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
November 2003
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.
Tuesday, November 4th at 7:30 p.m.
Tobias Wolff
Old School (Knopf)The author of the genre-defining memoir This Boy's Life, the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novella The Barracks Thief, and short stories acclaimed as modern classics, Tobias Wolff now gives us his first novel. Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything he's achieved, and steers his destiny in directions no one could have predicted. The school's mystique is rooted in Literature, and for many boys this becomes an obsession, editing the review and competing for the attention of visiting writers whose fame helps to perpetuate the tradition. Robert Frost, soon to appear at JFK's inauguration, is far less controversial than the next visitor, Ayn Rand. But the final guest is one whose blessing a young writer would do almost anything to gain. No one writes more astutely than Wolff about the process by which character is formed, and here he illuminates the irresistible power, even the violence, of the self-creative urge.
Wednesday, November 5th at 7:30 p.m.
Don Lattin
Following Our Bliss (Harper San Francisco)The 60's rocked America's spiritual life. With his characteristic wit and insight, renowned San Francisco Chronicle journalist Don Lattin looks at the spiritual legacy of that extraordinary time, viewed through the eyes of those who grew up at the center of some of the era's wildest experimentation. Feminism, Pentecostalism, the drug culture, Buddhism, the sexual revolution, Vatican II, rock 'n' roll, the gay rights movement, yoga, the Moonies and more - the scope, creativity, and power of these alternative practices rooted in the 60's and 70's not only challenged the religious establishment but also transformed American society.
Thursday, November 6th at 7:30 p.m.
Mark Rovan
Surfing the Soul: Mountain, Ocean and Spiriti Poems (Lompico Creek Press)Mark Rovan writes of sensuous oceanscapes and deep water wisdom; soaring spirit poems and the grace of the Pacific Northwest mountains; precise, passionate writing and the pioneering personalities that dazzle the imaginations of the surfers' ultimate experience. A poet, athlete, and traveler, this local author is unique in his portrayal of the people and experiences of surfing alongside rich accounts of a life spent observing nature from California and Hawaii to Montana and New Zealand.
Saturday, November 8th at 2:30 p.m. *
Simon Winchester
The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford Dictionary (Oxford)From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary. The greatest monument ever erected to a living language, the OED brought together great thinkers and a language "so vast, so sprawling, and so wonderfully unyielding" that the making of the dictionary became 70-year odyssey. With his trademark superb storytelling and quirky agility in dealing with the footnotes of history, Simon Winchester illuminates such personalities as Fizedward Hall, a bitter madman hermit obsessively devoted to the OED, and such words as bondmaid, left out altogether when its slips of paper were found lurking under a pile of books long after the B-volume had gone to print.
* Please Note Time
Monday, November 10th at 7:30 p.m.
John Hart and David Sanger
San Francisco Bay: Portrait of an Estuary (University of California Press)With its shimmering vistas of fog, light, and cityscape, the San Francisco Bay is famous worldwide - yet seldom is the significance of this most important estuary deeply explored. John Hart's lyrical writing and David Sanger's 155 eye-opening photographs celebrate the Bay in its varied past, its complicated present, and its promising future. From native cultures to urban development, from the migration of sandhill cranes to the eerie white fields of the salt harvest, from the plucky local movement to save the bay to the grand environmental effort it became, this gorgeous book of images, history, and hope will be cherished. This event precedes an exhibition of Hart and Sanger's work at the Oakland Museum of California, Natural Sciences Gallery, running from January 14 through March 14, 2004.
Tuesday, November 11th at 7:30 p.m.
Maxine Hong Kingston
The Fifth Book of Peace (Knopf)This new book from the author of The Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey opens as Maxine Hong Kingston discovers that her neighborhood in the Oakland-Berkeley hills is engulfed in flames. Her home burns to the ground, and with it, all her earthly possessions, including her novel-in-progress. Kingston, who at the time was deeply disturbed by the Persian Gulf War, decides that she must understand her own loss of all she possessed as a kind of shadow-experience of war: a lesson about what it would be like to experience up close its utter devastation. Thus she embarks on a mission to re-create her novel from scratch, to rebuild her life, and to reach out to veterans of war and share with them her views as a lover of peace.
Wednesday, November 12th at 7:30 p.m.
