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Daniel Taylor-Ide travels widely in the U.S., India, and Nepal, working for the United Nations, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, and the government of Nepal. He was knighted by the king of Nepal for his efforts. He founded the Woodlands Mountain Institute, an organization dedicated to sustainable development planning for mountain regions and peoples; is the president of Future Generations Inc.; and leads a research group at Johns Hopkins University in the School of Public Hygiene and Public Health. Daniel lives on Spruce Knob Mountain in West Virginia with his wife, Jennifer, and three children, Jesse, Tara, and Luke.

Designated a National Book Award Finalist for *When Smoke Ran Like Water (2002, Basic Books)*, Devra Davis is director of the worlds first Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and professor of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburghs Graduate School of Public Health. Her recent book, *The Secret History of the War on Cancer*, was a top pick by *Newsweek* and is being used at major schools of public health, including Harvard, Emory, and Tulane University. Dr. Davis' career has spanned all areas of academia, public policy, and scientific research. President Clinton appointed the honorable Dr. Davis to the newly established Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, (1994-99) an independent executive branch agency that investigates, prevents, and mitigates chemical accidents. As the former senior advisor to the assistant secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services, she has counseled leading officials in the United States, United Nations, World Health Organization, and World Bank. She also served as a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in which the group awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with the honorable Al Gore. Dr. Davis holds a BS in physiological psychology and a MA in sociology from the University of Pittsburgh. She completed a PhD in science studies at the University of Chicago as a Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellow and a MPH in epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University as a Senior National Cancer Institute Post-Doctoral Fellow. She has also authored more than 190 publications in books and journals ranging from the *Lancet* and *Journal of the American Medical Association to Scientific American *and *the New York Times.*

Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and, more recently, the 2003 Emily Couric Leadership Award, the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1997 Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, the 1997 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 1996 National Humanities Medal. In 2006 she received the coveted Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service (together with Anderson Cooper, John Glenn, Mike Nichols and Queen Noor of Jordan see the press release, newspaper coverage and photos), and in 2008 she was honored with the Library of Virginia's Lifetime Achievement Award. Rita Dove has published the poetry collections The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth (2004), a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985), the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992), essays under the title The Poet's World (1995), and the play The Darker Face of the Earth, which had its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was subsequently produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Royal National Theatre in London, and other theatres. Seven for Luck, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra with music by John Williams, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1998.

**Samantha Power** is an Irish-American academic, author and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Power began her career by covering the Yugoslav Wars as a journalist. From 1998 to 2002, she served as the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she later became the first Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy. She was a senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama until March 2008, when she resigned from his presidential campaign after apologizing for referring to then-Senator Hillary Clinton as "a monster."

Leonard Peikoff is an American Objectivist philosopher. He is a former professor of philosophy and a former radio talk show host. He is the founder of the Ayn Rand Institute and the legal heir to Ayn Rand's estate.

Bob Schieffer is the former anchor and moderator of *Face the Nation*, CBS News' Sunday public affairs broadcast. He has also served as CBS News' chief Washington correspondent. Schieffer has covered Washington for CBS News for more than 40 years and is one of the few broadcast or print journalists to have covered all four major beats in the nation's capital - the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and Capitol Hill. He was chief Washington correspondent beginning in 1982, congressional correspondent in 1989, has covered every presidential campaign and has been a floor reporter at all of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions since 1972. In 2004, he was chosen as moderator for the third presidential debate. A member of the Broadcasting/Cable Hall of Fame, Schieffer was named the 2003 recipient of the Paul White Award from the Radio-Television News Directors Association. Schieffer joined CBS News in 1969 and, after a brief stint as a general assignment reporter, was named Pentagon correspondent, a post he held for four years. Before joining CBS News, he was a reporter at *the Fort Worth Star-Telegram* and, in 1965, became the first reporter from a Texas newspaper to report from Vietnam. Schieffer later became news anchor at WBAP-TV Dallas/Fort Worth, a post that eventually led to his joining CBS News. The author of three books, Schieffer's most recent book is *Face the Nation: My Favorite Stories from the First 50 Years of the Award Winning News Broadcast*. He is also author of the 2003 *New York Times* bestseller, *This Just In: What I Couldn't Tell You On TV, and Acting President*, published in 1989. Shieffer's latest book is [\_Overload: Finding the Truth in Today’s Deluge of News\_](https://www.amazon.com/Overload-Finding-Truth-Todays-Deluge/dp/153810721X "") (2017).

