Museum of Glass Big Read Program: Bewilderment

Community Readings & Public Programming

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Big Read broadens our understanding of ourselves and our neighbors through the power of a shared reading experience. The goals of the NEA Big Read are to inspire meaningful conversations, celebrate local creativity, elevate a wide variety of voices and perspectives, and build stronger connections in each community. Participating organizations choose a book from the 24 titles available in the NEA Big Read Library. Museum of Glass is one recipient of a NEA Big Read grant, and chose the novel Bewilderment by Richard Powers. See below for the Museum’s free public programs centered around Bewilderment.

Bewilderment (and Artemis, Too): A Lecture with Dr. Douglas Sackman

June 27 | 1-2pm | Museum of Glass Hot Shop

On June 27, Museum of Glass will host Dr. Douglas Sackman, Distinguished Professor and Chair, History, at University of Puget Sound, for a lecture titled Bewilderment (And Artemis, Too): Looking Back on Our Whole Earth from the Perspectives of Space, 250 Years of American Environmental History and Richard Powers’ Stellar Novel. The Artemis II voyage inspired widespread wonder and reflection on our planet, science, and our future. In a sense, our vicarious experience with the voyage was a “Big Read,” not unlike Richard Powers’ novel Bewilderment. The novel also allows us to look back on Earth and see it as a whole. The "Whole Earth Perspective," first made possible by photographs taken by the Apollo missions of 1968 and 1972, was intertwined with the rise of modern American environmentalism and its embrace of the idea of “wilderness”—one that has shifted significantly over the last 250 years. Synchronistically, Artemis is also a goddess of wilderness.

This lecture is included with regular Museum of Glass admission.

Douglas Sackman is a historian of the North American West who explores Americans’ diverse relationships with the natural world. He is the editor of A Companion to American Environmental History and the author of Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America and Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden.

About Bewilderment

AN OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB SELECTION
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize
Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Description: The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain…

With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

About Richard Powers

Richard Powers is a multi-award-winning American author. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

His fiction often explores the effects of science and technology on humanity, and he has been nominated for the Booker Prize four times, most recently for his novel Playground in 2024. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award in 2006. The Overstory, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2018, also won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, among other honours. Powers has previously said he is partially indebted to Booker-winner Margaret Atwood for his 2021-shortlisted novel Bewilderment, which explores the anxiety of family life on a damaged planet.

Powers’s other works include Prisoner's Dilemma (1988), The Gold Bug Variations (stories, 1991), Operation Wandering Soul (1993), Galatea 2.2 (1995), Gain (1998), Plowing the Dark (2000), The Time of Our Singing (2003), The Echo Maker (2006), Generosity (2009), and Orfeo (2014).

richardpowers.net