Talking has nothing to do with conversation.
GERTRUDE STEIN

 

Events

 

 

 

Wednesday, November 3rd at 7:30 p.m.
Merrill Feitell
Here Beneath Low Flying Planes
(University of Iowa Press)

Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon writes, "Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic stories, are made from the plain and the painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one." This UCSC alum and winner of the 2004 Iowa Short Fiction Award deftly reminds us of the indelible impact we have on one another no matter how anonymous we feel under our collective sky.

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Thursday, November 4th at 7:30 p.m.
M. Allen Cunningham
The Green Age of Asher Witherow (Unbridled Books)
Jason Headley
Small Town Odds (Chronicle)

Two debut novels tell coming of age stories separated by a century. Using historical documents and a breathtaking poetic intensity, Cunningham writes a fictional memoir of a man growing up in the mid 1800s in Mt. Diablo's Black Diamond coal mines where superstitions and the history of the Golden State intertwine. Robert Olen Butler writes, "rarely does a writer combine strikingly beautiful prose style with an unerring instinct for storytelling." Writing with an sense of place and character reminiscent of Richard Russo, Jason Headley tells the hilarious and poignant story of the 1980s Eric Mercer, an enormously likeable screw-up who has settled into an underachieving life as part-time bartender, mortician and father in his one-stoplight hometown, Pinely, West Virginia. Pulitzer-winning Butler again writes, "[this] is a rich and wonderful novel about the most universal human concerns -- how we pursue a sense of self in a world that is beyond our control."

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Monday, November 8th at 7:30 p.m.
Richard Rhodes
John James Audubon
(Knopf)

The bastard son of a French naval officer and a chambermaid, Audubon was sent to America to escape conscription into Napoleon's army. In the New World, money was scarce but birds were plentiful. Traveling into the untamed American wilderness, this skilled artist, observer, and charmer remained devoted to his wife even though he abandoned her for years at a time while painting and promoting Birds of America. By weaving journals, gorgeous illustrations, and new research, this Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb eloquently sheds light on Audubon's unmatched ability to capture so much life in his depictions of birds that they transcend traditional wildlife painting.

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Tuesday, November 9th at 7:30 p.m.
Arthur Gelb
The City Room
(Berkley Trade)

From his nights as a copyboy to his days as the managing editor, Arthur Gelb spent 45 years at The New York Times. On his way to the top, he exposed crooked cops and politicians, mentored a generation of our most talented journalists, and was the first to praise such yet undiscovered talents as Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand. Though the days of manual typewriters, green eyeshades, and bookies working the news desks are practically forgotten, this veteran newspaperman's legacy is one for the ages.

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Wednesday, November 10th at 5:00 p.m. *
Tara Bray Smith
West of Then
(Simon)

At the center of this dazzling and devastating memoir is Karen Morgan, beautiful island flower, fifth generation white Hawaiian -- now a homeless junkie living on the streets of Honolulu. When she goes missing in 2002, her eldest daughter Tara sets out to find and save her, and the journey unravels the rich history as well as the realities of modern of Hawaii, a land of astonishing beauty and many ghosts. In search of her own history, Tara must reckon with herself and the meaning of home.

* Please note time

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Wednesday, November 10th at 7:30 p.m.
Peter Balakian
Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response
(Perennial)

The author of the memoir Black Dog of Fate brings us a riveting narrative of the genocide of Armenians in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. During the United States' ascension in the global arena, America's humanitarian movement for Armenia was the nation's first true epoch of internationalism and passionate commitments came from figures like Woodrow Wilson, Clara Barton and Ezra Pound. But in the turmoil following World War I and as U.S. oil interests in the Middle East increased, the massacre was crime that went largely unpunished. America's struggle between human rights and national self-interest -- a pattern that would be repeated again and again -- resonates powerfully today.

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Saturday, November 13th at 2:30 p.m. *
Belle Yang
Hannah is My Name
(Candlewick)

From the beloved artist and author of Baba and The Odyssey of a Manchurian comes another blend of her family's history and her vibrant artwork. Belle Yang herself moved from Taiwan to San Francisco as a child, yet in her new children's book, it is Hannah's family that has made the journey. Here in America, Baba tells his daughter, people are free to say what they think, and children can grow up to be whatever they choose. So Hannah begins a new school, learns a new language, and starts to adjust to a new life while the family anxiously waits for the arrival of the green cards that will assure they are finally home to stay.