**Dr. Cohen** is the Robertson-Steele Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Program for Neuropsychiatry Research at McLean Hospital. President emeritus of McLean. He leads a multidisciplinary research program on the causes of psychiatric disorders, with the goal of developing new, more effective, and better tolerated treatments. He and his colleagues employ pharmacologic, brain imaging, epidemiologic, genomic and cell model approaches to study schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, in particular. Collaborating investigators work at McLean and at the Broad Institute, Harvard University, MIT and international sites. Dr. Cohen has directed clinical and laboratory research projects at McLean for over 35 years. He is the founding director of the McLean Brain Imaging Center, and president and psychiatrist in chief emeritus at McLean Hospital, having led McLean from 1997 through 2005. Dr. Cohen was named Psychiatrist of the Year by National Alliance on Mental Illness of Massachusetts in 2005 and 2010. He has over 400 peer reviewed published manuscripts and book chapters describing the results of his work.

Richard Reeves, Senior Lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, is an author and syndicated columnist whose column has appeared in more than 100 newspapers since 1979. A new column also appears on Yahoo! News each Friday. He has received dozens of awards for his work in print, television and film. Educated as a mechanical engineer, Richard Reeves began his career in journalism at the age of 23, founding the *Phillipsburg Free Press* in Phillipsburg, N.J. He has been a correspondent for the *Newark Evening News* and the *New York Herald Tribune* and was the Chief Political Correspondent of *The New York Times*. He has also written for numerous other publications, becoming National Editor and Columnist for *Esquire* and *New York Magazine* along the way. Named a "literary lion" by the New York Public Library, Reeves has won a number of print journalism awards and has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist and juror. In 2007, W.W. Norton will publish his biography and re-creation of the experiments of Ernest Rutherford, the Nobel prizewinning physicist, who was born on the frontier of New Zealand in 1871 and went on to become the greatest experimental scientist of his time, discovering the unimagined subatomic world we now know and then splitting the atom he first envisioned. He is currently working in the United States and Europe on a history of the Berlin Airlift, scheduled for publication in 2008.

During his few weeks as Vice President, Harry S Truman scarcely saw President Roosevelt, and received no briefing on the development of the atomic bomb or the unfolding difficulties with Soviet Russia. Suddenly these and a host of other wartime problems became Truman's to solve when, on April 12, 1945, he became President. Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, in 1884. He grew up in Independence, and for 12 years prospered as a Missouri farmer. He went to France during World War I as a captain in the Field Artillery. Returning, he married Elizabeth Virginia Wallace, and opened a haberdashery in Kansas City. Active in the Democratic Party, Truman was elected a judge of the Jackson County Court (an administrative position) in 1922. He became a Senator in 1934. During World War II he headed the Senate war investigating committee, checking into waste and corruption and saving perhaps as much as 15 billion dollars. As President, Truman made some of the most crucial decisions in history. Soon after V-E Day, the war against Japan had reached its final stage. An urgent plea to Japan to surrender was rejected. Truman, after consultations with his advisers, ordered atomic bombs dropped on cities devoted to war work. Two were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japanese surrender quickly followed. In June 1945 Truman witnessed the signing of the charter of the United Nations, hopefully established to preserve peace. After on re-election, Truman decided not to run again, he retiring to Independence. At age 88, he died December 26, 1972, after a stubborn fight for life.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Professor Gates is Editor-in-Chief of *the Oxford African American Studies Center*, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American Studies and Africana Studies, and of *The Root*, an online news magazine dedicated to coverage of African American news, culture, and genealogy. He is the co-author, with Cornel West, of *The Future of the Race* (1996), and the author of a memoir, *Colored People* (1994), that traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s. Among his other books are *The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers* (2003); *Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Black Man *(1997); and *Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars* (1992). He is completing a book on race and writing in the eighteenth century, entitled *Black Letters and the Enlightenment*. Professor Gates earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge, and his B.A. summa cum laude in History from Yale University, where he was a Scholar of the House, in 1973. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke. In his career he has received nearly 50 honorary degrees, from institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, New York University, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Williams College, Emory University, Howard University, University of Toronto, and the University of Benin.