Ghost Word

Peggy Orenstein on the marketing of pink

2011-02-06T08:42:00.000-08:00

From her home in north Berkeley where she lives with her filmmaker husband Steven Okazaki and seven year old daughter Daisy, Peggy Orenstein has been opining for years about the world of girls and feminism for the New York Times magazine. Last week, her latest book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, 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.

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.

Do you wear pink?

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 evidence of innocence. And that innocent pink pretty quickly turns into something else, a kind of diva, self-absorbed pink and ultimately a sexualized pink.

What is Daisy’s position on the color now?

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.

What’s the big deal about little girls being obsessed with princesses? Hasn’t that always been the case?

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 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.

No question it’s cute. And it can feel empowering 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.

What accounts for the rise of the Disney princess phenomenon?

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.

How can the emphasis on pink and princesses hurt girls in the long run?

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 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 other 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.

One of the things I hadn’t thought of was the impact of this hyper-segmenation on the relationship between girls and boys. 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 opposite 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.

And of course, pity the boy who likes pink. Unless, maybe he lives in the Bay Area.

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?

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.

In which part of Berkeley do you live?

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.

Where do you do most of your writing?

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.

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?

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 were girls and they are all incredibly smart, insightful women and moms. They’re three of my very dearest and most trusted friends.

What’s your favorite part about living in Berkeley?

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?

Best Books of 2010

2010-12-20T12:22:00.000-08:00

I have been spending most of my time writing about Berkeley, CA for Berkeleyside and asked Berkeley authors for their favorite books of 2010. Here is the article I wrote.

: A few of the many good reads on Lance Knobel's bookshelves.

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 rate three times higher than other California residents. 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.

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 Stieg Larsson books to a book about bankers during the Depression, reveals just how broad our reading tastes are.

Sylvia Brownrigg: 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: The Bigness of the World, by Lori Ostlund, and The Professor: A Sentimental Education by Terry Castle.

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.

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.

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, In Flight Entertainment. 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.
Sylvia Brownrigg, who lives in the Elmwood, is the author of five acclaimed novels including The Delivery Room and Morality Tale. She frequently reviews books for the New York Times Book Review and has just completed her first young adult novel, Kepler’s Dream.

Linda Schacht Gage: When a Cal journalism student gave me a copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 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.

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.

But the most enjoyable book for me in 2010 was Cutting for Stone, 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.

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 Tinkers (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2010) and a fur covered copy of Dave Egger's The Wild Things.

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.

Tomas Moniz: 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 The Hunger Games series: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins.

My daughter and I fought over who got to read it first the night it came out.

‘Dad, I’m fifteen! How old are you?’ my daughter argued.

Needless to say, her pleas fell on deaf ears.

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.

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.
Tomas Moniz, who lives in south Berkeley, is the author of the zine Rad Dad and an English professor at Berkeley City College.

Tom Leonard: 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.

Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret was written by an editor at the Washington Post 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.

Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age 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.

The Pulitzer Prize winning Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World 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.

Tom Leonard is University Librarian at UC Berkeley and a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of three books, 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.

Elizabeth Stark: In Karen Joy Fowler’s mind-blowing new collection, What I Didn’t See and Other Stories, a child in the final story describes her favorite book: “The stories in Castles and Dragons 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.

The debut novel of Yael Goldstein Love, The Passion of Tasha Darsky, 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, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, tops my holiday list.

Elizabeth Stark, who was born in Berkeley, is the author of Shy Girl. She is also a filmmaker, writing instructor and organizer of literary events around the Bay Area.

Donna Corbeil: 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 extraordinaire; 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, The Liar’s Club, followed by her more recent Lit, A Memoir. Ms Karr brings to life all the pain, humor, terror and awe of an unsettled and at times destructive childhood in The Liar’s Club and then in Lit shows us what kind of adult that can make.

You don’t have to read the first book to enjoy Lit, 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.

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.
Donna Corbeil is director of the Berkeley Public Library

Lance Knobel: This was a year for reading about financial crisis. Michael Lewis's The Big Short 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 Lords of Finance, 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.

The other book I'd recommend from this year's reading is Operation Mincemeat: How A Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, 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.
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.

Frances Dinkelspiel: One of the best discoveries I made this year was City of Veils, a literary mystery by San Francisco writer Zoe Ferraris. Her first book, Finding Nouf, 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 City of Veils 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.

My nonfiction pick of the year is Autobiography of an Execution 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.

Autobiography of an Execution 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.
Frances Dinkelspiel, a co-founder of Berkeleyside, is the author of Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California.

What Did California Look Like Before the Europeans?

2010-11-14T13:44:00.000-08:00

Grizzly bears at the shore

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.

That curiosity about the landscape continued as Cunningham 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 A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California, a remarkable picture book published in October by Berkeley’s Heyday Press.

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^st century and the same spot thousands of years earlier.

“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,” reads a description on the Heyday website. “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.”

El Cerrito Plaza today

Grizzly bears eating acorns (at El Cerrito Plaza thousands of years ago)

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.

“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.”

Downtown Oakland thousands of years ago

This article originally appeared on Berkeleyside.

East Bay author tackles circumcision in first novel

2010-11-09T18:18:00.000-08:00

Lisa Braver Moss is a product of Berkeley — she grew up there, went through the public school system, and attended UC Berkeley. When Moss decided to write a novel featuring a Jewish doctor who starts to question the practice of circumcision, she set it in Berkeley. Moss, who now lives in Piedmont, will be speaking Friday November 12 at 1:30 at the Jewish Book and Arts Festival at the Contra Costa Jewish Community Center.

Lisa Braver Moss

Ghost Word caught up with Moss just days after the November 1 release of The Measure of His Grief.

Why did you decide to write a novel that has circumcision as its main theme?

The Measure of His Grief 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.
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.
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.
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.
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, tikkun olam, is really the central tenet of Judaism.
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.

Why did you set it in Berkeley?

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.
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.
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.
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.

What was your Jewish upbringing in Berkeley like? Did your family attend temple? How did you obtain a Jewish identity?

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.
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.

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?

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.
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.
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.

Do you think you can be Jewish and not circumcise your sons?

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.

What surprised you most in your research about circumcision?

I was very surprised to learn that circumcision as done today is a vastly more 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.

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.

What has the reaction to your novel been? Are people squeamish about the topic?

The response has been wonderful — I’m pretty thrilled with the reviews.
Regarding the squirm factor, yes, that’s there–hey, there are a few scenes in the book that make me wince. But more than anything else, The Measure of His Grief 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.
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.
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.

This article first appeared in Berkeleyside.

Meredith Maran and My Lie: A story of false incest

2010-09-21T09:06:00.001-07:00

Bay Area author Meredith Maran has been chronicling her life and the world around her since the mid 1990s. Her bestselling memoir, What It's Like to Live Now and Notes From an Incomplete Revolution, 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.

Her 2001 book, Class Dismissed, 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.

But Maran’s tenth book will prove to be her most provocative – and controversial. My Lie, A True Story of False Memory, 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.

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.

On Tuesday, September 22, Berkeley Arts & Letters will present an evening with Maran, 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.

Maran will also be on KQED Forum with Michael Krasny at 10 am September 22.

Ghost Word caught up with Maran just as My Lie was published.

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?

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.

It actually felt--not good, exactly, but satisfying 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.

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?

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.

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?

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.")

If it happened to you once, can it happen again?

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.

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?

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 trying to forget it!

Have your other family members forgiven you for your lie?

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.

http://berkeleyarts.org/

A Fierce Radiance by Lauren Belfer

2010-08-30T08:47:00.000-07:00

When Lauren Belfer's City of Light 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, A Fierce Radiance, was about the discovery of penicillin, I rushed to my library and put it on reserve.

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.

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.

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.

A Visti from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2010-07-30T15:15:00.000-07:00

I just finished Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. 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.

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.

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.

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.

The book, with its nonlinear and decidedly unchronological sequences, paints a picture of how people evolve over time.

Meredith Maran put it well in Salon:

“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.”

A Night of Nonfiction

2010-07-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday evening, high in the hills about UCSF, author Terry Gamble will host an evening with some of the region's best-known non-fiction writers.

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.
The evening is a benefit for Litquake, the Bay Area's premier literary festival.

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:

T.J. Stiles, who biography on Cornelius Vanderbilt won the Pulitzer Prize. His previous book was on the Pony Express.
Katherine Ellison, 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, Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention, is about her and her son's ADHD. It will be released in October.
Rebecca Solnit, whose book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, won the California Book Awards Gold Medal.
Po Bronson, whose latest book, Nurture Shock, spent many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Stephen Elliot, the founder of the Rumpus on-line literary magazine, whose latest book, The Adderall Diaries, touches on the murder of Nina Reiser of Oakland.

Sounds pretty good, huh? The evening runs from 6:30 to 8 pm. Tickets are $125, with all the proceeds going to Litquake. Buy tickets here.

Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector

2010-07-18T13:25:00.001-07:00

Allegra Goodman exploded onto the literary scene in 1996 with the publication of her first novel, The Family Markowitz, and followed up that success with Kaaterskill Falls in 1998. Both novels dealt centered around Jewish families, and the latter was set in an Orthodox community in upstate New York.

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.

Her latest book, The Cookbook Collector, 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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

Henry Lee's gripping book on murder of Nina Reiser

2010-07-09T10:20:00.000-07:00

Henry Lee’s 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.

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.

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, look here.

Ghost Word caught up with Lee in between crime stories.

Where do you live? What years did you go to Cal?

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.

You got your start reporting at the Daily Cal. What was your most memorable story?

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 www.facebook.com/henrykleefan ) 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.

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?

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.

What did you find so fascinating about this case that made you want to write a book about it?

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.

You covered Nina Reiser’s disappearance and the court trial. What new information/different information did you find for the book?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Since Reiser was a bit strange, why do you think Nina married him? Did they ever have a good marriage?

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.

Would Reiser talk to you?

