Brown University Library News

Thursday, May 15, 2008 7:00 p.m. List Art Center Auditorium Brown University Following Ms. Cardona’s talk, a reception and book signing will be held in the John Hay Library. Guests will have an opportunity to visit the Yoken Archives located on the 3rd floor of the John Hay Library. Ms. Cardona’s visit to Brown is part of the Mel and Cindy Yoken Cultural Series. A citizen of the United States, France and Spain, Hélène Cardona is fluent in English, French, Spanish, German, Greek and Italian. Born in Paris of a Greek mother and Spanish father and raised all over Europe, she studied English Philology and Literature in Cambridge, England; Spanish at the International Universities of Santander and Baeza, Spain; and German at the Goethe Institute in Bremen, Germany. She attended Hamilton College, New York, where she also taught French and Spanish, and the Sorbonne, Paris, where she wrote her thesis on Henry James for her Master’s in American Literature. She worked as a translator/interpreter for the Canadian Embassy and the French Chamber of Commerce. She is also a teacher and dream analyst and has appeared in many films. A graduate of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, she studied with Ellen Burstyn at the Actors’ Studio, played Fuffi Drou in Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat and Candy in Lawrence Kasdan’s Mumford. Voice credits include The Painted Veil, The Interpreter, The Bourne Supremacy, The Terminal, The Pink Panther and others. For Serendipity, she co-wrote with Peter Chelsom the song Lucienne, which she also sang. She has lived in Geneva, Cambridge, London, Llandudno, Monte-Carlo, Bremen, Tarragona, Paris, New York City and Santa Monica, and travels extensively. She has translated What We Carry by Dorianne Laux into French, her father’s poetry from Spanish into English, the Lawrence Bridges film Muse of Fire for the NEA and has received grants from the Durfee Foundation and the French Cultural Services of Los Angeles. Her first book, The Astonished Universe, an uplifting and luminous collection of poetry about consciousness, is the first bilingual edition in English and French from Red Hen Press. Richard Wilbur writes that “each poem fully exists in two tongues at once, and this adds to the book’s great charm and visionary quality.”

Kenneth W. Rendell, dealer in historical letters, documents and manuscripts, and historical artifacts,
and director of the Museum of World War II
Wednesday, April 30
5:30-7:00 p.m.
John Hay Library, Lownes Room
20 Prospect Street, Providence
Kenneth Rendell has been a dealer in historical letters, documents and manuscripts, and historical artifacts since 1959 with offices in New York and Boston. He has authored numerous articles and has written the two standard textbooks in the field, History Comes to Life and Forging History.
Rendell has been involved in every major archival appraisal and has won the Tax Court opinions for both the government and the taxpayers that have become the standards for the field. He has been a consultant to virtually every university in the country, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, as well as the FBI, CIA, IRS, Newsweek, CBS News, and many other media organizations. He has uncovered literally all of the major journalistic hoaxes of modern times from the Hitler diaries in 1983 to the Jack the Ripper diaries several years ago.
His primary personal interest has been preserving archives and artifacts from World War II, and his collection is now housed in the 10,000 sq. ft. Museum of World War II in Natick, MA. London’s Imperial War Museum describes his museum on its Web site as the best World War II museum in the world. His other major collecting interest is the American West, and he formed what is probably the most diverse collection of Western Americana. This is the basis of his most recently published book, The Western Pursuit of the American Dream.
The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the John Nicholas Brown Center at 401 863-1177 or publichumanities@brown.edu. We look forward to seeing you there!