BRATTLEBORO — Pulitzer Prize-winning author and intelligence expert Tom Powers examines the shape of American foreign policy in a talk at Brooks Memorial Library on May 7 at 7 p.m.
His talk, “Soft Versus Hard Power in American Foreign Policy: Finding the Right Mix,” part of the Vermont Humanities Council's First Wednesdays lecture series, is free and open to the public.
Powers will examine America's not-always-successful attempts, from the Cold War to today, to strike the right balance in foreign policy between soft power and military might.
Powers, with Lucinda Franks, won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 for their coverage of radical Weatherman member Diana Oughton, and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, Commonweal, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone.
His recent book, The Killing of Crazy Horse (Vintage, 2010), is a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for biography, and winner of the Los Angeles Times book prize for history.
The 2013-2014 First Wednesdays season in Brattleboro concludes on June 4 with “Fallingwater: An American Masterpiece” with H. Nicholas Muller III, retired executive director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.