Why Washington Insiders Read at Calvert County Library
Calvert waters are good for political press personalities
by Carrie Steele

Just 45 minutes away, Washington, D.C. is on the fast track to long workdays, quick response, behind the scenes plays and knowing who’s who and can do what on and around Capitol Hill. But fast-track life of Washington makes the calmer, laid-back pace of Bay Country all the more alluring.

In Chesapeake Country, these Washington insiders are ranked as neighbors with intriguing stories to tell. Reeling in big stories from the nation’s capital for Calvert’s Authors by the Bay series is Calvert countian Donnie Radcliffe, a former Washington Post reporter covering all of Washington’s first ladies from Pat Nixon through Hillary Clinton. Radcliffe herself was the first speaker in the continuing series.

This year’s Author by the Bay is Bay Weekly co-founder, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Washington correspondent and Fairhaven resident Bill Lambrecht, who mixes national and environmental politics.

He follows Marlin Fitzwater of Deale, press secretary to Presidents Reagan and Bush; Diane Rehm of National Public Radio; and Helen Thomas, who at 85 is dean of White House reporters and the first woman officer of the National Press Club and the first woman president of the White House Correspondents Association.

Lambrecht has covered all but one national political convention since 1984 and traveled to six continents tracking policy and pollution.

Springing from such fertile political and environmental roots is his latest book: Big Muddy Blues; True Tales and Twisted Politics Along Lewis and Clark’s Missouri River. His ecological biography of America’s longest river also speaks to the most valuable resource on Earth — not to mention Chesapeake Country — our water.

Like the Chesapeake, the Missouri River bears scars and ecologic witness to the insatiable hunger of humans. Lambrecht takes a magnifying glass to the troubled Missouri River, a much-abused waterway with species running to extinction. Along the way we meet the river’s characters and quirks — the people who boat the river for work and pleasure and carp that jump aboard your boat — as well as find out how the Missouri came to claim its name as the Big Muddy.

Lambrecht’s last book, Dinner at the New Gene Café, examined the global politics of food in the era of genetic engineering.

Authors by the Bay is a program of the Calvert Library Foundation, which raises money to keep Calvert libraries up-to-date in both buildings and services. Most recently, the foundation funded a subscription so that library customers could download audio books onto their MP3 players.

Lecture and book signing with Bill Lambrecht Sun. Aug. 7, 6:30-8:30pm @ King’s Landing Park, Huntingtown. $25 includes lecture and light refreshments. Purchase tickets at any Calvert Library (and a few at the door): 410-535-0291.