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

What are the lasting impacts of Nina’s murder? Did you talk to her friends about how it has changed their lives?

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.

How are the Reiser children doing?

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.

Absolutely hilarious Gary Shteyngart book trailer

2010-07-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

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.

Trailer for Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

2010-06-16T18:03:00.000-07:00

This looks better than the futuristic novel. It stars Academy Award-nominated actresses Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan. It is scheduled to be released in October.

David Sedaris makes me laugh

2010-06-16T07:04:00.000-07:00

In Berkeley, David Sedaris could walk on the stage and grab the audience by just saying “hello.”

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.

The laughs started early and lasted late as Sedaris read selections from his book-in-progress, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, and from his diary.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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 in Chicago at the Steppenwolf Theater before coming to Berkeley.

Ian Falconer of Olivia fame will illustrate the fables. Dame Judi Dench and comedian Elaine Stritch will be doing a recording of the book, a prospect which seems to be making Sedaris a bit nervous.

“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.”

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.

Sedaris edits and makes corrections as he reads in front of a live audience, he said.

“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.”

A few tidbits gleaned from the evening:

• Sedaris now lives in England, not Paris
• He swims for exercise
• He has moved around so much, he no longer thinks of himself as a North Carolinian
• He doesn’t like people eating or drinking in the audience
• He doesn’t like to have his picture taken

You don't have to give up your typewriter

2010-06-15T06:51:00.000-07:00

The pleasures of typing united with the ease of the computer. (via Galleycat)

The Agony and Ecstacy of Book Reviews (set to thumping music)

2010-06-08T17:37:00.000-07:00

How does a writer survive a bad review?

Thanks to Meg Waite Clayton for tipping me off to this.

Michael Lewis is Washington's new darling

2010-06-01T16:45:00.000-07:00

From the moment Michael Lewis' new book, The Big Short, came out in April, it struck a nerve, It sold an astonishing sold 162,000 copies in its first month.

But now there’s news that the book has captured the attention of our country’s lawmakers.According to a story on the website Politico, The Big Short has been mentioned at least 15 times in the hallowed halls of Congress -- on the Senate floor, in committee meetings, and in press conferences.

Dick Durbin, the Senate Majority Whip, stopped pontificating during a discussion on regulatory reform to recommend the book to his colleagues.

“I’m going to plug a book: Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short,’” he said.

Senators Chris Dodd and Harry Reid also gave the book a shout out during Senate debates.

And its not just Democrats. According to Politico, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are quoting from the book. Republican Senators John Ensign of Nevada and Kit Bond of Missouri have mentioned the book.

Lewis met with House Republicans in the fall to talk about the financial crisis. He was so well-received that meeting turned into a three-hour Q and A session. Then Bay Area Congresswoman Jackie Speier 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.

Lewis, who has finished his book tour and is back in Berkeley, finds all this attention a bit unnerving.

“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.”

Lewis probably brought more smiles to lawmakers' faces with this satirical op-ed that ran recently in the New York Times.

Two new books on immigration and life in the Borderlands

2010-05-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

Tyche Hendricks, who teaches international reporting at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, will be talking about her new book, The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport: Stories From the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, tonight at 7:30 pm at Bookmith on Haight Street in San Francisco. She will be appearing with Peter Schrag, the former editorial page editor for the Sacramento Bee, who has also written a book that touches on US-Mexico relations called Not Fit For Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America.

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.

Ghost Word asked Hendricks about her book and some of the controversies surrounding immigration"

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?

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.

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.

What prompted you to write this book? How did you find your subjects?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The Donner Party saga still haunts us

2010-05-05T18:44:00.000-07:00

Gabrielle Burton has been thinking about Tamsen Donner, the wife of leader of the doomed pioneer party, for more than 25 years.

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, Searching for Tamsen Donner, published in 2009 by University of Nebraska Press.

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?

Burton attempts to answer that unknowable mystery in her new novel, Impatient With Desire. Written in a diary format, based on letters sent by Tamsen to her family back East, Impatient With Desire is a lyrical novel that explores a woman’s excruciating dilemma: should she remain loyal to her husband or her children?

Burton will be speaking about Tamsen Donner and her new novel at Book Passage on Thursday, May 6 at 7 pm. Her book has received rave reviews. It was an Indie Next Pick and a Borders Fiction pick.

I have written previously about Burton’s fascination with the Donner Party. 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.

Here’s how Burton describes her book:

“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.

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. Impatient with Desire 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.

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.

Historians have long known that Tamsen kept a journal, though it was never found. In Impatient with Desire, 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.”

Impatient with Desire 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, Impatient with Desire is absolutely hypnotic.

Get Haunted at Book Launch Party for Picture the Dead

2010-05-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

The Booksmith on Haight Street will be turned into a 19^th century spiritualist haunt on Thursday, May 6 when the author and illustrator of a new young adult novel, Picture the Dead, don period costumes for a reading of their work.

Oh, yeah. That local man of mystery, Lemony Snicket, will be acting as ghost.

The event is the formal launch of Picture the Dead, described alternately as a ‘illustrated paranormal teen romance novel,” or a book with a “Cold Mountain feel.” It was written by Adele Griffin and illustrated by Lisa Brown, who draws the three-panel book reviews for the Chronicle. She is also married to Snicket (aka Daniel Handler)

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)

Griffin and Brown got the idea for Picture the Dead 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.

“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.”

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^th century, the pair point out on their website.

“It was almost as if it was inviting us to this story,” said Griffin.

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.

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 put the pictures on her computer and remastered them.

The Booksmith event on Haight Street starts at 7:30 pm. If you can't make the party, Redroom.com will be streaming the party live.

Are Journalists the New Entreprenuers?

2010-04-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

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I spent part of Saturday at a conference for recovering journalists. Oops. I guess I mean journalists in transition.

And there were a lot of them at “Spring Training for Journalists,” 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.

In the past few years, Bay Area newspapers have shed 400 reporting and editing positions, 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.

I missed the opening statement by Steve Fairinu, who has just taken over the managing editor position of the Bay Citizen, 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.

It’s a smart move, because there is a great depth of talent in the Bay Area.

There were workshops on how to do multimedia reports using slides and sounds, and a keynote address by Davia Nelson, one of the “Kitchen Sisters,” on creating compelling radio documentaries. There was a panel on writing books and on revamping your resume.

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.

One example of the new entrepreneurism is the explosive growth of nonprofit journalism organizations. The Bay Area now has the highest concentration of these new businesses in the nation. Mother Jones, New America Media and the Center for Investigative Reporting have been around the Bay Area for more than 30 years but have completely reinvented themselves in recent years.

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 California Watch. Mark Katches and his team, which includes some longtime Chronicle reporters like Lance Williams, 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.

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.

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.

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.

I blog for City Brights on SFGate and for Ghost Word, my site about the Bay Area literary scene.

What I am most excited about is Berkeleyside, a local website I have started with two friends, Lance Knobel and Tracey Taylor, both veteran reporters. It is what they call in the business a “hyperlocal” site, which means it focuses on a defined geographical area.

There are a lot of these sites popping up, like The Island, a site run by Michele Ellson about Alameda, Coastsider, run by Barry Parr, which examines life in unincorporated San Mateo County, and OaklandLocal, a nonprofit site started by Susan Mernit.

We write about issues large and small, and that it why it is so much fun. I recently wrote a story about the closing of Mr. Mopps, 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)

My post on why San Francisco Magazine had not included any Berkeley sandwiches in its list of the region’s top 40 sandwiches drew a heated exchange about the best places to eat lunch in town.

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.

Tyche Hendricks 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, The Wind Doesn’t Need A Passport: Stories from the US-Mexico Border, in June. And since immigration is such a hot topic now, she is pitching op-ed pieces for various newspapers.

Sarah Henry 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, Lettuce Eat Kale, about food issues, is very popular. Henry also writes a column on foodies for Berkeleyside.

Fortunately for all of us, there is a great resource; the Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism. 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.

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.

I think perseverance is the reason so many reporters will work hard to make the transition from the old media world to the new.

David R. Dow: A Lawyer's Unsettling View on Executions

2010-04-24T08:48:00.000-07:00

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David R. Dow is an attorney living in Texas and he has a job that most Texans don’t respect: defending death row inmates.

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.

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.

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, Autobiography of an Execution, 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.

“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.”

Autobiography of an Execution 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.

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.

"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."

Autobiography of an Execution was published by Twelve, the imprint run by legendary editor Jonathan Karp. 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.

I am not convinced that Autobiography of an Execution will reach the bestseller list as its topic is so disturbing. But it is a poignant and moving book – and one that will leave you seething with anger. That is, after you get done crying.

Dan Fost tells the tale of the San Francisco Giants

2010-04-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

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Last night I went to a book release party for Dan Fost, who has just published The Giants Past and Present. 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.

Dan held the party at the Public House, 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.

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. Joan Ryan, whose new book is The Water Giver, was there, as was Jason Turbow, whose book The Baseball Codes, released in March, is now in its fourth printing. Benny Evangelista, who covers technology for the Chronicle, was also there.

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 Journal, and I worked for the out-of-town competitor, the Syracuse Post-Standard.

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.

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 Giants Past and Present. The book has been getting lots of attention. Dan was on Michael Krasny’s show on KQED (with Giants President Larry Baer) and on John Rothmann’s show on KGO 810 AM.

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.

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.

Here’s an interview with Dan done by a Giants blogger and one by the Marin Independent Journal.

Dave Eggers Rides to the Rescue of John Sayles

2010-04-20T07:14:00.000-07:00

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In 2009, The Los Angeles Times reported that John Sayles, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker and award-winning novelist, was having a hard time getting a new book deal.

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No publisher wanted to touch Sayles’ 1,000-page tome Some Time in the Sun, described as a tale about racism and the dawn of U.S. imperialism.

Sayle’s agent had sent the book to a number of publishers who passed, in part because of the gloomy state of the economy.

