Best-selling author. Social commentary full
of wisdom & elegance.


Highlights

This award-winning journalist speaks with singular wit, eloquence and insight on modern life and culture. He has a rich trove of delightful stories and revealing observations about people and places and everyday life.

Adam writes long essays on big thinkers for The New Yorker magazine and he has a genius for bringing these people and their ideas to life in his presentations, for communicating the emotions behind ideas, and the feelings that ideas evoke in us, and their relevance to modern life.

His most recent book embodies this gift for using historical biography to explore the way we live today. Angels & Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life looks at the birth of the modern era through the lives of two extraordinary people born within hours of each other exactly 200 years ago this year.

Adam writes in another genre, also, what he calls ‘comic-personal essays’—funny and touching stories about the 'domestic pleasures'—how families live (especially his own family) in the storied cities of Paris and New York. In these talks, as in his books, Adam has a marvelous talent for opening the heart and showing us who we are through our relation to place, with a touch that is light and a wisdom that is deep.

His previous book, Through the Children's Gate, is a meditation on hope, as his family, his city and his country live through and past the events of 9/ll.

Paris to the Moon gave us the romance that is Paris through the everyday adventures of his own American family living there from 1995 to 2000.

Adam is a remarkable speaker and consummate storyteller—warm and charming, very genuine and very good at connecting with audiences.

Books

Angels and Ages.

Their genius – their legacies – their humanity:
Born on the same day 200 years ago, Lincoln and Darwin changed the world forever.
How these men's words have remade our minds.

On a memorable day in human history, February 12, 1809, two babies were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Together they became midwives to the spirit of a new world, a new kind of hope and faith. Searching for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution, Adam Gopnik reveals them as both ordinary family men with ambitions, faults and loves and as great thinkers who helped shape the modern world—a world increasingly governed by reason, argument and observation, by the verdicts of time and history. As writers, they invented a new language to express that understanding, the liberal voice we now use both at home and in public. This presentation is a meditation as only Adam Gopnik can deliver it on how we got where we are and how we became who we are as children of robust democracy and science.

Through the Children’s Gate. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux gave names to all the entrances of their most famous work of genius, Central Park. The Children’s Gate is the entrance on the east side at Seventy-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue; and it’s the metaphor for why, after five years in Paris, his family came back to New York: so their children could "grow up in New York, to be natives here, as we could never be, to come in through the Children’s Gate, not the Stranger’s Gate" (which is high on the West Side). From Bluei, a goldfish fated to meet a Hitchcockian end, to Charlie Ravioli, an imaginary playmate who, being a New Yorker, is too busy to play, Adam’s book—and his presentation—are full of characters with extraordinary resonance for parents and children, for city-dwelling lovers of place, and any audience eager to pass through the Children’s Gate with him.

Paris to the Moon. From 1995 to 2000, Adam and his family lived in Paris, from which he wrote the "Paris Journals" for The New Yorker. In these "comic-sentimental" essays (collected in the bestseller, Paris to the Moon), he gives us the romance of Paris in its particulars, intimate and charming vignettes of real life in the world’s most romantic city. In what has been called the finest book on France in recent years, Adam describes the dual processes of navigating a foreign city and becoming a parent, and how they are not completely dissimilar journeys. Paris to the Moon is really not about Paris so much as it explores what Adam calls "the domestic pleasures" and how place (in this case, Paris) gives them special color and texture—a central theme of his work.

Americans in Paris. Released in March 2004, Americans in Paris collects the experiences of Americans both famous and obscure, living, visiting, working—and writing—in the Paris of their time. Organized chronologically, Americans in Paris keeps surprising and delighting the reader with the wit, insight and opinions of a full range of American observers, from Abigail Adams, wife of the second president ("It is a matter of great speculation to me when these people labor") to Isadora Duncan and Jack Kerouac. This book offers a unique perspective on the American spirit and our complex relationship with the French people and their great city.

The King in the Window. Adam has written a book of juvenile fiction, also set in Paris. The King in the Window is written with the wit and descriptive richness that have made critics call Adam Gopnik "a prose master" and "a writer of extraordinary grace and skill." This spell-binding and often comic adventure follows an American boy who has been mistaken for a lost heroic leader called the King in the Window and the part he plays in ending the great war of the Windows and Mirrors.

Topic

Cultivating the Garden—What is the value of cultivating domestic pleasure (that is, civilization)?

The Journalist

Adam has been writing for The New Yorker since 1986, and his work for the magazine has won both the National Magazine Award for Essay and the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. He has broadcasted regularly for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and wrote the article on American culture for the last two editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica.