Monday  April 4 7:30 pm

Sidra Stich, former chief curator at the Berkeley Art Museum, will show slides and talk about her new travel guide, art-SITES—Northern Italy. The world recognizes Italy’s rich heritage of Renaissance and Baroque treasures, but few travelers know that within the past decade new exhibition venues and an expanded gallery scene have also made Italy a leading center for modern and contemporary art. Sidra Stich provides commentaries on museums, galleries, showrooms, architecture, public art structures, film centers, bookstores, and festivals. This book gives an art historian’s introduction to the art as well as an experienced traveler’s advice about neighborhoods, walking tours, and the nitty-gritty of staying in northern Italy.

Tuesday  April 5  7:30 pm 

Novelist, historian, and essayist Ronald Wright joins us to discuss his new book, A Short History of Progress. For the past 10,000 years human societies have repeatedly caused disaster for themselves when they have failed to understand and respect the natural systems upon which their survival depends. The stakes became more dire in the twentieth century, when population growth and consumption of resources placed unprecedented pressures on the natural systems that give us our essential elements of life: clean air, water, and earth. Ronald Wright asks urgent questions about where we need to go in the twenty-first century in order to bequeath a livable environment to subsequent generations.

Wednesday  April 6  7:30 pm

Cara Black’s fifth Aimée Leduc mystery, Murder in Clichy, takes this exciting young Paris detective to the traditionally aristocratic, now largely Vietnamese Clichy district. When Aimée visits the Cao Dai temple to learn to meditate, her teacher, a nun named Linh, asks her to go to the Clichy quartier to exchange an envelope for a package. But the intended recipient, Thadée Baret, is shot and dies in Aimée’s arms before the transaction can be completed, leaving Aimée with a wounded arm, a check for 50,000 francs, and a trove of jade artifacts.

Thursday  April 7  7:30 pm 

Black Oak will host a reading event for the fiction anthology Lost on Purpose: Women in the City. These stories take place all over the world: Bombay, Beijing, Sydney, Glasgow, and Tijuana, as well as Boston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Editor Amy Prior (who lives in London) will be joined by these local contributors: writer and filmmaker Anna Sophie Loewenberg, writer and musician Sara Jaffe, and writer Calla Devlin.

Tuesday  April 12  7:30 pm 

Sandy Boucher will discuss her biography of Ruth Denison, Dancing in the Dharma. In the movement of Buddhism to the West, Ruth Denison was the first Buddhist teacher to lead an all-women's retreat and the first teacher to use movement and dance to train her students in mindfulness. Dancing in the Dharma tells the story of Ruth's youth in Nazi-dominated Germany, her counterculture years in Hollywood in the sixties and seventies, her world travels to study with the major spiritual teachers in Asia and Europe, and her flowering as a Buddhist teacher.

Wednesday  April 13  7:30 pm 

Alice Carey will read from her memoir I’ll Know It When I See It: A Daughter’s Search for Home in Ireland. Alice Carey’s rough childhood with poor Irish immigrant parents in Astoria, Queens, turns around when Alice’s mother becomes a maid to theater producer Jean Dalrymple. This change of fortune introduces Alice to the quirky, colorful world of Broadway, and also gives her mother enough money to bring her daughter back “home” to Ireland. Eventually, Alice returns to Ireland as an adult, and she makes peace with her recollections of a bittersweet past.

Thursday  April 14  7:30 pm

Charles Wilkinson, the pre-eminent scholar of tribal rights in the United States, will discuss Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. In two generations the Indian people have made immense strides toward gaining legal protection for their reservation lands and tribal customs. Through civil rights advocacy they have also done much to dispel racist stereotypes and win acceptance and respect. Wilkinson movingly describes how native peoples continue the fight to claim their fundamental human rights.

Tuesday  March 19  7:30 pm

Nick Salvatore, Professor of American Studies at Cornell University, is the award-winning author of books about Eugene Debs and Amos Webber. His new biography, Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America, relates the life of the African-American preacher whose booming, soaring, colorful sermons revolutionized the pulpit in America and helped usher in the Civil Rights movement. Nick Salvatore traces his career from rural Mississippi, where he was raised, to Detroit, where his daughter, the singer Aretha Franklin, rose to fame. Franklin’s personal history is tied not only to the rise of activism in the black church, but also to the rise of gospel, blues, and soul music.

Wednesday  April 20  7:30 pm 

Author of acclaimed works of history and natural history such as Salt and Cod, Mark Kurlansky comes to Black Oak with his newest book, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. Kurlansky examines and puts into historical context such events as the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Tet Offensive, the student-led Spring Uprising in Paris, Soviet tanks in Prague, the Democratic National Convention and the Chicago Seven, the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City, Apollo 8 orbiting the moon, the My Lai Massacre, and the first successful heart transplant.

Thursday  April 21  7:30 pm 

From the 1960s until just recently, John Perkins was a highly paid dealmaker in the international banking community. Ostensibly, he was making loans to underdeveloped countries in order to help them develop their infrastructures, but in effect he was acting as an unofficial agent of American expansionism by deliberately making loans that countries could not repay. In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he explains how banks, along with corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, use these loans to gain leverage over poorer nations and to take over their economies.

Sunday  April 24  7:30 pm 

Black Oak welcomes acclaimed Barcelona writer Nuria Amat and her translator Peter Bush with her first novel to be published in the United States. Queen Cocaine takes place in Columbia amid the brutal civil conflict between Marxist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, and narcotics traffickers. As the story unfolds, Rat, a pensive young writer from Spain, learns that this war punishes indiscriminately or, as she puts it, “Queen Cocaine pollutes everybody equally.”

Monday  April 25  7:30 pm 

We will be joined by travel writers Pico Iyer and Michael Shapiro. Michael Shapiro will discuss his new book, A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Lives, Craft and Inspiration, a collection of interviews with Bill Bryson, Frances Mayes, Paul Theroux, Peter Matthiessen, Tim Cahill, Jan Morris, Pico Iyer, Isabel Allende, and Simon Winchester, among many others.Pico Iyer reads from Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign, a search for the foreign which takes him to L.A., Yemen, Haiti, Ethiopia, a Bolivian prison, a hidden monastery in Tibet, Saudi Arabia, Easter Island, and the killing fields in Cambodia, and offers him the opportunity to meditate with Leonard Cohen and talk politics with the Dalai Lama. 

Wednesday  April 27  7:30 pm 

Steve Almond has a growing underground reputation destined to bubble up into widespread notoriety. His stories are often sexually explicit as well as sexually obsessed. But obsession is one of Steve Almond’s obsessions, as in his brilliant confession of candy addiction, Candyfreak (now out in paperback). Evil B. B. Chow, his second short story collection, is even more daringly transgressive and exquisitely written than his first (which is saying something). For all his weird bravado, Steve Almond never forgets that the weird is only interesting when it stands in relation to the sensitive and vulnerable psyche.

Thursday  April 28  7:30 pm 

Elizabeth Gaffney will read from her debut novel, Metropolis, set in late nineteenth-century New York and the underground world of Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York. In a grand fictional edifice of Dickensian plotting, a German immigrant flees a fire in the stables of P. T. Barnum’s circus, where he works. He then finds himself hiding from a citywide arson investigation in which he is wrongly suspected. “Gaffney has engineered a thrilling Brooklyn Bridge of a novel . . . carrying us in inimitable style across the rich, rank waters of New York City's history.”—Michael Chabon