March Lecture to Feature Producer of AZPM’s ‘Children of the Holocaust’
Laura Markowitz, project producer for AZPM’s Children of the Holocaust series, will be the featured speaker at the Friends of SaddleBrooke Libraries lecture on Thursday, March 21, at the DesertView Theater.
Nancy McCluskey-Moore
On Thursday, March 21, at 4 p.m. in the DesertView Theater, the Friends of SaddleBrooke Libraries (FSL) lecture will feature Laura Markowitz, project producer for the Arizona Public Media(AZPM) series Children of the Holocaust. The lecture is free for members of Friends of SaddleBrooke Libraries and $5 for nonmembers to attend.
From 1941 to 1945, Germany’s Nazi regime murdered two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. Of the six million Jews who were victims of this genocide, known as the Holocaust, an estimated 1.5 million were children. Against all odds, some children managed to survive.
Markowitz interviewed 20 child survivors of the Holocaust who now live in Southern Arizona. Some experienced the horrors of concentration camps. Some survived by hiding in attics, barns, and holes in the ground or were able to pass as Gentiles. Others fled with their families and became refugees, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Their first-hand accounts describe the brutality they witnessed and the acts of kindness that saved them.
This multi-platform, living-history project documents one of the darkest periods in human history—before this generation is gone and their stories are lost to us forever.
Markowitz has been a contributing producer for AZPM since 2009, covering education, the environment, social justice, and more for NPR 89.1 and PBS-6. Trained in family therapy so she could better cover the mental health fields, Laura became senior editor of the magazine Psychotherapy Networker, winning a National Magazine Award for writing. She was editor-in-chief of In the Family, an award-winning magazine covering LGBTQ family and mental health issues, and she was a regular contributor to Glamour, Ms., Utne Reader, and many other publications. She also coedited The Art of Psychotherapy and The Evolving Therapist.
After relocating to Arizona in 2002, she shifted from magazine feature writing to book writing and editing and multimedia production. In 2012 she published a critically acclaimed young adult novel called Book of the Sky God. More recently, she coauthored Voices on the Economy: How Open-Minded Exploration of Rival Perspectives Can Spark Solutions to Our Urgent Economic Problems (2022) and a forthcoming book about racism called Facing the White Shadow. From February through April 2024, she will be the Pima County Library Writer in Residence.
FSL Announce Spring 2024 Author’s Luncheon
Author J.A. Jance
John Faulkner
In a continuing effort to bring well-known national authors to speak at our Author’s Luncheon series, Friends of SaddleBrooke Libraries was able to secure a speaking engagement with J.A. Jance.
She is the prolific New York Times bestselling author of the J.P. Beaumont series (26 books), the Joanna Brady series (20 books), the Ali Reynolds series (17 books), and the Walker Family Mysteries (5 books). She was born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Ariz. Jance now lives with her husband in Seattle, Wash., and here in Tucson.
You will want to get your tickets quickly, as we expect the luncheon to be sold out.
The luncheon is on March 8 at 11:30 a.m. in the MountainView Clubhouse Ballroom. Ticket sales began on Feb. 9 at the SaddleBrooke TWO Clubhouse.
Arizona Authors, Arizona Topics
Janet Fabio
The Friends of SaddleBrooke Libraries (FSL) frequently feature Arizona authors and topics at lectures and luncheons. Get ready for these events or learn more by reading books from the SaddleBrooke Community Libraries.
Interested in Tucson’s history and local attractions? Tom Heath’s book My Life on the Streetcar is available in the DesertView and SaddleBrooke One Libraries. Tom was the entertaining speaker at the FSL author lunch in November. The September and October lectures featured speakers from the Tucson Museum of Art and the Tucson Mission Garden. Upcoming lectures will feature talks on the Tucson Presidio and mariachi music. To learn more, the Southwest collection at the DesertView library offers a variety of books on Arizona and Tucson history, plus information on local attractions.
In March J.A. Jance will be the featured speaker at the FSL author lunch (watch for announcements closer to the date). If you are not already a fan of the various Jance fiction series, you may want to pick up one of her most recent books, Blessing of the Lost Girls or Collateral Damage, which continue two of her popular series. Our libraries carry many of Jance’s books in hardcover, as well as large print format, paperback, and audiobooks. Many of them are set in Arizona, and J.A. Jance used to live in Arizona.
At the Jan. 5 lecture, Arizona author and science journalist Melissa Sevigny provided a fascinating insight into her account of true adventure Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon. If you love history and/or strong women, look for this book in the Southwest collection in the DesertView Library.
Other recent lectures featured local authors Patrick Whitehurst and Leo Banks. Whitehurst writes nonfiction, and Banks writes mysteries set in Southern Arizona. SaddleBrooke author Venetia Lewis will speak at the February lecture. Her book Changing Woman: A Novel of the Camp Grant Massacre can be found in the Local Authors collection at the SaddleBrooke One Library. You can also find books by other SaddleBrooke authors in this collection.
Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity, by Chris Impey, Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona, can be found at the DesertView Library. Though topics include the dizzying advances in astrobiology, searching for distant worlds, and life beyond Earth, the book is highly readable, even for those without a strong science background.
The DesertView Library also has most of the Arizona Highways publications. Check out the newest title, Summer Hiking Guide, to escape the heat this summer.
Creative works by SaddleBrooke residents who write books for children can be found in the Children’s Collection at DesertView Library.
To stay informed about all the events sponsored by the Friends of SaddleBrooke Libraries, visit sbfsl.org. Your membership provides the funds that allow our libraries to buy new books, DVDs, audiobooks, and large print books. To learn more about the libraries or to reserve books, see the library website sblibraries.com.