Monday, April 3rd at 7:30 p.m.
Katharine Noel
Halfway House
(Atlantic Monthly)
and
Eric Puchner
Music Through the Floor
(Scribner)
Please welcome this dynamic
fiction-writing couple! Katharine Noel's Halfway House dives
beneath the surface of mental illness by following young Angie —
diligent student and all-star swimmer — and her family as they
wrestle with her sudden, startling psychotic episode and the turmoil
it creates. Writes Julie Orringer (How to Breathe Underwater),
"[Noel] slips into the darkest corners of human experience so
adroitly that you're not aware how deep you've gone until you find
yourself laughing or weeping over the page."
With Music Through the Floor,
Pushcart Prize winner and former Wallace Stegner Fellow Eric Puchner
has created a collection of nine unforgettable stories-strikingly
original, fiercely funny, and quietly heartbreaking-portraying a group
of cultural misfits attempting to navigate mainstream America. According
to ZZ Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere), "Music Through
the Floor is a compendium of everything we hope for from current
fiction, delivered with a singular wit, energy, and ecstasy unique
to Puchner's prose. The stories are infectious and irresistible, as
if he's channeling Tristram Shandy, Dostoevsky, and South Park all
at once."
Tuesday, April 4th at 7:30 p.m.
Andrea Nicole Richesin, editor, & Contributors
The May Queen: Women on Life, Love,
Work and Pulling It All Together in Your 30's
(Tarcher)
In this candid collection of
27 essays, a wide array of women — including bestselling author
Jennifer Weiner, star of the hit independent film Kissing Jessica
Stein Heather Juergensen, and other artists, musicians, filmmakers,
and businesswomen in their 30s — take stock of their lives and
"consider what they have lost, what they have gained, and what
they still need to learn." Rejecting society's often conflicting
demands about what women should be, these writers speak frankly about
love, sex, career, feminism, motherhood, living a creative life, and
much more. Their personal stories are evidence that the thirties can
be a time of learning from and making peace with the past, and realizing
dreams in often surprising ways. Joining us will be editor Andrea
"Nicki" Richesin, Kimberley Askew, Meghan Daum, Erin Ergenbright,
and Heather Juergensen.
Thursday, April 6th at 7:30 p.m.
Willard Wyman
High Country
(University of Oklahoma Press)
Willard "Bill" Wyman
has been a wrangler, guide, and packer in Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness
and the Sierra Nevada high country for over forty years. His experiences
with this forbidding terrain — along with his work as a Stanford
literature professor — are pooled into a new novel of the American
West that documents the rugged, glorious ways of a life now past.
During the Great Depression, young Ty is sent from his family's failing
Montana ranch to learn from the last of the great mule packers, a
legend in the Montana Rockies. As Ty weathers WWII and the encroachment
of trucks and jeeps into the terrain where only mules once crossed,
he becomes deeply wedded to a life in the wilderness, even as the
frontier culture is reaching its last vital moments. Author Jim Houston
will introduce this event.
Monday, April 10th at 7:30 p.m.
Robert Atkins
Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats
to Free Expression
(The New Press)
If your idea of censorship is
an anonymous bureaucrat in a government office exercising prudish
control over "offensive" art and speech, wake up and smell
the conglomeration. Censorship today is just as likely to be the result
of a market force or a bandwidth monopoly as a line edit or the covering
of a nude sculpture, and the current system of new technologies and
economic arrangements has subtle, built-in mechanisms for suppressing
free expression. Atkins is the nationally known author of the ArtSpeak
books, the head of the National Coalition Against Censorship's Arts
Program, as well as the co-founder of Visual Aids. In Censoring
Culture, he brings together the latest thinking from art historians,
cultural theorists, legal scholars, and psychoanalysts, as well as
first-person accounts by artists.
Tuesday, April 11th at 7:30 p.m.