But Dave Eggers, 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.

McSweeney's editor Jordan Bass told the Associated Press that the novel "felt like equal parts (E.L.) Doctorow and 'Deadwood'" and praised its "captivating pacing."

This comes at the same time Salon.com announced that it would be placing McSweeney's content on its website.

Some other recent book deals by noted Bay Area authors: (All from Publishers' Marketplace)

Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson's 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

Author of the NYT bestseller Beautiful Boy, David Sheff's 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.

Guggenheim fellow Peter Orner's LOVE AND SHAME AND LOVE, a colorful mosaic of three generations of the Popper family of Chicago.

Northern California Awards Handed Out

2010-04-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

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The Northern California Book Award ceremony was held Sunday at the San Francisco Public Library and Catherine Brady, a professor at the University of San Francisco, won the fiction award for The Mechanics of Falling. (She's in the photo at left) Tamim Ansary won in the nonfiction category for Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Dave Eggers won in the creative nonfiction category for Zeitoun. D.A. Powell won in the poetry division for Chronic. Here are the other winners.

The Northern California Independent Booksellers Association has handed out their list for the best books of 2010 and there was a bit of an overlap. Eggers won in the nonfiction category and Powell won for poetry. Abraham Verghese won in the fiction category for Cutting For Stone, Novella Carpenter won in the food writing category for Farm City, and Tom Killon and Gary Snyder won in the regional category for Tamalpais Walking.

Frank Portman won in the teen category for Andromeda Klein, Gennifer Choldenko won in the children’s literature category for Al Capone Shines My Shoes, and Shino Arihara won for illustrating Zero Is the Leaves on the Tree.

Library Laureates Dinner at San Francisco Public Library

2010-04-15T11:29:00.000-07:00

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On Friday night April 16, the San Francisco Public Library is going to hold its annual “Library Laureates” dinner to honor Bay Area authors.

The list of 30 authors is a wonderful reflection of the diversity of voices around the Bay Area. Kathryn Ma, Allison Hoover Bartlett, Ethan Watters, Terry Castle, Jack Boulware, Joshua Braff, Charlie Haas, Don Lattin, Kate Moses, Steven Zinn, Victoria Zackheim, Merla Zellerbach, Lewis Buzbee, Tom Dolby, Greg Marcus, Randall Mann, Gerald Nachman, Joel Paul, Frank Portman, George Smith, Jacqueline Sue, Elaine Elinson, Stan Yogi, Janet Fletcher, Beverly Gherman, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Blanche Richardson, Kate Williams, and Mike Sullivan, will all be there. And yours truly.

We meet in the library for a group photo and small reception and then apparently we go to tables scattered around the building for dinner. (I hope I get to sit in the San Francisco History Room) The theme of the evening is Urban Legends, and since the indomitable Kathi Kamen Goldmark is helping organize this event, we are all encouraged to dress up in costume. I am contemplating going as Isaias Hellman.

A few days ago I got an email from Mary Ellen Hannibal who runs a wonderful new blog for the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. It’s writing-oriented, with interviews with authors, book reviews, and news that will interest collectors and booksellers. The blog is called The Readers Review and I highly recommend it.

Here is an interview I did with The Readers Review. It touches on Ghost Word, uncovering the story of Isaias Hellman, any my freelance work for the New York Times and Berkeleyside.

Off to Los Angeles

2010-04-09T16:58:00.000-07:00

I am heading down to Los Angeles again, this time to kick off a new lecture series called "Los Angeles Luminaries."

It will be held at the Homestead Museum in the City of Industry on Sunday at 3 pm.

It's the old house of William Workman, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1841 on the first immigrant wagon train to the area.

What's neat is that Isaias Hellman, the subject of my book, Towers of Gold, started a bank in 1868 with Workman and his son- in-law. Francis Pliny Fisk Temple. The relationship didn't last long. Hellman severed ties in 1871 because he thought Temple lent money too freely, without requiring equity.

Hellman turned out to be right. Temple and Workman formed a new bank without him, and it went bust. When Workman found out that he would have to relinquish his beloved home, he committed suicide That's the home that is now a museum.

In spite of the bank fiasco, Workman and Temple were major players in the development of Los Angeles.

Hellman also did business with Workman's son, William Henry Workman. They developed Boyle Heights together.

(The picture at the top is Los Angeles in the 1870s)

Arcadia Falls by Carol Goodman

2010-04-04T10:18:00.000-07:00

I have long been a fan of Carol Goodman’s gothic mysteries, and I have long felt the same way at the end of her books: slightly disappointed.

The beginnings are always terrific: a woman on her own in the world goes to some hermetically sealed place (a hotel or boarding school), encounters some interesting characters, and slowly understands there is an ancient death that has cast a pall over the place. And then the heroine gets sucked into the mystery, someone she loves is put in peril, but then she survives.

I was mesmerized by The Lake of Dead Languages, the first Goodman book I read.

I just finished Arcadia Falls, the story of a woman, Meg Rosenthal, whose husband has died and left her in debt. She sells their fancy house in Great Neck, N.Y., and accepts a job at a boarding school in the Hudson Valley. She brings her daughter, Sally, who has been angry and rebellious since her father’s death, and enrolls her in the school, which is called Arcadia Falls.

The seeds of a great mystery are all there, and they carry the novel for a long time. The school is located at an old artists’ colony that was started in the 1920s by two women, who were also lovers, Vera Beech and Lily Eberhardt. Together, they wrote and illustrated a children’s fairy tale, The Changeling Girl, about a young girl who must choose between her family and self-expression. (That theme mirrors what female artists of the period went through: can one have a family and be an artist or does domestic life preclude an artistic life?) The art colony evolved into a school, which is still thriving.

But when a young student falls to her death, it brings back memories of another death: that of the founder Lily Eberhardt, who may have died on the evening she was leaving Vera Beecher for a man. Meg Rosenthal, who is writing her thesis on the two women, uncovers Lily’s long-lost diary, and sets out to determine why she died and if the two deaths are linked.

All of this is terrific stuff, as is Rosenthal’s relationship with her daughter and budding romance with the local sheriff. The book is atmospheric, creepy, and intriguing. But at the end of the book Goodman uses an old slight of hand. She pretends to solve the mystery of the death, only to offer another explanation in its closing pages. That's when the coincidences grow too pat and convenient. The closing pages of the book feel contrived.

Still, Arcadia Falls, like Goodman’s other books, provides considerable pleasure.

A interview with Carol Goodman about Arcadia Falls.

Put Girl in Translation on your reading list

2010-04-02T10:09:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite books last year was an advanced readers' copy of Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok. It tells the story of a young Hong Kong immigrant, Kimberly Chang, who goes to work in her aunt’s clothing factory in Brooklyn. Since her Aunt Paula has paid for her mother and her to come to America, they become defacto indentured servants.

But Kimberly is very smart, and Girl in Translation traces her path to assimilation in America. Since she doesn’t speak English when she first arrives, Kimberly is placed in a class for low achievers. She is considered lazy and unremarkable. With time, and with her genius for math, she eventually gets into a private school. The more she excels, the more torn she becomes between the claustrophobic, Chinese-centered life of her aunt’s sweatshop and the promise of success in the larger world. It will be published April 29.

I was delighted to learn today that Girl in Translation has been chosen as a May 2010 pick for the Indie Next List.

And what's even more amazing is that the book was pulled out of the slush pile, which Kwok talks about on her blog.

It’s hard to know how much of this book reflects the life of its author. But I suspect she has drawn heavily on her experiences, as she, too, immigrated from Hong Kong. Here’s a biography I found on the Asia Society webpage:

“Jean Kwok was born in Hong Kong, immigrated to Brooklyn when she was five, and worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood. After entering public elementary school unable to speak a word of English, she was later admitted to Hunter College High School, one of New York City's most competitive public high schools. She won early admission to Harvard, where she worked as many as four jobs at a time, and graduated with honors in English and American literature, before going on to earn an MFA in fiction at Columbia. Kwok has worked as an English teacher and Dutch-English translator at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and has been a professional ballroom dancer, a reader for the blind, a housekeeper, a dishwasher, and a computer graphics specialist for a major financial institution. Her work has been published in Story magazine, Prairie Schooner, Elements of Literature: Third Course, and The Nuyorasaian Anthology.”

With this book's publication, there is no doubt that Kwok will be noticed as a major American writer. The one sad aspect of her tale is that her older brother Kwan, who helped edit her book and who provided much of the material on which this book is based, died in the crash of a private plane in 2009.

Kwok will be at Book Passage in San Francisco on May 5 and at A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland on May 6. Here is her schedule.

The fallout from the closure of Nummi

2010-03-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

I have a story in today’s New York Times about the imminent closing of the Nummi plant in Fremont. It focuses on some of the suppliers who produce component parts for Toyota. Nummi's closure will put 4,700 people out of work. More than 20,000 others will be out of a job as the as the car factory's suppliers close. The closure is going to have a major impact in northern California.

I went to visit Injex Industries in Hayward, which makes interior door panels and other plastic parts for Nummi. I was really impressed by the plant and the people who work there. It’s a mini-United Nations with people from all over the world. One woman I quoted has learned four languages on the job.

The factory wasn’t what I imagined either. It was clean and fairly quiet. They could produce an interior car panel in 58 seconds flat. Amazing,

You can read the story here.

Writing for the New York Times is one reason I haven’t been posting often. The other reason is my new endeavor: Berkeleyside. It’s a website focusing on Berkeley news. And believe me, there is a lot of news in Berkeley, from the mundane to the profound. I am working with two friends, both experienced journalists, Lance Knobel and Tracey Taylor. Please stop by.

Obama's love of books

2010-03-26T09:33:00.000-07:00

I just love that President Obama stopped by Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City yesterday. He was in Iowa to make a speech about the new health care law, and during his talk he mentioned that the bookstore would now get tax benefits to offset its rising health care costs.Then he stopped by the store.

And he bought three books,“Journey to the River Sea,” by Eva Ibbotson, “The Secret of Zoom,” by Lynne Jonell, (for his daughters) and a Star Wars pop-up book for the six-year old son of his press secretary.

I can't remember a recent American president every doing this. I think Obama is one of us: he loves to browse. I bet he would have loved to have spent another half hour at the store looking at the new releases. After all, he is a prolific and varied reader.

I think this can give independent bookstores a boost.

Four Bay Area Authors Crack the Big Time

2010-03-22T16:16:00.000-07:00

Publishers’ Weekly has just released its assessment of the 2009 publishing season, which wasn’t nearly as successful as the 2008 season.

But there are lots of fascinating nuggets in the list, including information about which Bay Area authors sell the most books in the U.S.

It’s quite a small list, which means not many local authors are selling hundreds of thousands of copies of their books. But I am quite sure the quality of the writing in the Bay Area is higher than many of the bestsellers, such as Dan Brown’s latest thriller, The Lost Symbol, which sold more books than any other: 5,543,643.

In the fiction category, San Francisco author Christopher Moore sold 146,098 copies of Fool, his eleventh book.

Annie Barrows, who lives in the East Bay, sold 104,284 copies of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

For non-fiction, that Danville hero, Chesley Sullenberger, sold 306,413 copies of Highest Duty.

And former FDA Commissioner David Kessler (I think he lives in the Bay Area) sold 155,000 copies of The End of Overeating.

In other news, congratulations go out to Linda Himelstein, whose book The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov and the Upheaval of an Empire, was nominated for a James Beard Award for best book in the beverage category. She is up against Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology by Randall Grahm, which was published by UC Press.

Oretta Zanini de Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta, also published by UC Press, was nominated in the reference category.

The spring edition of Lapham's Quarterly has a run down of what writers from previous centuries earned at their day jobs and what that salary would look like today if adjusted for inflation.

Anthony Trollope was a postal surveyor and earned )in today's dollars) $35,000-$50,000. Charlotte Bronte, a governess, only earned $1,838. T.S. Eliot, a clerk for Lloyd's Bank of London, earned between $18-$31,000.

The Thieves Come in the Night

2010-03-17T17:48:00.001-07:00

I woke up this morning to find someone had broken into my office overnight and had stolen my Mac and laptop. (I am writing this on my husband’s computer) Now my car has been broken into numerous times but this theft feels personal. The burglar had to walk down our front steps and around a path to open a sliding glass door.

What’s most funny is that he left behind two old PCs. I guess even thieves prefer Macs.

And then he had the nerve to take our New York Times.

I had all sorts of stuff on that computer, including a draft of a book proposal. I think I am backed up but it will take a day or so to make sure.

But now my cozy (and always-messy) office doesn’t feel quite the samel/

The End of Publishing as We Know It

2010-03-15T15:29:00.000-07:00

This video is making the rounds on Twitter today. You have to watch the whole thing to get it.

Here's an interview with Zoe Uffindell, the director. She lives in the UK.

City Lights Books named PW's Bookseller of the Year

2010-03-13T11:00:00.000-08:00

Publisher’s Weekly has named City Lights Books on Columbus Avenue its “Bookseller of the Year” for 2010.

“City Lights matches its literary strength with new marketing tools including a Web site, monthly e-newsletter, fan pages on Facebook and MySpace and daily news blasts through the store's Twitter account,” said an article in PW explaining the store’s selection.

The store will be honored in May at Book Expo America, the publishing industry’s annual convention, and the magazine will do a feature story on the store in its April 26^th edition.

City Lights was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. It started out as an all-paperback store and now sells hardcover and softcover books from major and minor publishers on three floors. Two years after the store's founding, Ferlinghetti launched a publishing arm that at first printed a "Pocket Poets" series. City Lights Publishers now has about 100 books in print and publishes about a dozen new titles each year.

San Francisco Magazine nominated for two National Magazine Awards

2010-03-10T16:03:00.000-08:00

San Francisco Magazine was nominated for two National Magazines awards today, one for general excellence and one for public service.

It’s a fabulous magazine, and my opinion has nothing to do with the fact that my brother, Steven Dinkelspiel, is president of the magazine. (Okay, only a little) I send my congratulations to him, to the editor, Bruce Kelley, and to the rest of the staff.

The article that brought San Francisco the nomination for Public Service is one written in December 2009 by Danelle Morton about the Lembi family’s real estate empire, now collapsing. Morton, who ghost wrote Staying True, the memoir of Jenny Sanford, the wife of the disgraced South Carolina governor, spent a year and a half looking into the Lembi’s extensive collection of apartments. The family was one of the city’s largest holders of real estate, with apartment buildings ranging from fancy places on Nob Hill to more pedestrian places in the Mission. It’s an excellent article that details how the availability of cheap money a few years ago permitted the Lembis to buy so much real estate, how they mistreated some of their tenants, and how the crash had brought their empire tumbling down.

San Francisco was nominated in the General Excellence category for magazines with circulation less than 100,000 for its April, August, and December issues.

In 2005, I attended the National Magazine Awards. San Francisco had been nominated then, but unfortunately didn’t win. I have a good feeling for this year.

Should a Daughter Help her Mother Commit Suicide?

2010-03-09T09:39:00.000-08:00

Zoe Fitzgerald Carter was living in Berkeley with her husband and two daughters when her mother began to call her from Washington DC to talk about ending her life. Carter’s mother, Margaret, a vivacious, intelligent woman, was suffering from Parkinson’s and a host of other ailments and could no longer stand the pain. She wanted to take charge of her life – and her death – by committing suicide.

But Margaret wanted the help of Carter and her two sisters, and that request, and all its ramifications are the subject of Carter’s moving memoir, Imperfect Endings: A Daughter's Tale of Life and Death. Published just last week by Simon and Schuster, Imperfect Endings is already provoking discussion about filial loyalty, love, and assisted suicide. The book was excerpted in “O” Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, was praised in the New York Times’ Health Blog, and was picked as one of Barnes & Noble’s ‘Discover Great New Writers” books for 2010.

Carter will be appearing at Book Passage in Corte Madera at 7 pm March 11 and at 7 pm March 18 at Read Books in Danville. In anticipation of her appearances, Ghost Word posed a few questions to Carter.

When your mother first started to raise the question of killing herself, did

you take her seriously? How long was it before you believed she truly wanted

to end her life? How long before you could accept her decision?

My mother started talking about ending her life eighteen months before she did it, and I did not take her seriously at first. I understood that she was worried about where her Parkinson’s disease was taking her, but I did not think she would kill herself.

It wasn’t until she got a prescription for a lethal dose of Seconal, and arranged to meet a member of the Hemlock Society’s “Caring Friends” network, that I began to understand how determined she was. Accepting her decision was a lot harder. I think it happened in increments but it wasn’t until about two weeks before she started her final fast that I gave her my overt support. I realized I had to get my own needs and desires out of the equation.

Do you think your mother knew how difficult her decision would be for you

and your sisters, particularly as helping her could put you at legal risk?

Or were her pain and discomfort so bad she could not think beyond that?

I think my mother was so caught up in the “how and when “of her death that it was difficult for her to focus on how my sisters and I felt about it. She had a tendency to call us up in the middle of the day and casually ask: “How would May first be for me to kill myself?” It drove me a little crazy, frankly.

On the other hand, she chose to end her life by fasting so we could be there with her without legal risk. (It is not illegal to witness a suicide, only to participate in it.) That was a very selfless choice.

But then – just to make things complicated -- when the fast wasn’t progressing quickly enough, she took a large amount of morphine. Although she survived it and lived three more days, I found this really upsetting. It raised some very potent issues about the psychic and even moral meaning of participating in someone’s death. I don’t think we can gloss over that part.

Your book raises the question of loyalty. To whom do we owe it? Did you

think part of being a good daughter was helping your mother die?

I think this is one of the key questions in the book. I really struggled with what it meant to be a “good daughter” – help my mother kill herself, or talk her out of it. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to revisit this dilemma and try to understand it better.

After having helped your mother hasten her death, do you think assisted

suicide should be legalized? What problems would it solve? What issues might

it raise?

I do think it should be legal, despite feeling that assisted suicide is tough on families and loved ones. At this point, physician assisted suicide is only legal in Oregon and Washington although Montana just passed a similar law.

One of the advantages of making assisted suicide legal is that these laws lay out very specific guidelines and regulations. I’m not sure about Montana, but in Oregon and Washington, two doctors have to determine that the person has less than six months left to live and there is a two-week waiting period.

There are other stipulations as well: for example, doctors can request that patients get evaluated by a psychiatrist. Obviously, you do not want people getting doctors to help them to die if they are only depressed or in crisis.

Some people worry that certain groups might feel pressure to end their lives if assisted suicide is legal, but if you look at the states where it is legal, not that many people take advantage of it. And the upside is enormous. People like my mother, who are in their right mind and want to die, can get help and support from a medical professional, and their family members are not forced to negotiate what can feel like a Sophie’s Choice between watching their loved ones suffer and entering the murky, guilt-producing world of “hastened death.”

How have you talked to your two daughters about their grandmother’s death?

What is their reaction?

I talked to both my girls about it before the book came out. They did not have any idea that my mother hadn’t died naturally so it was a surprise to them. Although they were both in D.C. with my mother during the last two weeks of her life, they were only four and eight at the time and I didn’t think it was right to burden them with that knowledge. It would have been confusing.

They’re 13 and 17 now and have both read the book and liked it. We’ve talked a lot about the importance of preserving our own memories of my mother and how the book is just a small slice of all that happened and all we felt about her.

Ten years after your mother's death, do you think that she did the right thing?

I think she did what she needed to do and I admire her strong-mindedness. She was absolutely fearless and unblinking at the end. But I don’t think there is ever a right or wrong in these situations. Everyone does the best they can under really complicated circumstances.

Bancroft Library celebrates its 150th birthday

2010-03-05T09:54:00.000-08:00

Attention history lovers! The Bancroft Library at the UC Berkeley is 150 years old and is throwing itself a party.

The party won’t be centered around cake and candles (although there will be a reception on Friday night). Instead, it will feature scholarship, which is only fitting for one of the world’s most distinguished libraries.

Historians from around the country will present papers on March 5 and 6 on different aspects of California history. The symposium starts with a look at the period when California belonged to Mexico, examines Native-American life in the 19^th century, looks at the life of Hubert How Bancroft and his contribution to documenting the development of the state, and more.

The talks have titles like “More than Hide and Tallow: America's California Commerce before the Gold Rush,” and “The Ghost Dance and the Crisis of Gilded Age Nevada.”

Some of the library’s most interesting photographs and documents will also be on display. One exhibit will highlight materials from the early days of the Bancroft Library and another will look at Hubert Howe Bancroft, the bookseller turned publisher turned historian.

Few realize that Bancroft, who moved to California in 1852 to set up an east coast annex of his cousin’s bookstore, collected the core of the current library’s collection. In addition to selling books, Bancroft collected manuscripts, maps, and letters about California, Oregon, Washington, the Rocky Mountain states, Alaska, British Columbia, Mexico, and Central America.

By 1870, Bancroft had amassed 16,000 volumes, and the number continued to grow every year. During the latter part of th3 19^th century, he sent out a team of interviewers to talk to many of the early settlers of the state. These handwritten interviews can still be found in the archives of the Bancroft.

In 1905, Bancroft, who had established a library in San Francisco, sold it to the University of California. It was a providential transaction, for the collection was transferred to Berkeley before the 1906 earthquake and fire.

In 2008, the Bancroft renovated its building facing the Campanile, and researchers can now look at the archives in a light-filled reading room on the top floor of the building. If you like history, consider becoming a fan of the Bancroft on Facebook. The library sends posts a historic photograph every day.

IPad looks cool

2010-03-02T13:35:00.000-08:00

You will be able to point the Ipad at the sky, and with its GPS unit, the stars above will appear on the unit. You can then find out more information about what you are looking at.

This is just one of the features demonstrated in this video. Penguin CEO John Makinson is presenting the demo at a presentation in London. (via Publisjers Marketplace)

A Get Together to Read all Those Unread Magazines

2010-02-26T08:11:00.000-08:00

If readers of Ghost Word are anything like me, they have a huge stack of unread magazines towering – or toppling – somewhere in their home.

For years, that was the condition of my extensive collection of New Yorkers. Past issues, some three or four years old, sat stacked on a table in my bedroom. I always wanted to read them. I always meant to, but I never got around to it. In desperation, I let my subscription lapse.

In honor of all those unread magazine, The Booksmith will host the first National Magazine Day on Saturday. Starting at 1 pm, people are invited to come to the Haight Street store in San Francisco and bring their stack of unread magazines. For $5, they can hang out in the store and read for hours, drink Philz Coffee, snack, and finally conquer that paper mess. At 6 pm, Kevin Smokler (whose idea this was in the first place) will moderate a discussion with Derek Powazek (Fray), Jen Angel (formerly of Clamor), Jeremy Smith (of the digital Shareble.net), and Andrew Leland (managing editor of The Believer).

Once you have finished all those magazine and have vowed to only read content on the web, pick up some tickets to hear San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll interview Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon.com and the author of Say Anything, a recent book on the history of blogging. Carrol and Rosenberg will be in conversation on Monday March 1 at 7 pm at the Berkeley Rep. It is a benefit for Park Day School in Oakland.

Bay Area Literary Tidbits

2010-02-22T08:34:00.000-08:00

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Andrew S. Ross took a look at the success of Books, Inc, the 11-store independent chain in the Bay Area on Sunday. Rescued from bankruptcy in 1996 by Michael and Margie Scott Tucker, the 149-year old company is thriving because it stays lean and treats each store separately.

“We buy for each individual store, seeing each store as a reflection of its community," Scott Tucker told Ross. In Books Inc.'s case, wrote Ross, “it also includes special shopping nights with a portion of the proceeds going to local schools, and discounts for community book clubs. "Integrating with the community will become more important as progress marches on," said Margie Scott Tucker.

University Press Books in Berkeley has its own unique way of connecting with community. On Monday, Feb. 22, it will host its second Slow Reading Dinner , where guests munch on food foraged from the Berkeley Hills cooked by a master chef. Then, over bottles of wine, the guests will read passages from their favorite books. Slowly, of course.

Two Bay Area authors are featured in Oprah Magazine in March. Zoe Fitzgerald Carter’s forthcoming memoir, Imperfect Endings, about her mother’s quest to commit suicide – with Carter’s assistance – is excerpted. Carter is a friend: we went to Columbia Journalism School together and our daughters work on the Berkeley High newspaper together. She gave me an advance copy of the book and I must say it packs a wallop. It is beautifully written, which almost disguises the anguish Carter felt at contemplating whether to help her mother die. Carter will be having her book release party at A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland at 7 pm on March 3.

Gina Welch’s In the Land of Believers was named one of Oprah’s top 10 books for March. Welch, who is from Berkeley, is a secular Jew who spent two years at Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, VA. Welch starts attending the church as a skeptic, but soon comes to understand – and appreciate – aspects of evangelical Christianity.

Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd is just ordinary

2010-02-18T08:01:00.000-08:00

Every since I read Any Human Heart I have been a fan of William Boyd's. It's the story of one man's life, and at the same time the story of the British Empire in the 20th century. The main character, Logan Gonzago Mountstuar, is a writer and his life interesects with Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set, the Spanish Civil War, the glory days of Paris, and much more. The book is written in diary form and purports to be Mountstuar's autobiography.

Restless came next and I was amazed at how different it was from Any Human Heart.It was a spy thriller set in Europe in World War II. But the more I learned about Boyd, I realized that was his talent as a writer. His books are all completely different from one another.

I was really excited to get an advance copy of his newest novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms. Unfortunately, I did not like it. It, too, is a take on a genre -- the innocent man done wrong who must confront the big, bad corporation -- genre. You know, a book like those written by John Grisham.

It opens with Adam Kindred, a climatologist who comes to London to interview for a job. He is Australian by birth and recently lost a plum academic assignment in the US because he had a fling with one of his students. (And his wronged wife's family donates generously to the school, hastening his exit.) Kindred goes to eat dinner after the interview, strikes up a casual conversation with a fellow diner, and returns a file the diner inadvertantly left at the restaurant. When Kindred arrives at the apartment, he finds the diner (who is really a doctor researching a new asthma drug for a pharmaceutical company) with a knife stuck in his abdomen. Kindred stupidly takes it out, thus putting his fingerprints all over it. He hears a noise in the apartment. The killer! He flees and soon he his being chased by both the police and the killer. Oh, and also by the big bad pharmaceutical company. See, the dead man is really a doctor who has discovered that the miracle asthma drug the company is developing has killed 14 children in clinical trials.

Kindred has to disappear completely and Ordinary Thunderstorms is a reflection, in part, on just how a person can sever all links to a past life. Kindred ditches his credit and bank cards, his mobile phone, and his identification. He sleeps on a fogotten patch of ground near the Thames, begs by day, and eats roasted seagull by night. He visits the soup kitchen of a local church and bathes in the bathrooms of train stations.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post liked this book a lot and argues that the over the top, hackkneyed first chapter is a deliberate act by Boyd. Charles says the book gets better along the way. I agree. The book does get better, but its stereotypical depiction of big bad business seems predictable and tired. Boyd does create compelling characters, particularly a young prostitute and her son who befriend Kindred, but overall I would say skip this one. Dinitia Smith sort of says the same thing in the Barnes and Noble review. Which is okay, because Boyd has such a rich backlist. I think I will go read some of his earlier books.

The San Francisco Writers' Conference

2010-02-13T09:20:00.000-08:00

I attended the San Francisco Writers' Conference on Friday, which continues through Sunday at the Mark Hopkins Hotel.

With more than 300 registrants, it must be the largest writing conference in the Bay Area. Unlike others I have attended, the SFWC places a large emphasis on the business side of publishing – how to build a platform, how to use social media to extend your brand, how to set up your own book tour and create events, how self-publishing can be a viable option. Then there are workshops on finding an agent. (Packed, of course.)

The result, in a certain sense, is that everybody is looking to someone else for something. Unpublished writers want tips on how to get an agent from published writers; a chance to pitch to agents; and have numerous questions for editors on what they are looking for. Agents at the conference are interested in meeting acquisitions editors they don’t know, and I bet the editors are looking to know more agents so they get more submissions.

There future of publishing was on everyone’s mind. Alan Rinzler, the executive editor of Jossey-Bass, gave a talk on why now is the best time ever to publish a book. Believe me, the room was packed. Rinzler spun off a few statistics about how business is looking up: stock prices for publishing companies went up an average of 18.8% in 2009; more debut novels were published last year than ever before; young kids are reading more.

But the bottom line came to this traditional answer: editors are always looking for good books. When Rinzler reads a great proposal, it is akin to falling in love. His heart pitter patters. His breath grows short. Excitement mounts. (He didn’t really say that, but he meant that)

A few other tidbits I gleaned:

Content rules. As an author, you must build your brand by writing well, and not just on the page but on Twitter, Facebook, on your blog (and yes, you must have one) and on all those nice hand-written thank you notes you must send out to everyone you meet. The idea is to distinguish yourself and stand out from the crowd. If everyone is writing thank you notes, though, what happens?

Even though everyone is talking about e-books, a writer must publish a real book to be taken seriously.

Even huge authors had to start somewhere. At the keynote at Friday’s lunch, Steve Berry, who has sold 10 million books, (and to think I had never heard of him before) had to send out a manuscript 86 times before a publisher bought it. His message was important: have faith in yourself as a writer and don’t give up.

At the cocktail party at the end of the day, the self-publishing company Author Solutions unveiled a new book marketing program for authors. It is called AuthorHive, and it is a one-stop shop where authors can put together a tailored publicity plan. AuthorHive can be hired to send out just a press release (about $300), set up radio interviews, do a blog tour, create a book trailer or website, etc. AuthorHive promises to end the piecemeal approach to book marketing by giving authors a central place to coordinate their book marketing efforts. Since this company is a subsidiary of a self-publishing company, it may be more geared to that group rather than writers who have books coming out with publishing companies.

While a central place to coordinate marketing sounds like a great idea, I was immediately struck by the company’s name. AuthorHive sounds suspiciously like AuthorBuzz, the publicity company run by MJ Rose, an author and consultant. AuthorBuzz puts ads on Shelf Awareness or other blogs. It seems that the creators of AuthorHive want to capitalize on Rose’s success by choosing a similar name. The tag line for AuthorHive is “create some buzz for your book.”

I twittered about this last night and immediately heard back from MJ Rose. “May be but I do advertising with a background of being CD if 150 mil dollar ad agency and am author myself. Live &die by my rep.”

In English, Rose says she brings her background of being the creative director of a huge ad agency plus her experience as an author.

Still, one more example of how the transformation of the publishing business is having an impact on authors and their role in selling books.

Bay Area Literary Tidbits

2010-02-04T10:01:00.000-08:00

There are lots of exciting writing possibilities in Oakland these days:

The library system is putting on a series of writing workshops in three branches. People can learn how to write short fiction, poetry, or memoir or teens can take a course on blogging.

More interested in journalism? The Community Media Access Center in the West Oakland branch is hosting a six-month course to train community journalists. The good news? It pays a $1,000 stipend.

Over in Berkeley, things are a bit different. New York Times blogger Michelle Quinn visited the main branch of the Berkeley Public Library and was atonished by what she read. Hint: it concerns bugs.

Writer Michael Lewis is a Hollywood darling, yet he remains true to his hometown of Berkeley.

San Francisco writer Ethan Watters offers 10 things to know before going on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.

Journalist Paul McHugh has penned a mystery called Deadlines that Mercury News reporter Pete Carey says is an accurate portrait of metropolitan journalism in a difficult era. Carey likes the book, too,

Larry King Picks Towers of Gold for his Book of the Week

2010-02-02T09:19:00.000-08:00

Imagine my surprise when I heard from a Larry King producer that the very popular CNN talk show host wanted to list Towers of Gold as his book pick for the week starting February 1, 2010.

I guess King wants to showcase responsible bankers for once.

Amazon has called "uncle" but the truce is really just the beginning

2010-02-01T12:09:00.000-08:00

On Sunday evening, Amazon came to its senses and decided to allow Macmillan to set a price of $12 to $15 for new e-books. As of Monday afternoon, the buy links for Macmillan had not yet been reactivated, though.

The more I read, the less I understand about this issue. There are so many pricing points and percentages and sales models. I have never worked at a bookstore or in a publishing house, so the finer points elude me.

Lots of other people have interesting things to say, though. Here are a few:

Andy Ross in his Ask the Agent blog

The Shatzin Files

Author Charles Stross

Wired.com

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Who Cares About the Authors?

2010-01-30T12:36:00.000-08:00

What a rude shock to wake up this morning and find that Amazon has stopped selling all books published by Macmillan, including the new paperback release of Towers of Gold.

Macmillan has told Amazon it wants to set its ebook rates at $15 rather than Amazon's standard $9.99. In an attempt to pressure Macmillan, Amazon has removed the "buy button" from every Macmillan books. (This also has a lot to do with the new iPad and Steve Jobs comments' that lots of publishers are unhappy with Amazon.)

This is disturbing. What is equally disturbing are all the comments left on the New York Times website about the controversy. Most say ebooks aren't worth $15, go to your library, wait and buy the books used for .01. The emphasis is on finding a bargain.

What's left out of this equation is compensation for the author. It takes a long time to write a book and the average author probably loses money on his or her books. I spent eight years researching and writing my book and the last 18 months promoting it. Believe me, I am running a deficit.

If readers want new books, they have to spend money on the books so authors can afford to write them. That's why it is reasonable to ask $15 for a Kindle version (of which I would get a few pennies.) Yes, electronic books are less expensive since there are no direct publishing costs, but don't forget all the back end costs of editing, preparing boos, designing the book, promoting it, etc.)

I for one, am going to stop using Amazon and I urge everyone to do the same. If you want to buy a book on line go to Powell's Books or Indiebound instead.

UPDATE: Later in the day, Macmillan CEO John Sargent bought an ad on the website Publisher's Marketplace. It was a letter to all Macmillan authors and illustrators and their literary agents explaining the disagreement. I am glad Macmillan is trying to communicate with us.

The World of Wine and Isaias Hellman

2010-01-29T09:52:00.000-08:00

I’ve been poking around the world of wine recently, both for some stories I have done for the New York Times and a book I am contemplating. Two things have come up this week that bring together my work on Isaias Hellman and Towers of Gold and winemaking.

First, I got a chance to tour Pt. Molate in Richmond, the place where Hellman and other members of the California Wine Association built the world’s largest wine processing facility in 1908.

The CWA, which controlled about seven-eighths of California’s wine production (everything from growing grapes, making wine, bottling and shipping it) lost its facilities in the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco. The organization then turned to the East Bay, at a point north of today’s Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, where a facility would be next to the railroad and a port. It built a massive brick building with crenellated towers resembling a German castle.

Winehaven, as the plant was called, shut down during Prohibition and the Navy ran a fuel depot on the property for dozens of years. The Navy has left and a Berkeley developer and the Guidiville Band of Pomo Indians are trying to build a five-star resort complete with Indian gaming on the property. The main Winehaven building still stands, and the developers would repair it and turn it into the casino.

Pt. Molate has been closed to the public for years since much of the ground is contaminated. But you can drive through and see the castle, old bungalows that once housed winery staff and then navy personnel, a vine covered warehouse, and more. In my tour, I got to see the air raid shelter in the factory’s basement and there were still cans of drinking water from 1953, stacks of gurneys, portable commodes, and wool blankets. The Navy left a lot of stuff when it closed the fuel dept. The Richmond Museum is taking a lot of it, but debris remains.

I really enjoyed my tour and the chance to glimpse this side of Isaias Hellman. He dabbled in wine all his life, buying the renowned Rancho Cucamonga in 1871. He hired the French wine maker Jean Louis Sansevain to run his vineyards, and he exported wine around the country.

Which brings me to my next connection: this blog post from a group of wine lovers about Hellman’s 1875 sweet wine called Angelica. They tasted it two days ago and gave it a 97 rating! That’s very impressive for a wine so old.

Richard Jennings of Mountain View, the taster, assessed the angelica this way: Bricked medium cranberry red color with clear meniscus; fascinating, VA, coffee liqueur, chocolate, raisinette nose; tasty, rich, chocolate, orange, raspberry, coffee liqueur, raspberry syrup palate with good acidity; long finish (bottled from wood in 1921; reminiscent of both a mature Port, but with greater color -- no doubt due to the 46 years in wood before bottling -- and a mid-1800s vintage Madeira Bastardo, i.e., vintage Madeira from a red grape, with the acidity of a Terrantez or Verdelho)

I have a few bottles of this in my cellar. Anyone want to come and try it with me?

Bay Area Literary Musings

2010-01-27T21:44:00.000-08:00

Of course the big news of the day is the Apple iPad. I loved all the jokes about how it sounds like a sanitary napkin. The interface to read books does seem appealing, but I am still not sure if I can be lured away from my printed paper. For me, an individual book represents the expression of an author’s thoughts and personality and I never find the same connection while reading on a computer.

I am more tempted by the netbook possibility of the iPad. It seems like the perfect size to tout around on an interview or to the Bancroft library when I need to take notes. I have become completely addicted to my iPhone, so I can imagine falling hard for the iPad.

A heads up: Every wonder why there is animosity between the Jews from central Europe and eastern Europe? Ever wonder why some Jews have Christmas trees and celebrate Christmas? Ever think that Jews in California don’t seem all that Jewish? If so, come to a discussion Thursday Jan. 28 at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center on California Street near Arguello. Fred Rosenbaum, author of The Cosmopolitans, a book about the growth of the Bay Area Jewish community, and I will be in a discussion moderated by Francesco Spagnolo, the Director of Research at the Judah L. Magnes Museum . We’ll talk about the particular characteristics of Jews in the Bay Area, their contributions, and what they have accomplished, (or not) The panel starts t 7 pm.

The New York Times has picked up 1,000 new subscribers since it launched its Bay Area edition in late October.

Since I am writing regularly for this section, I am delighted to learn of the positive response to our work.

Earlier this year I pointed to the release of a book by Stanford professor Terry Castle, who also writes for the London Review of Book. Castle”s book, The Professor and Other Writings, has just been released. Salon interviewed with Castle, and she has a lot of intriguing things to say. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Sex, particularly lesbian sex, is a consistent theme in your new book. What did you think of Katie Roiphe's recent essay on the lack of carnality among today’s young American male novelists?

I enjoyed Katie Roiphe’s article immensely. She’s right. Some of these "emo-guy" writers -- I won’t name names -- suffer from advanced cases of male estrogen oversaturation. They have the heartbreak of floppy-man-boob disease. And no, I’ve never been bothered by carnality in writing. I think Philip Roth is a genius. Male horn-dogging doesn’t bother me that much. (Maybe because it doesn’t affect me directly.) The writing is what matters. I once saw Norman Mailer jogging shirtless in Provincetown in some huge, billowing turquoise Lonsdale boxing trunks. A lumbering and majestic sight. I’ve been trying to emulate the look myself ever since.

Don’t’ forget to come hear San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll interview writer Dave Eggers Feb 1 at 7 pm at Berkeley Rep.

Who knew books were so versatile?

2010-01-25T13:42:00.001-08:00

A hat tip to Allison Hoover Bartlett, author of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, for sending this to me

Falling for a bookstore

2010-01-22T09:26:00.000-08:00

I consider myself an independent bookstore devotee, which means I wander into bookstores any chance I get and take a look at which books are on display.

Earlier this week, I feel in love. Again. I gave a reading at The Green Arcade on Market Street and Gough, a store founded by Patrick Marks, who used to be a book buyer at the now-defunct Cody’s.

Green Arcade is a community bookstore, which may not seem so obvious since it is located on a busy intersection. But it sits on the edge of Hayes Valley with its hundreds of apartments and restored Victorians.

The Green Arcade feels welcoming from the moment you walk in. The walls are painted a bright red and music comes from a vintage jukebox rescued from an old San Francisco bar, The Golden Spike. There are upholstered armchairs scattered around and the store’s employees have put up tags signaling particular types of books. There are separate sections for the books of Michael Pollan and Rebecca Solnit, for example.

The Green Arcade specializes in “green” books on climate change, gardening, and sustainable agriculture. (Hence it’s name) Why was I reading from Towers of Gold, a book about 19^th century California, then? Well, Patrick Marks also loves history and makes it a subspecialty of the store. (There is also a great kids section)

The vintage juke box

Bay Area Literary Tidbits

2010-01-14T09:25:00.000-08:00

I will be talking at Bookshop West Portal in San Francisco tonight at 7 pm. Please join me!

Marcus Books of Oakland, the nation’s oldest African-American bookstore, may be shutting its doors. The store needs thousands of dollars to stay afloat after its owner, Blanche Richardson, lost funds in a Ponzi scheme and took out a subprime loan.

Donations can be sent to:

Marcus Books
c/o Sandra F. Banks, Esq.
3941 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA 94602

Two literary lions, Kathi Kamen Goldmark (West Coast Live producer, author, and much more) and Sam Barry, (author, HarperOne promotions and much more) have started a new blog to help people navigate the publishing field. It has a great name: The Author Enablers.

Daniel Olivas, an author, lawyer and Stanford graduate, will be discussing his short story collection Anywhere But LA, at Kepler’s Books on Thursday Jan. 21.

Jon Carroll, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist, will interview Dave Eggers at Berkeley Rep on Monday Feb. 1. It is a benefit for Park Day School.

Sometimes books can get a second wind. (No Bay Area reference, but well-regarded book)

Promising Books of 2010

2010-01-03T19:13:00.000-08:00

It’s a new year, which means a whole new set of books to read. Here are some forthcoming books from Bay Area authors, or authors with ties to the Bay Area, which I think will be worth your time:

January

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters (just published) – Ethan, one of the founders of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, is an incredibly interesting thinker. He looks at the world through such a distinct lens. His latest book examines how the U.S. has exported its views on mental illness around the world. Conditions like anorexia, first diagnosed in the U.S., are increasingly common around the world. The Japanese now buy $1 billion of Paxil, the antidepressant, each year. Who would have thought America would do such a good job exporting its problems? Ethan will hold a book launch party at Booksmith on Haight Street Jan 21 at 7:30 pm.

The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle – I was wandering around the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association convention at the Marriott in downtown Oakland in October when I came upon Castle and a stack of her books. It was the annual cocktail party where publishers bring authors to meet booksellers. (I was there as a guest) The room was packed, and crowds were gathered around high-profile authors such as Po Bronson and Annie Barrows. Castle’s table, by contrast, was relatively empty, so I went over and got a signed copy of her book.

A few days later I picked up The Professor and Other Writings and began to read. To my surprise, I couldn’t set it down. I had never heard of Castle before, but it quickly became apparent that I was in the minority. She is a professor of English at Stanford and writes interesting and thoughtful autobiographical essays for the London Review of Books, the Atlantic, and Slate. Susan Sontag declared Castle “the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.” (One of the essays in the book describes the pair’s peculiar and strained relationship) The book is a collection of Castle’s work and the essays range from one about looking for the grave of an uncle who died in World War I to one examining a relationship she had with one of her female professors. The pieces are absorbing and well worth your time.

March

Imperfect Endings by Zoe Fitzgerald Carter – Carter’s memoir, which will be excerpted in O, Oprah’s magazine, tells the almost unbelievable story of her mother’s suicide. Margaret, who has been living with Parkinson’s disease for 26 years, decides she has had enough and wants to die. But she insists that Carter and her two sisters help her plan her death. They are required to attend it as well. Imperfect Endings raises difficult questions about love and loyalty, but it is written with such style and sympathy that it is difficult to put down. Carter, who lives in the East Bay, has written for New York, Premiere, and other national magazines.

Impatient with Desire by Gabrielle Burton – This is a novel about the ill-fated Donner Party with a focus on George Donner’s wife, Tamsen. Burton, who lives in Los Angeles, has been fascinated by Tamsen Donner for decades and came out with a nonfiction memoir on the topic in 2008. (I wrote about Burton’s fascination and attempts to retrace Donner’s last steps here.) Now she has used her considerably writing skills to craft a moving and poignant novel done in a journal format. Impatient With Desire looks at Tamsen Donner’s resilience and her determination to get her children to safety.

April

The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrist’s Reflections on Healing in a Changing World by Dora Calott Wang is a memoir that explores the high cost of managed care. When Dora first became a psychiatrist, she actually counseled and helped people with mental health problems. But managed care companies soon took over the health care industry and gave bean counters, rather than doctors, the power to approve treatments. In this well-written and moving memoir, Dora describes the dismantling of the mental health safety net. Hospitals close, ill patients are turned out on the streets, and others die because their insurance plans deny them much-needed medical care. In the middle of this gloom, Dora has a baby girl and the memoir recounts how she reconciles her desires to protect Zoe with her growing powerlessness to help her patients. Dora is a psychiatrist who resides in New Mexico but she received a master’s in writing at UC Berkeley and did her medical residency at UCSF.

The San Francisco Chronicle came out with a list of notable books coming out in January 2010.

When bankers were philanthropic: the Hellman Brothers

2009-12-27T12:57:00.000-08:00

Sam Watters, a chronicler of the architecture of Los Angeles, wrote his post-Christmas column on the buildings constructed in the early years of the 20th century by Isaias and Herman Hellman.

Watters tries to draw a parallel between the actions of the Hellmans with today's bankers:

"Brinks must be stuffing its armored delivery trucks with Goldman Sachs' annual bonuses. The company's compensation and benefit pool for 2009 is expected to top $20 billion, an average of more than $600,000 for each of the 31,700 company employees whose jobs were saved a year ago by a taxpayer bailout. Among the questions raised by this bonanza: What will bankers do with the money? "

As you see, today's bankers come up short. Watters then goes on to talk about how each Hellman brother constructed a building on their old homesteads that still stand today.

Herman Hellman lived in a small house on Fourth and Spring in Los Angeles, and in 1903 he started construction on one of the city's first steel-reinforced concrete buildings. He brought in Albert Rosenheim, an architect from St. Louis, to design the future home of the Merchants Bank. It is now known as Banco Popular (see photo above) I only learned recently that Rosenheim was related to Herman's wife. The building cost $1 million, a huge amount of money at that time.

A few years later, Isaias Hellman hired the architectural firm Morgan and Wells to design a new headquarters for the Farmers and Merchants Bank, Los Angeles' first successful bank. The building on Fourth and Main streets still stands and is used for commercials and parties. I gave a talk last year there for the Jewish Historical Society of Southern California.

Watters' piece is nice. He even mentions my name. My only complaint is that much of the information comes from Towers of Gold and he never mentions the title of my book.

Cindy Snow's Best Books of 2009

2009-12-23T11:39:00.000-08:00

Cindy Snow is in the enviable position of knowing about “hot” books before most people.

For the past few years, Snow has worked at A Great Good Place for Books in the Montclair section of Oakland, not really for the money, but for the access to all the galleys and ARCs sent by publishers. The backroom of the bookstore is jammed with stacks of books, and Snow and the other employees can pick whatever they choose to read.

For her list of the best books she read in 2009, Snow, an Oakland resident, mostly stuck to fiction, although she threw in one non-fiction book on South Africa.

The Unit by Ninni Holmquist (I had never heard of this dystopian novel by this Swedish novelist, but the trailer looks intriguing.)

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (This winner of the National Book Award seems to be stacked on the counter of every bookstore I have gone into these last few days. I think the publisher made the right decision to rush this out in paperback. I have bought tw0 copies myself for gifts.)

Olive Kittredge by Elizabeth Strout

Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson

Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Brooklyn by Colm Toiben

Under the Dome by Stephen King

Alive in Necropois by Doug Dorst

Little Bee by Clive Cleve

If you like these “best of” lists, the blog Largehearted Boy has very conveniently aggregated dozens of Best of 2009 lists, ranging from Amazon and Barnes and Noble to a large collection of litblogs.

Nancy Chirinos' Best of 2009 list

2009-12-21T10:26:00.000-08:00

For the past few years, I have asked Nancy Chirinos, a voracious reader, to provide Ghost Word with a list of the favorite books she read in 2009. Nancy has reviewed books for the Chronicle and lives in Noe Valley in San Francisco. Here are her thoughts:

“This is one of my favorite lists to make. I keep a book journal where I grade 'em all, so it's easy for me to pick the year's A's. Not as many good books this year, but the year's not over. I'm reading Zeitoun by Dave Eggers which I expect will be a fav, and slowly reading some Pema Chodron and Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte.”

The List:

When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson, 3rd in a detective trilogy. I loved them all.

The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti, kind of a Dickensian tale.

Infidel by Ayan Hirsi Ali, fascinating memoir

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

The Road Home by Rose Tremain--loved it

Stairs to a Gate by Lorrie Moore--loved it too

The Hemmings of Monticello by Annette Gordon Reed--fascinating, only non-fiction, non-memoir on my list!

