Robert Scheer to speak Thursday, May 21

Come hear veteran journalist Robert Scheer take aim at America's defense policy and military budget Thursday, May 21, 7 pm.

Scheer argues that war cannot defeat terrorism. What's required is simple police work, dogged, boring and not terribly expensive, not trillion-dollar bombers, submarines and nuclear arsenal, expenditures he contends are unrelated to defeating terrorists and of little use in Iraq.

He soberly reminds readers that Americans have never objected to wasteful defense budgets, and antiwar elected officials fight as viciously as neoconservatives to bring money to their district's defense industries. Scheer's prose is as clear as his evidence; readers will be galvanized by his incendiary account.

Robert Scheer has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines.

Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Robert Scheer is a Clinical Professor at the Annenberg School For Communication at USC. He was raised in the Bronx, where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Thursday, May 21, 7 pm
Glendale Public Library Auditorium
222 East Harvard Street, Glendale
(818) 548-2042

American artist Andrew Wyeth dies at 91

Beloved and iconoclastic American artist Andrew Wyeth died Friday, January 16, at his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. He was 91. Andrew Newell Wyeth III was born on July 12, 1917, in Chadds Ford, the son of the famous illustrator N.C. Wyeth. As a boy Andrew was frail. He was homeschooled and learned to draw before he could read. As a teenager, he did illustrations under his father's name, but despite his admiration for his father he resisted following in his career footsteps. Wyeth's other hero was the famed realist painter Winslow Homer and his influence can be seen in Wyeth's own work. Wyeth married a local Maine woman, Betsy James in 1940. Their relationship would endure a lifetime and she would be his champion, overseeing the publication of illustrated books, starting a reproduction business, creating a Wyeth archive and producing a film documentary about her husband.

Wyeth never roamed far from his boyhood home and his work almost always depicts friends and family and the Pennsylvania or Maine landscapes familiar to him. "He painted snowy landscapes under leaden skies, a barn with a door ajar, an abandoned house, tire tracks, a wedding tent in an empty field, fishermen’s nets hung to dry in the breeze: images of absence, silence, loss, abandonment, desolation but also expectation." (New York Times) Being a realist painter at the height of abstract expressionism's popularity, he had a mixed reaction from critics. His conservative politics and his commitment to his rural haunts also put him at odds with the New York art scene of the 1950s and 60s. Nevertheless, he was immensely popular with the public and enjoyed commercial success and ultimately critical recognition, as well. An exhibition of his work toured the U.S. in 1966-67, attracting huge crowds at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Whitney Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1976 Wyeth was given a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Books and DVDs about this great American artist can be borrowed from the Glendale and Pasadena Public Libraries. Also available are numerous titles about his father N.C. Wyeth, and his son Jaime, who is also a painter.

Click for Andrew Wyeth Catalog holdings

Click for N.C. Wyeth Catalog holdings

Click for Jamie Wyeth Catalog holdings