ILLINOIS

Co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Music Department.

About the book: From Sandy Tolan, author of the now classic The Lemon Tree, comes a moving story of music as a means of empowerment and healing. CHILDREN OF THE STONE: The Power of Music in a Hard Land is the incredible story of Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, a child of Palestinian refugee camps who was caught by a photographer hurling a rock at Israeli soldiers in 1988 in the West Bank. The snapshot, which appeared around the world, showed a fragile 8-year-old with fear and anger in his eyes. The image came to symbolize the rage and frustration of the intifada. Ten years later, Ramzi laid down the stones when he discovered the viola—he was awed by the power of music to lift himself and others out of despair.

About the author: SANDY TOLAN is the author of Me & Hank and The Lemon Tree. As cofounder of Homelands Productions, Tolan has produced dozens of radio documentaries for NPR and PRI. He has also written for more than forty magazines and newspapers. His work has won numerous awards, and he was a 1993 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and an I. F. Stone Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

About the interlocutor: Philip Bohlman is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago and a visiting professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater(Hannover). At Chicago, Bohlman is on the resource faculty of the Germanic Studies Department, the Mary Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion, the Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, the Divinity School, and the Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture.