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Pre-packaged identities are only a gift card away for the times when soul-searching cuts too deeply into sitting around time. But there are other, less corporate ways of pondering selfhood, too. In her memoir A Strong West Wind, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gail Caldwell sheds some light on that question for the ages: "How do we become who we are?"

Not surprisingly, Caldwell's thesis bears no mention of Starbucks or Gap, but ultimately attributes her own self-formation as lovingly, sometimes defiantly carved from the forms of the people, the places and the books she's loved. The tale of this Texan's life as part of the tumultuous and rebellious boomer generation in a land of "beauty and boredom" transcends personal history to become a sort of chronology of an era tender from growing pains and ripe with budding possibility.
Wed., Feb. 22, 7 p.m.