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

That’s what I like about these lists; they vary from person to person. I have only read one of Nancy’s picks – the trilogy of Kate Atkinson. I also love the books, which detail the life of Jackon Brodie, an ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective who solves crimes.

Best Books of 2009

2009-12-19T08:55:00.000-08:00

This has been a good reading year for me. Freed from the constraints of working on my own book – although I spent a great deal of time marketing Towers of Gold – I got a chance to read a lot. I think I read 41 books in 2009 (and there are still two weeks to go) which is the most I have read since 2005.

Which is why it is always surprising that so few books seem to make my “best of” list. I enjoy many books while I am immersed in them, but very few keep me thinking after a few weeks. And most embarrassing, I often forget which books I have read. That’s why I started to keep a book diary in 1995, a practice I now extend to my blog.

Here are the most memorable books I read in 2009, Not all of them were pitch-perfect, but I was absorbed by these book and learned something.

Nonfiction:

West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State by Mark Arax. Arax, a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, explores the unknown and obscure corners of California in this loosely connected series of essays. This is a wonderful and absorbing book that offers a fresh take on this large, eclectic state.

A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America, by Peter Richardson. Richardson traces the Ramparts story from its beginnings as a Catholic magazine in Palo Alto through its heyday in San Francisco when the whole world was watching, to its untimely end. A great history of an important magazine with wonderful insights into the counterculture.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession, by Allison Hoover Bartlett. Now Allison is a member of North 24^th, my writing group, so I am a bit biased. But she tells the almost too-crazy-to-be-true story of John Gilkey, who makes himself feel like a member of the intellectual elite by stealing rare books.

We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante, by Eve Pell. How many women could claim to be part of the ruling class, then work to free prisoners in California jails, and end up as an investigative reporter? Pell can, and her memoir is a rare glimpse into a blue blood world that is so proscribed and controlling you will shed tears for the people born into it.

George Being George, the life of George Plimpton, edited by Nelson Aldrich, Jr. – I loved this oral history of George Plimpton, who started the Paris Review. While the book explores Plimpton’s life, loves, and work, it is also a history of the literary world of much of the 20^th century.

Fiction:

Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz – I picked up this thick tome at the Brown University bookstore, during the middle of a college tour with my daughter. From its opening pages I was riveted by the story of a Princeton college admissions administrator who suffers a midlife crisis and crisis of conscience. Korelitz had been a reader for the Princeton admissions office, too, and I liked seeing the fictional essays she created for the book.

All That Work and Still No Boys by Kathryn Ma. Ma, (another friend) has such an unusual – and somewhat subversive voice – that each of these short stories is a revelation. I still can’t stop thinking about the old woman who moves into a retirement home and finds herself worrying about her dining companions in the cafeteria.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe. I lost myself in this novel about a Harvard graduate student who moves back to her family’s home and finds herself plunged into the world of the Salem witch trials.

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostava – This will be released in January 2010. Her previous book, The Historian, was a huge bestseller and the publisher, Little Brown, plans to spen $500,000 alone to promote the new one. I enjoyed The Swan Thieves even more than Kostava’s first book but since there are no vampires in it, it may not do as well. The book deals with a painter who has slashed a famous French impressionist painting and the psychiatrist who treats him – and gets drawn into a world of secrets.

Video on Isaias Hellman and Towers of Gold

2009-12-15T09:00:00.001-08:00

Towers of Gold from Steven Pressman on Vimeo.

Steven Pressman made this wonderful video for the paperback release of Towers of Gold. Pressman, a journalist (he wrote a book on EST founder Werner Erhard), is now producing videos and book trailers.

Kudos to the Bay Area authors whos books have garnered critical acclaim

2009-12-10T08:54:00.000-08:00

Writing a book is not an easy task, as everyone knows. But getting it noticed may even be more difficult. Hundreds of thousands of books are published each year, most to deafening silence. That is why garnering attention for your work is an accomplishement. Ending up on a "Best of" list is truly noteworthy.

Publications around the world are creating their Best of 2009 lists now. (Ghost Word's will come out next week) A number of Bay Area authors have snagged spots on some of those lists and I want to congratulate them.

Allison Hoover Bartlett, whose The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, was selected as a best book of 2009 by the Library Journal.

Linda Himelstein, whose The King of Vodka, was selected by Business Week as one of its best books.

Neil MacFarquhar, whose The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday was selected by Barnes and Noble as a best book. (Neil moved frm San Francisco to New York just a few months ago)

Other books did extremely well, if not (yet) making that particular kind of list.

Kathryn Ma’s debut story collection, All That Work and Still No Boys, won the Iowa Short fiction award and was named a “discovery” book by the Los Angeles Times.

Where to find McSweeney's Panorama newspaper

2009-12-07T17:38:00.000-08:00

Panorama, the 320-page "newspaper" conceived and executed by Dave Eggers and McSweeney's, hits the streets tomorrow, Tuesday Dec 8.

Interestingly, since Eggers billed this as an attempt to reinvent and reinvigorate the newspaper, Panorama will be sold for $5 in independent bookstores around the Bay Area. By doing this, Eggers acknowledges the importance of independents.

Panorama has also engaged numerous volunteers who will walk the streets of San Francisco hawking the paper, a practice that harks back to the golden age of papers when newspapers would often run extra editions to get out breaking news.

McSweeney's publisher Oscar Villalon tweeted a request for newsies on Twitter last week.

Here's a list of bookstores and street corners where you can find Panorama. You can also order it on SFGate, but for $13.

The New York Times Bay Area blog has a Q and A with Eggers.

Secrets of the State revealed in Marin County

2009-12-03T07:53:00.000-08:00

Mt. Tamalpais circa 1922

Courtesy of Marin County Free Library. Anne T. Kent California Room

I went to the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Civic Center in Marin on Wednesday and was treated to a nice surprise.

I had gone there to look at some court documents, and was dismayed to find that the records office had closed at 12:30 pm, due to budget cuts. I had a few hours to kill before a talk, so I wandered to the Marin County library on the fourth floor. There I stumbled upon something I had never heard of: the Anne T. Kent California History Room.

This is an amazing space (really just a portioned section of the library) containing a fabulous collection of books, newspaper clippings, ephemera, and photographs. I looked at some books I had not been able to track down during my research for Towers of Gold and saw others I really wanted to browse through. The collection is wonderful. There was a complete run of the San Francisco Blue Book, a sort of society-oriented phone book, numerous oral histories of Marin County residents, early voter registration records, and books on all the other sections of California.

Marin County Librarian Virginia Keating started collecting material in the 1930s and the room is named after Anne T. Kent, who led the way in the 1920s to establish the county’s free library system.

Its photographs are on-line.

I have to return to Marin to look at those court files. It will be difficult not to spend my time poking around instead in the history room.

Want to know more about the rivalry between German Jews and Eastern European Jews?

2009-12-01T13:14:00.000-08:00

If you want to hear some stories about Jews who have had an impact in the Bay Area or a discussion about the rivalry between central European and eastern European Jews, please come by the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael Wed. Dec 2 at 7 pm. I will be having a discussion on a broad range of topics with Fred Rosenbaum, author of the recently-released Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay. Stephen Dobbs will moderate the discussion.

The New York Times, being the New York Times, is a lightning rod for criticism. The new Bay Area section of the Times is no exception. Read a lively exchange about the strengths and weaknesses of the section in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Writer Michael Lukas isn’t all that impressed with the section, but he changes his mind slightly after hearing what Felicity Barringer, the editor of the section, has to say.

Kevin Smokler interviews Oscar Villalon, the new publishers of McSweeney’s, in The Rumpus. Surprise of the interview: Villalon doesn’t go into bookstores very often.

Is the Book Dead? The San Francisco Version

2009-11-30T11:34:00.000-08:00

It's become routine at book conventions, book fairs, and author gatherings to ponder the dismal fate of the publishing industry and contemplate how e-books will affect book sales.

The Mechanic's Institute in San Francisco is hosting its own version of this discussion on Thursday, and this one promises to be truly interesting.

Panelists include Daniel Handler, (author of the Lemony Snicket books) John McMurtrie, the Chronicle's book section editor, Oscar Villalon, the former editor of the book review, now publisher of McSweeney's, Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon and author of new book on blogging, Brenda Knight, an associate publisher of Cleis Press, and Annalee Newitz, a syndicated columnist for Techsploitation. Alan Kaufman, author of Jew Boy, will moderate the discussion.

The talk starts at 6:30 pm. Details are here.

Bay Area Literary Tidbits

2009-11-19T09:46:00.000-08:00

San Francisco writer T.J. Stiles won the National Book Award in Nonfiction Wednesday night for his biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Siles, who lives in the Presidio with his wife and son, wrote The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt after completing a book about Jesse James. He talks about the project here.Film is courtesy of Galleycat.

The adaption of Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side, about Michael Oher, a homeless African American youth who is adopted by the Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, a white, Christian Southern family and who achieves great success on the football field, will be released Friday, Nov. 20. The advance buzz on the movie is good (Famed Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr apparently cried at a screening) but sources tell me that current relations among Oher and the Tuohys are extremely strained. Oher, who now plays for the Baltimore Ravens, will not be doing any press for the film. The movie has a feel-good ending, but the truth is not as pretty

Disney has shelved a film adaptation of Julies Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Michael Chabon of Berkeley has done the most recent rewrite of the script.

Chabon and his wife, Ayelet Waldman, will be speaking at Berkeley Rep on Dec. 7 in a benefit for Park Day School. This will be the first time the pair has appeared on stage together since they both published memoirs.

The interviewer will be San Francisco columnist Jon Carroll. Do you think he will have the nerve or the gall to ask Chabon what would be harder for him, to have his wife or children die? (Ala Waldman’s essay in the New York Times.) Probably not, but Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs (a fabulous book) mentions that he is somewhat laconic and Waldman pushes him to interact more forcefully in the world. He certainly has been extremely supportive of her writing and other endeavors. So the conversation should be interesting.