The Banned Book Blog...
ABFFE President Chris Finan has begun a special Banned Books Week Tour for his new book, From the Palmer Raids to the PATRIOT Act, and he'll be sharing highlights from the tour over the next few days on Omnibus.
So, here I am, sitting in a coffee shop in Missoula, Montana, wondering what I have gotten myself into. A couple of months ago, I began calling bookseller friends and asking them if they would be interested in booking a talk about my new book, From the Palmer Raids to the PATRIOT Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech. 
I had done some traveling in the spring when the book was published by Beacon Press. But I couldn't resist the idea of doing a tour around Banned Books Week, which starts Saturday.
The tour starts in Montana with readings in two bookstores, Barbara Theroux's Fact and Fiction here in Missoula and Russ Lawrence's Chapter One in Hamilton. Then, I fly to Washington State for events at the Seattle Public Library, King's Books in Tacoma and Village Books in Bellingham. I am also going to the Midwest: Oskaloosa, Iowa; Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Grand Rapids, Chicago and Milwaukee. Three weeks from now, I will finish up at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison.
My wife, Pat Willard, could not hide her horror when I told her I'd be gone for so long. It wasn't just the idea of being alone with the kids for three weeks (Our boys are 21 and 26.) Pat is on a tight deadline to finish the revisions of the book she is writing for Bloomsbury about the WPA's unpublished food survey, America Eats! (You can read more about Pat's new book on her Web site.) She spent all of last year traveling around the country visiting food festivals and state fairs covered by the WPA's writers to see how they have changed, and she may have to take one more trip while I'm gone. But if I'm gone and Pat's gone and the "kids" are home alone, will there be a home left to return to?
Posted at 09:26AM Sep 26, 2007 by Dan Cullen in General | Comments[0]
