An evening of enlightenment

The Press sponsors or co-sponsors dozens of community events every year, from Ironman Coeur d'Alene to the tiniest charity drives. While all raise something - money and awareness near the top of the list - only a few raise participants' IQ.

The Idaho Humanities Council's Distinguished Humanities lecture and dinner is one of those.

Renowned thinkers, writers and speakers have shared their stories and their world views with attendees in Coeur d'Alene every year since 2004. Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian James McPherson mesmerized his listeners last autumn with insight into Abe Lincoln and his quest to hold the union together. National Book Award winner Timothy Egan shared golden nuggets of historic research he completed in writing some of his most famous novels about the great Northwest. News analyst Juan Williams held back little in taking his audience behind the front lines of national political battles. Detective novelist Sara Paretsky was as funny as she was intelligent.

This year the Humanities Council is bringing another great writer to town, known mostly for his superb short stories. Anthony Doerr, only 38 but winner of a host of top writing awards, will speak at the Coeur d'Alene Resort one week from this Friday.

Just a sampling of honors so far for Doerr: Four O. Henry Prizes, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, three Ohioana Book Awards.

A collection of Doerr's most recent short stories, called "Memory Wall," has moved him even further up the list of distinguished writers.

The stories "move to a rhythm that suggests something pulsing under their calm surfaces, the steady breaking of old blood, old memories, the oldest waves of human feeling," wrote Terrence Rafferty, in a 2010 New York Times Book Review of "Memory Wall." One of the stories in the book captured the 2011 London Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, considered the largest prize in the world for a single short story.

Doerr will be talking about all that and more. We'll be there, and we hope you'll join us for an evening of celebrating one thing we all have in common: Our humanity.