Cronkite, Brinkley just go together

A breath of fresh air blows into town tomorrow night.

It will arrive compliments of Douglas Brinkley and the Idaho Humanities Council, which will host its 10th annual banquet here at The Coeur d'Alene Resort.

Fans of this yearly intellectual treat have never been disappointed. Novelist and New York Times columnist Timothy Egan, NPR radio news analyst Juan Williams, Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian James McPherson and best-selling author Sara Paretsky have all entertained and enlightened local IHC audiences in the past few years. Brinkley promises to be right up there with the best of them.

How can you not be curious to hear someone who serves as official historian for CBS but admits to idolizing Bob Dylan? Here's a famous faculty member at prestigious Rice University in Houston who has written superb biographies of Walter Cronkite - his primary focus Thursday night - and presidents Carter and Ford, but also has penned profiles of Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Ken Kesey for Rolling Stone Magazine.

In her story previewing Brinkley's visit to Coeur d'Alene, George Kingson wrote: His lecture will be a mixture of straight biographical facts, anecdotal drama and, of course, humor. "Nobody wants an unfunny speaker," he said.

It's too late to buy tickets for this year's event, but Kingson's report on Brinkley's talk will appear in Friday's Press. In the meantime, we encourage you to find out more about IHC at idahohumanities.org - an organization whose mission is "deepening understanding of human experience by connecting people with ideas." Idaho Humanities Council has been doing that in other ways, like bringing constitutional scholar David Adler to Coeur d'Alene the last two years.

The Press extends to Brinkley a very warm North Idaho welcome, and our ongoing appreciation to the Idaho Humanities Council for including our region in this tremendous opportunity to grow and to learn.