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.
Monday, May 8th at 7:30 p.m.
David Helvarg
50 Ways to Save the Ocean
(Inner Ocean)
"My favorite chronicler
of the environmental movement, David Helvarg has drafted a workable
blueprint for grassroots action to save the seas."-Robert Kennedy,
Jr. The oceans, and the challenges they face, are so vast that it's
easy to feel powerless to protect them, but veteran environmental
journalist David Helvarg, (President, Blue Frontier Campaign) focuses
on actions everyone can take to conserve this vital resource. Jim
Toomey's illustrations (Sherman's Lagoon) add a whimsical side
to this well-researched book that guides us from mindful home maintenance
and tide pool etiquette, all the way up to global environmental activism.
Wednesday, May 10th at 7:30 p.m.
Caroline Paul
East Wind, Rain
(William Morrow)
When a plane crashes on the remote
Hawaiian island of Niihau, the islanders have no idea that the surviving
pilot has just bombed Pearl Harbor. Only the lone Japanese-American
couple on Niihau knows the truth. Pressured by the pilot and bruised
by years of prejudice, the Haradas begin to question their own loyalties.
The island's peace unravels into war of nations and of American identity.
Caroline Paul is the author of Fighting Fire, a memoir that
recounts her experience as a journalist turned fire fighter in San
Francisco.
Thursday, May 11th at 7:30 p.m.
Elizabeth Rosner
Blue Nude
(Ballantine)
Born in the shadow of postwar
Germany, Danzig is a once-prominent painter who now teaches at an
art institute in San Francisco, a painter who can no longer paint.
When the unsettlingly beautiful Meray, a Israeli-born granddaughter
of a Holocaust survivor, becomes his model, both artist and muse must
examine the history they carry. "Blue Nude is a novel
that spans time and continents, from postwar Germany to California
to Israeli kibbutzim, a novel that explores the big questions of history,
fate, art, and how we choose to live the lives we're given. And yet
it's also wonderfully intimate in its exploration of the hearts of
its individual characters. Elizabeth Rosner [The Speed of Light]
has written a thought-provoking, moving, and original book."-Dan
Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me
Tuesday, May 16th at 7:30 p.m.
Alex Berenson
Faithful Spy
(Random House)
A New York Times reporter
draws upon his experience covering the occupation in Iraq to write
a chillingly plausible thriller, a cautionary tale sophisticated in
its political details and personal stories. John Wells is the only
American CIA agent ever to penetrate al Qaeda, yet during his many
years spent in Pakistan's mountains, he has become a Muslim and now
sees the US as decadent and shallow. The CIA no longer trust him,
even as he tries to inform them that he is being sent on a mission
that will harm the very people they are trying to protect. By an author
who truly knows his territory, this novel grapples with the complexities
and terrors of today's world.
Thursday, May 18th at 7:30 p.m.
Michelle Goldberg
Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian
Nationalism
(Norton)
Michelle Goldberg, a senior political
reporter for Salon.com, has been covering the intersection of politics
and ideology and both sides of the ever-seething culture wars for
years. She now illuminates the fevered religious radicalism of America.
From the the mega-church to the federal court, she reports on how
the growing influence of dominionism-the doctrine that Christians
have the right to rule nonbelievers-is threatening the foundations
of democracy. We meet military retirees pledging to seize the nation
in Christ's name and leaders of federally funded programs offering
Jesus as the solution to the country's social problems. In an age
when it seems faith rather than reason is heralded, Kingdom Coming
brings us face to face with the irrational forces that are remaking
much of America.
Monday, May 22nd at 7:30 p.m.
Rick Reilly
Shanks for Nothing
(Doubleday)
A senior writer for Sports
Illustrated and National Sportswriter of the Year ten times over,
Rick Reilly is the also the witty golf-nut behind Who's Your Caddy?,
in which he talked his way into carrying clubs for folks like Jack
Nicklaus, Deepak Chopra and Donald Trump-and then told us all the
dirty details from the green. Now he returns to spoofing all things
country club (Missing Links). Back at the Ponkaquoque Municipal
Course and Deli, Raymond "Stick" Hart is having trouble
with his girl and golf-snobs. His solution: he'll just qualify for
the British Open.
Wednesday, May 24th at 6:30 p.m. *
Book Club
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
by Peter Orner
(Little Brown)
This month's selection is The
Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner. Please join us
for a discussion of the book followed by an author event with Peter
Orner at 7:30 p.m.
* Please Note Time
Wednesday, May 24th at 7:30 p.m.
Peter Orner
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
(Little Brown)
Peter Orner's (Esther Stories)
novel explores the impermanence of love and the history of a place.
