Events

    Toward Net-Zero Utility Bills and Comfortable, Healthy and Sustainable Homes Tuesday, March 16, 5:00 p.m. Speaker: Nick Harris of Energy Beyond Design Learn about the simple steps you can take now to reduce your utility bills, improve your comfort and health, and green your home. Nick Harris, an energy analyst and retrofitter from Energy Beyond Design, will discuss how homeowners can develop road-maps for successful and cost-effective home energy projects. Members of the audience will be eligible for steeply discounted home energy audits to get them started on their own path towards a better home. The Green Dream Team is a group of experts dedicated to providing you with the most comprehensive selection of services to improve, remodel, build, furnish, and landscape your home - always in an eco-friendly and sustainable way. For information, contact Rich Wingerter at 650-207-8014. www.essentialquality.com

    Tuesday, March 16, 7:30 p.m. Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemons Became Mark Twain  BUY NOW Mark Twain is arguably the most famous and influential writer in American history. His legacy is defined by The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  But little to nothing is known about the crucial years during which Samuel Clemens transformed himself into the beloved American writer we celebrate today as Mark Twain. Samuel Clemens traveled by stagecoach to the Wildwest in 1861 as an ex-Confederate guerilla and unemployed riverboat pilot, and returned six years later as Mark Twain. LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY tells how Samuel Clemens reinvented himself, all the while evading Indians and gunslingers, failing miserably as a miner, dodging challenges to duels, pioneering surfing in Hawaii, and getting into a lot more trouble along the way. Backed by solid scholarship but never dry, LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY is the first full-length study of Mark Twain’s life-changing time in the still-Wild West and where he began his writing career and shaped himself into an American favorite. Roy Morris is the editor of Military Heritage magazine and the author of five previous books on the Civil War era, including The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America (Smithsonian Books, 2008); Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 (Simon and Schuster, 2003); and The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2000).  A former newspaper reporter and political correspondent for The Chattanooga News-Free Press and The Chattanooga Times, Morris was the founding editor of America's Civil War magazine and has served as a consultant for A&E Network and the History Channel.   Photo Credit: Paula Grant Shuford