Untitled Document

September 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, September 9th at 7:30 p.m.
Sandra Dasmann
Praying for Fog

"I'm not done with this yet, this wild aliveness, this difficult and tricky incarnation." Award winning poet and founder of PLEXUS, the Berkley feminist newspaper, Sandra Dasmann wrote these words before her young and painful death from Multiple System Atrophy. Stubbornly working to finish this collection of poems to leave to her friends and sons, Sandra's willpower and passion awed all her knew her. This night is a celebration of her work and will be led by Ellen Bass, lauded poet of the collection Mules of Love, UCSC professor, and dedicated friend of Sandra.

Wednesday, September 10th at 7:30 p.m.
Beveryly Seltzer
The Lady and the Lingcod (Trafford)

Beverly Seltzer, friend of best-selling author and fisherwoman Linda Greenlaw, now tells her own tales about her years as a commercial fisherman and life-long sports-fishing enthusiast. Weaving adventure stories from the seas of Alaska, Hawaii, and California among seafood recipes and lessons in knowing how tonight's salmon got to your plate, Seltzer's book is as clever as it is humorous. Join our local open-water fishing celebrity - our own Baja Bev - for a night of tasty and occasionally salty tales.

Tuesday, September 16th at 7:30 p.m.
Melody Chavis
Meena, Heroine of Afghanistan (St. Martins)

Believing that women held the keys to a peaceful Afghanistan, Meena, a 21-year-old Kabul University student, founded the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan. At age 30, she was dead, assassinated for her powerful stand on women's rights and democracy. Meena's visionary struggles for equality continue with today's efforts of RAWA and in its outreach to the next generation, a teaching of possibility and responsibility between mothers and daughters. John Robins, best selling author of Food Revolution and follower of RAWA's efforts, will introduce Melody Chavis, author of this bold biography. We encourage families to attend together.

Wednesday, September 17th at 7:30 p.m.
Diane di Prima and Maria Maziotti Gillan

Diane di Prima has been hailed as the first woman Beat poet and the best of them. She has been by turns a political revolutionary, priestess of psychedelics and pagan magic, Buddhist, publisher, and a teacher of poetics and poetry. She is the author of 35 books of poetry and prose, including the memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, and was nominated for Poet Laureate of California. Maria Mazzioti Gillan is the author of five books of poems, the most recent being Italian Women in Black Dresses, in which she explores the many ways in which we each find our identity. This event is sponsored by Poetry Santa Cruz.

Thursday, September 18th at 7:30 p.m.
Audrey Niffenegger
The Time Traveler's Wife (MacAdam / Cage)

Out of all the new fiction battling for attention at the 2003 Book Expo of America, this spell binding tale of love refracted through the prism of time sparked the most talk. This is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry finds himself periodically displaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences amusing, unpredictable, and devastating. An utterly original novel!

Monday, September 22nd at 7:30 p.m.
Tonay Cohan
Native State (Doubleday)

In this elegantly crafted, engrossing memoir, the acclaimed author of On Mexican Time chronicles his journey from a 1950's Hollywood childhood as a son of a fading showbiz figure to a bohemian life in Europe and back to his native state of California, where he faces the man who had driven him away. Native state is an indelible portrait of an artist as a young man, and --as son and dying father grope toward acceptance---a coming-to-terms with self, family, origins and the elusive American idea of home.

Tuesday, September 23rd at 7:30 p.m.
Eleanor Langer
A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of hte Neo-Nazi Movement in America (Holt)

"An extraordinary book, written with passion, grace, and wisdom. The murder at its center is a reflection not just of racism in the United States, but of something much more widespread that lies smoldering beneath the surface of our times. Langer has taken one act of violence, looked at it carefully and courageously, and illuminated a whole more universe."---Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

Wednesday, September 24th at 7:30 p.m.
Eric Raunchway
Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (Hill and Wang)

When President McKinley was murdered at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901, Americans were bereaved and frightened. Rumor ran rampant: A wild-eyed foreign anarchist with an unpronounceable name had killed the Commander-in-Chief. Eric Rauchway's brilliant Murdering McKinley re-creates Leon Czolgosz's hastily conducted trial and then traverses America as Dr. Vernon Briggs, a Boston alienist, sets out to discover why Czolgosz rose up to kill his President. While uncovering the answer that eluded Briggs and setting the historical record straight about Czolgosz, Rauchway also provides the finest portrait yet of Theodore Roosevelt and his Progressive Era of American politics.

Thursday, September 25th at 7:30 p.m.
World Affairs Book Club
Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in the Land under Siege by Amira Hass

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, we will discuss the powerful book by award-winning Israeli journalist Amira Hass, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in the Land under Siege. This piece of reportage provides a compelling and moving image of Palestinian existence in the occupied territories. For more information you may email Graham Parsons at parsons402@yahoo.com or call the store at 462-4415.

Sunday, September 28th at 2:30 p.m.*
Vicki Robin
Your Money or Your Life (Penguin)

"Your Money or Your Life is one of the best and most effective strategies for financial freedom, for simpler living and for being a good global citizen. Best selling author Vicki Robin will introduce you to the 9-step program that has help hundreds of thousands of people on every continent to rethink their spending in light of what's really important in life. Most find 20% of their expenses dropping away naturally while quality of life improves. She is also Chair of the Simplicity Forum, an international think-tank designed to make simple living simpler for everyone. Life is too fast, too complex and too short - simplicity is a way out of stress and into a life in balance. Vicki Robin will answer your questions and present the material in a new way, hoping to stimulate our minds as we work with a new economic outlook. Come with paper and pen, and your varied questions!
Please note time!

Tuesday, September 30th at 7:30 p.m.
Daniel Ellsberg
Secrets (Penguin)

Daniel Ellsberg began his career as the coldest of cold warriors but in October 1969, Ellsberg set out to turn around American foreign policy by smuggling out of his office the seven-thousand-page top-secret study, known as the Pentagon Papers, of U.S. decision making in Vietnam. Now, for the first time, Ellsberg tells the full story of how and why he became one of the nation's most impassioned and influential anti-war activists-and how his actions helped alter the course of U.S. history. Covering the decade between his entry into the Pentagon and Nixon's resignation, Secrets is Ellsberg's meticulously detailed insider's account of the secrets and lies that shaped American foreign policy during the Vietnam era. Ellsberg provides a vivid eyewitness account of the two years he spent behind the lines in Vietnam as a State Department observer-an experience that convinced him of the hopelessness of Johnson's policies and profoundly altered his own political thinking. As Ellsberg recounts with drama and insight, the release of the Pentagon Papers, first to The New York Times and The Washington Post, set in motion a train of events that ultimately toppled a president and helped to end an unjust war.

Please Note: This event will be held at the Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA, 95062, Phone: 423-8209. Tickets are required for admittance and run from a sliding scale and are for sale at the Book Cafe and the Resource Center for Non-violence. The Book Cafe is co-sponsoring this reading with the Resource Center for Non-Violence. For more information call 831/423-1626.