January 2001

 

Wednesday, January 3rd at 7:30 pm
Peter Meyer
Warp Speed Growth (Amicon)

It is the beginning of 2001, and business possibilities abound in Santa Cruz County. We see start-ups popping up everywhere, but often their rented lot is vacant within weeks. How do you sustain a local business with effective and rapid growth? Peter Meyer, a principal in Scott Valley's The Meyer Group, specializes in helping companies grow rapidly, and in a way that they can sustain. He has now published a remarkable book that focuses on how to expand and grow in a new marketplace. Issues like company clutter, stagnation and complacency are addressed as well as the new role of technology. This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in the flow of new technology markets, international commerce, and the challenges of maintaining your own business.

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Tuesday, January 9th at 7:30 pm
John Copeland
Retribution (Corinthian Books)

As a RF-80 pilot in the Korean War, John Copeland flew 100 combat missions, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross and two air medals. With his combat experience and Tom Clancy-like eye for detail and pulsating prose, this local author places his readers in the middle of the action in Retribution. This disturbingly plausible novel takes you into the hotbed of the Middle East where John Burns, a former Marine turned CIA operative, searches for the Arab terrorists who tortured and murdered his commanding officer. Personal retribution leads to the discovery of global terrorism in this espionage page-turner.

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Wednesday, January 10th at 7:30 pm
Vineeta Vijayaraghavan
Motherland (Soho)

With simplicity of spirit and graceful prose, Vineeta Vijayaraghavan weaves a tender, yet direct coming-of-age story of a young woman who returns to her homeland of India. A lively teenager who lives in New York, Maya has little interest in spending the summer with the foreign relatives she left 10 years ago. Maya's cynical attitude gradually changes during the three months she works in the tea plantations. In knowing her grandmother and her uncle again, Maya finds home. A lyrical, delightful first novel.

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Wednesday, January 17th at 7:30 pm
John Stauber
Trust Us We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles on Your Future (Tarcher/Putnam)

The author of Toxic Sludge Is Good For You rouses us from passivity to reveal a shocking expose on the "neutral third parties" whom we trust to give us the real facts. Stauber shows us how little we know, on everything from how to vote to how to raise our children. So called experts are often anything but neutral, and the art of spin is everything in this day of marketing to the masses. As Bill Moyers says, "If you want to know how the world wags and who's wagging it, here's your answer."

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Thursday, January 18th at 7:30 pm
Thomas Scoville
Silicon Follies: A dot.com Comedy (Pocket Books)

A hysterical take of the absurdity of the fast-forward, highly caffeinated lives of the dot.comers. The fickleness of success, the maniacal insanity of the high-stakes entrepreneurs, and competitiveness of cyberspace merge with characters that anyone in the valley would recognize. Scoville's comic novel is adapted from his popular Salon.com series and is a savvy, Silicon Valley must-read.

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Thursday, January 18th from 6:30 - 8:00 pm
Writing Group

Every third Thursday of the month, join Book Cafe's Wendy Mayer as she leads our writer's group, which meets upstairs in the back of the store. These meetings are free and open to everyone. The intent is to provide an opportunity for local writers at any stage to come together and write. Due to the limited amount of time, the group will focus on short exercises and sharing of information rather than group critique. Putting pen to paper is the name of the game.

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Friday, January 19th at 7:30 pm
Scott Phillips
The Ice Harvest (Ballantine)

This remarkable debut novel is full of eccentric, believable characters and tense, malevolent fun. Scott Phillips brings us Charlie, the seedy, stripbar-going, mob-cheating lowlife lawyer who seems twistedly likeable to us, even while he wanders the streets of Wichita in an alcoholic haze on Christmas Eve. The Ice Harvest is a dark comic-thriller in the vein of A Simple Plan and Fargo and is being praised as highly.

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Saturday, January 20th at 10:45 am
Bilingual Storytime with Billie Harris and Brett Taylor

Billie Harris--whose marvelous, whimsical voice can be heard on KUSP's Castle Cottage---joins us for another monthly story time for young children. She will be joined by the amazing Brett Taylor whose Latin beat can be heard on KUSP's The Global Village. He is coming to read some delightful books in Spanish for those who love to hear that lyrical language as much as English. We invite children and adults alike to join us for a grand time.

