Award-winning author Jonathan Safran Foer was the featured speaker at the 2010-11 Witt Series-sponsored Fred R. Leventhal Family Endowed Lecture on Thursday, Sept. 23, in Pam Evans Smith Arena.
Foer is the author of best-selling novels Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything Is Illuminated, named Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and the winner of numerous awards, including the Guardian First Book Prize, the National Jewish Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize.
His latest book, Eating Animals, is an exhaustively-argued account of one man’s decade-long struggle with vegetarianism. Part memoir, part exposé, the book examines the topics of factory farming and commercial fisheries and explores the cultural significance of food. It is his first work of non-fiction.
Made possible by a gift to Wittenberg University from the Fred R. Leventhal family of Springfield, the endowed Witt Series-sponsored annual lecture has welcomed numerous distinguished guests since 1982, including Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter and author David Halberstram; influential financial analyst Malcolm Forbes; Harvard law professor Arthur Miller; Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel; historian Doris Kearns Goodwin; journalist Carl Bernstein; and environmental lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
