President’s Lecture Series starts with author Sobel

President’s Lecture Series starts with author Sobel

The 2000-2001
President’s Lecture Series will commence Oct. 30 with
a talk by award-winning science writer and former New York
Times reporter Dava Sobel.

Author of “Galileo’s
Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love,”
Sobel will set the tone for the 2000-2001 President’s
Lecture Series, which also will include addresses by Alma
Guillermoprieto, Rev. William A. Lawson, Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. and Jared Diamond.

All of the lectures
will be held at 8 p.m. in the Grand Hall of the Rice Memorial
Center.

Sobel will speak
on “Galileo’s Daughter.” The book recounts
both Galileo’s work—including his famous conflict
with the Catholic Church about his theory that the Earth
revolves around the sun—and his close relationship
with his illegitimate elder daughter, Maria Celeste, who
was a devoutly religious nun.

Sobel’s
book “Longitude,” about an 18th-century clockmaker
who solved the great scientific problem of the day, spent
a total of 41 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list,
has been translated into 22 languages and won several awards,
including book of the year in England.

A fellow of
the American Geographic Society, Sobel has lectured at numerous
institutes such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Explorers
Club, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Folger Shakespeare
Library, the Royal Geographic Society (London) and BookExpo
America 1998. She also has been interviewed on radio and
television programs, including National Public Radio’s
“All Things Considered” and ABC World News Tonight.

The second lecture
in the president’s series will be the Dominique de
Menil Lecture, delivered by Guillermoprieto Nov. 13.

Since joining
the New Yorker as a contributing writer in 1989, when her
first “Letter from Bogota” appeared in the magazine,
staff writer Guillermoprieto has written numerous articles
about Latin America, including reports on the uprisings
in Chiapas, Mexico, and about Pablo Escobar and the Colombian
drug cartels. Her article on the Shining Path in Peru was
nominated for a National Magazine Award in 1994.

Guillermoprieto
has written two books. Her first, “Samba,” was
nominated for the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her second, “The Heart That Bleeds,” brings together
13 stories that originally ran in the New Yorker between
1989 and 1993.

In June 1995,
Guillermoprieto was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship
by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in
recognition of her “accomplishments in journalism that
demonstrate originality, creativity and ability to make
a contribution to our life.” She is the recipient of
several other awards, including a 1985 Alicia Patterson
Fellowship, Columbia University’s 1990 Maria Moors
Cabot Prize and the 1992 Latin American Studies Association
Award. In 1994, she became the first recipient of the Samuel
Chavkin Prize for Integrity in Latin American Journalism.

The series’ Martin Luther King Memorial Lecture speaker will be Lawson,
who will address a Rice audience Jan. 25.

Since arriving
in Texas after earning multiple degrees in sociology, divinity
and theology and completing doctoral studies in ethics and
society, Rev. William “Bill” Lawson has made significant
contributions to the spiritual and social needs of the Houston
community. Founder of the Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church,
he was instrumental in the creation of the Pre-College Center
at Texas Southern University and in the establishment of
the black studies program at the University of Houston.

Lawson’s
community and social action ministries are vast and diverse.
In 1965, he organized PUSH, which gave impetus to the desegregation
of schools in Houston. He later organized and sponsored
the area’s largest and most productive Boy Scouts program.
Troop 242 claims more than 92 Eagle scouts. And in 1988,
he conceived and orchestrated the Houston Initiative, which
involved churches and synagogues in meeting the needs of
Houston’s homeless and jobless. The program now is
spearheaded by the United Way.

Lawson is an
active member of the Houston Job Training Partnerships Administration,
the Unity National Bank board of directors, the Commission
on Mental Health for Children and Their Families and the
United Way board of directors, among others.

Kennedy will
be the fourth President’s Lecture Series speaker March
21 with the talk “A Contract With Our Future.”

His reputation
as a resolute defender of the environment stems from a litany
of successful legal actions that have helped protect New
York-area waters and the environmental rights of the traditional
homelands of indigenous tribes in Latin America and Canada.
The New York City Watershed Agreement, which he negotiated
on behalf of environmentalists and New York City watershed
consumers, is regarded as an international model in stakeholder
consensus negotiations and sustainable development. Hudson
Riverkeeper John Cronin calls Kennedy a “pioneer as
an attorney in the area of municipal and government responsibility
for environmental problems.”

Kennedy will
discuss the role that our natural surroundings play in our
work, our health and our identity as Americans and explain
how good environmental policy is good business policy, good
economic policy and good policy for posterity.

A licensed master
falconer, Kennedy serves as chief prosecuting attorney for
the Hudson riverkeeper and senior attorney for the Natural
Resources Defense Council. He also is a clinical professor
and supervising attorney at the Environmental Litigation
Clinic at Pace University School of Law in New York.

Diamond will
be the final speaker of the series April 10.

Recipient of
the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award and a professor at
the University of California–Los Angeles, Diamond is
author of the books “The Third Chimpanzee,” “Why
Is Sex Fun?” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Guns,
Germs and Steel,” which will be the focus of his discussion.

Regarded as
an “epic of modern thought … an intellectual odyssey
that challenges entrenched dogma,” “Guns, Germs
and Steel” asks and answers the question: Why did Europeans
and Asians conquer the indigenous peoples of Africa, the
New World, Australia and the South Pacific instead of being
conquered themselves? The answer touches on zebras, technology,
genetics, genocide, pestilence, weather, geography and luck.
It also unconditionally refutes racist dogma that claims
biological superiority for Eurasians. According to Diamond,
geographical accidents, not intelligence, seem to be the
reasons for Eurasia’s success.

Diamond began
his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary
biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences
and the American Philosophical Society, and he has published
more than 200 articles in Discover, Natural History, Nature
and Geo magazines.

Supported by
the J. Newton Rayzor Lecture Fund, the President’s
Lecture Series has long been a distinguished element of
Rice’s academic community. The series, open to the
Rice community and the people of Houston, embodies William
Marsh Rice’s commitment to contribute educational opportunity
to the broader society. The Office of the President sponsors
this series that brings stimulating speakers who foster
understanding about a wide range of topics in the sciences,
humanities, engineering, social sciences, architecture,
music and public policy.

To attend the
free lectures, enter gate 13 off Rice Boulevard or gate
8 off University Boulevard. Parking is available in lot
E (near gate 13) and in the stadium lot. A shuttle bus will
run between the Rice Memorial Center and the stadium lot
from 7 to 9:30 p.m.

No tickets will
be needed for admission to the lectures. Seating will begin
at 7 p.m. For more information, call (713) 348-5585 or e-mail <ricepls@rice.edu>.