Joel R. Primack & Nancy Ellen Abrams
The View from the Center of the Universe
(Riverhead)
In their groundbreaking new book,
The View from the Center of the Universe, Joel R. Primack,
one of the world's leading cosmologists, and Nancy Ellen Abrams, a
philosopher and writer, use recent advances in astronomy, physics,
and cosmology to frame a compelling new theory of how to understand
the universe and our role in it. While most of us think of the universe
as empty space peppered with stars separated by vast distances, the
truth, the authors argue, is far richer and more meaningful. With
these two brilliant Santa Cruz authors and professors as our expert
guides, we will come to understand that the universe is more coherent
and spiritually significant than anyone ever imagined.
Thursday, April 13th at 7:30 p.m.
Jeannette Walls
The Glass Castle
(Scribner)
The Glass Castle
is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory
look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant.
When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured
his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how
to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and
destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of
domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family.
So the Walls children fed, clothed, and protected one another, and
eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them,
choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered. The Glass
Castle is a truly astonishing memoir permeated by the intense
love of a peculiar, but loyal, family. Now gossip columnist for MSNBC.com,
Jeannette Walls has a story to tell, and tells it brilliantly, without
an ounce of self-pity.
Tuesday, April 18th at 7:30 p.m.
Eric Blehm
The Last Season
(Harper Colllins)
Twenty eight seasons living alone
in the most remote and unforgiving of wild places had instilled in
Randy Morgenson a remarkable sense of where the wilderness might hide
a hiker or climber. Then one day this legendary backcountry ranger
went missing himself. Former editor of TransWorld SNOWboarding,
Blehm reconstructs the desperate search-and-rescue operation, weaving
in Morgenson's riveting biography, and takes readers deep into the
heart of the High Sierra and into the much-romanticized world of the
backcountry rangers-revealing the mind and spirit of a complicated,
thoroughly original, and wholly fascinating man. "A first-rate
detective story but an even better love story-an account of the love
for wild places."— Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature
Wednesday, April 19th at 7:30 p.m.
June Casagrande
Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies:
A Guide to Language for Fun and Spite
(Penguin)
Author of the "A Word, Please"
column for four Los Angeles Times community newspapers, Casagrande
has invented a whole new twist on the grammar book: a laugh-out-loud
funny collection of anecdotes and essays on grammar and punctuation,
as well as hilarious critiques of the self-appointed language experts.
You know the night will be riotous yet grammatically correct with
chapters like "Semicolonoscopy-Colons, Semicolons, Dashes, and
Other Probing Annoyances", " I'll Take "I Feel Like
a Moron" for $200, Alex-When to Put Punctuation Inside Quotation
Marks", and "Snobbery Up with Which You Should Not Put Up-Prepositions."
Thursday, April 20th at 7:30 p.m.
Susan Shillinglaw
A Journey Into Steinbecks' California
(Roaring Forties Press)
Part art book, part biography,
and part travel guide, this unique work offers insight into how our
area landscapes and townscapes influenced John Steinbeck's creative
process and how, in turn, his legacy has influenced modern California.
Literary pilgrims, tourists and historians alike will enjoy this new
perspective on Steinbeck and the people and places that he brought
to life in his writing. Shillinglaw is a scholar in residence at the
National Steinbeck Center and a professor at San Jose State University,
where she was also the director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies
for many years.
Monday, April 24th at 7:30 p.m.
Jack Bowen
The Dream Weaver: One Boy's Journey
through the Landscape of Reality
(Longman)
"Jack Bowen's novel is like
traveling with Alice to a Wonderland inhabited by the greatest
philosophers and scientists who ever lived…A triumph!" —
Wenda O'Reilly, Ph.D., President, Birdcage Press. Bowen began as a
student of human biology at Stanford, but a serendipitous discovery
at the library led him to earn a Master's degree in philosophy. A
member of the 1996 and 2000 Olympic water polo squad and an avid recording
musician, Bowen now has now published his fictional and entertaining
introduction to philosophy that follows young Ian as he gnaws on life's
most difficult questions. From playfully addressing the chicken-and-the-egg
conundrum to steadfastly tackling the definition of morality, this
work delivers a twist on the meaning of life!
