tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-108477332024-03-07T19:19:54.506-08:00Ghost WordEthereal thoughts on books and writing.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger761125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-10112450323651696212012-02-27T14:09:00.000-08:002014-02-13T12:32:25.976-08:00Why is is so quiet here? Find me on BerkeleysideIt's been more than a year since I posted a story on Ghost Word, but not because I am lazy. I am writing regularly on <a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/">Berkeleyside</a>, a news site I run about Berkeley. I frequently write about local books and authors there, so come check it out. You can find it here. <br />
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I plan to resurrect Ghost Word soon at a different URL.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-89346114027753793222011-02-06T08:42:00.000-08:002011-02-06T08:42:45.891-08:00Peggy Orenstein on the marketing of pink<link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN52PpWx3GslprJPkZDbIa_egtQh7eZDuE7EmaH-PzbbMTP4EZwxAf_C5AAIEeOHRROzRYWlCnxxUtIjlBaFk_tV36u25P3omtyShMHhp3ze24-aKWSFC92Cccf_9IqZhg2TF6sw/s1600/peggyorenstein.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN52PpWx3GslprJPkZDbIa_egtQh7eZDuE7EmaH-PzbbMTP4EZwxAf_C5AAIEeOHRROzRYWlCnxxUtIjlBaFk_tV36u25P3omtyShMHhp3ze24-aKWSFC92Cccf_9IqZhg2TF6sw/s1600/peggyorenstein.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN52PpWx3GslprJPkZDbIa_egtQh7eZDuE7EmaH-PzbbMTP4EZwxAf_C5AAIEeOHRROzRYWlCnxxUtIjlBaFk_tV36u25P3omtyShMHhp3ze24-aKWSFC92Cccf_9IqZhg2TF6sw/s1600/peggyorenstein.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN52PpWx3GslprJPkZDbIa_egtQh7eZDuE7EmaH-PzbbMTP4EZwxAf_C5AAIEeOHRROzRYWlCnxxUtIjlBaFk_tV36u25P3omtyShMHhp3ze24-aKWSFC92Cccf_9IqZhg2TF6sw/s1600/peggyorenstein.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN52PpWx3GslprJPkZDbIa_egtQh7eZDuE7EmaH-PzbbMTP4EZwxAf_C5AAIEeOHRROzRYWlCnxxUtIjlBaFk_tV36u25P3omtyShMHhp3ze24-aKWSFC92Cccf_9IqZhg2TF6sw/s1600/peggyorenstein.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN52PpWx3GslprJPkZDbIa_egtQh7eZDuE7EmaH-PzbbMTP4EZwxAf_C5AAIEeOHRROzRYWlCnxxUtIjlBaFk_tV36u25P3omtyShMHhp3ze24-aKWSFC92Cccf_9IqZhg2TF6sw/s1600/peggyorenstein.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicJP_wnJpNOz33Lv6zVxumMneD0WfzwHb1LdoJ-EjCDlHS8Yeoo1BPiPOOPi-GVX1orlsLTvQTEv7UNMvnNdxqQHQiAEgDcRDalTfmDziGM4CMF-jFJMelj3iu53XZ6C4bDRSguw/s1600/CinderellaAteMyDaughter_hc_c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicJP_wnJpNOz33Lv6zVxumMneD0WfzwHb1LdoJ-EjCDlHS8Yeoo1BPiPOOPi-GVX1orlsLTvQTEv7UNMvnNdxqQHQiAEgDcRDalTfmDziGM4CMF-jFJMelj3iu53XZ6C4bDRSguw/s320/CinderellaAteMyDaughter_hc_c.jpg" width="210" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">From her home in north Berkeley where she lives with her filmmaker husband <b>Steven Okazaki</b> and seven year old daughter Daisy, <b>Peggy Orenstein </b>has been opining for years about the world of girls and feminism for the New York Times magazine. Last week, her latest book, <i>Cinderella Ate My Daughter</i>, was published and it is getting big play in both legacy and on-line media. It is both an expose of and meditation about the corporate push to market princesses and pink and early sexuality to young girls.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Orenstein just escaped the snows of Chicago (she got on the last plane leaving O’Hare on Tuesday) and is about to embark on the West Coast portion of her book tour. (She will be speaking Feb. 7 at St. John’s Church in Berkeley and Feb. 17 at A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland) Ghost Word caught up with her to ask a few questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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<b>Do you wear pink?</b><br />
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Of course I wear pink. I’m not a crazy person. But it’s such a tiny slice of the rainbow and although in one way it seems to celebrate girlhood, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girls’ identity to appearance then it presents that connection not only as innocent but as <i>evidence </i>of innocence. And that innocent pink pretty quickly turns into something else, a kind of diva, self-absorbed pink and ultimately a sexualized pink.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
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<b>What is Daisy’s position on the color now?</b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Truthfully, she was actually never that into pink, which is part of why I became so aware of it. It was never her favorite color, but people were constantly pressing it on her. I remember being in a drug store and the very nice clerk offered her a balloon, then asked what color she wanted and before she could answer, (I think she was going to say purple) said, “I bet I know,” and handed her the pink one. Daisy looked at me kind of confused, like she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to say thank you or no thank you. And I thought, really? When did THIS happen? I think last time I asked her, her favorite color was “rainbow.” That’s all right by me.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN52PpWx3GslprJPkZDbIa_egtQh7eZDuE7EmaH-PzbbMTP4EZwxAf_C5AAIEeOHRROzRYWlCnxxUtIjlBaFk_tV36u25P3omtyShMHhp3ze24-aKWSFC92Cccf_9IqZhg2TF6sw/s1600/peggyorenstein.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN52PpWx3GslprJPkZDbIa_egtQh7eZDuE7EmaH-PzbbMTP4EZwxAf_C5AAIEeOHRROzRYWlCnxxUtIjlBaFk_tV36u25P3omtyShMHhp3ze24-aKWSFC92Cccf_9IqZhg2TF6sw/s1600/peggyorenstein.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
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<b>What’s the big deal about little girls being obsessed with princesses? Hasn’t that always been the case?</b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Comparing the way girls do Princess today to the way we played is like comparing a five-channel TV to a satellite dish. There are 26,000 Disney Princess products alone—considering they can’t slap them on cars, liquor, cigarettes anti-depressants or tampons, that means they’re on EVERYTHING. And it becomes </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">this mandate, the only game in town. I remember going to Daisy’s preschool and they were doing a project where they were making a book, each one filling in the sentence “if I were a [blank] I’d [blank] to the store.” So if I were a ball I’d roll to the store. And the boys had filled the sentence in all kinds of ways. Yes, some said Lightening McQueen but they said puppies, bugs, raisins, all sorts of things. The girls said exactly four things: Princess, Ballerina, Butterfly and Fairy. One especially ambitious girl said “Princess, butterfly fairy Ballerina.” It’s too narrow. The teacher was really surprised—she’d been around a long time and this was really when the princess juggernaut was truly taking off. She had tried to get the girls to broaden their imaginations but said they just wouldn’t.<br />
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No question it’s cute. And it can feel empowering </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">because you think, well, girls are freer to express their femininity and their sexuality and we're not tamping that down or denying it anymore. But it’s part of this flume ride that defines girlhood as makeovers and spa birthday parties and princesses and Bratz dolls and being the fairest and ultimately the hottest of them all, that encourages them to define themselves from the outside in instead of from the inside out. It pretty quickly slides from playing pretty, to playing “sassy” to playing sexy, which does the opposite of what people might think in terms of girls’ emotional and psychological health. Being objectified—judging yourself by the way you think others see you--actually disconnects them from their sexuality and makes for decreased sexual health as they get older. One of the most sobering conversations I had was with Deborah Tolman, who does research on girls and desire. She told me that by the time girls are teenagers, when she asks them questions about how arousal or desire felt they respond by how they think they looked. She has to tell them looking good is not a feeling. As parents of daughters—and for those of us who are women ourselves—I think we understand that potential, that vulnerability, and it’s the last thing we want for our girls. So it’s the magnitude, the dominance and what, in the commercial culture, it’s channeling girls into that’s disturbing. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a name='more'></a><br />
<b>What accounts for the rise of the Disney princess phenomenon?<br />
</b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Money. That’s the short answer. The phenomenon is actually only about 10 years old. Obviously, there were princesses in movies before that and girls played princess, but Cinderella, Snow White even Belle and Jasmine, those movies were just family movies, not “princess” movies. They were like Peter Pan or Pinocchio. The movies came out, there’d be a little merchandise, a Halloween costume or two, and then they’d be gone until next time the film was released from “the vault.” Then in 2000 the new head of consumer licensing got this idea to market the female characters separately from the movies—for the first time in Disney history-and call them “princesses.” They rolled it out and the first year it was a $300 million business. By 2010 Princess took in $5 billion. And that’s just Disney. So they say, well, we just give girls what they want, as if magnifying a desire is less coercive than instigating it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
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<b>How can the emphasis on pink and princesses hurt girls in the long run?</b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">There’s no a + b=c here. Im not saying if your daughter waves a magic wand she’s going to get an eating disorder. That would be absurd. But </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">there's a lot of effort into making us think it's benign. The mythology that this represents more freedom for girls, and more power and greater sexual health and greater self-efficacy, all of that; I think the evidence is really very much to the contrary. And nowhere do you see it really like writ large more than in these <i>other </i>Disney princesses. You know, Miley and Lindsey and Britney and now Demi Lovato (who just got out of rehab). That flip from fetishizing wholesomeness to fetishizing what comes after. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> <br />
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One of the things I hadn’t thought of was the impact of this hyper-segmenation on the relationship between girls and boys. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It's natural for little girls to want to assert that they're little girls with whatever the culture gives them, because they want to make sure they stay little girls, because the whole penis-vagina thing hasn't quite kicked in and they don't know if their anatomy might switch and they might grow up to be something else. That's kind of scary, so they want to make sure that everyone knows you're a boy and everyone knows you're a girl. So you fixate on extremes that represent your gender, and that's a natural thing to do. However, when it’s then packaged and sold to you in this extreme way, it separates the cultures of boys and girls, making it harder and harder for them to see one another as people—as the other sex rather than the<i> opposite</i> sex. It makes it very hard for them to be friends and to learn from one another. I ended up doing a lot of research on the value of cross-sex play for both boys and girls—cognitively, psychologically, emotionally, on their future relationships in the home and workplace. Turns out it’s incredibly important and valuable to them in the long run when it happens naturally, which it does ( you don’t need to force it). But you wonder, when everything is so gender-coded, how do you do that? How do you play with the boy next door if you've got the pink Magic 8 Ball and the scrabble set that says f-a-s-h-i-o-n on the cover? And conversely, I think girls begin to think if something is not pink, it's not for them, and that's problematic. I mean, there's only one pink Lego kit. If pink is your only color, that's the only one you can get; everything else is for boys.<br />
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And of course, pity the boy who likes pink. Unless, maybe he lives in the Bay Area.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<b>Berkeley prides itself on being a liberal, thoughtful beacon of a city where parents are tuned in to gender stereotyping. Have you found mothers here to be more sensitive to princess marketing gimmicks than mothers in other parts of the country. Or are we just like everyone else?</b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We’re a version of it, for sure. We maybe more aware in some ways of these issues, but we go to the same stores, we are confronted by the same products, we live in and have to navigate the same culture and have to help our girls navigate it as well. It would be arrogant to say we’re superior or so different. I noticed this phenomenon in Berkeley, so....there are a whole range of attitudes and decisions around pink-and-pretty products, diva products, sexualized products among both progressives and conservatives although for different reasons. My hope is just to give parents some perspective so when they do make these choices, or help their daughters make them, they can be intentional and think through their own values and potential consequences. You know, parenting is so present tense. When you have a six month old you can’t imagine having a three year old. When you have a three year old you can’t imagine having a six month old. So it’s hard to connect the dots, hard to see the arc of how the culture pushes girls to see femininity, identity, and sexuality as a performance rather than something internally felt. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<b> In which part of Berkeley do you live?</b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I do live in North Berkeley. I’ve lived in Berkeley for nearly 19 years. I moved from San Francisco I married my husband because he had a rent controlled one-bedroom apartment. With a parking space. At the time, that seemed the height of luxury.<br />
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<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>Where do you do most of your writing?</b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I work either in my office in our back yard or, when I’m lonely, I go to work with my husband, Steven Okazaki, who’s a filmmaker, and work in his spare office.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
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<b>In your acknowledgements, you thank some Berkeley writers, including Ayelet Waldman, Sylvia Brownrigg and Ruth Halpern and call them your “mother superiors.” Can you tell us a bit about your writing and editing process? Do you show your work to these mother superiors for feedback and comment?<o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It’s not so much about the writing as those women are my ideal readers, the ones I hold in my mind while I work and think, if this argument passes intellectual muster with them, if this joke would make them laugh, if this idea would make them think, then it stays in the book. And on a personal level, they’re the ones with whom I discuss these issues—we all have daughters, we all <i>were </i>girls and they are all incredibly smart, insightful women and moms. They’re three of my very dearest and most trusted friends.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
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<b>What’s your favorite part about living in Berkeley? </b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Well, I just spent 12 days on the East Coast and Midwest where my readings were snowed out in New York, Washington DC and Chicago. I barely got out of Chicago—I was on the very last plane out before they shut down O’Hare for two days. So what do you think my favorite part is?</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-91634388373622327562010-12-20T12:22:00.000-08:002010-12-20T12:22:16.591-08:00Best Books of 2010<span style="font-size: large;">I have been spending most of my time writing about Berkeley, CA for <a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/">Berkeleyside</a> and asked Berkeley authors for their favorite books of 2010. Here is the article I wrote.</span><br />
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<dl class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_23547" style="width: 730px;"><dt class="wp-caption-dt"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/dsc_0440-2/" mce_href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/dsc_0440-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-23547"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-23547 " height="479" mce_src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/DSC_04401.jpg" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/DSC_04401.jpg" title="DSC_0440" width="720" /></a></span></dt>
<dd class="wp-caption-dd"><span style="font-size: large;">A few of the many good reads on Lance Knobel's bookshelves.</span></dd></dl></div><span style="font-size: large;">Berkeley is a city for book lovers. There are 30 independent bookstores in the city and at least three stores specializing in rare books. Berkeley residents love their public library and check out items at <a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/07/26/the-berkeley-public-library-a-few-facts/" mce_href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/07/26/the-berkeley-public-library-a-few-facts/">a rate three times higher than other California residents.</a> In 2008, that meant they borrowed 2.2 million books, CDS, DVDs, and tools. The University of California library system, considered one of the best in the world, has more than 11 million books scattered throughout 29 libraries on campus.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Given the community’s deep interest in the printed word, Berkeleyside asked a number of authors and library professionals for their recommendations for the Best Books of 2010. The books didn’t have to have been published in 2010; they only had to be read this year. And the eclectic choices, from the <a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-admin/Stieg%20Larsson" mce_href="Stieg Larsson">Stieg Larsson</a> books to a book about bankers during the Depression, reveals just how broad our reading tastes are.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.sylviabrownrigg.com/" mce_href="http://www.sylviabrownrigg.com/"> <b><b> </b></b></a><b><b><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/browriggimages/" mce_href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/browriggimages/" rel="attachment wp-att-23491"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-23491" height="150" mce_src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/browriggimages-122x150.jpg" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/browriggimages-122x150.jpg" title="browriggimages" width="122" /></a></b>Sylvia Brownrigg</b>: The great thing about literature is that it travels so swiftly, leaving no carbon footprint -- you don't need to be a locavore when it comes to reading. However, it is always a pleasure to enjoy and champion writers from around town, and two brilliant books were published in 2010 by San Francisco authors: <i>The Bigness of the World</i>, by Lori Ostlund, and<i> The Professor: A Sentimental Education</i> by Terry Castle.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ostlund's stories, mostly of middle-aged lesbians navigating the dangerous waters of communication, and the often safer territory of travel abroad, are wry, subtle and intelligent, with memorable lines and a melancholy that lingers under the humor. I first encountered Ostlund's great voice at a Litquake reading, and was delighted when her prize-winning collection came out in paperback this year.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Terry Castle's book is a different kettle of fish: half of the book is a gripping, painful and funny memoir of a tormented affair she had as a grad student with a charismatic, madly narcissistic older woman. The second half is a selection of Castle's long review essays from the "London Review of Books", which typically combine autobiographical comedy with deep, startling readings of the authors under review. The most famous -- one could say infamous -- of these pieces was Castle's appreciation/ deflation of Susan Sontag, after the latter's death. It is hard to shake the image of the celebrated theorist darting in and out of buildings on University Avenue in Palo Alto, urgently modeling for Castle what it was like to dodge gunfire in Sarajevo.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If you are going to travel, from the comfort of your armchair or in this case your Kindle (not that I have one, yet) -- you have to sample the English writer Helen Simpson's newest story collection, <i>In Flight Entertainment.</i> Simpson is always sharp, true and insightful, and in this latest book takes the brave risk of using climate change as a theme in several stories, with the result that the reader is haunted afterwards, not just by great writing but by an ominous sense of where we're all headed. This book will be coming out in paperback, a book you can actually hold, in 2011, but before then it's on offer for Kindle readers -- or those who are willing to go to Britain to stock up for their bedside table.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Sylvia Brownrigg, who lives in the Elmwood, is the author of five acclaimed novels including <b>The Delivery Room</b> and <b>Morality Tale</b>. She frequently reviews books for the New York Times Book Review and has just completed her first young adult novel, <b>Kepler’s Dream.</b></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/viewer/" mce_href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/viewer/" rel="attachment wp-att-23492"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-23492" height="150" mce_src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/viewer-117x150.png" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/viewer-117x150.png" title="viewer" width="117" /></a>Linda Schacht Gage: </b>When a Cal journalism student gave me a copy of <i>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks</i> by Rebecca Skloot, I read it in one night. The book is the true story of cancer patient Henrietta Lacks and the impact her resilient cells have had on the medical industry. I liked the combination of compelling family story and accessible scientific information. It's also a mystery with a strong social justice theme running through it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Like many others, I read all three Stieg Larsson books about the busy girl, Lisbeth Salander, who had dragon tattoos, played with fire and kicked the hornet's nest. That led to an exploration of some other Scandinavian mystery/thrillers by Henning Mankell, whose Kurt Wallender Mystery Series provides some great reads.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But the most enjoyable book for me in 2010 was <i>Cutting for Stone</i>, by Stanford's Dr. Abraham Verghese. It's an epic tale of twin boys raised in Ethiopia by two doctors after their mother dies and their father leaves them behind. A beautiful narrative seamlessly interwoven with medicine set against a backdrop of civil war.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Tip for Readers: The First Editions Club at Book Passage in Larkspur Landing and San Francisco. Each month a signed first edition of the bookstore's choosing arrives in the mail. In 2010, some great reads landed in my lap through this club, including <i>Tinkers</i> (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2010) and a fur covered copy of Dave Egger's <i>The Wild Things</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Linda Schacht Gage, an Emmy award winning television reporter , teaches at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She is the chair of the Neighborhood Library Campaign, former chair of the Berkeley Library Foundation, and chair of the Berkeley Authors’ Dinner, the major fundraiser for the foundation.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/tommoniz/" mce_href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/tommoniz/" rel="attachment wp-att-23529"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-23529" height="150" mce_src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/tommoniz-149x150.jpg" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/tommoniz-149x150.jpg" title="tommoniz" width="149" /></a>Tomas Moniz: </b>One of the best things about having teenagers in your house: an excuse to continue reading young-adult novels. Even though my own children have, in their own words, moved beyond ‘those childish books’, I seem to have acquired a debilitating appetite for wizards and dragons, sibling detectives, and teen revolutionaries. So, with that excuse, I completely enjoyed the culminating third novel in <i>The Hunger Games</i> series: <i>Mockingjay</i> by Suzanne Collins.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">My daughter and I fought over who got to read it first the night it came out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">‘Dad, I’m fifteen! How old are you?’ my daughter argued.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Needless to say, her pleas fell on deaf ears.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">After we each read it, we thoroughly enjoyed discussing the book because it presented issues that many young-adult books tend to avoid: the complexity of friendships, personal disappointment, conflicting desires. There were no easy answers to the dilemmas faced by the characters. The book’s lead character, Katniss, refuses to compromise or to acquiesce to authority, despite the pain and the loss it causes her. The book's ending was a shock and left us unclear if she was the greatest revolutionary of young adult literature or completely insane.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Inspired by the book, my daughter and I sat around talking about politics instead of the typical who is getting together with whom, which tends to be the default subject matter most of the time. Though have no fear, there’s a love triangle in the book as well, but it just seemed so secondary after everything else. Read it, but beware.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><a href="http://raddadzine.blogspot.com/" mce_href="http://raddadzine.blogspot.com/">Tomas Moniz</a>, who lives in south Berkeley, is the author of the zine </i><i><b>Rad Dad</b> and an English professor at Berkeley City College.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/leonard-2/" mce_href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/leonard-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-23493"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-23493" height="150" mce_src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/leonard-109x150.jpg" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/leonard-109x150.jpg" title="leonard" width="109" /></a>Tom Leonard: </b>2010 is a year of economic wreckage, from our neighborhoods to the international community. There is no better perspective than to look at things falling apart in the clear light of history.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret</i> was written by an editor at the <i>Washington Post</i> who has led the paper’s coverage of the Great Recession. Steve Luxenberg goes back to his childhood to look into the social experiment of institutionalizing mentally ill people in the first half of the 20th century. His family’s tale shows that moving up could mean stepping down hard on a sibling. The sacrifice is a small drama in a bleak landscape, then grand opera as the Holocaust generation comes into focus.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Kevin Boyle's <i>Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age</i> won a National Book Award a few years ago and it throws an even brighter light today on race in boom and bust. Boyle manages to make actors we may think we know well—the KKK, the NAACP, Clarence Darrow-- into the wounded figures we recognize in political debates today. The story is about newcomers to Detroit neighborhoods of the 1920s, the same decade that gave us many communities with racial boundaries in Oakland and Berkeley.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Pulitzer Prize winning<i> Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World</i> by Liaquat Ahamed is sympathetic without taking prisoners. Lord Keynes’s good name is the only reputation to survive (though his market speculation was news to me -- he lost three-quarters of his investments before the Great Crash). “Lunatics presently in charge,” after World War I pursued the illusion of gold as salvation or, as in the case of one president of the Reichsbank, thought his job was to efficiently deliver mountains of paper money rather than to stop hyperinflation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Tom Leonard is University Librarian at UC Berkeley and a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of three books, <b>Above the Battle: War-Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles, The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting, and News for All.</b></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/stark/" mce_href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/stark/" rel="attachment wp-att-23494"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-23494" height="150" mce_src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/stark-125x150.jpg" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/stark-125x150.jpg" title="stark" width="125" /></a>Elizabeth Stark: </b>In Karen Joy Fowler’s mind-blowing new collection, <i>What I Didn’t See and Other Stories,</i> a child in the final story describes her favorite book:<i> </i>“The stories in <i>Castles and Dragons </i>are full of magical incident. Terrible things may happen before the happy ending, but there are limits to how terrible. . . . The stories are much softer than the (Brothers) Grimm and (Hans Christian) Anderson. It was many, many years before I was tough enough for the pure thing.” Reaching beyond the limits of imagination and beyond terror toward dazzling pleasure and transformation, Fowler’s book is the pure thing. A wonderful read.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The debut novel of Yael Goldstein Love, <i>The Passion of Tasha Darsky,</i> an absorbing and compelling love story about genius and motherhood, signals the arrival of a great talent. Love has her own pedigree, as the daughter of the amazing Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, whose latest novel, <i>36 Arguments for the Existence of God</i>, tops my holiday list.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Elizabeth Stark, who was born in Berkeley, is the author of </i><i><b>Shy Girl</b>. She is also a filmmaker, writing instructor and organizer of literary events around the Bay Area.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/donna/" mce_href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/donna/" rel="attachment wp-att-23495"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-23495" height="150" mce_src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Donna-100x150.jpg" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Donna-100x150.jpg" title="Donna" width="100" /></a>Donna Corbeil: </b>The most memorable books for me tend to be those most recently on my nightstand, an age thing no doubt. One author – two books -- top my list for this year. Mary Karr is a poet and storyteller <i>extraordinaire</i>; her stories are all the more powerful because they are her own and told with honesty and bravado. I read for the first time, though it is now 15 years since it was first published, <i>The Liar’s Club</i>, followed by her more recent <i>Lit, A Memoir</i>. Ms Karr brings to life all the pain, humor, terror and awe of an unsettled and at times destructive childhood in <i>The Liar’s Club</i> and then in <i>Lit</i> shows us what kind of adult that can make.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">You don’t have to read the first book to enjoy <i>Lit</i>, it stands on its own and she retells some of the earlier stories as they seep into the psyche of her adult life. Lit is more about what we do as adults with our own histories; they can drown us if we let them or, as Ms Karr demonstrates, we can make poetry out of them. But, in any case, her most recent memoir is rich in humor, sorrow, reconciliation and the power of hope. Not a bad message to end the year with, told by an expert storyteller with just the right amount of humor and humility.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Whether you believe in a higher power or not, self-love, redemption and peace are the human form they take in her struggle with alcoholism, motherhood, divorce and success.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Donna Corbeil is director of the Berkeley Public Library</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/knobelimages/" mce_href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/knobelimages/" rel="attachment wp-att-23496"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-23496" height="107" mce_src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/knobelimages.jpg" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/knobelimages.jpg" title="knobelimages" width="107" /></a>Lance Knobel: </b>This was a year for reading about financial crisis. Michael Lewis's <i>The Big Short</i> was the most engaging account of the crisis, even if it didn't attempt a systematic view. There's even a Berkeley connection (beyond Lewis himself): one of the contrarian investor groups that Lewis writes about had its start in the North Berkeley hills. Liaquat Ahamed's <i>Lords of Finance</i>, which covers the maneuverings of central bankers in the 1920s, gave me a historical perspective on our current travails, as well as a fascinating portrait of those financiers -- Montagu Norman, Emile Moreau, Hjalmar Schacht and Benjamin Strong. I don't think future historians will find Ben Bernanke and Jean-Claude Trichet quite so interesting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The other book I'd recommend from this year's reading is <i>Operation Mincemeat</i>: <i>How A Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory</i>, Ben Macintyre's account of the true story behind The Man Who Never Was. There's no need for fiction when reality is this astounding.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Lance Knobel is a co-founder of Berkeleyside, an international consultant, and the former Director of the Programme of the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. He lives in the Elmwood.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/fd-ab-2/" mce_href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/12/16/best-books-of-2010-a-berkeley-perspective/fd-ab-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-23559"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-23559" height="154" mce_src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/FD-AB.png" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/FD-AB.png" title="FD-AB" width="120" /></a>Frances Dinkelspiel: </b>One of the best discoveries I made this year was <i>City of Veils</i>, a literary mystery by San Francisco writer Zoe Ferraris. Her first book, <i>Finding Nouf</i>, won the 2008 Los Angeles Times Prize for First Fiction, but I hadn’t heard of it until I read its follow-up. Ferraris lived in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s with her then-husband, and in <i>City of Veils</i> she brilliantly conveys the inner workings of that society, particularly the conflicts between men and women. Her main characters are a female forensic scientist, Katya Hijazi, who has to pretend she is married to hold down her job as a technician in a Jeddah homicide unit, and the desert guide Nayir Sharqi, who helps her solve the mystery of why a woman’s body washed up on a beach. Sharqi is an orthodox Muslim and he struggles to reconcile his fond feelings for Hijazi with the realization that propriety means he should keep his distance. While the mystery drives the narrative forward, the real treat of the book is its examination of a modern Arab country.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">My nonfiction pick of the year is <i>Autobiography of an Execution </i>by David Dow, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center and the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit legal aid corporation that represents death-row inmates. Dow defends murderers for a living, and this memoir explores both his rationale for defending those who have committed heinous crimes and the toll it takes on his personal life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Autobiography of an Execution</i> is a moving indictment of the death penalty, which, Dow argues, is handed out more often to those who are poor and have dark skin and upheld frequently by crooked cops and indifferent judges who are generally white. But this book isn’t a mere polemic; it shows one man’s struggle to get the system to take stock of what it is doing and the personal cost when his efforts fail.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Frances Dinkelspiel, a co-founder of Berkeleyside, is the author of <b>Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California. </b></i></span><br />
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-63445659057303854622010-11-14T13:44:00.000-08:002010-11-14T13:44:41.783-08:00What Did California Look Like Before the Europeans?<div class="hfeed content-540px" id="page"><div id="container"><div class="single" id="primary"><div class="post-19758 post type-post hentry category-arts category-books tag-a-state-of-change tag-heyday-books tag-laura-cunningham entry" id="post-19758"> <div class="entry-byline"> <span class="entry-date"><abbr class="updated" title="2010-11-09T13:28:18+0000"></abbr></span></div><div class="entry-content"> <div class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_19759" style="width: 410px;"><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/11/09/what-did-california-look-like-before-people/cunningham4bears-at-whale-lo/" rel="attachment wp-att-19759"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-19759 " height="260" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/cunningham4Bears-at-whale-lo.jpg" title="cunningham4Bears-at-whale-lo" width="400" /></a><div class="wp-caption-text">Grizzly bears at the shore</div><div class="wp-caption-text"><br />
</div></div>When Laura Cunningham was growing up in Kensington, CA she used to walk to school and wonder what the San Franciso East Bay looked like before buildings and roads covered everything.<br />
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That curiosity about the landscape continued as <a href="http://www.a-state-of-change.com/Bio.html">Cunningham</a> got a degree in paleontology at Cal and natural science illustration degree at UC Santa Cruz. So in the early 1990s, Cunningham began to research what California looked like when it was teeming with elk and antelope rather than cars and people. The result is<em> <a href="http://www.a-state-of-change.com/index.html">A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California</a>,</em> a remarkable picture book published in October by Berkeley’s <a href="http://www.heydaybooks.com/index.html">Heyday Press.</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/11/09/what-did-california-look-like-before-people/cunningham3east-bay-grass-lo/" rel="attachment wp-att-19760"><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19760" height="185" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/cunningham3East-Bay-grass-lo.jpg" title="cunningham3East-Bay-grass-lo" width="540" /></a><br />
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Flipping though the pages is like taking a step back in time. Cunningham has created realistic paintings of the early California landscape, beautifully recreated in the book. There is a painting of grizzly bears resting under a large oak tree and one of them eating the carcass of a whale that has washed up on shore. There are paintings of marshes full of birds and small mammals and paintings of native grasses. Cunningham also includes “before and after” paintings, such as El Cerrito Plaza in the 21<sup>st</sup> century and the same spot thousands of years earlier.<br />
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“Vernal pools, protected lagoons, grassy hills rich in bunchgrasses and, where the San Francisco Bay is today, ancient bison and mammoths roaming a vast grassland,” <a href="http://www.heydaybooks.com/nature/a-state-of-change-forgotten-la.html">reads a description on the Heyday website</a>. “Through the use of historical ecology, Laura Cunningham walks through these forgotten landscapes to uncover secrets about the past, explore what our future will hold, and experience the ever-changing landscape of California.”<br />
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<div class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_19761" style="width: 430px;"><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/11/09/what-did-california-look-like-before-people/ecplaza-today-lo/" rel="attachment wp-att-19761"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-19761 " height="203" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/ECplaza-today-lo.jpg" title="ECplaza-today-lo" width="420" /></a><div class="wp-caption-text">El Cerrito Plaza today</div></div><div class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_19762" style="width: 400px;"><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/11/09/what-did-california-look-like-before-people/ec-grizzlies-oaks-lo/" rel="attachment wp-att-19762"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-19762 " height="355" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/EC-grizzlies-oaks-lo.jpg" title="EC-grizzlies-oaks-lo" width="390" /></a><div class="wp-caption-text">Grizzly bears eating acorns (at El Cerrito Plaza thousands of years ago)</div></div><br />
Cunningham spent years learning about California’s flora and fauna. In addition to poring through books and handling fossils at libraries at UC Berkeley and around the state, she hung out on ridge tops to catch a glimpse of a California condor. (They used to live in the Bay Area but are now only live south of the Monterey area.) She traveled to Yellowstone National Park to observe grizzly bears up close and hiked to remote hills to find patches of native grasses. She discovered some animals that once lived in California but no longer do, like the Gong, an albatross-like bird that has a distinctive cry. Now it can only be found in the South Pacific, she said.<br />
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<a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/11/09/what-did-california-look-like-before-people/sofc_homepage/" rel="attachment wp-att-19767"><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19767" height="269" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/SOFC_homepage.jpg" title="SOFC_homepage" width="318" /></a><br />
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“What impressed me most was the sheer abundance of wildlife,” said Cunningham, 45, who now lives in a small Nevada desert town. “We’ve lost a lot of the abundance and biodiversity of the state. It must have been beautiful.”<br />
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<div class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_19763" style="width: 370px;"><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/11/09/what-did-california-look-like-before-people/oakland-oaks-web/" rel="attachment wp-att-19763"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-19763 " height="197" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Oakland-oaks-web.jpg" title="Oakland-oaks-web" width="360" /></a><div class="wp-caption-text">Downtown Oakland thousands of years ago</div><div class="wp-caption-text"><br />
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<div class="wp-caption alignleft" id="attachment_19621" style="width: 266px;"><a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/11/08/berkeley-native-tackles-circumcision-in-novel/lisagarden3/" rel="attachment wp-att-19621"><img alt="" class="size-medium wp-image-19621" height="300" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/lisagarden3-256x300.jpg" title="lisagarden3" width="256" /></a><div class="wp-caption-text">Lisa Braver Moss</div></div><a href="http://lisabravermoss.com/"></a><br />
Ghost Word caught up with Moss just days after the November 1 release of <em>The Measure of His Grief. </em><br />
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<em><strong>Why did you decide to write a novel that has circumcision as its main theme?</strong></em><br />
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<a href="http://www.powells.com/s?kw=the+measure+of+his+grief"><em>The Measure of His Grief</em> </a>is a literary novel about a Berkeley physician, Dr. Sandy Waldman, and his Jewish identity, his marriage, his secrets, his grief over the death of his father, and the price he pays for being a visionary. It’s also about Sandy’s wife, Ruth, a nutritionist and cookbook author who had a difficult childhood and who will lose patience with Sandy; and their teenage daughter, Amy, whom Sandy and Ruth adopted at birth and who spends a lot of the novel grappling with whether to make contact with her birth family. So, while the book is very much about circumcision, it’s not a treatise on the topic; it’s literary fiction.<br />
I first became interested in the circumcision controversy in the late eighties, after the births of my sons. We’re Jewish and they were circumcised, but that decision haunted me because while it reflected my tradition, it did not reflect my spirituality. I felt that in order to ensure that my sons would be accepted in the community, I’d been asked to separate myself from my biological urge to protect them. I found myself wanting to write about my experience, and published a few articles questioning the practice from a Jewish point of view.<br />
I went on to write articles and books on other topics, but remained interested in Jewish circumcision. I found it surprising that despite all its psychological, sexual, medical and religious complexities, no novelist had ever taken it on.<br />
Two things inspired me to make a foray into fiction with this topic. One, I myself had become much more deeply engaged in Jewish thought and Jewish life and community as a result of the research I did to write those first articles. The more I delved into Jewish writings to understand the circumcision tradition — in order to write in opposition to it — the more Jewishly engaged I felt. I always thought that would make an interesting story, and that’s what happens to Dr. Sandy Waldman. He’s grown up assimilated, for reasons different from mine — he’s the son of Holocaust survivors, many of whom didn’t rear their children Jewishly — but like me, Sandy discovers what Judaism means to him as he rails against circumcision.<br />
The second inspiration happened when I interviewed several men about this topic, including a Jewish man who felt he had remembered his own circumcision trauma. I learned about foreskin “restoration,” in which circumcised men stretch their residual tissue over a period of months and years to mimic the function of the lost tissue. I was astounded by the fact that there may be as many as a quarter of a million men around the world who are currently engaged in this process, and I couldn’t seem to shake myself free of that information and its rich possibilities for exploration in fiction. Also, the idea of that kind of repair struck me as very rich, since repair/healing, <em>tikkun olam</em>, is really the central tenet of Judaism.<br />
So between the foreskin restoration aspect, the interviews I did, and my own strengthened Jewish identity as I expressed my opposition to circumcision, I began to realize I might have a novel — and that if indeed I did have a novel, I had a male main character.<br />
<a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/11/08/berkeley-native-tackles-circumcision-in-novel/tmohg_revision8251/" rel="attachment wp-att-19622"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-19622" height="300" src="http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/tmohg_revision8251-196x300.jpg" style="margin: 8px;" title="tmohg_revision825[1]" width="196" /></a><br />
<br />
<strong><em>Why did you set it in Berkeley?</em></strong><br />
<br />
I was born at Alta Bates Hospital and reared in Berkeley — went through the Berkeley public schools, graduated from Berkeley High, and then attended Cal Berkeley. My father had a retail store right across from the Cal campus during demonstrations and riots, so I saw a lot, and Berkeley is very much a part of my consciousness. It’s a great place to set a novel: beautiful, forward-thinking, yet also in some ways provincial, exasperating in its self-satisfaction.<br />
Regarding circumcision, I find it fascinating that in a town where anything goes, and even among very assimilated Jews, circumcision generally remains the norm in Jewish families. Things are shifting somewhat with the dropping circumcision rates in the general population and the prevalence of interfaith families in Berkeley and elsewhere. But for the most part, circumcision is still regarded as a central emblem of Jewish identity even in Berkeley, a place that prides itself on thinking outside the box and abiding by its own version of correctness. I wanted to explore that paradox.<br />
That said, circumcision is a conundrum among progressive Jews everywhere, not just in Berkeley. All non-Orthodox Jews who are patching together their decisions about keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath, and so on, must also come to terms with circumcision, which is often the one tradition that’s kept.<br />
Another reason this book is set in Berkeley is that with all its tolerance of ethnic minorities, Berkeley is not an entirely comfortable place to be Jewish. I wanted to explore that, too.<br />
<br />
<strong><em>What was your Jewish upbringing in Berkeley like? Did your family attend temple? How did you obtain a Jewish identity?</em></strong><br />
<br />
I grew up mostly assimilated, with some observance of Jewish holidays but very little in the way of other Jewish practices or education. I went to religious school for a few months when I was eight or nine, but I never developed a stable sense of community around being Jewish. Yet I felt from an extremely early age that being Jewish was important. To this day I’m not sure I could put my finger on how or why; it was something intangible, but even as a girl I knew I would always embrace my Jewishness in some way.<span id="more-19620"></span><br />
Then as a young mother, I began digging into Jewish learning so that my articles would be well-informed. As I mentioned, it was in this process that my Jewish identity and affiliation became stronger. For example, I became a regular at the Jewish Community Library in S.F. and signed on for an adult bat mitzvah at my synagogue.<br />
<br />
<strong><em>Considering all the causes Berkeley residents have embraced over the years, why do you think they have not questioned the practice of circumcision more closely?</em></strong><br />
<br />
Great question; I’m not at all sure I know the answer. If you’re asking about Jewish residents, my sense is that at least in my parents’ generation, Berkeley tended to attract Jewish transplants who were anti-establishment and anti-religious observance. I wonder if perhaps underneath the embracing of progressive ideals, there’s also been some unconscious anxiety about the dangers of complete Jewish assimilation. Circumcision is a one-shot deal during which the parents can reassure themselves that they’re still holding to something Jewish. That’s my theory for today, anyway.<br />
If you’re asking about Berkeleyans who aren’t Jewish and who make it a point to question authority on all fronts, I don’t know why circumcision often seems to be an exception. Certainly the procedure flies in the face of all medical precedent, which dictates that surgery should be a last resort, not something done as a preventive measure on a routine basis. Also, very few physicians are well-informed about the relatively recent research establishing the anatomical function of the foreskin and the erogenous nature of its tissue. What that means is that many doctors don’t understand the drawbacks of circumcision, and therefore cannot present a balanced choice to parents.<br />
My sense is that circumcision is often done even in families in which the parents would ordinarily embrace natural remedies and alternative solutions to health issues, and are opposed to unnecessary medical intervention. I wonder whether circumcision’s link to sexuality causes anxiety, thereby clouding the judgment of physicians and medical consumers alike.<br />
<br />
<strong><em>Do you think you can be Jewish and not circumcise your sons?</em></strong><br />
<br />
Strictly speaking, from the point of view of Jewish law, you’re Jewish if your mother is Jewish, circumcision notwithstanding. That said, as a matter of practice, circumcision is still seen as central in mainstream Jewish practice. What do I believe? That what’s really central to the future of Judaism is engagement in Jewish life, intellectual and spiritual inquiry, and community. This does not necessarily involve circumcision. Indeed, I would propose that a conscious decision not to circumcise can be a more Jewishly authentic act than going along with something that collides with one’s personal ethics, violates one’s spirituality, or disrupts one’s biological urge to protect one’s newborn.<br />
<br />
<em><strong>What surprised you most in your research about circumcision?</strong></em><br />
<br />
I was very surprised to learn that circumcision as done today is a vastly <em>more</em> radical procedure than Biblical circumcision. That’s because during the Hellenic period, many Jewish men, in an attempt to “pass” as non-Jews and thereby gain civil rights, would systematically stretch their residual foreskin tissue over a period of months so as to look uncircumcised. The Talmudic rabbis reacted by legislating a far more extensive operation, one that could not be reversed by stretching. It is this more radical procedure—not Abraham’s comparatively mild cut—that both mohels and physicians are still practicing today.<br />
<br />
I’m also continually surprised that recent research demonstrating the highly erogenous nature of foreskin tissue does not seem to be of interest to more people, though there is a subculture of gay men who are tuned into this. There’s some jittery joking along the lines of “well, it’s a good thing it’s gone, because otherwise I’d be an absolute animal.” But I’ve observed very little serious consideration of the information; it doesn’t seem to fully sink in, maybe because it makes men feel queasy about what they may have lost.<br />
<br />
<strong><em>What has the reaction to your novel been? Are people squeamish about the topic?</em></strong><br />
<br />
The response has been wonderful — I’m pretty thrilled with the reviews.<br />
Regarding the squirm factor, yes, that’s there–hey, there are a few scenes in the book that make <em>me</em> wince. But more than anything else, <em>The Measure of His Grief</em> is a story about a man and his wife and their daughter as they all try to navigate their ways through love, grief, identity and everything else that’s part of being human.<br />
Is circumcision a squirmy issue? Sure. But then, I’m old enough to remember a time when homosexuality was looked upon as “icky” by the mainstream; when I was growing up, it was seen as a psychiatric condition, even in progressive Berkeley. Well-meaning people felt completely justified in their squeamishness about this; it wasn’t even questioned. So I think we have to question our squeamishness about circumcision.<br />
That said, you can’t legislate openness to a topic. I realized as I was finishing the book that despite its male subject matter and male main character, I may well have written a women’s book. I’m fond of saying that this novel will interest anyone with a penis and anyone who knows someone with a penis. Well, my readers may fall mostly into the latter category.<br />
<br />
This article first appeared in <a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/">Berkeleyside. </a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-58525214653044325332010-09-21T09:06:00.001-07:002010-09-21T09:06:56.764-07:00Meredith Maran and My Lie: A story of false incest<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFjnJE-CNz0Usn3YNNiJYoPZtvGK6nmFgE3F8kQ-sCTn5qt1a5VGvTHYTIL-MWLg4F6uMqygMzY-Z62f-zgMSqyvKDz0LX1Xr3zfi0jCrEtmrCwbKgukDtRtVYIxVK6YYcz27mSA/s1600/Maran_Meredith_FA10_Detail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFjnJE-CNz0Usn3YNNiJYoPZtvGK6nmFgE3F8kQ-sCTn5qt1a5VGvTHYTIL-MWLg4F6uMqygMzY-Z62f-zgMSqyvKDz0LX1Xr3zfi0jCrEtmrCwbKgukDtRtVYIxVK6YYcz27mSA/s320/Maran_Meredith_FA10_Detail.jpg" /></a></div><meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bay Area author Meredith Maran has been chronicling her life and the world around her since the mid 1990s. Her bestselling memoir, <i>What It's Like to Live Now</i> and <i>Notes From an Incomplete Revolution,</i> detailed what it was like to come out as a lesbian, raise two sons in a marginal neighborhood, strive for social justice, and grapple with the successes and shortcomings of feminism. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Her 2001 book, <i>Class Dismissed,</i> is Maran’s in-depth look at Berkeley High, where she spent a year following three students from three different ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds. It remains an incisive look at an American high school grappling with sex, class, race, and the achievement gap.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But Maran’s tenth book will prove to be her most provocative – and controversial. <i>My Lie,</i> <i>A True Story of False Memory</i>, published last week by Jossey-Bass/Wiley, tells the story of how Maran falsely accused her father of sexual abuse. Her volatile charges, made in the middle of the height of the recovered memory movement, split her family apart, denied her children a relationship with their grandfather, and shaped Maran’s reality for more than a decade.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Years later, Maran realized she had made the whole tale up, and My Lie recounts how she reached out to her father and family for forgiveness. My Lie also attempts to make sense of the recovered memory movement that rocked the nation in the late 1980s and led to numerous high-profile trials, like the infamous McMartin preschool case. Maran discusses how a generation of feminists attempted to bring incest and sexual abuse out of the shadows and how some overly zealous prosecutors and therapists exploited the recovered memory phenomenon.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">On Tuesday, September 22, Berkeley Arts & Letters <a href="http://berkeleyarts.org/">will present an evening with Maran,</a> San Francisco Chronicle Book Review Editor, and Berkeley novelist Ayelet Waldman. The topic “How do we come to believe lies?” will begin at 7:30 pm at the Hillside Club.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Maran will also be on KQED Forum with Michael Krasny at 10 am September 22.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ghost Word caught up with Maran just as <i>My Lie</i> was published. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">Your story is so shocking and disturbing – a daughter realizes that her once-beloved father molested her, cuts off contact for a decade, and then realizes she had made the whole thing up. To tell this story, you must lay your faults and biases out for everyone to see, which must have been extremely difficult. Why did you decide to tell this story publicly and how hard is it to admit this lie?</span></b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">I have a big mouth, and I'm a memoirist and essayist. Therefore, my faults, along with my gifts, are always on public display. I'm a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kinda gal. I like people who are the same way. Denial, obfuscation, withholding, dishonesty with self and/or others: not my favorite traits. And I can't ask more from others than I ask from myself.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
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<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">It actually felt--not <i>good,</i> exactly, but <i>satisfying</i> to explore this piece of my worst behavior, to come forward and say, I did this terrible thing and I'm doing my best now to understand why and to make amends where that's possible. I'm a great believer in "be the change you want to see," and admitting a wrong is a good place to start.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">You write that as a young journalist you wrote extensively about incest and sexual abuse and that after a while this became the prism through which you saw the world. How did immersing yourself in the “recovered memory” movement influence your thoughts about your father?</span></b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I'm a person who is publicly admitting to a huge mistake--not a saint. It's profoundly tempting to blame the harm I caused on the mania of the times. There's no question in my mind that absent the recovered memory craze, I wouldn't have accused my father of molesting me. I'm almost equally certain that I would have come up with another way to blame my pain--and women's pain--on men if that story hadn't presented itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
</span><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">My Lie not only deals with your particular story, but the larger question of what is truth. Your talk at Berkeley Arts & Letters is titled “How Do We Come to Believe Lies?” What is it about our society that permits people to create their own truths, to insist their version of the world is accurate, to be self-delusional? </span></b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It's not just our society. It's human nature. That said, America was built on "rugged individualism," the notion that any one of us can "succeed" by virtue of pure conviction. I think Americans are particularly attached to the belief that suffering is preventable and that there's a simple explanation and solution for everything: better to believe a false, simple explanation ("Obama isn't an American citizen";" "Our fathers are all molesters") than to grapple with the complexity of truth ("I can't stand having an African American President") or uncertainty ("I don't know how I can be a feminist and a grown woman and still feel so powerless with my father.")<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">If it happened to you once, can it happen again?</span></b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The bigger question is, if it happened to US once, can it happen again. And the answer, clearly, is yes. We're the country that lived through Salem, McCarthyism, the sex-abuse mass panic--and we're the country in which two years after the rumor started, more people than ever believe that Obama is a Muslim and health-care reforms would kill their grandmothers. It's happening again right now. We're just lucky that somehow we avoided having Palin as our Vice President in spite of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">You recanted your charges against your father several years ago. He is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. Does he remember this piece of your joint history? </span></b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We're really lucky: my dad's Alzheimer's is relatively mild, and he's married to a woman who is his best friend, home health care provider, straight woman for his endless jokes, and the love of his life. By his own description, his wife is not only keeping him alive, but making him happy. So, the bad news is: yes, he remembers this piece of our history. The good news is: he's <i>trying</i> to forget it!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">Have your other family members forgiven you for your lie? </span></b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Define "forgiven." Each person in my family feels differently about it (and everything else). Our relationships are as different as we are. Mostly, I feel grateful that the harm I did hasn't permanently estranged us.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://berkeleyarts.org/<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-10333148988229064902010-08-30T08:47:00.000-07:002010-08-30T08:47:03.640-07:00A Fierce Radiance by Lauren Belfer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQBSggslnALtxRlHfWl0oIyHbNfkzmv1Yb3BlA5lVKpfHZrP7j2NyGWtBu64cE4h3g8RYnbHLcI4rplYjRHHcMDgQLhCQthLckoQ2Sxu4T-zmWQKckPx1rVJSRoBWCFU0_UzYyMQ/s1600/fierce.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQBSggslnALtxRlHfWl0oIyHbNfkzmv1Yb3BlA5lVKpfHZrP7j2NyGWtBu64cE4h3g8RYnbHLcI4rplYjRHHcMDgQLhCQthLckoQ2Sxu4T-zmWQKckPx1rVJSRoBWCFU0_UzYyMQ/s1600/fierce.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQBSggslnALtxRlHfWl0oIyHbNfkzmv1Yb3BlA5lVKpfHZrP7j2NyGWtBu64cE4h3g8RYnbHLcI4rplYjRHHcMDgQLhCQthLckoQ2Sxu4T-zmWQKckPx1rVJSRoBWCFU0_UzYyMQ/s1600/fierce.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQBSggslnALtxRlHfWl0oIyHbNfkzmv1Yb3BlA5lVKpfHZrP7j2NyGWtBu64cE4h3g8RYnbHLcI4rplYjRHHcMDgQLhCQthLckoQ2Sxu4T-zmWQKckPx1rVJSRoBWCFU0_UzYyMQ/s1600/fierce.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQBSggslnALtxRlHfWl0oIyHbNfkzmv1Yb3BlA5lVKpfHZrP7j2NyGWtBu64cE4h3g8RYnbHLcI4rplYjRHHcMDgQLhCQthLckoQ2Sxu4T-zmWQKckPx1rVJSRoBWCFU0_UzYyMQ/s320/fierce.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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<br />
When <b>Lauren Belfer's </b><i>City of Light</i> came out, I devoured it. I don't generally adore historical novels, but this one about Niagara Falls and the building of an electrical system hooked me from the start. So when I heard that her new novel, <i>A Fierce Radiance</i>, was about the discovery of penicillin, I rushed to my library and put it on reserve.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, I wish I didn't move that fast. Belfer's second novel is not nearly as good as her first. It tells the story of a female photographer from Life Magazine who goes to the Rockefeller Institute in NYC to photograph human tests of penicillin. It then goes on to talk about how the federal government commandeered research and production of the drug during World War II, but strictly limited its use to soldiers. The pharmacy companies were required by law to produce the drug and sell it cheaply, but they conspired to create similar drugs which they later patented and made money on.<br />
<br />
The back story is good. It's just that Belfer inserts clunky dialogue and far-fetched situations to tell the story. I found myself cringing at her writing at times.<br />
<br />
Still, I did not know anything about the medical quest to prove penicillin and produce it on a large scale, and A Fierce Radiance told me that story. <br />
<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7493133-%3Cbr"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-12781957571322911272010-07-30T15:15:00.000-07:002010-07-30T15:15:18.039-07:00A Visti from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVhFwBwljUhdPmaXQDnnbIYqV0etyQyNjNczqNoRmYHeCPyty8WTzTM3wAvK_JkhFXygAjzJlFlIQJw4AyLnof9-ylbVc0iZYDZLaIdafBDbt0mtMQ0R3884y641cQY-HFhI_67g/s1600/goonPH2010061504752.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVhFwBwljUhdPmaXQDnnbIYqV0etyQyNjNczqNoRmYHeCPyty8WTzTM3wAvK_JkhFXygAjzJlFlIQJw4AyLnof9-ylbVc0iZYDZLaIdafBDbt0mtMQ0R3884y641cQY-HFhI_67g/s320/goonPH2010061504752.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">I just finished <b>Jennifer Egan’s</b> <i>A Visit from the Goon Squad</i>. I am not sure what to make of the book. It’s a series of sketches of various people in and around the music industry at various times of their lives. The book is not like a traditional novel with a neat narrative arc, character development or even an identifiable plot. And yet it is not exactly a set of linked stories, either. It’s written in the first, second, and third person points of view and sometimes it’s even tough to know who is narrating. Yet I liked it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The book opens with a 30ish kleptomaniac named Sasha. She is in a public bathroom and a woman on the toilet has left her purse open by the sinks. Sasha peeks in and spots her wallet. Like a kid drawn to free candy, Sasha cannot resist stealing the wallet.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">All of the vignettes spin from there. Readers meet Sasha’s boss, the music executive Bennie Salazar, and then the book travels back in time to San Francisco, when Salazar and his friends had a punk music band. We meet different characters from the band at different points in their lives, at times when they are successful and times they are not.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One-78 page section is devoted to a PowerPoint presentation put together by Sasha’s 12-year old daughter. Egan has gotten a lot of press for including this in the book and one friend of mine said she thought A Visit from the Good Squad will be taught in MFA programs from years to come.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The book, with its nonlinear and decidedly unchronological sequences, paints a picture of how people evolve over time.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Meredith Maran <a href="http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/06/13/jennifer_egan_interview_ext2010">put it well in Salon:</a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Like strands of raffia wrapped around a bursting-at-the-seams scrapbook, the novel is loosely bound by time, the dread "goon squad" of the title. Teenagers lacerate their parents’ hypocrisies (Sasha’s daughter is allotted 78 pages for her PowerPoint presentation detailing her mother’s annoying habits), then reappear as parents of their own snarling kids. Parents are exposed as graying, thickening, incurably immature iterations of their teenage selves. Young rock stars grow old and irrelevant, then hip again: "Two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the avatar of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar." Time gets us all, Egan reminds us, tossing us into the quicksand pit of the past, hurling us over the cliff of the future, playing hard to get — and making pleasure hard to get — in the now.”</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-32217931700132974572010-07-19T11:59:00.000-07:002010-07-20T15:05:17.221-07:00A Night of Nonfiction<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXU6h-Rjga0kXvMb6OUuhFN5eAg03UH4dqo1fRx8irpGRvap9UDvUDWL8Uz5SZ5z-T37DqB9YImfpYV8t3Da9O7EhwxojJZEZcmdtUieM96DeX2eXPXDHtEgmwWN9cSkY86Rbdyw/s1600/litquake-logo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXU6h-Rjga0kXvMb6OUuhFN5eAg03UH4dqo1fRx8irpGRvap9UDvUDWL8Uz5SZ5z-T37DqB9YImfpYV8t3Da9O7EhwxojJZEZcmdtUieM96DeX2eXPXDHtEgmwWN9cSkY86Rbdyw/s400/litquake-logo.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>On Wednesday evening, high in the hills about UCSF, author <a href="http://www.terrygamble.com/"><b>Terry Gamble</b></a> will host an evening with some of the region's best-known non-fiction writers. <br />
<br />
Cocktails will be served and drinks will flow. I suspect there will be lots of interesting conversation, given that the writers' specialties range from 19th century tycoons to 21st century killers to natural disasters to ADHD. Other sub specialties include S&M, the contents of Imelda Marcos' closet, the rift between German Jews and Eastern European Jews, the Pony Express, and the birth of photography.<br />
The evening is a benefit for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litquake">Litquake,</a> the Bay Area's premier literary festival.<br />
<br />
While I am one of the featured authors, I am sure I am there by mistake since the others have such a long list of accolades behind them. They include:<br />
<ol><li><b>T.J. Stiles</b>, who biography on Cornelius Vanderbilt won the Pulitzer Prize. His previous book was on the Pony Express.</li>
<li><b>Katherine Ellison</b>, who won Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for the San Jose Mercury News for the overthrow of the Marcos regimes in the Philippines. Her new book, <i>Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention</i>, is about her and her son's ADHD. It will be released in October.</li>
