seal. Vanity Fair, January 2009

[***]“Clark Rockefeller” Found Guilty: the Murder Verdict—and What Became of the Victim’s Wife by Mark Seal, Vanity Fair, April 12, 2013

"Rockefeller Impostor gets 27-to-life for San Marino Man's Murder," Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2013

[***]"Exclusive Video: Phony Rockefeller Speaks After Being Sentenced-to-27 Years to Life in Prison," Pasadena Star News, August 15, 2013[INTERVIEW is about 20 minutes. Watch the interview and read the article.]

If you know of other con artists, please post in comments section.  From semesters past, students have learned that Hogue-like stories are not all that unusual.

Ivette Gonzalez kept her eyes on the news with Twitter.  She got news of a story that she wanted us to see.  I'm glad she did.  Sounds like the illustrious James "The Runner" Hogue.

This time it is a basketball player.  Here's the story:

22 year-old man posed as 16 year-old high school student [link broken]

Angela Liu found a similar story about a man who . . . well, just go to this link and find out. [link broken]

Look what Laura Noonan found: "A 33-year-old woman is charged with stealing her daughter's identity to attend high school and join the cheerleading team."  Want to learn more?  Click here.

Mike Tuano wonders, "Now imagine if Hogue was a little more clever, and decided to use his smarts and con-artist specialty to lean towards a more 'financial' gain .  .  .  . He would probably end up being like this guy [Victor Lustig]."  Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower--twice.  Yes, you read that right. Twice. To learn more go to Wikipedia's site on Lustig and Biography's profile of him.

In December 2014 I read about a teenager who said he made $72 million in stock trades. Not true, it turns out.

Anyone want to find more James Hogue wannabees or types or poseurs extraordinaires?  Let the games begin.  Post links in comments.

1B: Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-2014)

"Gabriel José García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, a town in Northern Colombia, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents in a house filled with countless aunts and the rumors of ghosts. But in order to get a better grasp on García Márquez's life, it helps to understand something first about both the history of Colombia and the unusual background of his family."-- from the website Macondo

The death of the great Colombian novelist Gabriel José García Márquez was reported by The New York Times on April 17, 2014. He was 87.

For more information about García Márquez visit Macondo, an excellent website on Garcia Marquez; Macondo is also the name of the writer's fictional town in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a seminal novel work in Magical Realism and world literature. Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 for his body of work.  Go to his Nobel Prize page to learn more about him. Here is an interview that the Paris Review conducted with Garcia Marquez in 1981. In an excerpt from it, he talks about his literary education;

      INTERVIEWER

How did you start writing?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

By drawing. By drawing cartoons. Before I could read or write I used to draw comics at school and at home. The funny thing is that I now realize that when I was in high school I had the reputation of being a writer, though I never in fact wrote anything. If there was a pamphlet to be written or a letter of petition, I was the one to do it because I was supposedly the writer. When I entered college I happened to have a very good literary background in general, considerably above the average of my friends. At the university in Bogotá, I started making new friends and acquaintances, who introduced me to contemporary writers. One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories. They are totally intellectual short stories because I was writing them on the basis of my literary experience and had not yet found the link between literature and life. The stories were published in the literary supplement of the newspaper El Espectador in Bogotá and they did have a certain success at the time—probably because nobody in Colombia was writing intellectual short stories. What was being written then was mostly about life in the countryside and social life. When I wrote my first short stories I was told they had Joycean influences.

INTERVIEWER

Had you read Joyce at that time?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

I had never read Joyce, so I started reading Ulysses. I read it in the only Spanish edition available. Since then, after having read Ulysses in English as well as a very good French translation, I can see that the original Spanish translation was very bad. But I did learn something that was to be very useful to me in my future writing—the technique of the interior monologue. I later found this in Virginia Woolf, and I like the way she uses it better than Joyce. Although I later realized that the person who invented this interior monologue was the anonymous writer of the Lazarillo de Tormes.

INTERVIEWER

Can you name some of your early influences?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

The people who really helped me to get rid of my intellectual attitude towards the short story were the writers of the American Lost Generation. I realized that their literature had a relationship with life that my short stories didn’t. And then an event took place which was very important with respect to this attitude. It was the Bogotazo, on the ninth of April, 1948, when a political leader, Gaitan, was shot and the people of Bogotá went raving mad in the streets. I was in my pension ready to have lunch when I heard the news. I ran towards the place, but Gaitan had just been put into a taxi and was being taken to a hospital. On my way back to the pension, the people had already taken to the streets and they were demonstrating, looting stores and burning buildings. I joined them. That afternoon and evening, I became aware of the kind of country I was living in, and how little my short stories had to do with any of that. When I was later forced to go back to Barranquilla on the Caribbean, where I had spent my childhood, I realized that that was the type of life I had lived, knew, and wanted to write about.

