Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

discusses

Exit:
The Endings That Set Us Free

$5 tickets are on sale now

This event includes a book signing

Date

Jun
4
Monday
June 4, 2012
6:00 PM ET

Location

Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle St., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

Harvard Book Store is delighted to welcome MacArthur prize–winning sociologist and Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard University SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT for a discussion of her new book, Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is enthralled by exits: long farewells, quick goodbyes, sudden endings, the ordinary and the extraordinary. There’s a relationship, she attests, between small goodbyes and our ability “to master and mark the larger farewells.”  In Exit, her tenth book, she explores the ways we leave one thing and move on to the next; how we anticipate, define, and reflect on our departures; our epiphanies that something is over and done with.  

Lawrence-Lightfoot, a sociologist and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has interviewed more than a dozen women and men in states of major change, and she paints their portraits with sympathy and insight: a gay man who finds home and wholeness after coming out; a sixteen-year-old boy forced to leave Iran in the midst of the violent civil war; a Catholic priest who leaves the church he has always been devoted to, the life he has loved, and the work that has been deeply fulfilling; an anthropologist who carefully stages her departure from he “field” after four years of research; and many more. 

Too often, Lawrence-Lightfoot believes, we exalt new beginnings at the expense of learning from our goodbyes. Exit finds wisdom and perspective in the possibility of moving on and marks the start of a new conversation, to help us discover how we might make our exits with purpose and dignity.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a MacArthur Prize–winning sociologist, is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard University. She is the author of eleven books, including ExitThe Third ChapterRespectThe Essential Conversation, and Balm in Gilead, which won the 1988 Christopher Award for “literary merit and humanitarian achievement.” In 1993, she was awarded Harvard’s George Ledlie Prize for research that makes “the most valuable contribution to science” and is to “the benefit of mankind.” She is the recipient of thirty-one honorary degrees and is the first African American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.

Online ticket sales have now ended. Tickets are still available at Harvard Book Store and over the phone at 617-661-1515.

$5 tickets are also coupons good for $5 off a purchase at events or at Harvard Book Store. Coupons expire 30 days after the event, and cannot be used for online purchases, event tickets, or gift certificates. Please note that your ticket guarantees you a seat until five minutes before an event begins.

 

Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle St., Cambridge, MA 02138

Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 10 minutes

As you exit the station, cross Mass. Ave. and proceed along Brattle St. Follow Brattle St. as it curves to the right in Brattle Square (follow the sidewalk on the right side of the street). The Brattle will be on the left-hand side of the street. The building is shared with Algiers Cafe and Alden & Harlow Restaurant, and the theatre entrance is on the left side of the building—look for the sidewalk poster case and marquee.

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