George Packer is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of two novels and three works of nonfiction including The Assassins' Gate, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in November, 2005, and Blood of the Liberals (FSG, 2000), which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is also the editor of the anthology The Fight for Democracy. He lives in Brooklyn.

John Powers is film critic at Vogue, Editor at Large of L.A. Weekly and Critic at Large for NPR's Fresh Air. His 2004 book, Sore Winners: American Idols, Patriotic Shoppers and Other Strange Species in George Bush's America has just been released in paperback by Anchor.

After getting his Ph.D. from Stanford University in "Modern Thought and Literature," Powers taught at Georgetown University. In 1985, he moved to Los Angeles where he became a full-time journalist. Over the years, his work has appeared in such other publications as New York, Rolling Stone, Harper's, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and Gourmet, for which he served as Southeast Asia correspondent. In 1993, he co-directed the acclaimed BBC documentary I Am a Sex Addict with Vikram Jayanti (who, like Mr. Powers, is not a sex addict). He and his wife, Sandi Tan, live in Pasadena.

When:

Free Reservations: Tue, Nov 8, 7 PM, Central Library, Los Angeles California