Friends of the Knox County Public Library

Archived Event

You’re invited to join Friends, the Knox County Public Library, Union Ave Books, and the East Tennessee Historical Society for an evening with Washington Post reporter and author Dan Zak on Thursday, August 4, at 7 p.m. at the East Tennessee History Center.

Almighty cover Zak will discuss his new book, Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age. He will be joined onstage by Sister Denise Laffan, a nun with the Japanese Buddhist order of Nipponzan Myohoji, which is building a Peace Pagoda in Cocke County. The Peace Pagoda, an all-volunteer project, promotes the vision of a nuclear-free world based on mutual respect for all life.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase, and the author will be available to sign books after he speaks.

Almighty begins with the story of the night in July 2012 when a trio of elderly peace activists infiltrated the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to draw attention to a costly military-industrial complex that stockpiled deadly nukes and drones. In the telling of this story, Zak reexamines the seventy-year history of America’s nuclear weapons program and its attendant madness at a time when concern about weapons proliferation worldwide is great.

World Policy Journal recently published an interview with Zak on its blog. Richard Rhodes reviewed Almighty in the Opinions section of the Washington Post. Bruce Andriatch, the Assistant Managing Editor for Features at The Buffalo News, also reviewed the book. The New York Times published a review by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Kai Bird.

NPR’s Kelly McEvers interviewed the author on All Things Considered on July 12.

Dan Zak has written a wide range of news stories, narratives and profiles while on local, national and foreign assignments. His reporting has taken him to the Academy Awards, to seven provinces in Iraq, to the East and West wings of the White House, to the Marshall Islands, to the United Nations, and to chairs opposite Robert Gates, John Kasich, Megyn Kelly, David Letterman and Meryl Streep. His book Almighty: Courage, Resistance and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age was published July 12. He’s on Twitter: @MrDanZak.