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Thursday April 1 7:30 pm
Ava F. Kahn, the editor of Jewish Life in the American West, will discuss and show slides from this groundbreaking book, which demolishes the stereotypes of the typical Westerner and typical Jewish immigrant during the late 1800s. These thought-provoking essays and photographs present a world few people know--a world of Jewish cowboys, pioneers in covered wagons, gold miners, frontier politicians, and suffragettes. Jonathan Kirsch calls this “an intriguing and illuminating glimpse of an overlooked chapter in the history of the American frontier.”
Sunday April 4 7:30 pm
Stew Albert offers a riotous insider’s tour of the inspired chaos that was the Yippie movement in his thoroughly engaging memoir, Who the Hell is Stew Albert? His account of how an “almost-nice Jewish boy” from Brooklyn ended up getting beaten by cops in Chicago, hanging out with Timothy Leary and Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, and juggling a friendship with both Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, reads like a Horatio Alger story on hashish. It also traces in fine detail the rise and fall of the great protest movements of the 1960s, including the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, in an analysis of politics and personalities that is both fond and somewhat rueful.
Tuesday April 6 7:30 pm
Annie Koh, co-founder of Hyphen Magazine, which focuses on Asian American news and culture, is also one of the co-authors of How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office, which was edited by William Upski Wimsatt. Koh and her co-authors have created a war chest of new online and offline tools chosen to capture the imagination of young non-voters in time for the November elections. By documenting 20 success stories of young people who have swung or won elections, they have captured a historical moment when youth-led political movements are beginning to flex their organizational muscles.
Wednesday April 7 7:30 pm
Cara Black returns to Black Oak to read from her best-selling mystery, Murder in the Bastille, which has recently been issued in paperback. After being brutally attacked in a dark alley, Aimée Leduc wakes in the hospital to find that she has lost her eyesight–perhaps permanently. The attack appears to be a case of mistaken identity and the overworked Parisian flics are eager to close her case, but Aimée suspects that something more sinister may be afoot. With the help of her diminutive partner, René, she begins to uncover an unlikely consortium of wealthy arts patrons and underworld thugs whose common interests include a willingness to kill. Slides will be shown during this event.
Tuesday April 13 7:30 pm
Peter Everwine will read from From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems, a long-awaited collection of radiant meditations on nature and aging, which are interspersed with his deft translations from Hebrew and interpretations from Nahuatl, a literature he discovered while living in Mexico. “Everwine’s lyrics and translations--for they all seem part of a single voice--haunt me with their clear, crisp, unsentimental, heartbreaking lines.... Unassuming, hard and unswerving as fate itself.” Paul Mariani
Wednesday April 14 7:30 pm
In the days following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Frederick Turner, a novelist and “Sunday painter” who had always been able to find solace in art, began to feel that it might merely be a harmless decoration, or worse, a useless distraction from truly important matters. His response was to embark on a quest to prove to himself that art does matter, a journey to the caves of France and Spain which contain paintings and engravings more than 32,000 years old. Turner chronicles his travels in his elegant and compelling new book, In the Land of Temple Caves: From St. Emilion to Paris’s St. Sulpice--Notes on Art and the Human Spirit. “Beautifully said, humanely thought out, the story he tells is particularly useful in these sorrowful times. Read, and take heart!” William Kittredge
Thursday April 15 7:30 pm
Daniel Boyarin, the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, will discuss his latest book, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Boyarin argues that the historical separation between Judaism and Christianity was not, in fact, the clearly defined splitting of a single entity identifiable as Judaism into two separate religions, one a hybrid of the other. Rather, the ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by “border-makers,” heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity, imagining religion for the first time as a realm of practice and belief that could be separated from the broader cultural network of language, genealogy, or geography. “His bold thesis will no doubt prove controversial and important." Elaine Pagels
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Monday April 19 7:30 pm
Eddie Yuen will discuss Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement, which he co-edited with Daniel Burton-Rose and George Katsiaficas. The revised and updated sequel to The Battle of Seattle, this dynamic and scholarly book documents the key debates within the anti-globalization movement in the last few years. Both noted academics and grassroots organizers discuss a multitude of issues, including the history and theory of the globalization movement, international networks, and strategic dilemmas.