David Baron
The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature (W.W. Norton)When in the late 1980's, residents of Boulder, Colorado, suddenly began to see mountain lions in their yards, it became clear that the cats had repopulated the land after decades of persecution. In a riveting, honest, and complex tale, David Baron traces the history of the mountain lion and chronicles Boulder's efforts to coexist with its new neighbor. The Beast in the Garden is a scientific detective story and a real-life drama, a tragic story of the struggle between two highly evolved predators: man and beast. "A gripping tale of human naiveté, misguided intentions, and conventional wisdom gone awry," writes Howard Berkes, National Public Radio.
Friday, November 14th at 7:30 p.m.
Robert Pollin
Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity (Verso)"Contours of Descent is lucid economics as if reality matters. Cutting through the myths, hype and diversionary corporate-side indicators, Professor Pollin lays out an agenda to turn around the economy that is increasingly disconnecting from millions of workers and their well-being. A laser-beam exposure of globalization as defined by the World Bank, the IMF, Alan Greenspan and the corporate supremacists."--Ralph Nader
Friday, November 15th at 7:30 p.m.
Alberto Fuguet
The Movies of My Life (Rayo)Film critic, Chilean literary movement leader, and one of the most brilliant minds of his generation to emerge from Latin America, Alberto Fuguet brings us an epic novel about the power of America's pop culture and a seismologist who tries to balance in a shifting world. Set in the oddly parallel worlds of Nixon's suburban California and Pinochet's Santiago de Chile, this ingenious novel follows Bletran Soler, a man who knows more about tectonic plates than life, when earthquake tremors trigger his memory to review the fifty most important films of his life. Capturing the spirit of film, an adolescent's escape into story, and a family seemingly twisted priorities, The Movies of My Life is refreshingly original and destined for international success.
Monday, November 17th at 7:30 p.m.
Marla Streb
Downhill: The Life Story of a Gravity Goddess (Plume)In 1994, Marla Streb left her promising career as a biomedical researcher to climb onto a bicycle and hurtle herself down the side of a mountain at speeds topping fifty miles an hour. And at the age of 36, she continues to compete and win against women ten years younger at the highest levels of her sport-downhill mountain biking. Downhill also chronicles her life before racing-her training as a classical pianist, bicycling throughout Europe with her companion turned boyfriend Marc, crisscrossing the country in abattered polka-dotted VW bus, and, perhaps the defining moment of her life, the loss of her brother. As she recounts her experiences with humor and grit, Marla Streb reinforces for all readers the need to abandon everything to pursue what you love and to live passionately.
Tuesday, November 18th at 7:30 p.m.
Maude Meehan
As if the World Made Sense (Many Names Press)Come celebrate Maude Meehan's 83rd birthday with the Book Cafe, her family and local poet Patrice Vecchione. They'll be birthday cake and poems aplenty. Of her new collection Ellen Bass writes, "A lifetime of commitment, compassion, wisdom and love shine through these poems. Along with passion, humor, grit and tenderness, Maude Meehan teaches us something about how to live, which is what poetry should do."
Wednesday, November 19th at 7:30 p.m.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals (Ballantine Books)Bestselling author Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson's groundbreaking When Elephants Weep explored emotions in the animal kingdom, particularly those of animals in the wild. Now, he reveals startling evidence that our barnyard friends have complex feelings, too, among them love, loyalty, friendship, sadness, and grief. Weaving together history, science, literature, and his own vivid experiences observing pigs, cows, goats and other beasts in the barn, Masson bears witness to the emotions and intelligence of these remarkable animals. Sure to be as controversial as it is fascinating, Masson's latest work will stir human emotions far and wide.
Thursday, November 20th at 7:00 p.m. *
World Affairs Book Club
This group meets every month to discuss a book relevant to current event(s) 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. As always, we welcome people from all backgrounds and affiliations to participate. This month's selection is For more information you may email Graham Parsons at parsons402@yahoo.com or call the store at 462-4415.
* Please Note Time
Thursday, November 20th at 7:30 p.m.
Celebration of Local Authors
Join us as we celebrate our local literary community, rich in talent and history. George Ow Jr., James Houston, Sandy Lydon, Geoffrey Dunn and Tony Hill join us in time for the holidays to celebrate and sign their work. And what amazing snapshots it is of this community: Chinatown Dreams, Snow Mountain Passage, Santa Cruz is in the Heart, Chinese Gold and much more. Come hear a very special presentation of Chinatown Dreams and embrace the diversity of words and writers, images and landscape of Santa Cruz County.
