Please join us on Zoom for readings and a conversation with three nonfiction authors – Alexander Wolff, Brett Dakin, and Judy Polumbaum – whose new books revolve around family histories in which resistance to various forms of political depravity plays a key role.

To join this virtual event, register here.

The New York Review of Books calls Alexander Wolff's Endpapers ,"Revelatory, riveting, and deeply moving . . . Endpapers is a kind of reckoning: an exploration of the author’s family’s bargains with the Nazis, a reflection on inherited guilt and its imperatives, and a contemplation of the ways that postwar Germans have attempted to expiate the horrific deeds and moral blindness of their elders.” 

Illustrator's Quarterly calls Brett Dakin's American Daredevil: Comics, Communism, and the Battles of Lev Gleason "Essential reading for both the casual reader as well as students of comic book history."

Victor S. Navasky, author of Naming Names, former editor and publisher of The Nation, says of Judy Polumbaum's All Available Light: The Life and Legacy of Photographer Ted Polumbaum, “Do yourself a favor and read the highly original All Available Light, which is really three books in one, each of which deepens one’s understanding of the others: A loving daughter’s memoir of her late father, a Cold War account of the courage it took not to name names during the McCarthyite years (which he didn’t), and an erudite but easily accessible account of how a caring photographer goes about making the images that are still very much still with us.”

The bookstore also will deliver book bonuses related to this event: Each copy of any of these three titles purchased from Prairie Lights will come with a small print of an original image from the archives of photojournalist Ted Polumbaum, the central subject of one of the books.

Alexander Wolff’s Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home tells the saga of his book publisher grandfather, who fled the Nazis, and his father, who was left behind in Germany to fight for them. Alex spent 36 years on staff at Sports Illustrated and is the author of the New York Times bestseller Raw Recruits; The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama; and Big Game, Small World, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. A former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton, he lives with his family in Vermont.

Brett Dakin is the author of a biography, American Daredevil: Comics, Communism, and the Battles of Lev Gleason, just nominated by Comic-Con for the Eisner Award for best comics-related book of 2021, and a memoir, Another Quiet American: Stories of Life in Laos. His writing has appeared in the New York Daily News, the International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and The Guardian. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, Brett grew up in London and now lives in New York City with his husband and their dog, Carl.

Judy Polumbaum’s All Available Light: The Life and Legacy of Photographer Ted Polumbaum tells the story of a photojournalist who was both of and ahead of his times – member of the Greatest Generation-turned-peace activist. Fired from his newswriting job for defying McCarthyite inquisitors, Ted took up a freelance photo career, completing hundreds of assignments for LIFE magazine and many other publications, chronicling everything from celebrities, sports and weather to the great social movements of era. Judy is an unrepentant former newspaper reporter and University of Iowa professor emerita whose scholarly research focused on media in China. She lives and writes on the outskirts of Las Vegas.