WHO: Michele Turk is a journalist and former Red Cross staff member who supervised disaster volunteer management for the American Red Cross in Greater New York, which helps nine million people in New York City and Orange, Putnam, Rockland and Sullivan Counties prevent, prepare for and respond to emergencies. 

WHAT: Author reading and book signing. Blood, Sweat and Tears: An Oral History of the American Red Cross is the story about the modern-day Red Cross told through the voices of 29 current and former Red Cross paid and volunteer staff from all parts of the country, including four New Yorkers. The stories range from that of a World War II veteran who credits the Red Cross packages with keeping him alive when he was a POW in Germany to Americans who became heroes simply because they signed up for a Red Cross course and were later able to save a life, to volunteers who spent an intense year in Vietnam cheering up soldiers. We hear from the staffer who pulled people from an automobile before the medics arrive, the mom who saved a neighbor's child when he was drowning and the nurse who took off from her job to go half-way around the world to distribute food and supplies to victims of the tsunami that struck the day after Christmas 2004. Blood, Sweat and Tears is the first narrative history of the Red Cross since the 1950s. It features more than 70 photographs and illustrations, including vintage Red Cross posters.

WHEN: Thursday, July 20, 7 p.m.

WHERE: Barnes & Noble/Lincoln Triangle, 1972 Broadway at 66th Street, Manhattan.

Panel discussion will include the following people who are profiled in the book:

• Virginia Stern, Red Cross disaster mental health worker, who volunteered three days a week with the September 11th Recovery Program for nine months, and also worked along the Gulf Coast last fall after Hurricane Katrina.
• Warren Zorek, veteran Red Cross disaster services volunteer and former chair of the National Advisory Committee of the Red Cross' Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center, who lost more than 50 members of his own family in the Holocaust.
• Ken Thompson, whose mother was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. After 9/11, he traveled to New York as a Red Cross volunteer, along with 14 others from Oklahoma. He is the director of external affairs for the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism.