Susan
Gregory Thomas is the author of Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates
Parents and Harms Young Minds. An investigative journalist and broadcaster,
she was formerly a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report and co-host
of public TV’s Digital Duo. She has written for Time, the Washington
Post, Glamour, Cookie Magazine, and Babble.com.
In Buy, Buy Baby, Ms. Thomas (the mother of three children ranging in age from infant to grade school) looks at how marketers for toy and media companies exploit infants and toddlers and the impact of that exploitation on our society. She argues that consumerism trumps learning as companies try to infiltrate nearly every aspect of a child’s life, and presents evidence that some of these products actually impair development and could harm our kids socially and cognitively, for life.
Allison
Gilbert is currently at work writing her third non-fiction book, Parentless
Parents: How the Deaths of Our Mothers and Fathers Impact the Way We Parent Our
Own Children, and she will provide the Writers' Center an exclusive sneak
peak at her research-in-progress when she joins us on November 8th. Parentless
Parents will be published by Hyperion and is a follow-up to her critically
acclaimed book, Always Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost
Both Parents. Parentless Parents will explore how the way we parent
is shaped by the loss of our own mothers and fathers; how marriages are impacted
when one spouse is parentless and the other is not; and offer strategies for keeping
the memory of our parents alive for our children.
In Always Too Soon, Ms. Gilbert (a producer at CNN in New York and mother of two small children living in Westchester) interviewed celebrities and others about losing their parents. She spoke with, among others, Rosanne Cash, Geraldine Ferraro, Ice-T, Yogi Berra, Mariel Hemingway, and New York Times best-selling authors, Hope Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich. Always Too Soon sparked the formation of the Parentless Parents organization, a national network of support groups for mothers and fathers who have lost their own parents. You can find out more about Ms. Gilbert by visiting her website at www.allisongilbert.com. And, if you are a parent who has lost both your parents, you can help with her research by taking the Parentless Parents online survey.
The reading will be introduced by Jeff Gordinier, Editor-at-Large for Details magazine and author of X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking.
Suggested
Donation: $5 ($3 for HVWC members)
Programs and events at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center are made possible, in part, by grants from the Bydale Foundation, the David G. Taft Foundation, the Orchard Foundation, the William Robinson Foundation, and the Thendara Foundation; with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and by the Basic Program Support Grant of Arts Westchester with funds from Westchester County Government.