Andrew Young, noted civil rights activist, former mayor of Atlanta, Ga., and ambassador to the United Nations in the Jimmy Carter administration, will be the special guest lecturer at the annual Taste of Road Scholar event taking place on Tuesday, August 18, at historic Shearer Cottage in Oak Bluffs.

Lucinda Franks, author and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, will share her insights into the Bernard Madoff scandal in a discussion on Thursday, August 13, at 8 p.m. at the Chilmark Community Center.

The Oak Bluffs library welcomes Lou Berger, seasonal resident and former head writer for Sesame Street for 11 years, for a reading of his book, The Elephant Wish on Tuesday, August 11 from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m.

The book is a modern fairy tale, in which Eliza Prattlebottom, on her eighth birthday, makes a wish: “Oh, I wish that an elephant would come and take me away!” Two days, six hours, thirty-seven minutes and nine seconds later, Eliza’s wish comes true.

For the first few pages of Paul Schneider’s Bonnie and Clyde, The Lives Behind The Legend, we see tall, willowy, sultry Faye Dunaway as the infamous gangster moll, Bonnie Parker, and we picture tall, broad-shouldered Warren Beatty as her outlaw boyfriend, Clyde Barrow. It doesn’t take long for the author to get the real people back in focus: Bonnie is petite (under five feet tall), more adorable than sultry, and Clyde also is short but a head taller than his energetic pip-squeak girlfriend.

Summer resident and award-winning landscape architect Michael VanValkenburgh will give an illustrated presentation and reflection of Vineyard landscapes he has designed over the past 25 years on Wednesday, August 5 at 7:30 p.m. at Polly Hill Arboretum in West Tisbury.

The poems in Portrait of a Reading Woman convey the tapestry of a life richly lived and richly told. Originally a Bostonian, Helen Gorenstein has spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard for over 40 years. Drawing on memories from her childhood in the 1930s, her marriage, and her “long summers” on the Island, she retraces her steps from childhood into her seventh decade.