Frances FitzGerald, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Way Out There In The Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War, will deliver a free public lecture on "National Missile Defenses and the Politics of Nostalgia" at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, October 10 in the UCSB Corwin Pavilion. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, Way Out There In The Blue will be available for purchase and signing at this event.

National missile defenses do not exist and will not for a decade - if ever. Yet they have become the centerpiece of the Bush administration's defense and foreign policy. What we have here is an ideological issue that goes back to the second half of the 19th century.

FitzGerald received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Fire In the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972). A revised and updated edition of FitzGerald's second book, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1979), was recently released and explores the politics of textbook publishing. FitzGerald's third book, Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary America (1986), examines four modern-day Utopian experiments, including San Francisco's gay Castro neighborhood and the free-love commune of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in central Oregon. Her latest book, Way Out There In The Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (2000), was selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and granted the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award. FitzGerald is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, and has written for numerous publications including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Architectural Digest, Islands and Rolling Stone. Her journalism has taken her to Vietnam, the Middle East, Europe, Central America and the South Pacific. She serves on the editorial boards of The Nation and Foreign Policy, and is vice-president of PEN.

This event is part of the "Global Peace, Security, and Human Rights" lecture series being sponsored by the UC Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, UCSB Arts & Lectures, Global and International Studies Program, Global Peace and Security Program and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. It is being put on in partnership with the Santa Barbara Committee on Foreign Relations, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, PAX 2100, International Studies Association at Santa Barbara City College, and the International Studies Program at Ventura College.