ABOUT HOOKS BOOK EVENTS
Through easy, affordable and customizable book events, HooksBookEvents helps enhance the productivity and job satisfaction of employees and constituents by infusing new ideas into your organization. Our minority, women-owned business connects corporate and government audiences with authors and new ideas. Based in Washington, DC, we are happy to travel with our award-winning authors to help the people in your organization achieve their highest potential through the power of great books.
ABOUT PERRY PIDGEON HOOKS, President and Co-founder
Perry (pictured left) has had a love affair with books that started when she was 4 and her mom took her to the public library in her hometown of Memphis, TN. The southern belle was hooked from the first whiff of those musty children’s tomes. Through her years at the University of Virginia to her post-college adventures in England then New York City, she always found time to check out the local book stores. Perry decided early on that everyone should share her passion, so she founded book clubs wherever she went. In the mid-1990s, she began working with independent book stores as a marketing director to promote authors and bring them to non-traditional book venues. She’s also spent time working in the financial services and advertising industries, and with trade associations. Each experience has helped her hone her skills in designing programs and author series that fit her clients’ needs. She founded HooksBookEvents in 2000 and since has focused her energies on taking world-renown authors into some of the most well-known organizations in the country. “My goal is to spread ideas and get people thinking,” Perry says. “If I can do that, I believe we will be helping to create solutions to problems.. big and small.” Email Perry / Phone: 301-229-1128.
ABOUT LORETTA YENSON, Co-founder and Chief Financial Officer
Loretta grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa where books provided a window to the outside world. Her Chinese parents encouraged reading, mostly British authors, and stressed education. When it came time for Loretta to attend college, they jumped at the opportunity to send her to school in the U.S. Loretta easily landed a spot at Wellesley College for her BA in Political Science and at Columbia University where she received a master’s degree in International Relations. She chose banking and work in the not-for-profit world for a career, and in the last three decades has developed programs for new board members — including a speaker and author series that fit the needs of the board, the organization and the donors. She is HooksBooksEvents chief financial officer. Email Loretta.
ABOUT SUSAN THOMAS, Operations Manager
A native of the Greater Washington area, Susan has worked in the financial services industry for 17 years. Her passion for numbers and business operations led her to study for and receive an MBA, and helped her move from the position of financial analyst to vp of commercial lending operations. Reading has also been an integral part of her career and personal life — another passion that merged with her career when she joined HooksBookEvents in 2008. Email Susan.
ABOUT HOPE KATZ GIBBS, Director of Communications
Philadelphia native Hope Katz Gibbs has been a journalist since graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. She moved to the Washington, DC area in 1991 to get her masters in educational leadership at The George Washington University, and in 1993 started a freelance career. Since then, her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, The Miami Herald, the Costco Connection, elan magazine, George Washington University magazine and other alumni, association, general interest, and education publications. Hope got into the PR biz in 2002 when she became the Director of Communications for the City of Fairfax Schools. In 2006 she was hired by the global futurist research and consulting firm Social Technologies to lead its corporate communications department. In 2008, she founded her own company, Inkandescent Public Relations, a PR / media relations / marketing firm that helps authors, small- to mid-size organizations and women-owned businesses increase visibility. Email Hope.
BOOKS WE LOVE: 2008
When we said we are avid readers, we weren’t kidding. We read several books a month. Following are our Top 12 favorites from 2008. (Stay tuned for picks for 2009.)
Beyond The Great Wall, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (Artisan, 2008) — This book encompasses receipes and travel in “the other China” — the high open spaces and sacred places of Tibet, the Silk Road and more where the people and places are culturally distinct from the more familiar China. It is a book of eye-opening collection of magnificent photos, enticing recipes and warm stories of real people. Next is to find time to try some of these recipes!
Cry, The Beloved Country, by Alan Paton (Scribner, 2003) — This book should be required reading for all. It is the deeply moving story of a Black pastor and his son, set in South Africa during the height of apartheid, who fight against the injustice of racial prejudice. The writing is so exquisite you will not fail to be moved by it. Published almost 60 years ago, much (unfortunately) still rings true today.
Einstein’s Dream, by Alan Lightman (Vintage, 1993) — An oldie but a goodie. Contemplating the left and right brains with Dan Pink, led HBE staff to this charming novel about young Einstein’s possible dreams while working in the patent office in 1905.
Hello, Cupcake!, Alan Richardson and Karen Tack (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) — This cookbook on irresistibly playful creations anyone can make. It is fun for adults and children, and easily kept two 13-year old girls occupied for over two hours! The end result was almost too cute to eat, but we managed to get over that. So cute that one Dad even mentioned the cupcakes to the Moms at a hockey game the next day!
Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Free Press, 2007) — This is a true tale of a lovely African woman who surmounts unthinkable odds escaping an arranged marriage by fleeing to the Netherlands — where she winds up serving in the Parliament. Wonderfully empowering for women. The new forward by Chris Hitchens is also worth a read.
Wife in the North,” by Judith O’Reilly (PublicAffairs, 2008) this is a book we both loved. O’Reilly, a successful journalist and mother of three, agreed to leave London for rugged Northumberland, and a test-run to weigh the benefits of country living. No sooner do they arrive than her husband leaves to return to work in London. She swaps her high heels for rubber boots and life-long friends for cows, sheep, and strange neighbors. Her experiences are hilarious, typical fish-out-of-water stories, yet hit a cord for women trying to strike the right balance between career and family. Would Perry still trade in Washington D.C. for a farm in North Carolina? Hm …
My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor (Viking, 2008) — Not to be missed. Click here for a preview.
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac (Penguin, 1976) — No doubt about it, this book is one of our favorite books. A thinly fictionalized autobiography, narrated by one of Kerouac’s alter-egos Sal Paradise, the cross-country bohemian odyssey continues to serve as a mantra, even to a bunch of 50somethings.
Selections from The Principle of Relativity, by Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking (Running Press, 2004)— A history major’s attempt to understand the theory of relativity was not pretty. These are the actual Einstein papers and formulae. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the game of challenging my brain to comprehend this, I found more pleasure reading “Einstein’s Dream” by Alan Lightman, last May.
Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson (Mariner Books, 2007) — And, yet another war. This book, originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, was one of the first calls for public awareness and environmental action. It examines the way dangerous chemicals have been used without sufficient research or regard for their potential to harm wildlife, water, soil and humans – and today we are dealing with the consequences. Some say it is already too late as “humans have wilfully disturbed the whole web of life, the ‘intimate and essential relations’ between the earth and all its passengers, animate and inanimage.” More than 45 years after its initial publication, “Silent Spring” is, unfortunately, still timely.
Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver (Penguin, 2006) — This NY Times bestseller chronicles Mortensen’s amazing and successful adventure building schools and delivering education to Pakistani and Afghani girls.
War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, Richard Engel (Simon & Schuster, 2008) — A dramatic and intimate account of battle reporting in Iraq. As a young journalist with $2,000 in this pocket, fluent in Arabic and a sense of adventure, Engel took off to Iraq in 2003 at the start of the war. He has witnessed nearly every major milestone – what it was like to go into the hole where US Special Forces captured Saddam Hussein, watching as Iraqis voted in their first election, tracking the successes and setbacks of the war.