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Thursday, December 1st 7:30 pm
Columbia professor of law and MacArthur Award winner Patricia J. Williams is one of the keenest legal theorists of law, race, society, and gender in the United States. Her memoir, Open House: On Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own, allows us to hear this renowned columnist and savvy activist reflect candidly about the many facets of her life as a lawyer, scholar, writer, African American, descendant of slaves, mother, and single woman. Williams writes about why she is fascinated by Oprah and of how she decided to take up the piano when she turned fifty. She also tackles subjects such as cloning, the legacy of slavery, and privacy issues in the cyber age. Opening remarks will be provided by Margaret Russell, professor of law at Santa Clara University.
Saturday, December 3rd 7:30 pm
(please note special location)
Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center at 1414 Walnut St., Berkeley
Suggested Donation $5 for Gold Star Families for Peace.
Cindy Sheehan lost her son, Army Specialist Casey Austin Sheehan, in an ambush in Iraq in April 2004. As information came out that the Iraq war was based on “cooked intelligence,” Sheehan began speaking out against the war. In August of 2005 she made headlines by camping out in Crawford, Texas, to confront President Bush. Since then she has become one of the most visible and rousing anti-war activists in the country. Cindy Sheehan will join us to discuss her new book about war, truth, accountability, and activism, Not One More Mother’s Child.
Sunday, December 4th 7:30 pm
Poet Kay Ryan, winner of the 2004 Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, will read from her new
and sixth book of poems, The Niagara River. After many years of honing her voice and craft, Kay Ryan has become one of the most distinct and indispensable of contemporary poets. She describes a poem as a “self-imposed emergency.” Her poems, she says, don't begin with a simple image or sound, but instead start “the way an oyster does, with an aggravation.” What she hopes to convey, however, is a sense of refreshment. “Poems should leave you feeling freer and not more burdened,” Ryan says. “I like to think of all good poetry as providing more oxygen into the atmosphere; it just makes it easier to breathe.”
Monday, December 5th 7:30 pm
We will be joined by two writers who contend that corporate capitalism poses a dire threat to the political health of American democracy and to the well-being of its workers. Activist Si Kahn will discuss The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy, which he co-wrote with educator Elizabeth Minnich. Kahn and Minnich argue that the Bush administration aims at selling our public spaces and infrastructure—health care, schools, Social Security, public lands, the military, and prisons—to the highest corporate bidders. They warn that this privatization means that public resources will be dedicated to private profit rather than the public good, and that the public will lose its ability to influence the use of these resources. Jack Rasmus is on the Executive Board of the National Writers Union (UAW local 1981). In The Corporate Offensive Against American Workers and Unions from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, he contends that since the first term of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the federal government has been waging a corporate offensive against workers, unions, and workers’ rights. Radical restructuring of jobs, wages, the retirement system, taxes, healthcare, and civil liberties, Rasmus argues, are ways of taking away from workers their benefits and political voice.
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Tuesday, December 6th 7:30 pm
Lachu Moorjani is owner and chef of Ajanta Indian Restaurant on Solano Avenue in North Berkeley,which has been voted the best Indian restaurant in the Bay Area numerous times by Zagat Survey, San Francisco Focus Magazine, Bay Area Restaurant Guide, and the East Bay Express. The restaurant is known not only for its delicious meals and elegant interior, but also for its newsletter that lets readers know about new regional Indian dishes that the restaurant will present each month. In his new cookbook, Ajanta: Regional Feasts of India, Lachu Moorjani adapts the fabulous meals from his restaurant to home kitchens and to those who are just learning to cook Indian food, putting together complete, authentic Indian meals from specific regions of India. Discussion of Ajanta at Black Oak Books will be followed by a reception at Vintage Berkeley, around the corner at 2113 Vine Street, where we will pair fine wines with delicious food made at Ajanta restaurant.
Wednesday, December 7th 7:30 pm
Eric J. Sundquist, professor of literature at UCLA, is author of the seminal work in American cultural studies To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of
American Literature. He comes to Black Oak to discuss his most recent book, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. In predominantly white, Protestant America, African Americans and Jews were once thought to have a special relationship, a common cause and an alliance crucial to the promotion of civil
rights. That relationship, according to the author, was once a productive dialogue that turned bitter, and finally mute, a mere relic of our cultural history. In charting volatile debates over social justice and liberalism, anti-Semitism and racism, and examining fiction by such writers as Harper Lee, Anna Deavere Smith, Paule Marshall, and Saul Bellow, Strangers in the Land proves to be a major work of literary and cultural scholarship.
Thursday, December 8th 7:30 pm
Black Oak will host two of the West’s best-loved novelists. Craig Lesley will read from his new work of autobiography, Burning Fence: A Western Memoir
of Fatherhood. This penetrating reflection on difficult conditions of fatherhood and family life is also a vivid picture of the Northwest, from the high desert of eastern Oregon to the Pacific Coast and the mountains of Idaho. It captures the hardscrabble lives and rough humor of outdoorsmen like Craig’s shell-shocked father who became a coyote trapper and poacher. Readers of Jean Hegland’s first novel, Into the Forest, have been eagerly awaiting her next book. Windfalls is a passionate story of motherhood that looks
unflinchingly at the tough choices that women face. It contrast two women’s lives, Cerise, who gets pregnant while a teenager, and Anna, who finishes college and marries before giving birth to two daughters. The intersection of their lives reveals both depths of hardship and then unexpected, uplifting redemptions.
Sunday, December 11th 7:30 pm
In 2000 Richard Schwartz published the outstanding history of our town, Berkeley 1900: Daily Life at the Turn of the Century. That book is an illuminating collection of documents that shows what life was like here in Berkeley when we were a horse-and-buggy town of 15,000 people, and much of downtown Berkeley was still farmland. Schwartz has focused his new book on the remarkable story of how Berkeley extended relief and hospitality to refugees of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Earthquake Exodus: Berkeley Responds to the San Francisco Refugees unveils events that were monumental in their day, but largely forgotten within a generation. Like Berkeley 1900, this story of the ten-week relief effort will be a wonderful holiday gift for anyone interested in Berkeley, San Francisco, and East Bay history.
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