Who knew books were so versatile?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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?

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

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

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.

Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big To Fail

I have just started reading Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin and I must say it is a page turner. Sorkin has done a masterful job of narrative non-fiction, making the reader feel like he or she is in the center of the action, in real time.

Since Sorkin only had 10 months to write the book -- and he continued to write his column for the New York Times in this time -- he needed a lot of help. In its current issue, New York Magazine details just how extensive that help was.

With his $700,000 advance, Sorkin hired two researchers. Check. That I understand. But then he also hired three independent editors, count that -- three editors -- to go through various sections of the book. Of course he had his own editor at the publishing house as well.

"With only ten months to conduct interviews and produce a 160,000-word draft, Sorkin hired two researchers to compile exhaustive timelines of virtually every newspaper and magazine article on the crisis, as well as prepare detailed dossiers on each of his central characters," according to the New York magazine article.

"In addition to his editor at Viking, Rick Kot, who edited Barbarians at the Gate, Sorkin asked three freelance editors to work on different portions of the book, including former New York Times Sunday business editor Jim Impoco, now at Reuters, and Hugo Lindgren, New York’s editorial director (who had no involvement in this story). Impoco, in particular, heavily edited the book’s opening three chapters."

This astonishes me. It almost feels like cheating. Throw up some prose and rely on others to make it sing.

In Sorkin's case, however, it was a smart move. His book was an instant New York Times bestseller and has already broken through the clutter of all of the other books written on the financial crisis.

His colleagues at the Times have criticized Sorkin for using their work and not attributing it to them  But since this book was put together so quickly, it's not surprising to hear this.

UPDATE: Lesley Stahl did a great interview with Sorkin for  WowOwow. I liked this part about his writing process:

LESLEY: Did you enjoy writing the book?

ANDREW: You know, I did it under such a time pressure; the whole process was about ten-and-a-half months. So it was painful at some level.

LESLEY: That’s all? That’s quite extraordinary to put out a book like that.


ANDREW: It was a pretty miserable experience on a day-to-day. But trying to get at the emotions and the interconnectedness of these people was a terrific reporting experience. And I had some researchers who were helping me. I used to do my writing typically from midnight to about 6:30 in the morning, like I was back in college. I used to go to the corner store near my apartment, I’d buy a two-liter bottle of diet Coke and a bag of Stacy’s chips from the same guy. He’d laugh at me every time.

LESLEY: And you kept working at your day job, for The New York Times, at the same time?


ANDREW: Yes. Yes, I did.

Catch Towers of Gold on TV

 After a quiet interlude, I am about to do a bevy of events for Towers of Gold. I will be on CBS’ Mosaic show this Sunday Nov. 15 at 5 am. Yes, you read that right: 5 am.

Mosaic is a weekly show on spirituality. This week the host, Rabbi Eric Weiss, brought in guests to discuss Jewish Book Month. I talk about Towers of Gold and how social networking is changing publishing. Howard Freeman, talks about the programs and resources offered by the Jewish Community Library in San Francisco, and Joel Harris, owner of the wonderful independent bookstore, Clayton Books, in Clayton, CA talks about the bookselling environment.

I will be at Congregation Beth David in Saratoga on Tues. Nov 17 at 7:30 pm

I will be at the Marin Chapter of the California Writers Club on Sunday Nov. 22 from 2 to 4 pm. It is held at Book Passage in Corte Madera. I will be talking about how to make your memoir interesting to people other than just your family.

Then I will rush to the new Books, Inc on Fourth Street in Berkeley. The store is hosting a wine tasting and author meet-and-greet for local book groups. Free wine! Free talk! Lots of my favorite authors will be there, including Meg Waite Clayton, Michelle Richmond, Annie Barrows, and more.

I will be talking about Bay Area Jewish History with Fred Rosenbaum and Stephen Dobbs at the Osher Marin JCC on Wednesday, Dec. 2 at 7 pm.

On Thursday, Dec. 3 at 1 pm, I will do a slide/lecture for the Outdoor Art Club in Mill Valley.

For a complete events listing, look here.

A Tribute to Nien Chang, author of Life and Death in Shanghai

I was saddened to read today that Nien Chang, the author of Life and Death in Shanghai, had died.

I only met Nien Chang once, and briefly at that, but it is a meeting I have remembered all my life. I was a reporter in Ithaca, New York, working for the Syracuse Newspapers, and I had free reign to write about almost anything I wanted.

I spent a lot of time writing about events at Cornell University because the school brought in so many interesting speakers, had such distinguished scientists, and a plethora of fabulous authors.

Chan’s memoir, Life and Death in Shanghai, was a critical and commercial success when it was released in1987. I read it and was deeply moved by the deprivations she suffered during China’s Cultural Revolution. Chang was imprisoned and her daughter was murdered by the state.

So when I heard Chang was coming to speak at Cornell, I made sure to arrange an interview with her. We met in a spartan classroom on campus. I came in and she was already seated at a table. She was petite, with gray hair, and wore a dress with a Chinese collar.

What struck me immediately – and what I still remember almost 22 years later – was her calm. Chang had been beaten, brutalized, and bullied by the Chinese authorities, yet she seemed to hold no rancor. She had no bitterness. She had forgiven her captors and tormentors. She was at peace with them.

I was astounded by this. I had never met someone so accepting. Her calm spread over me like a balm and I found myself with a new kind of peace.  Chang was the most profound person I had ever met in my life, and I have never forgotten her.

It seems others feel like I do. James Fallows of The Atlantic has penned an ode to her.

Here is her MySpace page.


The beautiful portrait (above) of Nien Chang was taken by Mary Noble Ours.

McSweeney's "newspaper" issue on San Francisco will be 380 pages

McSweeney’s has announced some details of its newspaper-sized edition focusing on San Francisco and northern California.

The 380-page broadsheet will go on sale the first week of December and feature an investigation into the reconstruction of the Bay Bridge, the growth of pot farms in Mendocino County, a 116-page book section, a 112 page magazine and three pull out posters.

Lots of well-known writers are contributing to the paper, including Stephen King, Michael Chabon, Andrew Sean Greer, Nicholson Baker, Allison Bechdel, Junot Diaz, and Michelle Tea, among others.

“We think that the best chance for newspapers’ survival is do what the internet can’t; namely, use and explore the large-paper format as thoroughly as possible,” the McSweeney’s website reads.

Other tidbits:

The Newspaper Guild unit in San Francisco has formed a freelancer’s unit.

UC Press has a series of podcasts with its various authors.

San Francisco columnist Jon Carroll will interview Brad Bird of Pixar on Nov. 9.

Edgar-nominated mystery writer Cornelia Read will lead a two-day mystery writing intensive at the Claremont Hotel and Spa in November. 

David Weir, who has worked at Wired, Rolling Stone, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, calls on UC Berkeley School of Journalism Dean Neil Henry to have his students investigate the death of Betty Van Patter, an accountant who was murdered while looking into the books of the Black Panthers. This would be like the Chauncey Bailey project. Weir got the idea after reading about the killing and the indifference of local politicians in Peter Richardson’s new book on Ramparts Magazine, A Bomb in Every Issue.

Those students at the J-School are awfully busy, though. They are blogging for the New York Times’ new Bay Area blog, plus hyperlocal blogs in Oakland, Richmond and the Mission District of San Francisco.

Lance Knobel,, who started Berkleyside, the hyperlocal blog I write for, will be talking about the blog tonight on KBLX at 90.7 at 9 pm. Learn all about the hyperlocal movement.

Why Small is the New Big: Hyperlocal Sites

My life is continuing to spin faster than I can handle, and posting to Ghost Word keeps getting left to the end. In recent weeks, my freelance journalism has picked up. I have written some stories for the Bay Area section of the New York Times, as well as a book review for the Los Angeles Times. After blogging so much for so long, it’s nice to be writing for newspapers again.

That said, I am very excited about a new project. In recent weeks I have been writing for a new hyper-local website called Berkeleyside. It’s a website devoted to all things Berkeley, from the lofty (Berkeley’s growing role as a leader in green energy technology) to the simple (the yummy cupcakes at CupKates, a roving cupcake truck.) I am working on Berkeleyside with Lance Knobel and Tracey Taylor, two veteran journalists who have worked both in the U.K. and the U.S, and others.

 As newspapers lay off staff and have difficulty covering local news, hyper-local sites are springing up to fill the void. The Bay Area has dozens of sites covering everything from riding the Muni to Alameda to the Mission District of San Francisco. It’s interesting, then, that Berkeleyside is the only hyperlocal site in town. Others may have avoided Berkeley because there are two newspapers covering news here, The Daily Planet and The Daily Californian.