1475 41st Avenue Capitola, CA 95010
Open 7 days a week -- 8am to 10pm
831-462-4415
Talking
has nothing to do with conversation.
GERTRUDE STEIN
Events
March 2004 Author Events
Please let us know at least 7 days in advance if you would like an autographed copy. This will allow us sufficient time to have enough copies of the book in stock. Thank You.
Thursday, March 4th 7:30 p.m.
Laurie R. King
The Game
(Bantam)
Laurie King and her best-selling mystery series featuring Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, return! In a rich and atmospheric tale, the illustrious duo follows the dangerous trail to India, 1924, to save the life of one of literature's most fabled heroes -- Kimball O'Hara, the cunning spy for the Crown who served as the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling's famed Kim. The Game brings alive an India fraught with unrest and poised for change -- and thrills us with an unpredictable mystery that has the brilliance and character we know to expect from our beloved local celebrity.
Monday, March 8th 7:30 p.m.
Brad Land
Goat: A Memoir
(Random House)
When he was 18, Brad Land was abducted, beaten, and dumped on the side of the road. The new year, still reeling from the attack, Brad joined his brother at Clemson and pledged a fraternity. Enduring cruel hazing rituals, increasing estrangement from his own brother, and the death of a fellow pledge, Brad had to choose between total alienation or accepting a brutality he already knew too well. Of Land's searing debut, Events Manager Jenn Ramage says, "This is the most jarring, emotionally explosive debut I've ever read. Brad Land's plain, gritty prose style underscores the sharp edges and deep rooted violence we find in this exploration of masculinity and brotherhood. The portrait of Mr. Land's relationship with his brother---devastating, humbling and raw---forms another living, breathing character, as real as the ghosts that haunt Mr. Land's every movement and memory. I was up nights reading Goat."
Tuesday, March 9th 7:30 p.m.
A Special Night for Book Clubs with Jeanne Watkatsuki Houston
Legend of the Fire Horse Woman
(Kensington)
Her talk will be focused to book clubs and refreshments will be provided. This way book lovers of all kinds can meet and form new groups that may, ultimately, mean lasting literary friendships. As an extra enticement, Jeanne Houston will visit book clubs who buy at least seven copies of her new novel at the Capitola Book Cafe. You simply need to place your book club order with us and we'll get in touch with Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. You get an intimate conversation with one of our local treasures; all because you sign up for doing what you do best: reading.
Houston is the co-author of Farewell to Manzanar (with novelist husband James D. Houston), a classic memoir of her internment in the Manzanar Relocation Camp at age seven in 1942, a result of Presidential Executive Order 9066. 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were interned in such camps, and the number included parents Ko and Riku Wakatsuki and Jeanne and her six siblings. 10,000 Japanese-Americans were held at the Manzanar desert site from February 1942 until August 1945, shortly after the a-bombing of Japan. Farewell to Manzanar (1973) was the first extensive published account of the American tragedy, and it remains in print after 60 editions, having sold 1.5 million copies.
Wednesday, March 10th 7:30 p.m.
Caroline Kraus
Borderlines
(Broadway)
When Caroline Kraus left her sheltered St. Louis home after the death of her mother, she moved to San Francisco in search of clarity and healing. Instead, in a dreamlike city of beatnik bookstores and coffeehouses, she meets Jane. Bewitching and free-spirited, fellow bookseller Jane offers Caroline the intuitive understanding and female companionship she craves, and soon the two women are inseparable. But gradually, Caroline discovers that behind the intoxicating intensity lies a dangerous, symbiotic stranglehold - an almost fatal blurring of individual boundaries. Joyce Maynard writes, "A riveting memoir that reads like a thriller...complex, wryly funny, and utterly compelling, the author's experience comes vividly to life as she weaves together narratives of past and present, of profound attachment and terrifying loss. Here is a story of a life unraveling; this could be Hitchcock, but the fact that it actually happened intensifies the horror of Kraus's story, and the relief we feel at knowing she survived. Borderlines marks a tremendous debut from a gifted writer."
Thursday, March 11th 7:30 p.m.
Orin Starn
Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian
(Norton)
After pioneers massacred most of his Yahi tribe, Ishi hid out for more than 50 years in northern California mountains. His capture in 1911 caused a national sensation, and the famed anthropologist Alfred Kroeber declared him to be the most "uncontaminated" and "uncivilized" man in the world and placed him on living display at his new San Francisco museum. Ishi's Brain chronicles the recent campaign of modern-day Native Americans to find and properly rebury the remains of the last Yahi Indian. With great intellectual candor as well as human feeling, Starn focuses on the extraordinary man at the center of it all - the wild man, the curiosity, the noble myth maker - and explores the evolution of anthropology, the struggle between Manifest Destiny and the conquest of the West, and new insights into Native American history and modern tribes rivalries and solidarity.
CANCELLED
Monday, March 15th 7:30 p.m.
Gayle and Joe Ortiz
The Village Baker's Wife
(Ten Speed Press)
From Lemon Lust Bars to Raspberry Walnut Brownies, from croissants to morning muffins, the secrets of Gayle's Bakery's delicious success are within the pages of this lavish baking book. Our Capitola Culinary Couple join the Book Cafe for a night celebrating their talents and their gorgeously illustrated, devilishly tempting professional baker's guide to success.