<li><b>Rebecca Solnit</b>, whose book, <i>A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster,</i> won the California Book Awards Gold Medal.<span style="line-height: 16px;"><span style="line-height: 21px;"><span style="color: #060606;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"> </span></span></span></span></span></li>
<li style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 16px;"><span style="line-height: 21px;"><span style="color: #060606;"><b>Po Bronson</b>, whose latest book, <i>Nurture Shock,</i> spent many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.</span></span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 16px;"><span style="line-height: 21px;"><span style="color: #060606;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"> </span></span></span></span></span><b>Stephen Elliot</b>, the founder of the Rumpus on-line literary magazine, whose latest book, <i>The Adderall Diaries</i>, touches on the murder of Nina Reiser of Oakland.</li>
</ol>Sounds pretty good, huh? The evening runs from 6:30 to 8 pm. Tickets are $125, with all the proceeds going to Litquake. <a href="https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=10356">Buy tickets here. </a> <br />
<span style="line-height: 16px;"><span style="line-height: 21px;"><span style="color: #060606;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"></span></span></span></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-90791065562059577502010-07-18T13:25:00.001-07:002010-07-18T13:25:23.496-07:00Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz-KYXo3UJhuj5Q_27oMMqM_-Dk_Sa0UhGDTyGbc8Rq68tQcHlrPyCjLPtWAOXqX57hIqcGU_OzHlQIWgRHMQAIljymlQcXN1hmc9P9pTx7EL8Is65-Oyh5epJNg3lGHqfTSN33A/s1600/AllegraGoodman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz-KYXo3UJhuj5Q_27oMMqM_-Dk_Sa0UhGDTyGbc8Rq68tQcHlrPyCjLPtWAOXqX57hIqcGU_OzHlQIWgRHMQAIljymlQcXN1hmc9P9pTx7EL8Is65-Oyh5epJNg3lGHqfTSN33A/s400/AllegraGoodman.jpg" width="322" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;"><a href="http://www.allegragoodman.com/"><b>Allegra Goodman </b></a>exploded onto the literary scene in 1996 with the publication of her first novel, <i>The Family Markowitz,</i> and followed up that success with <i>Kaaterskill Falls </i>in 1998. Both novels dealt centered around Jewish families, and the latter was set in an Orthodox community in upstate New York. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;">Goodman was born in Hawaii in 1967, got her bachelor’s degree from Harvard, and her PhD in English from Stanford University. Her succeeding novels, Total Immersion, Paradise Park, and Intuition are set in those various locales.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;">Her latest book, <i>The Cookbook Collector,</i> reflects the time Goodman spent in California. Set in both Berkeley and Palo Alto, the cookbook collector traces the lives of two sisters, Emily and Jess, who are as different as they can be. Emily, who lives in Palo Alto, is the CEO of a Veritech, a fledgling technology company on the verge of going public. Tess, who lives in Berkeley, is getting her doctorate in philosophy from UC Berkeley and is making ends meet working in an antiquarian bookstore and Yorick’s. Since Emily is practical and Jess is dreamy, the book has been marketed as Sense and Sensibility for the technology age.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;">The story opens in 1999 when the NASDQ was on a seemingly unstoppable upward trajectory and ends in 2002, after the country is humbled by the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The Cookbook Collector deals with America’s last period of economic instability: the stock market crash of the late 1009s. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;">The Cookbook Collector has many scenes of Berkeley, particularly its great bookstores. Ghost Word caught up with Goodman to find out why she set so much of her book in Berkeley.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;">Many of your previous books have been set in New York state and center on Hasidic communities. Why did you decide to set a book in the Bay Area, specifically Berkeley?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;">Actually, only one of my books is set in New York. "Kaaterskill Falls" is about a community of orthodox (and anti-Hasidic) German Jews who summer in the Catskills. My new book is set in Cambridge Mass and in the Bay Area--where I went to graduate school. I think Berkeley interested me so much because I lived for four years on the Farm at Stanford! The mystique of what seemed like a real college town across the Bay! <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
<b>When did you spend time in Berkeley? (I know you spent some time at Stanford.) Your book is filled with specific details about the city, including references to Pegasus Books, Amoeba Music, Moe's, etc. </b> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;">As a grad student I loved to explore the bookstores of Berkeley--particularly the used bookstores. I'd try to find old hardback copies of classics I was reading for my oral exams. My husband and I also had friends who lived in Berkeley and we attended a wedding in the Rose Garden.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;">This city has a reputation for being politically progressive and food oriented. Do you share that impression? What do you like best about Berkeley? Least?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtUX94mXXi4xcixDevd4UP3Kh-12MmNBzijMyiA2g5QMhyrTgtRwER99AAbn0O5RVxeJXRPDY1b-zYuqkLW2fCsSWcQLwk8Ut2B-ZrDP_kY6birGQ_aeVU-oGEA5hBLpY218Sqbw/s1600/cookbookcollector.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtUX94mXXi4xcixDevd4UP3Kh-12MmNBzijMyiA2g5QMhyrTgtRwER99AAbn0O5RVxeJXRPDY1b-zYuqkLW2fCsSWcQLwk8Ut2B-ZrDP_kY6birGQ_aeVU-oGEA5hBLpY218Sqbw/s320/cookbookcollector.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;">I think Berkeley is politically progressive and also historically progressive, by which I mean that dissent and political debate inform the city's traditions. Cambridge also has a progressive tradition, but sometimes I suspect its heyday was in the 19th century during the time of the firebrand Abolitionists, and earlier during the Revolutionary War. The food in Berkeley is better than the food in Cambridge because of the abundance of lovely California produce. I love the fact that in Berkeley you can get organic whole wheat pizza AND greasy falafel AND vegan muffins AND Korean take out AND an elegant expensive dinner if you so choose. Cambridge restaurants--both the fast and slow kind--are generally less imaginative. We have fewer hole-in-the wall places serving unusual dishes. At the other end of the price spectrum, places like the Harvest or Henrietta's table are good, but boring. The Mediterranean restaurant Oleanna is much more fun. We do have good bakeries in Cambridge, like the Hi-Rise, a superb chocolatier, Burdick's, and our ice cream parlors, Toscanini's, J.P. Licks, and my favorite, Christina's can stand toe to toe with any in Berkeley.<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
<b>Many of the book's early scenes are set in a bookstore run by a man who has made "old" money at Microsoft, and almost seems like he would prefer to keep his books rather than sell them. Is this based on a particular bookstore or individual? What is it about rare books that makes people want to hold on to them?<o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
Rare books hold a certain romance, especially for people who make their fortunes writing software! Why? Because they are singular, tangible, delicate objects in a virtual world. My bookseller George says rare book dealers are the last romantics.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
The book is being marketed as "Sense and Sensibility," for the technology age with pragmatic sister Emily and romantic sister Jess. Did this extend to the settings as well? You depict Berkeley as a city of dreamers whereas those living in Palo Alto are wrapped up in the high tech explosion of the late 1990s.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;">I think extending that theme to places would be a bit reductive, so I try to avoid it. After all, those in Silicon Valley are arguably the biggest dreamers! Emily is one of them.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;">A main part of the book has to do with a collection of antiquarian cookbooks that Jess catalogs. Why did you choose cookbooks rather than, for instance, botanical books? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt;">I am fascinated by cookbooks as guidebooks. We read about what to eat and by extension how to live. One of the central questions for the sisters in my novel: Can you find a recipe for conduct? Or do you have to make up your own rules?</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-35884590171809142182010-07-09T10:20:00.000-07:002010-07-09T10:20:12.600-07:00Henry Lee's gripping book on murder of Nina Reiser<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTMuR-nySdc9FNVfO5cjDyIQyAydQ9JOFl1CU69q2bcBZMElKgOCfo2X7GXBFUjUTS9faKt4RCAuELoDjapMuohs1Cy-tI3Jpgq0DU-J_y4EWHBgrgMPsOoYFy0pv-VOdgpBgdqg/s1600/PresumedDeadcropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTMuR-nySdc9FNVfO5cjDyIQyAydQ9JOFl1CU69q2bcBZMElKgOCfo2X7GXBFUjUTS9faKt4RCAuELoDjapMuohs1Cy-tI3Jpgq0DU-J_y4EWHBgrgMPsOoYFy0pv-VOdgpBgdqg/s320/PresumedDeadcropped.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#%21/henrykleefan?ref=ts">Henry Lee’s</a> byline is one of the most familiar in the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s covered crime in the East Bay for 16 years and is known to have the best police sources around. He writes so fast that his words are often online shortly after the report of a crime comes across the scanner.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Lee got his start as the crime reporter for The Daily Californian, the newspaper for UC Berkeley. In 2006 he covered the mysterious disappearance of Nina Reiser of Oakland, a beautiful young mother of two who had last been seen heading to Berkeley Bowl. Hans Reiser, Nina’s brilliant but strange computer programmer husband, was eventually convicted of her murder. The case gripped the Bay Area.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Lee’s book about the crime, Presumed Dead: A True Life Murder Mystery, will be published July 6. He will be appearing Monday July 12 at The Booksmith on Haight Street at 7:30 pm, at Books, Inc. on Fourth Street in Berkeley on August 11. For a complete events list, <a href="http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#%21/henrykleefan?ref=ts">look here.</a><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ghost Word caught up with Lee in between crime stories.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Where do you live? What years did you go to Cal?</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I live with my wife in Oakland. I went to Cal from 1991 to 1994. I was originally pressured to study law or medicine or business, but I decided to go with psychology, telling my parents (Dad is an electrical engineer; Mom is a retired medical technologist) that psychology is "half 'ology." At Cal, I chased cops as the crime reporter for the Daily Cal. But my interest in sirens goes back to when I was a boy, chasing cops and ambulances with my best friend on our BMX bikes! I like to think of what I do now as a simple, befitting extension of my childhood fascination with sirens.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">You got your start reporting at the Daily Cal. What was your most memorable story?</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I just remember a lot of fun stories. I covered the Naked Guy (look for a picture of me witnessing one of his arrests circa '93 at <u><span style="color: blue;">www.facebook.com/henrykleefan</span></u> ) I also gained a reputation for arriving at crime scenes faster than the cops. In two distinct cases, I recall chatting with the cops while they were on perimeter posts searching for suspects. In one of those cases, I ended up chasing the bad guy, who was on foot, while I was on my bike. The cops were on foot, huffing and puffing behind me. I actually yelled out, "Westbound over the fence" as the guy ended up going through my own apartment complex on Dana Street at the time. Seconds later, cops broadcast on their radios, "Westbound over the fence!" They caught the guy. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">How long have you been a reporter for the Chronicle? How do you manage to file so many stories every day? Do you work in the East Bay or San Francisco or just rove around, posting from cafes?</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I've been a reporter ever since I started out as a summer intern in 1994. I don't know if we should curse the Internet, but that is how I can file from anywhere, my Oakland office, my Oakland home, in a car, from the courthouse, or while on vacation (which I have been known to do). I bring my laptop wherever I go; I consider it something akin to the "nuclear football" that the military brings with the President. Criminals never work bankers' hours, and alas, neither do I. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">What did you find so fascinating about this case that made you want to write a book about it?</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">There was so much to delve into, with Hans' computer background, how Hans met Nina, how they fell in and out of love, their rancorous divorce proceedings, Hans' strange behavior before his arrest and while taking the stand on his own defense, that there was no way that all of it could fit into the confines of daily newspaper reporting. With my book I was able to flesh everything out, go deeper into this case and be a fly on the wall for the readers during key moments in the couple's past as well as the police investigation. Of course, I ended up being part of the case myself (see Henry Chasing pic), and that ended up being part of the trial as well.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">You covered Nina Reiser’s disappearance and the court trial. What new information/different information did you find for the book?</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I was able to obtain the entire police case file, which provided important behind-the-scenes details in what would become a surreal cat-and-mouse game between Hans and the cops. I was able to sit down with Nina's ex-boyfriend, Sean Sturgeon, to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamic involving Sean, Hans and Nina. I also conducted key interviews of other players in this case, including attorneys, officers, friends and relatives of the couple and reviewed voluminous court documents with details that have not yet been revealed.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">People love crime stories in the newspaper and books that take a deeper look at crimes like the one at the heart of Presumed Dead. Why do you think we like to know and learn about violent acts?</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Crime stories allow people to explore the psyche of those who commit terrible acts. I have always wondered why human beings do such hurtful, violent things to each other. But in reading and writing about such terrible deeds, we can learn about the human mind, how it operates and explore different ways of managing anger and avoiding conflict. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hans Reiser seems like an odd person, one brilliant, socially awkward, and a bit creepy. What did you discover about the way he treated Nina and those around him? Were there any clues that he had a streak of violence?</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hans came across to people as arrogant, self-centered and uncaring about others. He didn't have a history of hurting others to the extent that he killed Nina, but there was an incident when he used a bow and arrow to hurt a neighbor's cat. Some have said that childhood cruelty to animals is a big predictor of future violence toward people.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Since Reiser was a bit strange, why do you think Nina married him? Did they ever have a good marriage?</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I do think that they had a genuine love for each other in the beginning. Nina thought that Hans was a gifted computer programmer and that the two could start a happy family together in Oakland. But what tore them apart was their wildly divergent views on parenting.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Would Reiser talk to you?</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I asked him for an interview about two years ago, but in response he requested that I read Anna Karenina in its entirety and to bring a polygraph machine with me so that he could prove to me that he wasn't lying when he said that Nina was a threat to their children. I received a letter from Hans from Mule Creek State Prison just this week, in which he asked me to bring a draft of my book if it hadn't already been published. He said he didn't feel as if I understood him. It's too late for me to talk to him face-to-face, but I'm confident that I've painted an accurate picture of him and his worldview in the book<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">What are the lasting impacts of Nina’s murder? Did you talk to her friends about how it has changed their lives?</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nina's family and friends mourn her loss every day. It struck a chord in the Montclair, where parents had to talk in code to avoid having their school-age children learn the details of Nina's disappearance and murder. Her loss is a void in their lives, because she was just trying to be the best mother that she could under some very difficult circumstances.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">How are the<i> </i>Reiser children doing?</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The children have since been adopted by Nina's mother and now live with her in Russia. For the longest time, the little boy would ask, "Where is Nina?" They will never see either parent again, and I hope that knowing that their mother is close by, if not in spirit but also by the fact that she has since been reburied in Russia, will bring them some measure of solace.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-3695013836705132682010-07-08T11:10:00.000-07:002010-07-08T11:10:45.708-07:00Absolutely hilarious Gary Shteyngart book trailer<object height="385" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EfzuOu4UIOU&hl=en_US&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EfzuOu4UIOU&hl=en_US&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br />
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I laughed all the way through this one. Writer Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan) gets famous writers and the actor James Franco to give a plug for his latest book, Super Sad True Love Story.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-19758901606677693592010-06-16T18:03:00.000-07:002010-06-16T18:03:26.965-07:00Trailer for Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro<object height="385" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kymQcM4ej3w&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kymQcM4ej3w&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br />
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This looks better than the futuristic novel. It stars Academy Award-nominated actresses <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_%282010_film%29">Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan.</a> It is scheduled to be released in October.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-85690517503665370122010-06-16T07:04:00.000-07:002010-06-16T07:05:43.710-07:00David Sedaris makes me laugh<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSQ_XeisR87TeebyUvKwPFuCMVpjTk4wBt-Mr0YZCkget9ZZzxQogtzgoHISVPtwL94D96uPlV8Frdie-ODAMfAolsN7pULXX165C5jWKlEo6BhQLUwGGu0NM7l8_iHkXROwKT4A/s1600/SedarisDavid2008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSQ_XeisR87TeebyUvKwPFuCMVpjTk4wBt-Mr0YZCkget9ZZzxQogtzgoHISVPtwL94D96uPlV8Frdie-ODAMfAolsN7pULXX165C5jWKlEo6BhQLUwGGu0NM7l8_iHkXROwKT4A/s640/SedarisDavid2008.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
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In Berkeley, <b>David Sedaris</b> could walk on the stage and grab the audience by just saying “hello.”<br />
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In fact, that’s what happened Monday June 14, the opening of Sedaris’ seven-day run at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. From the time Sedaris strode out on the stark stage, dressed in a button down shirt and tie and carrying a folder of papers, he had the audience leaning forward in their seats, gobbling up every word.<br />
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The laughs started early and lasted late as Sedaris read selections from his book-in-progress, <i>Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary</i>, and from his diary.<br />
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“I have a book I need to turn in at the end of the month, so that’s what I am doing here,” Sedaris told the sold-out theater. “It is a book of fables, but fables have morals and I don’t.<br />
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Sedaris then proceeded to read a number of stories with animal protagonists that were wry and keenly observed, that is, of course, if one believes animals can have human characteristics.<br />
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Sedaris started his set by explaining that he had recently bought a vest and was wearing it at an airport in Wisconsin when a gruff, older worker for the Transportation Security Administration ordered him to remove it. He was piqued by her request, he said, so he decided to turn her into a rabbit and put her in his story.<br />
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Let’s say she doesn’t come off particularly well. The rabbit is so power hungry he (she becomes a he in the story) chews off the magical golden horn of a unicorn just to prove a point.<br />
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Sedaris has to turn in his book at the end of the month, so he is on a small road show to refine the stories. He was just <a href="http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/2010/06/david-sedaris-chicago-steppenwolf.html">in Chicago at the Steppenwolf Theater</a> before coming to Berkeley.<br />
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<b>Ian Falconer</b> of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Olivia-Ian-Falconer/dp/0689829531"><i>Olivia</i></a> fame will illustrate the fables. Dame <b>Judi Dench</b> and comedian <b>Elaine Stritch </b>will be doing a recording of the book, a prospect which seems to be making Sedaris a bit nervous.<br />
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“I just want to make sure that by the time it gets into her (Stritch’s) hands there is not a lot of fat,” said Sedaris. “I just wanted to make it as good as it can be. I just hate the idea of her wasting her breath.”<br />
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It says volumes for Sedaris’ popularity that even though he is presenting a work in progress, tickets for his readings/act sell out almost immediately. Tickets for the Berkeley Rep show were snatched up in hours.<br />
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Sedaris edits and makes corrections as he reads in front of a live audience, he said. <br />
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“I’m editing as I’m talking,” Sedaris said during a Q & A session at the end of the show. “Sometimes I read and I get an idea and I think this might fix things. Sometimes I just hear myself and I think I am embarrassed to have read that, or yes, that sounds just right.”<br />
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A few tidbits gleaned from the evening:<br />
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• Sedaris now lives in England, not Paris<br />
• He swims for exercise<br />
• He has moved around so much, he no longer thinks of himself as a North Carolinian<br />
• He doesn’t like people eating or drinking in the audience<br />
• He doesn’t like to have his picture takenUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-88033490633604414362010-06-15T06:51:00.000-07:002010-06-15T07:12:27.032-07:00You don't have to give up your typewriter<object height="386" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EozwYbMTtS0&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EozwYbMTtS0&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="386"></embed></object><br />
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The pleasures of typing united with the ease of the computer. (via Galleycat)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-67491588191946024452010-06-08T17:37:00.000-07:002010-06-08T17:37:39.105-07:00The Agony and Ecstacy of Book Reviews (set to thumping music)<object height="385" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/93Cr6s-Heso&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/93Cr6s-Heso&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br />
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How does a writer survive a bad review? <br />
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Thanks to <a href="http://www.megwaiteclayton.com/">Meg Waite Clayton </a>for tipping me off to this.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-27222107903923745102010-06-01T16:45:00.000-07:002010-06-01T16:45:28.690-07:00Michael Lewis is Washington's new darling<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7_YdggvuKign2FfcPVBsVuB9zHJI6k9H3cMkAfO28d8zKW5A-m31ltB6cEHaQpIbl0pIh6jH_Ik8uozfMxhnsWvWoU8t1tDMMuZ1bDtAPCZjkEYmNwieZz0kaIOtqum2TMFpHqg/s1600/michael-lewis-charlie-rose-show.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7_YdggvuKign2FfcPVBsVuB9zHJI6k9H3cMkAfO28d8zKW5A-m31ltB6cEHaQpIbl0pIh6jH_Ik8uozfMxhnsWvWoU8t1tDMMuZ1bDtAPCZjkEYmNwieZz0kaIOtqum2TMFpHqg/s400/michael-lewis-charlie-rose-show.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">From the moment <b>Michael Lewis</b>' new book, <i>The Big Short</i>, came out in April, it struck a nerve, <a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/05/11/that-money-machine-michael-lewis/">It sold an astonishing sold 162,000 copies</a> in its first month.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But now there’s news that <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37987.html">the book has captured the attention of our country’s lawmakers.</a>According to a story on the website <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37987.html">Politico</a>, <i>The Big Short </i>has been mentioned at least 15 times in the hallowed halls of Congress -- on the Senate floor, in committee meetings, and in press conferences.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>Dick Durbin</b>, the Senate Majority Whip, stopped pontificating during a discussion on regulatory reform to recommend the book to his colleagues.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I’m going to plug a book: Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short,’” he said.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">Senators <b>Chris Dodd </b>and <b>Harry Reid </b>also gave the book a shout out during Senate debates. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And its not just Democrats. According to Politico, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are quoting from the book. <span style="color: black;">Republican Senators <b>John Ensign</b> of Nevada and <b>Kit Bond </b>of Missouri have mentioned the book.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">Lewis met with House Republicans in the fall to talk about the financial crisis. He was so well-received <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/04/michael-lewis-tk.html">that meeting turned into a three-hour Q and A session</a>. Then Bay Area Congresswoman <b>Jackie Speier </b>asked him in May to address the House Democratic Caucus. Since then, Lewis has been getting phone calls at his Berkeley home from house staffers with questions about the meltdown. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">Lewis, who has finished his book tour and is back in Berkeley, finds all this attention a bit unnerving.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">“When senators are reading your book, it reaffirms your faith in society, on the one hand,” he told Politico, “and, on the other hand, it makes you nervous, because I don’t think of myself as advising people who are actually going to change things.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p><br />
</o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p>Lewis probably brought more smiles to lawmakers' faces with <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/opinion/30lewis.html?dbk">this satirical op-ed</a> that ran recently in the New York Times. </o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-70761848733349183032010-05-17T09:38:00.000-07:002010-05-17T09:38:58.283-07:00Two new books on immigration and life in the Borderlands<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicwU1SQEN5yLfM_z3rhXdxjIrKaXIVJuXrQzD7rQUJ0nO6zJB9WNMZCMzSEL_A9imJWc4nCjFYvZnO8Ku2iGWbK-loRuIZ1zBgrRlpVFbA1GXIPBzUbaRvYCam79zVF-k9fMTpKw/s1600/Tyche-Hendricks_181_small_RAD-203x300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicwU1SQEN5yLfM_z3rhXdxjIrKaXIVJuXrQzD7rQUJ0nO6zJB9WNMZCMzSEL_A9imJWc4nCjFYvZnO8Ku2iGWbK-loRuIZ1zBgrRlpVFbA1GXIPBzUbaRvYCam79zVF-k9fMTpKw/s320/Tyche-Hendricks_181_small_RAD-203x300.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Tyche Hendricks</b>, who teaches international reporting at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, will be talking about her new book, <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520252509"><i>The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport: Stories From the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,</i></a> tonight <a href="http://www.booksmith.com/event/immigration-peter-schrag-not-fit-society-tyche-hendricks-wind-doesnt-need-passport">at 7:30 pm at Bookmith on Haight Street</a> in San Francisco. She will be appearing with <b>Peter Schrag</b>, the former editorial page editor for the Sacramento Bee, who has also written a book that touches on US-Mexico relations called <a href="http://www.booksmith.com/book/9780520259782"><i>Not Fit For Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America.</i></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Hendricks’ book, which draws a vivid portrait of the people who live on both sides of the border, comes out as the US is once again gripped by questions of illegal immigration. The recent passage of a law in Arizona that gives police expanded power to ask people for documents proving their legal status is just the latest expression of frustration over the immigration question. Hendricks is now a special projects coordinator at KQED. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Ghost Word asked Hendricks about her book and some of the controversies surrounding immigration" </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>In passing its new restrictive immigration bill, Arizona lawmakers described the border as an almost lawless region, where thieves, drug dealers and murders have almost unfettered access to the U.S. They said the law was necessary because the federal government was not preventing people from coming in to the U.S. illegally. Is life in these border towns really so tense? Is there any common ground between people living on both sides of the border?<br />
<br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">The Arizona law authorizing local police to serve as federal immigration agents comes during an economic recession (when immigrants historically have been targets of public frustration) and after years in which Congress has failed to act to overhaul immigration laws. Over the past decade or so, beefed up border enforcement in Texas and California funneled illegal border crossings and a share of drug smuggling across the Arizona desert, so Arizonans get a steady stream of news stories about border troubles. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">People who live in the borderlands (in both the United States and Mexico) do bear the brunt of those problems – not only uncontrolled migration and drug trafficking but also pollution, too-rapid growth and strained health care resources. But I also found a remarkable spirit of neighborliness in twin border towns, a shared history and many, many families with cross-border ties. I was inspired by the way that doctors, ranchers, environmental scientists and businesspeople in both countries were rolling up their sleeves in a very pragmatic way and reaching across the border to tackle problems together.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<b>What prompted you to write this book? How did you find your subjects?<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal">The book began with a series I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle about the U.S.-Mexico border. In telling the stories of individual people and places and concerns along the length of the border, a larger story emerged. While the border from a distance appears to be a dividing line, I began to see that, up close, it’s actually a bi-national region, one that’s often misunderstood by those of us who live far away from it. It’s the place where our two countries are stitched together – fascinating, vibrant, fraught with serious challenges, but a place whose inhabitants might have something to teach the rest of us about how to get along and tackle our shared concerns. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I found the people and topics I wrote about in the book through classic shoe-leather reporting: talking to people who pointed me to other people. It took plenty of advance preparation and a certain amount of spontaneous serendipity.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<b>California, Arizona, and New Mexico were once part of Mexico. I would think that would give Americans a sense of connection with Mexicans. Instead this country seems to resent the country. Yet Mexicans do so much low paid work that Americans don't seem to want to do.<br />