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Monday, November 15th at 7:30 p.m.
Kate Atkinson
Case Histories
(Little, Brown)

"Atkinson specializes in audacity, which she offers up with irresistible humor and grace" (San Francisco Chronicle). This award-winning author of Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Emotionally Weird now flawlessly weaves together three stories -- a missing sister, a beloved daughter's first day at her father's law firm, and a housewife who feels trapped by her decisions until a fit of rage creates a grisly escape. While Jackson Brodie investigates each of these cases and becomes caught in the grief, comedy, and desire within them all, he finds their unshakable need for resolution very much like his own.

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Tuesday, November 16th at 7:30 p.m.
Liza Featherstone
Selling Women Short
(Basic Books)

On TV, Wal-Mart employees are smiling women delighted with their jobs, but Californian Betty Dukes took her reality to court as the lead plaintive in a class-action lawsuit against the "family-oriented" Christian company. Exploring Wal-Mart's discrimination against women and other controversial topics, Liza Featherstone combines personal stories with superb investigative journalism to show why women who work low-wage jobs are getting a raw deal, and what they are doing about it.

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Thursday, November 17th at 6:30 p.m. *
Book Club
Three Junes
by Julia Glass
(Anchor)

Julia Glass's finely observed first novel traces the lives of a Scottish family across three summers, as they experience the joys and frustrations, sadness and possibility offered by romantic and familial love. Mourning the death of his wife, Paul McLeod travels from Scotland to Greece one June; there he confronts both the truth of his marriage and the reality of his age in a brief flirtation with a much younger woman, an American artist. At the beginning of another summer, after Paul's death, his son Fenno, a gay man who has exiled himself to New York, confronts his family's disappointments and their complicated hope. Years later, in yet another June, Fenno befriends a pregnant woman who traveled to Greece one summer during college and who now faces a choice that will change her life.

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Wednesday, November 17th at 7:30 p.m.
Eric Hansen
The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer
(Pantheon)

An intrepid traveler with a keen eye for the odd and unusual, Eric Hansen will go anywhere and try anything. This author of Orchid Fever and Motoring with Mohammed now captures revealing conversations and the most transporting moments he has had between Cannes and the Maldives. From the mind-altering drink of kava in Vanuatu and heartrending work at Mother Teresa's Home of the Dying in Calcutta, to time spent with an ornithologist who studies the sex lives of banana slugs and takes topless dancers on bird-watching expeditions, Hansen is a passionate observer and tireless traveler.

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Thursday, November 18th at 7:30 p.m.
Geoffrey Stone
Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism
(Norton)

This necessary and timely book investigates how the First Amendment and other civil liberties have been compromised in America during wartime. Stone focuses on six periods beginning with the Sedition Act of 1798 and ending with an examination of the state of civil liberties in the Bush era. With a dramatic cast of characters including presidents, Supreme Court justices, and resisters, and filled with rare photographs and posters, this work is resonant in its call for a new approach in our response to grave crises.

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Thursday, November 18th at 7:00 p.m. *
World Affairs Book Group
A Thousand Signs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan by Christiane Bird
(Ballantine)

Part travelougue, part history, part reportage, and part cultural study, this critically acclaimed work offers timely insight into an unknown but increasingly influential part of the world. Fatema Mernissi, author of Beyond the Veil and Islam and Democracy, claims, "One of Christiane Bird's revelations in [her book] is that in the Middle East, one should never confuse minority with marginality. This account by a particularly attentive American woman journeying into the land of the Kurds helps readers understand the most striking features of the Middle East: complexity." For more information call 462.4415 or email Jenn_ramage@yahoo.com.

