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Newtown Talks kicks off with Sebasian Junger at Edmond Town Hall on Thursday, Oct 24.
Doors at 6:30pm | Show starts at 7pm - Moderated by Suzy DeYoung and Lee Shull
Books are provided by Byrd's Books for pre-purchase and night of the event.
Sebastian recounts the fateful day of June 16, 2020 when a freak medical incident in the middle of the woods brought him to the brink of death. That episode inspired "In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife." Junger's latest book is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery. For years as an award- winning war reporter, Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children.
Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day and was told he had sufered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived. This experience spurred Junger — a confrmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical — to undertake a scientifc, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?
Audiences will be riveted by Junger’s harrowing accounts of war and thoroughly motivated by his prolifc metaphors that instill teamwork, crush the competition and earn respect.
Sebastian Junger is the internationally acclaimed, best- selling author of WAR, The Perfect Storm , A Death in Belmont and Fire . He is also the acclaimed director of the documentary flms Restrepo and Korengal . As a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and as a contributor to ABC News, he has covered major international news stories and has been awarded the National Magazine Award and a SAIS Novartis Prize for Journalism.
