To help you sort through the more than 140 offerings of the Chicago Humanities Festival, our critics offer a few suggestions. See the listings for the complete descriptions of the events:
No. 310. Next stop, Alpha Centauri: Writer and physicist Alan Lightman wrote one of the coolest novels of all time in “Einstein’s Dreams,” a series of brief poetic meditations on time, light and eternity.
No. 302. Most historians are content to answer the questions, “What happened and why?” Not British historian Niall Ferguson: He dares to deal with the query, “What if it had happened another way?”
No. 522. South African novelist J.M. Coetzee is a writer who resembles his prose: He’s lean, intense, scraped clean of all excess. The author of “Waiting for the Barbarians” and “The Life and Times of Michael K” reads from his work.
No. 602. The thinking person’s version of “The Addams Family”: Welcome to the spooky, altogether ooky work of novelist Patrick McGrath, who specializes in psychological thrillers with deliciously lurid Gothic touches.
— Julia Keller
No. 301. Alan Ayckbourn, whose contemporary English comedies include such ingeniously interlocked plays as “The Norman Conquests” and the new “House” and “Garden,” lectures on his inimitable art of creating “Elastic Time on Flexible Stages.”
Nos. 611 and 612. Playwright-director-actor Austin Pendleton talks about his many lives in the theater, followed by a performance of excerpts from Pendleton’s work by Writers’ Theatre under the direction of Michael Halberstam.
No. 629. Donald Margulies, whose “Dinner with Friends” received this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, discusses his extraordinary work and reminisces about his career as an American playwright.
— Richard Christiansen
No. 409. Computer driving you nuts? Patrick Whitney, director of the Institute of Design in Chicago, examines new kinds of design that bring technology into harmony with daily life.
No. 520. The act of building can be a force for peace, argues architect Amir Pasic He looks at the war-ravaged city of Mostar in Bosnia and discusses his restoration of historic Stari Most Bridge, a link between Christians and Muslims.
No. 634. Chicago invented the skyscraper, but Las Vegas perfected the architecture of fantasy. Architect Jon Jerde explains how design dreamworlds like his Fremont Street Experience get turned into reality.
— Blair Kamin
No. 303. Curator Stephen Little explains why the ancient art and philosophy of Taoism is having an increased appeal to contemporary minds.
No. 632. Younger (and beginning) collectors talk about acquiring art.
No. 633. Maryam Ovissi explores contemporary Iranian art and how a lot of it looks upon Islam more as an inspiration than constriction.
— Alan Artner
No. 115. Controversial musicologist and critic Richard Taruskin examines “The Birth of the New Russia Out of the Spirit of Music,” with emphasis on the relationship between aesthetic values and politics in post-Soviet music.
Nos. 209, 210. Aaron Copland’s children’s opera, “The Second Hurricane” — about six high school students whose tolerance and courage are tested when they are caught in a hurricane — gets a rare Chicago performance as part of the Children’s Humanities Festival. Updated and outfitted with new lyrics by Michael Barrett, Jamie Bernstein Thomas and Ed Schloth, the opera will be performed by members of the Jubilate Children’s Choir with the American Concerto Orchestra of Chicago under Barrett’s baton.
No. 645. Gloria Cheng will perform contemporary piano works by Thomas Ades, Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messiaen and Jonathan Harvey as part of a discussion-recital with the Chicago Symphony’s Matias Tarnopolsky.
— John von Rhein
No. 406. Cultural critic Camille Paglia can usually be counted on to bring a mixture of insight, hokum and outrageousness to even the most cliched topics, and I’m counting on her once again to explode the latest trend-story fad: “the revolutionary impact of the Internet.”
— Greg Kot
No. 600. John McGlinn, the most keenly sensitive conductor of scores from the musical theater, leads vocalists and orchestra in repertoire by Cole Porter.
No. 644. Margaret Whiting, Steve Ross, Cory Jamison and other top-notch interpreters explore the timeless music of Johnny Mercer.
No. 630. Karen Mason explores the art of contemporary songwriting with Craig Carnelia, Stephen Schwartz and others.
— Howard Reich
604. Hollywood Then and Now. Ann Douglas examines two of the key Hollywood genres — tuneful musicals and crime-ridden film noir — and places them in the context and culture of their times.
Facets Film Series: “The Ascent.” A great anti-war film by neglected director Larissa Shepitko, “The Ascent” (1976) unforgettably follows the plight of Russian soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in World War II.
Facets Film Series: “Taste of Cherry.” The 1997 Cannes Grand Prize-winning film by Iran’s masterful Abbas Kiarostami is a harrowing drama of alienation, desperation and the threat of suicide on a strange, sunny day.
— Michael Wilmington