Wednesday, April 26th at 6:30 p.m. *
Fiction Book Club
A Million Nightingales by
Susan Straight
(Pantheon)
This months seleciton is A
Million Nightingales by Susan Straight. Please join us for a discussion
of the book followed by an author event with Susan Straight at 7:30
p.m.
* Please note time
Wednesday, April 26th at 7:30 p.m.
Susan Straight
A Million Nightingales
(Pantheon)
From the author of Highwire
Moon comes a haunting novel set in early-nineteenth-century Louisiana:
the tale of a slave girl's emotional and physical journey from captivity
to freedom. Susan Straight has been called "a writer of exceptional
gifts and grace" (Joyce Carol Oates). In A Million Nightingales
she brings those gifts to bear on the story of Moinette, daughter
of an African mother and a white father she never knew, a young woman
sold away from her family at age fourteen. "Moinette is one of
those rare characters who enlarges both our sense of history and our
humanity." — Judith Freeman, author of Red Water
Thursday, April 27th at 7:00 p.m. *
World Affairs Book Club
In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on
the Edge of Chaos by Richard Lloyd Parry
(Grove)
This month's selection is In
the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos by Richard
Lloyd Parry. In the last years of the twentieth century, longtime
journalist Parry found himself in the vast island nation of Indonesia.
For thirty-two years, it had been paralyzed by the grip of the dictator
and mystic General Suharto, but now the age of Suharto was coming
to an end. Would freedom prevail, or merely lawlessness? A book of
hair-raising immediacy and a riveting account of a voyage into the
abyss, In the Time of Madness is an accomplishment in the great
tradition of Conrad, Orwell, and Ryszard Kapuscinski.
* Please Note Time
COMING IN EARLY MAY 2006 ….
Tuesday, May 2nd at 7:30 p.m.
Anthony Arnove
Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New
Press)
and
Paul Rockwell, Contributor to
10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join
the Military
(New Press)
Anthony Arnove (editor of Iraq
Under Siege, co-editor with Howard Zinn of Voices of a People's
History of the United States) sets out a compelling case for the
immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and a constructive vision
for the antiwar movement, one that involves a coalition of soldiers,
military families, and the many communities affected by the occupation.
10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military is a collection
of essays and reporting by journalists, activists, lawyers, ex-soldiers
and families (including Cindy Sheehan, Aimee Allison and journalist
Paul Rockwell) who have firsthand experience with the dangers facing
soldiers and the sly tricks used by some recruiters, and who can suggest
options other than the military for a young person seeking economic
stability and education.
Wednesday, May 3rd at 7:30 p.m.
Peter Schrag
California: America's High-Stakes Experiment
(University of California Press)
Peter Schrag takes on the big
issues-immigration, globalization, and the impact of California's
politics on its quality of life-in this dynamic account of the Golden
State's struggle to recapture the American dream. In the past half-century,
California has been both model and anti-model for the nation and often
the world, first in its high level of government and public services,
more lately for its dysfunctional government, deteriorating services,
and sometimes regressive public policies. While Schrag's incisive
analysis of the state of the state demonstrates that it has been struggling
with a range of problems for a generation, the author also deftly
shows that California's ability to forge its culturally and ethnically
diverse population into a successful democracy will be of crucial
importance well beyond our borders.
Thursday, May 4th at 7:30 p.m.
Kamran Nazeer
Send in the Idiots: Stories from the
Other Side of Autism
(Bloomsbury)
When he was four years old, Nazeer
was enrolled in a small school in New York City alongside a dozen
other children diagnosed with autism. Calling themselves the Idiots,
these kids received cutting edge care. Twenty-three years later, the
school no longer exists. Send in the Idiots is the candid, surprising,
and ultimately moving investigation into what happened to those children.
Now a policy adviser in England, Kamran decides to visit four of his
old classmates to find out the kind of lives that they are living
now, how much they've been able to overcome and what remains missing.
Written with unmatched insight and striking personal testimony, Kamran
Nazeer's account is a stunning, invaluable, and utterly unique contribution
to the literature of what makes us human.