Around 1950 or ’51 another event happened that influenced my literary tendencies. My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I was born, and to sell the house where I spent my first years. When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn’t been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories. I’m not sure whether I had already read Faulkner or not, but I know now that only a technique like Faulkner’s could have enabled me to write down what I was seeing. The atmosphere, the decadence, the heat in the village were roughly the same as what I had felt in Faulkner. It was a banana-plantation region inhabited by a lot of Americans from the fruit companies which gave it the same sort of atmosphere I had found in the writers of the Deep South. Critics have spoken of the literary influence of Faulkner, but I see it as a coincidence: I had simply found material that had to be dealt with in the same way that Faulkner had   treated similar material.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ and Magical Realism For information re: magical realism, see J. Kip Wheeler's webpage of literary terms; if this link does not work I have a link to Wheeler's webpage under the On Writing section on the  right side of the blog; look for Literary Terms by Dr. L. Kip Wheeler, and follow the links to magical realism. Also, I invite you to read about narrator, epiphany and motif at Wheeler's site.

Salman Rushdie's Magic in the Service of Truth: Gabriel García Márquez’s Work Was Rooted in the Real appeared in The New York Times, April 21, 2014. Rushdie argues that writers like García Márquez show how "imagination is used to enrich reality, not to escape from it."   He is concerned that "[t]he trouble with the term 'magic realism,' el realismo mágico, is that when people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying only half of it, 'magic,' without paying attention to the other half, 'realism.' But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere whimsy — writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It’s because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of the real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways, that it works."

The first 11 minutes of the

 documentary Garcia Marquez: A Witch Writing

If the video is not appearing, try this link.

T.C. Boyle on GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ:

"The book that spoke to me [when Boyle was probably in his early 20s] was imagined by my enduring hero, Gabriel García Márquez, and it is One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many before me have spoken of its magisterial blend of magic, humor, and history, so I will let all that slide and address one of García Márquez's short stories that appeared around that time in the New American Review, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." This is the story of a decrepit angel coming for a sick child in a storm on the Caribbean coast of Cólombia. The storm drives him down out of the sky to land in a very unangelic heap in the backyard of the child's parents, where he is confined in a chicken house, amongst the other winged and feathered creatures. The story is a sly (and yes, wicked) satire of the forms and strictures of the Catholic church, and it places the miraculous in the context of the ordinary--again, just as in real life. And oh yes, when I think of that story and that book, I can't help recalling the doggy smell of the stone gatehouse--we had three magnificent and magnificently stinking dogs at the time--and of the great leaping blazes we would build nightly in the old fireplace to keep the frost at bay." (from an Amazon.com page republished on Reinhard Dhonat's site devoted to Boyle.)

The house in Aracataca, Colombia where
Garcia Marquez, aka Gabo, was born in 1928.
 (El Espectador; with thanks to Sean Dolan)

from the Paris Review interview with García Márquez, 1981:

INTERVIEWER

Can you name some of your early influences?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

. . . . Around 1950 or ’51 another event happened that influenced my literary tendencies. My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I was born, and to sell the house where I spent my first years. When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn’t been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories. I’m not sure whether I had already read Faulkner or not, but I know now that only a technique like Faulkner’s could have enabled me to write down what I was seeing. The atmosphere, the decadence, the heat in the village were roughly the same as what I had felt in Faulkner. It was a banana-plantation region inhabited by a lot of Americans from the fruit companies which gave it the same sort of atmosphere I had found in the writers of the Deep South. Critics have spoken of the literary influence of Faulkner, but I see it as a coincidence: I had simply found material that had to be dealt with in the same way that Faulkner had treated similar material.

From that trip to the village I came back to write Leaf Storm, my first novel. What really happened to me in that trip to Aracataca was that I realized that everything that had occurred in my childhood had a literary value that I was only now appreciating. From the moment I wrote Leaf Storm I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world. That was in 1953, but it wasn’t until 1967 that I got my first royalties after having written five of my eight books.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that it’s common for young writers to deny the worth of their own childhoods and experiences and to intellectualize as you did initially?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

No, the process usually takes place the other way around, but if I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it’s always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told. Pablo Neruda has a line in a poem that says “God help me from inventing when I sing.” It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

From that trip to the village I came back to write Leaf Storm, my first novel. What really happened to me in that trip to Aracataca was that I realized that everything that had occurred in my childhood had a literary value that I was only now appreciating.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ in The New Yorker
The New Yorker has published numerous stories by García Márquez and a profile of him.  Here is the magazine's post with links.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ  Interview
William Kennedy's interview with García Márquez. It appeared in The Atlantic, January 1973 under the title, "The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona, and Other Visions."

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ Obituaries

The New York Times, April 17, 2014 has an extensive report on his life and death.  Many other news outlets around the world, including the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Time, The Guardian, and The New Yorker declare his importance.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ  Farewell Letter
The infamous "farewell letter" attributed to García Márquez is a fake. He didn't write it. It was reprinted many times.  If you wish to read it, click on this link.

Taken in 1982, Paris. Gabriel García Márquez with his son Gonzalo
 and wife Mercedes a short time prior to winning the Nobel Prize. (Gamma-Liaison)

One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into nearly 40 languages.
 Here is a small selection of book covers for the novel.

1A & 1B: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Hemingway Passport Photo, 1923

The New York Times has posted their extensive collection of Ernest Hemingway articles. You'll find links to his life story, book reviews, author commentaries, interviews and audio recordings.

Here's the first paragraph of a July 11, 1999 article summarizing his life:

Hemingway in Our Times

By MICHAEL REYNOLDS

 

n October 18, 1925, an American writer, not yet turned twenty-six, was first reviewed in The New York Times, whose anonymous critic called his short stories "lean, pleasing, with tough resilience," "fibrous," "athletic," "fresh," "hard," and "clean," almost as if an athlete, not a book, was being reviewed. Hemingway had that effect on reviewers and readers alike. His prose style was dramatically different, demanding equally new ways of describing it. Not more than a handful of the newspaper's readers likely knew the Hemingway name, but the review of "In Our Time" could not have been more propitious.

The above article continues here.

PBS American Masters presents a timeline of Hemingway's life. Another PBS page, this one for Michael Palin's "Hemingway Adventures," is a great place to start to learn about Hemingway. Palin, a formerly of the English comedy group, Monty Python, can be seen here on his "Hemingway Adventures," or search Michael Palin and Hemingway at YouTube. 

Hemingway was interviewed by the Paris Review for its Spring 1958 issue.  Conducted by editor George Plimpton, Hemingway talks about his writing methods and theories.  

Hemingway wrote often about war. Read "Hemingway on War and Its Aftermath" for a good overview of the topic.  You can find it here.

 

The copy of In Our Time, above, reports bookseller The Manhattan Rare Book Company, "is a FIRST EDITION, one of only 170 numbered copies, printed on Rives hand-made paper, of Hemingway's second book. With woodcut portrait  frontispiece after Henry Strater."

Published in "Paris [by]: Three Mountains Press, 1924. Tall octavo, original publisher's decorated tan paper boards; custom cloth box. Bookplate on front pastedown. A few spots of rubbing to spine, one corner lightly bumped; boards a little bowed; usual discoloration to endpapers. A very nice copy. $36,500."

It gets better.  As of October 8, 2014, Abe Books was listing a first edition copy of In Our Time for $75,000. 

Yes,  you read that right.  It is not a typo.  $75,000.  The lesson: don't sell your books back to the bookstore.  Unless they are giving you a very good price.

Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn

HBO premiered Hemingway and Gellhorn, with Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, on May 28th, 2012. (It was not a hit with the critics.) Hemingway and Gellhorn met in 1936 and were married from 1940-45.  Gellhorn was a distinguished writer and among the most  important correspondents of the 20th Century, reporting on the Spanish Civil War (alongside Hemingway), the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, and the Vietnam and the Arab-Israeli wars.  Here's the trailer for the film:

Hemingway's Literary and Artistic Influences

James Joyce

from The New York Times, July 6, 1961, Ernest Hemingway speaks of James Joyce, one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century:

"Hemingway was quick to see the merit in the work of James Joyce. . . . In a letter to Sherwood Anderson dated March 9, 1922, Hemingway wrote:

"'Joyce has written a most goddam wonderful book (Ulysses) * * *. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving, but you can find the whole Celtic crew of them in Michaud,' (then a moderately expensive Paris eating place).

"Nevertheless, on several occasions Hemingway contributed to the funds raised to aid Joyce, with whom he did a considerable amount of stout drinking in Paris. When Joyce's "Ulysses" was pirated in the United States Hemingway was one of the organizers of the protest which bore the names of many of the most distinguished figures in world literature."