Monday, March 17th 6:30 p.m. *
Book Club
Russian Debutantes Handbook by Gary Shteyngart
(Riverhead Books)
The Russian Debutante's Handbook is a quirky amalgam of dead-on American absurdities, albeit with somewhat stereotypical characters. While Vladimir flounders with how to improve his state, he becomes an expatriate in a trendy European city, becomes somewhat of a mobster himself, and generally has a good time. While many of the central characters remain elusively thin, Vladimir is a delight, and Shteyngart's wit is merciless: Russian women wear "wedding cakes of blond hair" and graduate students lounge in a bar "as if waiting for funding to appear."
* Please note time
Thursday, March 18th 7:30 p.m.
Mark Bittner
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
(Harmony)
In the early 1990s, Bittner, a 42-year-old musician who was still living like a "dharma bum," discovered that there were wild parrots in the trees near the house he was care taking on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. With few prospects for his days, he began feeding these colorful South American escapees from his fire escape, closely observing their trusting, flamboyant behavior as they perched up his arms and on his head, making their daily showing a local tourist attraction. More than just a casual birder's record, this book explores the joy and avian friendship an urban flock brought a man down on his luck. Bittner's heartfelt, amusing story has become the focus of a Pelican Media documentary of the same name.
Monday, March 22nd 7:30 p.m.
Larua Flanders
BushWomen: Tales of a Cynical Species
(Verso)
Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! writes, "Laura Flanders' BushWomen exposes how women in the Bush Administration create a false, feminist diversity while leading renewed attacks on women, workers, the environment, and in the so-called war on terror. Cutting through the caricatures and spin, she writes with the sharp-edged rigor that she practices daily on her radio show and in her many columns. Crucial reading at a critical time..." The host of Your Call, writer for The Nation, and founding director of the Women's Desk at the media watchdog group FAIR, Laura Flanders reports on the underscrutinized women in Bush's cabinet and how they rose to power. Learn why Chevron named a tanker after Condoleeza Rice; how financial ties got Ann Norton dubbed "The Woman from Marlboro Country"; and read excerpts from Lynne Cheney's lesbian novel. Scathing and entertaining, BushWomen shatters Bush's cynical crusade to put a female face on anti-feminist policy
Tuesday, March 23rd 7:30 p.m.
Poetry Santa Cruz welcomes back Jack Litewka and Jeff Tagamiuz
Join us in welcoming Jack Litewka who will be introduced by Adrienne Rich, his mentor, colleague and instructor. He is the author of two chapbooks - How the Conversation Began (Momo's Press) and The Dolphin and the Piano (Neon Sun Press) - and of a number of essays. As an undergraduate, he won first prize in the Ida Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Contest and was also the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He has worked as a taxi driver, management consultant, deli and fish department manager at a coop supermarket, director of a training organization for nonprofits and coops, baker in a bakery collective, managing director of a small publishing house, ergonomics consultant, and editor, among other positions. He is the inventor of a number of products and training devices, and holds three patents, one of which won an industrial design award. Litewka will be joined by Watsonville resident poet Jeff Tagami. In 1991, after fifteen years in San Francisco, Tagami returned to Watsonville. Until recently, he was a CORE lecturer at UCSC Oakes College. He currently teaches composition and literature at Cabrillo.
Thursday, March 25th 7:00 p.m. *
World Affairs Book Club
The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda by Elizabeth Neuffer
This group meets every month to discuss a book relevant to current events around the world. To date, we have examined books focusing on a variety of events in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe. This month's selection is The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda by award-winning journalist Elizabeth Neuffer. As always, we welcome people from all backgrounds and affiliations to participate. For more information you may email Graham Parsons at parsons402@yahoo.com or call the store at 462-4415.
*Please Note Time
Tuesday, March 30th 7:30 p.m.
Samuel Dillon
Opening Mexico
(FSG)
This remarkable narrative history tells the story of the citizens' movement which dismantled the kleptocratic one-party state that dominated Mexico in the twentieth century, and replaced it with a lively democracy. Told through stories of Mexicans who helped make the transformation, the book gives new and gripping behind-the-scenes accounts of major episodes in Mexico's recent politics. Samuel Dillon, along with co-author Julia Preston, was bureau chief in Mexico City for the New York Times from 1995 to 2000. In 1998 he and Preston won a Pulitzer-Prize
Wednesday, March 31st 7:30 p.m.
Laurie Fox
Lost Girls
(Simon and Schuster)
What do you do when your mother raises you to believe that fairy tales are real? And why do women fall in love with men who refuse to grow up? Fox charmed Book Cafe audiences with her first novel, My Sister from the Black Lagoon, and now she is back asking both questions as she traces the intimate relationship of five generations of women with Peter Pan, the protagonist of J.M. Barrie's classic tale. The women are the descendants of the original Wendy Darling, and they must balance their magical experiences with modern-day reality. With Fox's dazzling prose and elegant insights, Lost Girls contemplates the contradictory human yearnings for freedom and safety, flight and stability in a moving story of motherhood, love, and re-enchantment that speaks to women of all ages.
