Curtis Wilkie, author of “The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Greatest Trial Lawyer,” is the featured speaker at the Sept. 28 Friends of the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library Table Talk series.
Wilkie, a visiting professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi since 2002, examines the career of Richard “Dickie” Scruggs in his highly-praised 2010 account of the Mississippi lawyer known as the “King of Torts.”
Tom Brokaw called Wilkie’s work “a riveting American saga of ambition, cunning, greed, corruption, high life and low life in the land of Faulkner and Grisham. … Curtis Wilkie, a child of the South and a reporter’s reporter, is the perfect match for this wild ride.”
A Greenville native and Ole Miss graduate, Wilkie spent 25 years with the Boston Globe. As a national and foreign correspondent, he covered eight presidential campaigns and opened the Globe’s Middle East Bureau. Now at Ole Miss, he is currently the Kelly G. Ross Chair of Journalism and in 2007 became the first Overby Fellow at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics.
“We’ve had a great line-up of speakers for this Table Talk series, and we’re delighted to have Curtis Wilkie with us for the last program in September,” related Friends board member Jo Shumake.
Doors open at 11:30 a.m. for those wishing to bring their lunch and socialize before the program begins at noon. The Friends will serve iced tea.
Table Talk is held in the meeting room of the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library, 314 Seventh St. N. For more information on the series, contact the Friends at [email protected].
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