Tuesday April 20 7:30 pm
The publication of a new revised edition of Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior presented us with an occasion to invite Dan Millman to speak at Black Oak and, to our great joy, he accepted. Millman’s remarkable books, which include the best-selling Way of the Peaceful Warrior, have inspired countless numbers of readers to seek their own spiritual path; don’t miss this opportunity to meet and ask questions of an important teacher and guide.
Wednesday April 21 7:30 pm
Bannie Chow and Thomas Cleary will read from their new book of translations, Autumn Willows: Poetry by Women of China’s Golden Age. This is the first work in English devoted exclusively to three of the greatest poets of the glorious Tang dynasty. While the evocative loveliness of their poems bespeaks the richness of their outer and inner worlds, their lives were marked by tragedies that pre-shadow the decline of the Tang civilization, and the ensuing oppression of all Chinese women. “These exquisite poems evoke the scent, sounds, and colors of another time. The haunting beauty, wisdom, sadness, and longing are timeless.” Yun Wang
Thursday April 22 7:30 pm
Steven Weber, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, explains the political and economic dynamics of a mysterious but important market development in his fascinating book, The Success of Open Source. Much of the innovative programming that powers the Internet is the result of “open source” code--code that is freely distributed as opposed to being kept secret. This development not only poses a significant threat to Microsoft in the marketplace, but has subverted many assumptions about how businesses are run, and how intellectual products are created and produced. Weber argues that this success of the open source community is not a freakish exception to economic principles, but is guided by standards, rules, decisionmaking procedures, and sanctioning mechanisms of its own.
Tuesday April 27 7:300 pm
Jacqueline Kramer, a spiritual counselor and art teacher who has been a practicing Buddhist for the past twenty years, will read from her luminous book, Buddha Mom: The Path of Mindful Mothering, which has recently been issued in paperback. Far from experiencing motherhood as a sidetrack on the path toward spiritual liberation, Kramer has found that fully opening herself to motherhood has deepened her practice. In chapters organized around central Buddhist themes--Simplicity, Nurturance, Joyful Service, Unconditional Love--Kramer shows how her experiences of pregnancy, birth, and raising her daughter to adulthood served as a guide to integrating the roles of parent and spiritual seeker.
Wednesday April 28 7:30 pm
In the early 1970s, while Dr. Daniel Dorman was a resident in psychiatry at the teaching hospital at UCLA, he became responsible for the treatment of a nineteen-year-old woman named Catherine Penney who was suffering from severe schizophrenia. Despite the horrifying intensity of her symptoms, and the prevailing wisdom of the medical establishment, Dorman was determined to avoid using mind-numbing medications and focus instead on the circumstances of Catherine’s family history. Dante’s Cure: A Journey Out of Madness, which was written with Catherine’s consent and contributions (she is now a psychiatric nurse and an activist for mental patients’ rights), is the deeply moving chronicle of a young doctor’s courageous stand against the use of psychotropic medication, and a desperately ill and equally brave young woman’s blossoming into full autonomy and health.
Thursday April 29 7:30 pm
Jesse Shepard returns to Black Oak to read from his highly acclaimed first collection of short stories, Jubilee King, which has recently been published in paperback. These are deft and spare explorations of the distances that spring up between people and separate moments in time. In “Flaw in the Shelter,” an elderly caretaker balanced precariously on his roof learns a sudden lesson about fragility; in “First Day She’d Never See,” a young addict parts with both his car and his bewildering past; and in the title story, a young Mexican man helps an old gringo dig for the bones of a long-dead mare in a last attempt to restore the old man’s prosperity. “Trenchantly observant tales with the burnished light of fables or spiritual teachings.” Booklist
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