<br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">Until the Mexican American War ended in 1848, California, Arizona, New Mexico were part of Mexico (Texas had seceded a decade earlier) and the awareness of that history is particularly keen in Mexico. At the end the war, tens of thousands of Mexicans became U.S. citizens with the stroke of a pen… Tejanos and Californios, whose roots go back to the days of Spanish colonization. And for more than a century, Mexicans have migrated to the United States for jobs – not only in the border states, but in the steel mills and stockyards of Chicago the mines of Colorado and the orchards of Michigan. The connections forged over generations of migration have led to deep-rooted family ties between the United States and Mexico. Perhaps some of the resentment you describe comes from a lack of familiarity with that shared history.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Can a person live in Mexico and enter the US easily to go grocery shopping or something else? Or vice versa? In what ways do the two countries help one another?<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal">Mexicans who live in the border region who can establish that they have sturdy ties to their communities – jobs and homes – can obtain a U.S. “border crossing card” or “laser visa,” which allows them to make short visits to the border region of the United States, for shopping, visiting, etc. Tens of thousands of Mexicans come into the United States this way every day and tens of thousands of U.S. citizens likewise visit Mexico daily. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The economic activity of those visits is an important contributor to the prosperity of U.S. border cities like San Diego and El Paso. Trade associations, non-profit networks and governments have built relationships across the border. Fire departments in border towns such as Calexico and Mexicali depend on each other for mutual assistance. Hospitals in the two Nogaleses share resources and expertise. Air quality managers meet regularly, as do chambers of commerce. These links are often hampered by long wait times at border ports of entry and the frictions caused by fence building, but local people continue working together just the same.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-11018800962929422582010-05-05T18:44:00.000-07:002010-05-05T18:44:16.146-07:00The Donner Party saga still haunts us<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCL5LdzfjV8QYi93o8OdpEut6Y5TfEgMrJkCdTJzH4SsnCOsWcI3QtQGQQCrEswgc3HtIJ3vqofCqcssgiMi1Ea18WiGdLl0WjgIBl41gTDr9frLHtYjjjAKNRv-oprC-UuqwsYQ/s1600/burton_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCL5LdzfjV8QYi93o8OdpEut6Y5TfEgMrJkCdTJzH4SsnCOsWcI3QtQGQQCrEswgc3HtIJ3vqofCqcssgiMi1Ea18WiGdLl0WjgIBl41gTDr9frLHtYjjjAKNRv-oprC-UuqwsYQ/s320/burton_.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><a href="http://www.gabrielleburton.com/">Gabrielle Burton</a> </b>has been thinking about <b>Tamsen Donner,</b> the wife of leader of the doomed pioneer party, for more than 25 years.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> She and her family – her husband and three daughters – retraced Tamsen’s journey across the United States in a never-to-be-forgotten road trip. Burton recounted that 1970s journey in a memoir, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Searching-Tamsen-Donner-American-Lives/dp/0803222858"><i>Searching for Tamsen Donner,</i></a> published in 2009 by University of Nebraska Press.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal">But writing a memoir didn’t get Tamsen Donner out of Burton’s system. She still heard Tamsen’s insistent voice inside her head. Why, Burton wondered, had Tamsen sent her small children to safety that terrible winter of 1846 and stayed behind in the treacherous Sierra Nevada to look after George Donner, who lay close to death?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Burton attempts to answer that unknowable mystery in her new novel,<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_148142431"> </a><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Impatient-Desire-Gabrielle-Burton/dp/1401341012">Impatient With Desire.</a> </i>Written in a diary format, based on letters sent by Tamsen to her family back East, <i>Impatient With Desire</i> is a lyrical novel that explores a woman’s excruciating dilemma: should she remain loyal to her husband or her children?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Burton will be speaking <a href="http://www.bookpassage.com/event_thisweek.php">about Tamsen Donner and her new novel</a> at Book Passage on Thursday, May 6 at 7 pm. Her book has <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/12/entertainment/la-et-book12-2010mar12">received rave reviews.</a> It was an Indie Next Pick and a Borders Fiction pick. </div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal">I have written previously about <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/dinkelspiel/detail?entry_id=44732">Burton’s fascination with the Donner Party.</a> I can relate to it since I, too, love history. I also admire how she has spun out both fiction and nonfiction books about the Donner Party.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Here’s how Burton describes her book:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">“In the spring of 1846, Tamsen Donner, her husband, George, their five daughters, and eighty other pioneers headed to California on the California-Oregon Trail in eager anticipation of new lives out West. Everything that could go wrong did, and an American legend was born.</span></div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">The Donner Party. We think we know their story--pioneers trapped in the mountains performing an unspeakable act to survive--but we know only that one harrowing part of it. <i>Impatient with Desire </i>brings us answers to the unanswerable question: What really happened in the four months the Donners were trapped in the mountains? And it brings to stunning life a woman--and a love story--behind the myth.</span></div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Tamsen Eustis Donner, born in 1801, taught school, wrote poetry, painted, botanized, and was fluent in French. At twenty-three, she sailed alone from Massachusetts to North Carolina when respectable women didn't travel alone. Years after losing her first husband, Tully, she married again for love, this time to George Donner, a prosperous farmer, and in 1846, they set out for California with their five youngest children. Unlike many women who embarked reluctantly on the Oregon Trail, Tamsen was eager to go. Later, trapped in the mountains by early snows, she had plenty of time to contemplate the cost of progress.</span></div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Historians have long known that Tamsen kept a journal, though it was never found. In <i>Impatient with Desire</i>, Burton draws on years of historical research to vividly imagine this lost journal--and paints a picture of a remarkable heroine in an extraordinary situation. Tamsen's unforgettable journey takes us from the cornfields of Illinois to the dusty Oregon Trail to the freezing Sierra Nevada Mountains, where she was forced to confront an impossible choice.”</span></div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0.1pt 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Impatient with Desire</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"> is a passionate, heart-wrenching story of courage, hope, and love in hardship, all told at a breathless pace. Intimate in tone and epic in scope, <i>Impatient with Desire</i> is absolutely hypnotic.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-90347968012388482182010-05-04T11:13:00.000-07:002010-05-04T13:43:07.277-07:00Get Haunted at Book Launch Party for Picture the Dead<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixuf4eoA-XxVTDSlPrMR5pV-LEiPLql-zLTtAjL8F29HALxdrBhv0o6BQyqYU52s_VrNPrHhMfNO8HerTS-V3qvpCkun6ckXJgQIoXTbMXQDl6ZcMg7JTm5GQUR8WMGn24sBEbLg/s1600/picturethedead003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixuf4eoA-XxVTDSlPrMR5pV-LEiPLql-zLTtAjL8F29HALxdrBhv0o6BQyqYU52s_VrNPrHhMfNO8HerTS-V3qvpCkun6ckXJgQIoXTbMXQDl6ZcMg7JTm5GQUR8WMGn24sBEbLg/s320/picturethedead003.jpg" width="239" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">The Booksmith on Haight Street will be turned into a 19<sup>th</sup> century spiritualist haunt on Thursday, May 6 when the author and illustrator of a new young adult novel, <a href="http://www.picturethedead.com/"><i>Picture the Dead</i>,</a> don period costumes for a reading of their work.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Oh, yeah. That local man of mystery, <b>Lemony Snicket</b>, will be acting as ghost.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The event is the formal launch of <a href="http://www.picturethedead.com/"><i>Picture the Dead</i></a>, described alternately as a ‘illustrated paranormal teen romance novel,” or a book with a “Cold Mountain feel.” It was written by <b>Adele Griffin</b> and illustrated by <b>Lisa Brown</b>, who draws the three-panel book reviews for the Chronicle. She is also married to Snicket (aka <b>Daniel Handler</b>)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">That family is known for its fun and sense of humor and the book launch promised to provide both. Those who wander into the Booksmith can try their luck communicating with dead spirits, or if that doesn’t work, get their picture taken with a paranormal being. (Snicket)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzFcLigSx0WCXYOTstuvi6xc4RisI1QNva29k91lrF_sct0E35SXeLGwwrMjjd-DDTAJA8yy6eb9pa9CrH89WAxsnLt6OAx0_ppLNnC94iSGZtj90x01oZB5-dCgttQvRMHJMpeA/s1600/poster8x11SF2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzFcLigSx0WCXYOTstuvi6xc4RisI1QNva29k91lrF_sct0E35SXeLGwwrMjjd-DDTAJA8yy6eb9pa9CrH89WAxsnLt6OAx0_ppLNnC94iSGZtj90x01oZB5-dCgttQvRMHJMpeA/s320/poster8x11SF2.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Griffin and Brown got the idea for <i>Picture the Dead</i> a few years ago when their two families rented an enormous house outside of Boston for a vacation. While there, they got this sense that there was another, well, non-human presence, in the house.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“We thought it would be restful but it ended up being different,” said Brown. “It felt like there was a presence in the house. It wasn’t us, it wasn’t the kids. It was like we were in someone else’s house and we were the invaders. It wasn’t sinister, but you felt you weren’t alone.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Then Brown and Griffin stumbled upon an antique Victorian trunk in the basement. Crammed inside was an old scrapbook filled with Civil War photographs ringed in black, and “spirit photos” that purported to show the dead communicating with the living. Spiritualism and séances were popular in the latter half of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, the pair point out on their website.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“It was almost as if it was inviting us to this story,” said Griffin.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The trunk proved to be a conversation piece and Griffin and Brown soon found themselves collaborating on a historical novel set during the Civil War. It centers around Jenny Lovell, an orphan living with her uncle and not-so-kind aunt. When her fiancé dies in the war, she soon begins to sense that his spirit is not at rest. Jenny attempts to find out how and why her fiancé died, and her questions bring her into an alliance with a spirit photographer. Secrets spill out and soon nothing is as it appears.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>The pair did extensive research for the book and based the settings and many of the details on actual events and people. Brown studied daguerreotypes from the Library of Congress and drew her illustrations using those portraits as a guide. She then <a href="http://www.picturethedead.com/2010/05">put the pictures on her computer</a> and remastered them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The<a href="http://www.booksmith.com/event/lisa-brown-and-adele-griffin-picture-dead-launch-party-teen-readers-especially-welcome"> Booksmith event</a> on Haight Street starts at 7:30 pm. If you can't make the party, Redroom.com will <a href="http://www.redroom.com/picture-the-dead-book-webcast">be streaming the party live. </a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-48418457745014067362010-04-27T10:41:00.000-07:002010-04-27T10:41:51.051-07:00Are Journalists the New Entreprenuers?<meta content="UCB Letterhead TT" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <title>UCB Letterhead TT</title> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2FtemSRbACMZ_i3cpDznuV5JGr4AavCe3E0LaFufgqZw8TgUhf9l4XGaN83gqgDVsdWCx_C9YbdvPjfWjJWzBtZVU6XAMoerHBveRqvJycRWYUi8sQtynveSNI16NFm41E7Mw2w/s1600/reporters165.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2FtemSRbACMZ_i3cpDznuV5JGr4AavCe3E0LaFufgqZw8TgUhf9l4XGaN83gqgDVsdWCx_C9YbdvPjfWjJWzBtZVU6XAMoerHBveRqvJycRWYUi8sQtynveSNI16NFm41E7Mw2w/s320/reporters165.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">I spent part of Saturday at a conference for recovering journalists. Oops. I guess I mean journalists in transition.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And there were a lot of them at <a href="http://guildfreelancers.org/gf/?p=550">“Spring Training for Journalists,”</a> held at City College. There were current and former reporters and editors from the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Contra Costa Times, the Oakland Tribune, and elsewhere. The bulk of the crowd seemed to be people 35+, although there was a smattering of young reporters as well.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In the past few years, Bay Area newspapers <a href="http://www.baycitizen.org/faq">have shed 400 reporting and editing positions,</a> which means there are a lot of people trying to reinvent themselves. And that’s what the conference was about – how to survive in this somewhat hostile, yet very interesting, media environment.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I missed the opening statement by <a href="http://www.baycitizen.org/news?id=5"><b>Steve Fairinu</b>, </a>who has just taken over the managing editor position of the <a href="http://www.baycitizen.org/">Bay Citizen,</a> the new, not-yet-launched website that will cover Bay Area news. Apparently he was upbeat and inviting, and told the gathered reporters that he has a freelance budget and he intends to use it. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s a smart move, because there is a great depth of talent in the Bay Area. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There were workshops on how to do multimedia reports using slides and sounds, and a keynote address by <a href="http://www.kitchensisters.org/"><b>Davia Nelson</b>, one of the “Kitchen Sisters,” </a>on creating compelling radio documentaries. There was a panel on writing books and on revamping your resume.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">To survive nowadays, journalists have to wear multiple hats. Not only must reporters write and produce traditional pieces for newspapers, magazines, and radio -- usually on a freelance basis -- they also have to write for websites, start their own blogs, or even create their own small businesses by producing neighborhood websites.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One example of the new entrepreneurism is the <a href="http://bayarea.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/10/bay-area-emerges-as-center-of-nonprofit-journalism/">explosive growth of nonprofit journalism organizations.</a> The Bay Area now has the highest concentration of these new businesses in the nation. <a href="http://motherjones.com/">Mother Jones,</a> <a href="http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/">New America Media</a> and the <a href="http://www.centerforinvestigativereporting.org/">Center for Investigative Reporting </a>have been around the Bay Area for more than 30 years but have completely reinvented themselves in recent years.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Mother Jones has a vibrant website. New America Media has formed partnerships with thousands of ethnic journalists around the country and has brought their work to a central website. CIR, which has long partnered with CBS, recently created <a href="http://californiawatch.org/">California Watch</a>. <b>Mark Katches</b> and his team, which includes some longtime Chronicle reporters like <b>Lance Williams,</b> have seen California Watch stories appear in dozens of newspapers and websites around the state. San Francisco Public Press is a new consortium of journalists reporting on San Francisco news. Two of its stories recently appeared in the Bay Area section of the New York Times.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Individual reporters are also experimenting with new forms of journalism, making life as a reporter much different than the days when one went into work at 10 am, found and reported a story, and went home at 7 pm.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My experience is probably fairly common. I worked for the San Jose Mercury News for nine years. Since I left, I have freelanced for a number of news outlets including the Los Angeles Times, People Magazine, the Chronicle, and San Francisco magazine.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Most recently I have been writing for the new Bay Area edition of the New York Times, but that opportunity will soon go away as The Bay Citizen will take over that section at the end of May.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I blog for City Brights on SFGate and for Ghost Word, my site about the Bay Area literary scene.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What I am most excited about is <a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/">Berkeleyside</a>, a local website I have started with two friends, <b>Lance Knobel</b> and <b>Tracey Taylor, </b>both veteran reporters. It is what they call in the business a “hyperlocal” site, which means it focuses on a defined geographical area. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There are a lot of these sites popping up, like <a href="http://www.theislandofalameda.com/">The Island</a>, a site run by <b>Michele Ellson</b> about Alameda, <a href="http://www.coastsider.com/">Coastsider,</a> run by <b>Barry Parr</b>, which examines life in unincorporated San Mateo County, and <a href="http://oaklandlocal.com/">OaklandLocal, </a>a nonprofit site started by <b>Susan Mernit.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We write about issues large and small, and that it why it is so much fun. I recently wrote a story about <a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/03/24/mr-mopps-berkeleys-beloved-toy-store-is-closing/">the closing of Mr. Mopps</a>, a beloved toy store on Martin Luther King Way in Berkeley. The post got dozens of responses and even prompted a few people to try and buy the business. (Nothing concrete has happened yet, but it may)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My post on why <a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2010/03/29/does-berkeley-have-crummy-sandwiches/">San Francisco Magazine had not included any Berkeley sandwiche</a>s in its list of the region’s top 40 sandwiches drew a heated exchange about the best places to eat lunch in town.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I wrote those more light-hearted pieces while I was writing about the closure of the NUMMI plant for the New York Times and still doing talks about my book, Towers of Gold, which came out in paperback in January. Oh, yes, and also trying to sell ads for Berkeleyside. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://guildfreelancers.org/gf/?p=498"><b>Tyche Hendricks</b></a> is another example of a reporter who has multiple jobs. For years she covered immigration for the San Francisco Chronicle but recently left. Since then, Hendricks has taught a course on international reporting for the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, has just taken a new position with KQED, where she will be the special projects editor for The California Report. She will publish her first book, <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10906.php"><i>The Wind Doesn’t Need A Passport: Stories from the US-Mexico Border,</i></a> in June. And since immigration is such a hot topic now, she is pitching op-ed pieces for various newspapers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><a href="http://www.sarahhenrywriter.com/">Sarah Henry</a> </b>is another example. A former reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting, she went on to report for the health magazine Hippocrates, and then wrote for a number of websites like Babycenter, Caring.com, and WebMD. Henry recently helped write someone’s memoir and was a contract writer for Chronicle Books. Her website, <a href="http://lettuceeatkale.com/">Lettuce Eat Kale,</a> about food issues, is very popular. Henry also writes a column on foodies for Berkeleyside. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Fortunately for all of us, there is a great resource; the <a href="http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/">Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism. </a>It, too, has evolved as the news business has changed. Its main focus had been on training reporters in newsrooms to do multimedia reporting. Knight still does that, but it also has started to train independent journalists as well. It offers conferences and trainings to independent reporters and its website has a great collection of videos on how to produce multimedia, set up a hyperlocal site, and more. The journalism school has also been welcoming to this new batch of independent reporters.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My talk at the “Spring Training for Journalists” conference, which was co-sponsored by the California Media Workers Guild, the SF City College Journalism Department, and the Bay Area Media Training Consortium, was on writing nonfiction books. I told the audience that journalists are well equipped to write books, because it takes a lot of perseverance to succeed. And journalists have that quality. We are trained to track down information, even in the face of daunting odds, and not give up until we get that information. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I think perseverance is the reason so many reporters will work hard to make the transition from the old media world to the new.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-67016752166781201292010-04-24T08:48:00.000-07:002010-04-25T08:38:30.548-07:00David R. Dow: A Lawyer's Unsettling View on Executions<meta content="UCB Letterhead TT" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <title>UCB Letterhead TT</title> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEQc2PHAp2lNsqmjSISlXEOYGpiDLeUsXXfad7MV8Ga1Xz-O9pWAZ21R69yN_TV-1TEPDnSj5_ENFXNIqKZ6YJORc5Reu9XanRonTj5enEyuIVRbw2s89A6DxaXe536WbUXzsRcw/s1600/autobiography_execution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEQc2PHAp2lNsqmjSISlXEOYGpiDLeUsXXfad7MV8Ga1Xz-O9pWAZ21R69yN_TV-1TEPDnSj5_ENFXNIqKZ6YJORc5Reu9XanRonTj5enEyuIVRbw2s89A6DxaXe536WbUXzsRcw/s320/autobiography_execution.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.law.uh.edu/faculty/ddow2/dpage2/"><b>David R. Dow</b></a> is an attorney living in Texas and he has a job that most Texans don’t respect: defending death row inmates.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Texas is the kind of state that kills its criminals with regularity and doesn’t think twice. Unlike other states, such as California or Illinois, that have wrestled with the legality and methods associated with the death penalty, the majority of Texans seem to consider putting someone to death no big deal.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Dow is not one of them. As a professor at the University of Houston Law Center and the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit legal aid corporation that represents death-row inmates, Dow has served as the attorney for 100 men on death row. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For dozens of years, Dow has fought to stop his clients from being put to death. It’s a mostly futile exercise, but after reading Dow’s memoir, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Execution-David-R-Dow/dp/0446562068/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1"><i>Autobiography of an Execution,</i></a> you understand why he does it. Even though the majority of his clients are cold-blooded murderers, (he thinks seven were probably innocent) Dow makes a convincing case that the death penalty strips people of their humanity. It also disproportionally punishes the poor and people of color.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I used to support the death penalty,” writes Dow. “I changed my mind when I learned how lawless the system is. If you have reservations about supporting a racist, classist, unprincipled regime, a regime where white skin is valued more highly than dark, where prosecutors hide evidence and policemen routinely lie, where judges decide what justice requires by consulting the most recent Gallup poll, where rich people sometimes get away with murder and never end up on death row, then the death-penalty system we have here in America will embarrass you to no end.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Autobiography of an Execution</i> is a highly readable memoir. Dow cuts back and forth between scenes of his clients who are about to be put to death with scenes of his wife and young son. Dow is conflicted because defending death row inmates, most of whom did commit the crimes for which they are jailed, takes time away from his family. The scenes of his young, innocent son who trusts the world contrast sharply with the scenes showing the indifference of the legal system. Innocence versus venality. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The most heartbreaking story in the book is of one man who has been sentenced for the execution-style murder of his estranged wife and two children. Dow calls him “Henry Quaker.” Generally, Dow does not concern himself with his clients’ guilt or innocence; his job is to spare them from death. As the book progresses though, Dow becomes convinced of Quaker’s innocence. It is heartbreaking and infuriating to see how the machinations of the law are so structured that they cannot pause to consider whether someone really should be put to death. Everyone passes the buck; no one accepts responsibility for making the decision that someone will be put to death.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">"Our system of capital punishment survives because it is built on an evasion," writes Dow. "A juror is one of 12, and therefore the decision is not hers. A judge who imposes a jury's sentence is implementing someone else's will, and therefore the decision is not his. A judge on the court of appeals is one of three, or one of nine, and professes to be constrained by the finder of fact, and therefore it is someone else's call. Federal judges say it is the state court's decision. The Supreme Court justices simply say nothing, content to permit the machinery of death to grind on with their tacit acquiescence."</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Autobiography of an Execution </i>was published by <a href="http://www.twelvebooks.com/about/about.asp?page=jon">Twelve, </a>the imprint run by legendary editor <b>Jonathan Karp.</b> The house only publishes 12 books a year so it can give enough attention to each book. Being selected by Twelve generally signals that the book will be big. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am not convinced that <i>Autobiography of an Execution </i>will reach the bestseller list as its topic is so disturbing. But it is a <a href="http://www.mysanantonio.com/entertainment/books/Review_The_Autobiography_of_an_Execution.html">poignant and moving book</a> – and one that will leave you seething with anger. That is, after you get done crying.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-85928395921617814232010-04-21T07:46:00.000-07:002010-04-22T17:34:13.352-07:00Dan Fost tells the tale of the San Francisco Giants<meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <title>UCB Letterhead TT</title> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj11Zudde_6MdUI4nGyT7O_LdVqtZNO5UGpIL-_tBJIGpwJv6kubAfCgKamxHG4XVvQ5NJk2xXRosDG0T6mCfJK8AhGZHyzDoiSq2NcEKnv-TjFdPClWq3RlVhirjoh5WALRj2y9Q/s1600/Dan_Fost-225x300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj11Zudde_6MdUI4nGyT7O_LdVqtZNO5UGpIL-_tBJIGpwJv6kubAfCgKamxHG4XVvQ5NJk2xXRosDG0T6mCfJK8AhGZHyzDoiSq2NcEKnv-TjFdPClWq3RlVhirjoh5WALRj2y9Q/s320/Dan_Fost-225x300.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">Last night I went to a book release party for <b>Dan Fost, </b>who has just published <i>The Giants Past and Present.</i> It’s a big, colorful coffee table book about the history of the Bay Area’s most heart-wrenching team, which has not won a national championship since it moved here from New York in 1958.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Dan held the party at the <a href="http://www.publichousesf.com/">Public House</a>, the new Traci des Jardins restaurant in the ballpark. With a dozen beers on tap, dozens of flat screen televisions mounted on the walls showing different sports games, and great food, it was a wonderful place for a book party.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Dan is a former writer for the Chronicle (he now freelances for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Magazine, among others) so a number of his newspaper colleagues were there. <b>Joan Ryan,</b> whose new book is <a href="http://www.joanryanink.com/"><i>The Water Giver</i></a>, was there, as was <b>Jason Turbow,</b> whose book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Baseball-Codes-Beanballs-Bench-Clearing-Unwritten/dp/0375424695/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1"><i>The Baseball Codes,</i></a> released in March, is now in its fourth printing. <b>Benny Evangelista, </b>who covers technology for the Chronicle, was also there.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I have known Dan since 1986 when we were both new reporters in Ithaca, N.Y. He worked for the town’s main newspaper, the Ithaca <i>Journal</i>, and I worked for the out-of-town competitor, the Syracuse <i>Post-Standard</i>. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It was so much fun to be a reporter in a small town. We tried to scoop one another whenever possible, but it was a friendly rivalry. When there was a murder, everyone cared. Much of the town would be glued to the newspaper or radio coverage and would follow the trial like it was the most important event around. We were big fish in a very small pond.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">From the time Dan arrived in Ithaca, he stood out. (And not for his unruly curls, although they did garner him notice). He is a graceful and funny writer and his words always improved the Ithaca Journal. He has brought his deft touch to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Giants-Past-Present-Dan-Fost/dp/076033806X"><i>Giants Past and Present.</i></a> The book has been getting lots of attention. Dan was on <b>Michael Krasny’s </b>show on KQED (with Giants President <b>Larry Baer</b>) and on <b>John Rothmann’s </b>show on KGO 810 AM.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Dan will be reading from his book tonight, April 21, at Book Passage in Corte Madera at 7 pm. He will be at the Los Angeles Festival of Books this weekend.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpvGiKhFHLhAhvs3Vjekf3vNlg24F4wPMJ8hwXPduzzjh2xTgLToZOC6RLZSt4BvhY_WsDND4ZpT7mTUvwH3SQoFsxfrq257CqGvUJVIIrQoCSMDAzVdu9WMbm9o6UCprFC19ITg/s1600/fostbook.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpvGiKhFHLhAhvs3Vjekf3vNlg24F4wPMJ8hwXPduzzjh2xTgLToZOC6RLZSt4BvhY_WsDND4ZpT7mTUvwH3SQoFsxfrq257CqGvUJVIIrQoCSMDAzVdu9WMbm9o6UCprFC19ITg/s320/fostbook.JPG" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Dan grew up a Yankees fan but started to love the Giants when he moved here in the early 1990s. His son Harry may be the Giants’ biggest booster.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.sfgiantsbaseball.net/qa/qa-with-dan-fost-author-of-giants-past-present-win-a-copy">Here’s an interview </a>with Dan done by a Giants blogger and one by <a href="http://www.marinij.com/sports/ci_14910610">the Marin Independent Journal.</a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-84884009460230327782010-04-20T07:14:00.000-07:002010-04-20T07:14:28.454-07:00Dave Eggers Rides to the Rescue of John Sayles<meta content="UCB Letterhead TT" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="UCB Letterhead TT" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <title>UCB Letterhead TT</title> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9btUJPpAr1BQwbLPbiYExwtcTrkImeTPRq1_-Ndcnh2_76mNqS5bTjTiaRw94eiZV7JQcDmlYjzA-pYdjPEkeXRt6kBS30zbdbciuUwWx1AgdQxWwJ-ksfm3o9MbO_Yuc8u2fiQ/s1600/sayles060713.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9btUJPpAr1BQwbLPbiYExwtcTrkImeTPRq1_-Ndcnh2_76mNqS5bTjTiaRw94eiZV7JQcDmlYjzA-pYdjPEkeXRt6kBS30zbdbciuUwWx1AgdQxWwJ-ksfm3o9MbO_Yuc8u2fiQ/s320/sayles060713.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In 2009, The Los Angeles Times reported that <b>John Sayles</b>, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker and award-winning novelist, <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/26/entertainment/et-john-sayles26">was having a hard time getting a new book deal.</a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">No publisher wanted to touch Sayles’ 1,000-page tome <i>Some Time in the Sun</i>, described as a tale about racism and the dawn of U.S. imperialism.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sayle’s agent had sent the book to a number of publishers who passed, in part because of the gloomy state of the economy.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But <b>Dave Eggers, </b>the writer and San Francisco publisher of McSweeney’s books, has apparently purchased Sayle’s book and plans to publish it in the fall of 2011. The deal was reported recently on Publisher’s Marketplace. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">McSweeney's editor <b>Jordan Bass</b> told the Associated Press that the novel "felt like equal parts (E.L.) Doctorow and 'Deadwood'" and praised its "captivating pacing." </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">This comes at the same time Salon.com announced that it would be <a href="http://therumpus.net/2010/04/salon-and-mcsweeneys-sitting-in-a-tree/">placing McSweeney's content on its website. </a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Some other recent book deals by noted Bay Area authors: (All from Publishers' Marketplace)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Wired magazine editor <b>Chris Anderson's</b> THE NEW INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, the story of how entrepreneurs are using web principles to rejuvenate manufacturing - and the economy - through open source, custom-fabrication and do-it-yourself design, predicting that we are about to see the collective potential of a million garage tinkerers unleashed on global markets<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Author of the NYT bestseller Beautiful Boy, <b>David Sheff's</b> THE THIRTEENTH STEP, drawing on recent research and stories of the author's own and others' experiences to show what's wrong with how we approach addiction today and the best ways to treat and prevent it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Guggenheim fellow <b>Peter Orner's</b> LOVE AND SHAME AND LOVE, a colorful mosaic of three generations of the Popper family of Chicago.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10847733.post-34780498588113628692010-04-19T10:14:00.000-07:002010-04-19T10:14:42.062-07:00Northern California Awards Handed Out<meta content="UCB Letterhead TT" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/frances/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <title>UCB Letterhead TT</title> <style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheT9r4eX2VHflEi6zj9AQ4PLup81S_NbFJN3i-NIEA4y9tN4HMJitA4yi9orEoPZ9lIDZ4Jp5poT-e2vM8bTBxBmLcbYFBhJVY9Y2AwWIPCj5CKwUj9EcTPhYKsJG52g-3gto3_w/s1600/brady.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheT9r4eX2VHflEi6zj9AQ4PLup81S_NbFJN3i-NIEA4y9tN4HMJitA4yi9orEoPZ9lIDZ4Jp5poT-e2vM8bTBxBmLcbYFBhJVY9Y2AwWIPCj5CKwUj9EcTPhYKsJG52g-3gto3_w/s320/brady.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Northern California Book Award ceremony <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2010/04/19/2689303/north-state-authors-win-book-awards.html">was held Sunday</a> at the San Francisco Public Library and <b>Catherine Brady</b>, a professor at the University of San Francisco, won the fiction award for <i>The Mechanics of Falling</i>. (She's in the photo at left) <b>Tamim Ansary</b> won in the nonfiction category for <i>Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes</i>. <b>Dave Eggers</b> won in the creative nonfiction category for <i>Zeitoun</i>. <b>D.A. Powell </b>won in the poetry division for <i>Chronic</i>. Here are the <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2010/04/19/2689303/north-state-authors-win-book-awards.html">other winners</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Northern California Independent Booksellers Association has handed out their list for the <a href="http://www.nciba.com/">best books of 2010 </a>and there was a bit of an overlap. Eggers won in the nonfiction category and Powell won for poetry. <b>Abraham Verghese</b> won in the fiction category for<i> Cutting For Stone,</i> <b>Novella Carpenter</b> won in the food writing category for <i>Farm City</i>, and <b>Tom Killon</b> and <b>Gary Snyder</b> won in the regional category for <i>Tamalpais Walking.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>Frank Portman</b> won in the teen category for </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i>Andromeda Klein,</i> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>Gennifer Choldenko </b>won in the children’s literature category for <i>Al Capone Shines My Shoes</i>, and <b>Shino Arihara</b> won for illustrating <i>Zero Is the Leaves on the Tree.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1