Goas, an all-boys Catholic primary school, is thoroughly isolated
in semi-desert beneath a relentless sun, yet the stories told there
create an alternate, more fertile universe. Mavala Shikongo, a combat
veteran who fought in Namibia's long war for independence against
South Africa, has now reluctantly returned to Goas, and the American
teachers try not to fall in love with her. "The weight of the
brutal colonial and apartheid past is always there, but the freedom
story is never reverential, and the taut vignettes, anguished and
sometimes hilarious, are about ordinary people now."-Booklist
Thursday, May 25th at 7:00 p.m. *
World Affairs Book Club
Finding George Orwell by
Emma Larkin
(Penguin Press)
This month's selection is Finding
George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin. Larkin tells of the year
she spent traveling through Burma, using as a compass the life and
work of George Orwell, whom many of Burma's underground teahouse intellectuals
call simply "the Prophet." In stirring prose, she provides
a powerful reckoning with one of the world's least free countries.
"Mournful, meditative, appealingly idiosyncratic . . . an exercise
in literary detection but also a political travelogue."-The
New York Times.
Call 462-4415 or email jenn_ramage@yahoo.com for more information.
* Please Note Time
Postponed
until Tuesday, July 11th
On May 25, this respected author
will be in Washington DC receiving the 2006 Bradley Prize for Outstanding
Achievement.
Please join him when he speaks at Capitola Book Cafe this summer.
Thursday, May 25th at 7:30 p.m.
Shelby Steele
White Guilt
(Harper Collins)
In 1955 the murderers of Emmett
Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted of their crime, undoubtedly
because they were white. Forty years later, O. J. Simpson went free
after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. How has this
sea change happened? Distinguished race relations scholar Shelby Steele
(The Content of Our Character, A Dream Deferred) argues
that the age of white supremacy has given way to an age of white guilt-and
neither has been good for African Americans. Steele calls for white
leaders to stop using minorities as a means to establish their moral
authority and for black leaders to stop indulging them.
Tuesday, May 30th at 7:30 p.m.
Sasha Abramsky
Conned: How Millions Went to Prison,
Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House
(The New Press)
More than four million Americans,
mainly poor, black, and Latino, have lost their right to vote because
of felony disenfranchisement laws that remove the right from people
while they are in prison or on parole, and, in several states, for
the rest of their lives. A Senior Fellow for Democracy at the public
policy organization Demos and an award-winning journalist, Abramsky
details the revival of antidemocratic laws that came of age in the
post-Civil War segregationist South and profiles this latest fundamental
threat to democracy.
Wednesday, May 31st at 7:30 p.m.
Lee Child
The Hard Way: A Jack Reacher Novel
(Delacorte)
"Ranks in the first tier…Before
it's all, vividly, over, one feels confident that Reacher-smart, rootless,
and brave-will not only get his man but make him suffer."-The
New Yorker. Loner Jack Reacher must stop a ransom request gone
wrong and help a haunted man with a military past similar to his own.
This "thinking reader's action hero" (Seattle Times)
will chase the case from the streets of Manhattan to England.
Thursday, June 1st at 7:30 p.m.
Scott Anderson
Moonlight Hotel
(Doubleday)
A New York Times war correspondent,
Anderson (Triage and War Zones) has written from Beirut,
Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Israel, Sudan, Sarajevo, El Salvador,
and other war-torn areas. His novel of intrigue and dark humor looks
hard at the consequences of American empire. As the kingdom of Kutar
backslides into tribal conflict, mid-level diplomat David Richards
is ordered to stay, even as most Americans and foreigners flee, abandoning
the local population to their violent end. Holed up in the Moonlight
Hotel with a collection of ex-pats and foreign nationals, David tries
to maneuver over the radically-changed landscape.
Saturday, June 2nd at 2:30 p.m. *
Laurie R. King
The Art of Detection
(Bantam)
In this thrilling new crime novel
that ingeniously bridges the Kate Martinelli and Mary Russell series,
San Francisco homicide detective Kate Martinelli crosses paths with
Sherlock Holmes in a dual mystery created by the "intelligent,
witty, and complex" mind of New York Times bestselling
author Laurie R. King. Philip Gilbert was a true Holmes fanatic, from
his antiquated décor and his vintage wardrobe to his collection
of priceless memorabilia, including a manuscript some would kill for.
And perhaps someone did. Now, Kate must follow the convoluted trail
of a killer-one who may have trained at the feet of the greatest mind
of all times.
* Please Note Time
And After That, Some More June Superstars!
Tuesday, June 6 at 7:30pm
Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes (Crown)
Sunday, June 11 at 7:30pm
Robert Baer, Blow the House Down (Crown)
Tuesday, June 13 at 7:30pm
Scott Simon, Pretty Birds (Random House)
Wednesday, June 14 at 7:30pm
Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line
Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
(Knopf)