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Monday, January 22nd at 7:30 pm
Jim Gensheimer, Photographer
Pain and Grace: A Journey Through Vietnam (San Jose Mercury)

This rich, full color photo book documents a unique period in Vietnamese history. In 1987, San Jose Mercury News photographer Jim Gensheimer traveled to the South China Sea with the French rescue operation, Medicine du Monde, to photograph the plight of Vietnamese refugees who were fleeing their country by boat. Over the next thirteen years, he visited Vietnam six times to photograph its changing faces. Pain and Grace depicts Vietnam during a decade of exodus and return, rebuilding and healing. Included in this volume are essays by Kristin Huckshorn, who opened the first newspaper bureau on behalf of the Mercury News, and Mark McDonald, the current Mercury News Vietnam bureau chief. Please join us for a slide show and frank discussion on a changing country.

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Wednesday, January 24th at 7:30 pm
Elizabeth Carlassare
DotCom Divas: E-business Insights from the Visionary Women Founders of 20 Net Ventures (McGraw Hill)

Prepare to meet some of the most talented, energetic, and visionary Internet entrepreneurs of the e-business revolution. Each of these courageous and determined women created an innovative Net company from the germ of an idea. DotCom Divas reveals how these founding females dreamed up their winning visions, secured funding, and recruited top-notch team members. It shows us how they overcame personal and business challenges, grew their businesses, and navigated the constantly changing environment that comes with the territory. Local resident Elizabeth Carlassare will highlight their accomplishments and host a workshop for people interested in cultivating a thriving e-business.

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Thursday, January 25th at 7:30 pm
Matthew Fox
One River, Many Wells (Tarcher/Putnam)

Visionary theologian and best-selling author Matthew Fox returns to bring us into the common heart of the great spiritual traditions of the world. One River, Many Wells helps readers understand and embrace the common faith of deep ecumenism while tracing the shared ideals at the center of all the world's spiritualities. We are honored to welcome back the wise and witty author of Original Blessing.

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Monday, January 29th at 7:30 pm
David Abernethy
Dynamics of Global Dominance (Yale)

For centuries Europeans ruled vast portions of the world. How and why did these far-flung empires form, persist, and finally fall? David Abernethy, a professor of Political Science at Stanford University, addresses these questions with captivating brilliance and easy-to-follow explanations. He identifies broad patterns across time and space, interweaving them with fascinating details of cross-cultural encounters. Ultimately, he argues that relatively autonomous profit-making, religious, and governmental institutions enabled west European countries to launch triple assaults on other societies. At a time in which there are more independent, sovereign nations than colonies, and intimate global ties between these new nations, it is vital that we reexamine this period.

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Tuesday, January 30th at 7:30 pm
Nevada Barr
Blood Lure (Putnam)

The laws of nature take a terrifyingly murderous turn in this spellbinding addition to the New York Times bestselling series featuring Park Ranger Anna Pigeon. In Blood Lure, Anna returns to the West, where she is sent on a training assignment to study the grizzly bears in Waterton/Glacier National Peace Park, straddling the border between Montana and Canada. Along with bear researcher Joan Rand and a volatile and unpredictable teenaged boy, Anna hikes the backcountry, seeking signs of the bears. On their second night out, the tables are turned: one of the beasts comes looking for her. Daybreak finds the boy missing and a camper dead, her neck snapped by a single blow, the flesh of her face cut away with a knife. Feeling betrayed by both nature and humanity, Anna must find the beast stalking the trails-leading her readers deep into a gripping wilderness life-or-death mystery.

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Wednesday, January 31st at 7:30 pm
William Kittredge
Nature of Generosity (Random House)

Hailed as one of our finest writers on the American West, William Kittredge now brings his experience and intelligence to bear on the wider world and global landscape. He goes from New York and Venice to the Andalusian hills of Garcia Lorca, and the cow towns of Montana to the caves at Laszaux, trying to reconcile childhood simplicities with the complex, urgent adult question about who to be, and how, and why. Drawing on our various cultural and biological histories, Kittredge celebrates diversity as the cornerstone of social possibility and then suggests that our culture's habitually selfish, combative behavior is far from being in our best interests-or, indeed, in our nature. Like in his memoir Hole in the Sky, Kittredge calls us to a greater sense of self with clear passion and dignity.