Berkeley authors Adam and Arlie Hochschild present forum

Internationally recognized authors Adam and Arlie Hochschild, who frequently summer in Maine, lead a two-hour discussion titled “Finding Our Way in Bush’s America” at 7 p.m. Friday, July 29, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall. The public is invited to attend at no charge.

Co-sponsored by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates and Maine Veterans for Peace, the couple’s presentation is the inaugural event in the Veterans for Peace Captain William Ladd series of free public forums. Known as the “Apostle for Peace,” Ladd was a native of Auburn and author of “A Congress of Nations,” a historic plan for an international organization for peace and justice.

A co-founder of Mother Jones Magazine, Adam Hochschild teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. A contributor to The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books, he has written about South Africa, the former Soviet Union and civil rights.

Washington Post reviewer Steven Mufson called Hochschild’s latest book, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), a “riveting narrative” that “reminds us that people who fancy themselves civilized can have the most uncivilized institutions, that distance can lull a society into living with terrible injustices, and that economic interests can corrupt the moral fabric of a nation.”

Hochschild is the author of numerous other volumes, including Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son (Viking Adult, 1986) and King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

Professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, Arlie Hochschild wrote the groundbreaking books The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (University of California Press, 1983); The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (Metropolitan Books, 1997); The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (University of California Press, 2003); and The Second Shift (Viking-Penguin, 1989), called “one of the best critiques of work in America” by the Los Angeles Times. A study of a Fortune 500 company, Hochschild’s book makes the case that working parents often choose to spend more time in the office than at home.

With writer Barbara Ehrenreich, Hochschild co-edited Global Woman: Maids, Nannies and Sex Workers in the New Economy (Metropolitan Books, 2003), and her recent articles include “Let Them Eat War” (Mother Jones) and “The Empathy Squeeze” (TomDispatch.com and The American Prospect), essays about President Bush’s appeal to blue-collar voters.

The Harward Center for Community Partnerships is an emerging organizational structure at Bates College designed to pursue academic excellence through integrating local and global communities with the mission of the college. Under the leadership of its newly appointed director, David Scobey, the center will link key academic endeavors at the college with community collaboration, research and service.

Maine Veterans for Peace is a nonprofit educational and humanitarian organization dedicated to the abolishment of war.