Talks & Entertainment

*This program does not include a book signing. All books will be pre-signed by the author.

From the four-time Academy Award nominee and star of Dead Poets Society, Reality Bites, Training Day as well as the Before Sunrise trilogy and Boyhood comes Rules for a Knight, a fable about a Knight’s journey and a short guide to what gives life beauty and meaning.

It is 1483, and Sir Thomas Lemuel Hawke, a Cornish knight, is about to ride into battle. On the eve of his departure, he composes a letter to his four young children, consisting of twenty virtues that provide instruction on how to live a noble life, and on all the lessons, large and small, that he might have imparted to them himself were he not expecting to die on the battlefield.

Rules for a Knight is many things: a code of ethics; an intimate record of a lifelong quest; a careful recounting of a knight’s hardest won lessons, deepest aspirations, and most richly instructive failures; and an artifact, a relic of a father’s exquisite love.

Drawing on the ancient teachings of Eastern and Western philosophy and religion, on literature, and poetry, and on the great spiritual and political writings of our time, Hawke has written a parable that—in the story of a young man’s journey toward a life of authenticity and meaning—captures the instinctive movement of the heart toward truth and beauty. Hawke will be in conversation with Margaret Talbot, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father’s Twentieth Century.