You can read James Joyce's Ulysses here.  It was published in 1922 to much acclaim and controversy.  Regarding the latter, some thought it to be a "dirty book."  Finnegans Wake, a novel that Joyce worked on from 1922 until its publication in 1939, is far more experimental.  Read it here.

"Portrait of Gertrude Stein"
 by Picasso (1906)

Hemingway was influenced by many writers and artists early in his career, among them Gertrude Stein, who was known for her literary and artistic salon in Paris after World War I.  Dennis Ryan examines Stein's influence on Hemingway's early career--she critiqued his prose--in his article "Dating Hemingway's Early Style/Parsing Gertrude Stein's Modernism".  Stein was a fierce experimentalist, and you can read a sample of her work here.

Hemingway wrote about his time in Paris in his nonfiction account, A Moveable Feast.  Alfred Kazin's essay, "Hemingway as his Own Fable," from The Atlantic, June 1964, reviews Hemingway's book and offers some insight to his autobiographical impulses as seen in his prose.

Cezanne's "Mont Sainte-Victoire
 Seen from Les Lauves" (1904-06) 

Artists like Paul Cezanne were also important models for Hemingway, who claimed that he made repeated visits to museum galleries to see how the post-Impressionist captured the landscape. While in Paris during the 1920s, Hemingway also came to know Pablo Picasso and would later make a film about The Spanish Civil War, the subject of Picasso's famous "Guernica".

Picasso's "Guernica" (1937)
 portrays the destruction of Guernica, Spain
 by German and Italian bombers during the Spanish Civil War

Hemingway filming The Spanish Earth (1937),
the story of Spain's Republican resistance
 of fascist Gen. Francisco Franco,
 who had the support of Nazi Germany and Italy.
Written with John Dos Passos,
 Hemingway also served as the film's narrator.

The Spanish Earth is a 55 minute film. You can watch it above.

The "real" Hemingway, as he is presented
 in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris."

More "real" Hemingway
 from "Midnight in Paris."



There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

--Ernest Hemingway

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

Jill Leovy

In conversation with Warren Olney, radio host, "To The Point" and "Which Way L.A." on KCRW 89.9 FM

Thursday Feb. 5th @ 7:15 P.M.

LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY (LAPL - Downtown L.A.)

This program is presented by LAPL's [ALOUD]. It is Free, but Full. Standby tickets might become available.

Ghettoside tells the kaleidoscopic story of one American murder—one young black man slaying another—and a driven crew of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs.  This fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime in South Los Angeles provides a new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in America—and how the plague of killings might yet be stopped. KCRW’s Warren Olney sits down with award-winning reporter Leovy to discuss this master work of literary journalism that is equal parts gripping detective story and provocative social critique. Read the review of Ghettoside at The New York Times BOOK REVIEW website.

Jill Leovy is a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times, where she has worked for fifteen years. She's the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including, as a member of a six-reporter team, the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. In 2007, Leovy created an innovative blog project called “The Homicide Report” that covered every single one of the 845 murders in Los Angeles that year.

Warren Olney is the host and executive producer of Which Way, LA? and To the Point. WWLA is the signature daily local news program on 89.9 KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com. Olney reaches a national audience with To the Point, distributed by Public Radio International, and several other public radio markets nationwide. Olney and both of his programs have been honored with nearly 40 national, regional and local awards for broadcast excellence since its inception. Most recently, Olney received the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award for his broad achievements in television news, as well as his storied career over 20 years on public radio, both locally and nationally.

Main image: Photo of interactive map from "The Homicide Report" showing murder victims in Los Angeles in the past 12 months.  

Reservation Policy for Free Programs:
As most [ALOUD] at Central Library programs are free of charge, it is our policy to overbook. In the case of a FULL program your free reservation may not guarantee admission. We recommend arriving early. Space permitting, unclaimed reservations will be released to standby patrons at 7 PM. 

Book signings
ALOUD is one of the many free programs the Library Foundation makes possible at the Los Angeles Public Library. Most ALOUD author programs are followed by book signings.  To help sustain this valuable cultural exchange, at least one copy of the author’s book must be purchased from theLibrary Store if you wish to participate in the post-program book signing. Proceeds support the Los Angeles Public Library.  Library Foundation members receive a 15% discount on all Library Store purchases.

Directions/Parking:
Unless otherwise indicated, ALOUD programs take place at the Los Angeles Central Library's Mark Taper Auditorium, 630 W. Fifth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071.