* Please Note Time

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Monday, November 22nd at 7:30 p.m.
Matt Warshaw with contributors Daniel Duane and Allston James
Zero Break
(Harvest)

This author of Maverick's and The Encyclopedia of Surfing and former editor of Surfer magazine returns to the Book Cafe for Zero Break: An Illustrated Collection of Surf Writing 1777 - 2004. This definitive anthology of the best-ever writing about surfing, illustrated with classic and cutting-edge photographs and artwork, is hip and eclectic and speaks to surfing's widespread and longstanding appeal. From Mark Twain's 19th century description in Roughing It to Susan Orlean's essay on girl surfers in Maui and work by Jack London and Charles Schultz, this collection brings together the sport's most colorful characters, their hair-raising tales of big-wave surfing and a historic exploration of surf culture.

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Tuesday, November 23rd at 7:30 p.m.
Poetry Santa Cruz

Gail Wronsky is professor of women's studies, creative writing, and Surrealism at Loyola Marymount and she has translated the work of Argentinean poet Alicia Partnoy and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Her own poetry appears in her collections Again the Gemini are in the Orchard and Dying for Beauty. UCSC and SJSU alumna Debra Spencer is a learning disabilities specialist at Cabrillo College and her first collection of poems is Pomegranate.

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Tuesday, November 30th at 7:30 p.m.
Kenneth Turan
Never Coming to a Theater Near You
(Public Affairs)

The LA Times and NPR "Morning Edition" film critic profiles the most sophisticated, original, and entertaining films viewers are hungry for but that never came to neighborhood theater. Noticing an increasing disconnect between the films he recommends personally and the ones people have managed to see, Turan bemoans the almighty power of the megaplex blockbuster and catalogues his absorbing reviews and insights into films that got squeezed off the screen too quickly -- films that should not be missed!

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and... in December

Thursday, December 2nd at 7:30 p.m.
Terrie M. Williams, Ph.D
The Hunter's Breath: On Expedition With the Weddell Seals of the Antarctic
(M. Evans and Company)

The only mammal on earth able to survive year-round in the most extreme Antarctic temperatures is the Weddell seal, and it holds a wealth of knowledge for scientists. In the course of their Antarctic journey, this intrepid group led by UCSC professor Williams, learned that every day in this harsh climate brings with it the possibility of blizzards, frostbite, and high winds. On the coldest, driest, and windiest continent on the planet, there is scant room for error -- but their discoveries are worth the danger. A power-point presentation will be shown.

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Sunday, December 5th at 7:30 p.m. *
Marianne Williamson
Gift of Change: Spiritual Guidance for a Radically New Life
(Harper San Francisco)

This bestselling author of Everyday Grace and A Return to Love delves deeply into the role of change and transition in our lives. The most difficult times often bring the most wisdom, an inherent resistance to change still leads us to recklessness when faced with it, and yet within grief and fear that such transitions bring us, there can always be hope and healing.

* Event Procedures: This is a FREE event. Beginning on 11/9, the first 50 customers who purchase one copy of Gift of Change from the Book Cafe will have one seat reserved for the event. Please line up outside of the store prior to the event. Seating will begin at 6:30 pm. Reserved ticket holders will be asked in first, in the order of the line. Then general admission will begin, in order of the line. See store for additional details.

Reserved seats will be held until 7 pm ONLY.

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Monday, December 6th at 7:30 p.m.
Matt Lawrence and
Like a Splinter in Your Mind: The Philosophy Behind the Matrix Trilogy
(Blackwell)

The Matrix films are not just about Kung Fu and special effects. Rather, they are about knowledge, reality, consciousness, freedom, fate, foreknowledge, good, evil, faith, enlightenment, and the very meaning of existence. In short, they are about philosophy -- with some great effects on the side. Long Beach College Philosophy Professor Lawrence focuses squarely on the film, yet shows us how these questions relate to our own lives and our own philosophical journeys. The author will be joined by illustrator Scott Mayhew.

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Wednesday, December 8th at 7:30 p.m.
Martin Cruz Smith
Wolves Eat Dogs
(Simon & Schuster)

"Riveting. Smith's melancholy, indefatigable Senior Investigator Arkady Renko has been exiled to some bitter venues in the past -- including blistering-hot Cuba in Havana Bay and the icy Bering sea in Polar Star -- but surely the strangest (and most fascinating) is his latest, the eerie, radioactive landscape of post-meltdown Chernobyl." -- Publisher's Weekly, starred review. This master of the international thriller and author of Gorky Park brings readers into the new reality of the former Soviet Union in an intelligent, harrowing page-tuner.