New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert to give 2006 Honors Lecture at Syracuse University

New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert to give 2006 Honors Lecture at Syracuse UniversityOctober 11, 2006Kelly Homan Rodoskikahoman@syr.edu

Elizabeth Kolbert, award-winning writer for The New Yorker and author of an acclaimed book on global warming, will visit Syracuse University on Oct. 25 to speak to students in the University’s Renee Crown University Honors Program.

“A Conversation with Elizabeth Kolbert” will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel and is free and open to the public. Paid parking for the public is available in the University’s visitor pay lots. A book signing will follow the lecture.

Kolbert, a graduate of Yale University and a former political reporter for The New York Times, has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999. She won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Magazine Award in 2005 and has just been awarded the 2006 National Academies’ top award for communicating science to the general public. Her stories have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue and Mother Jones, and have been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Political Writing. A collection of her work, The “Prophet of Love and Other Tales of Power and Deceit” (Bloomsbury) was published in 2004.

Kolbert traveled from Alaska to Greenland, working with top scientists to get to the heart of the debate over global warming. Her book, “Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change” (Bloomsbury, 2006), grew out of her three-part series in The New Yorker.

Through the book, Kolbert brings the environment into the consciousness of the reader and asks what, if anything, can be done to save our planet. She explains the science and studies, draws parallels to ancient civilizations and tells the personal stories of those affected the most — the people who make their homes in the Arctic Circle and Antarctica who are watching their worlds disappear.

Named for alumna Renee Schine Crown ’50, the Renee Crown University Honors Program is an enhanced educational experience for exceptional students that includes seminars, honors courses, special cultural events and close contact with faculty and other honors students. The program, which reflects the University’s emphasis on enriched intellectual depth and breadth, communicative empowerment, global awareness and civic engagement, is open to qualified students in all of the University’s undergraduate schools and colleges.