Sunday February 1 7:30 pm
Thomas W. Lippman, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington and the author of Understanding Islam, will discuss his new book, Inside the Mirage: America’s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia. “Unlike other recent books on the topic, Inside the Mirage explores the Saudi-American relationship in all its complexity. While not ignoring the many problems between Riyadh and Washington, it chronicles the mutual interests that brought the two unlikely partners together seventy years ago and sustained that relationship through crises and wars. It is a fast-moving and readable account of one of the least understood but most important aspects of American foreign policy.” F. Gregory Gause, III
Monday February 2 7:30 pm
Elijah Wald, author of the acclaimed Narcocorrido, returns to Black Oak to read from Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. As a musician who has been playing this music in honky-tonks and dives for thirty years, Wald has a deep feel for the blues. He explores the music’s most popular artists and trends, and the vast range of African American styles that formed the foundation of the blues boom. Having provided a rich context for Robert Johnson’s work, Wald offers an oral history of Johnson’s life, and delves into his recordings in detail to determine the legendary bluesman’s own musical objectives.
Wednesday February 4 7:30 pm
Estelle Frankel is a practicing psychotherapist, spiritual advisor, and teacher of Jewish mysticism, all of which find expression in her first book, Sacred Therapy: Jewish Spiritual Teachings on Emotional Healing and Inner Wholeness. This fresh look at the central myths, metaphors, and spiritual practices of the Jewish tradition demonstrates how people of any faith can draw upon these teachings to gain wisdom, clarity, and a deeper sense of meaning. “Frankel has done an impressive job of blending ancient Jewish wisdom with modern psychology to fashion a powerful force for healing.” Rabbi Harold Kushner. This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center
Sunday February 8 7:30 pm
We’ve been reading and loving Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia cartoon strip for years. In The ABC of Vice: An Insatiable Women’s Guide, Alphabetized, she has teamed up writer and humorist with Regina Barreca to produce a mischievous manual for bad girls, which includes, for example, this advice about dieting: “To spend good worry time over whether or not you are retaining water is useful only if you are a boat.”
Monday February 9 7:30 pm
Carter Scholz casts his nets farther than most short story writers in his dazzling new collection, The Amount to Carry, which has recently been published in paperback. These stories, which blend physics and poetry, engineering and philosophy, shimmer at the edge between the known and the unknowable, and yet they all have deeply human concerns at their heart. In “Travels,” a disembodied wavelength who was once Marco Polo is held to account by an exacting omniscient computer; the eponymous character in the unsettling and weirdly funny story “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor,” develops a very unhealthy relationship with his furniture; while “The Nine Billion Names of God” offers a hilarious exchange of letters between an increasingly enraged editor of a science fiction magazine and an audacious writer named, well, Carter Scholz.
Wednesday February 11 7:30 pm
Ben Jones makes a remarkable literary debut with The Rope Eater, an epic tale of survival and madness set during the American Civil War. Brendan Kane is a dreamy Vermont farm boy who drifts into the Union Army, only to desert after witnessing unspeakable horrors on the battlefield. Seeking solace in a New England whaling town, Kane signs up as a crew member on the Narthex, a strangely shaped vessel bound for the Arctic, without knowing its destination or goals. As they leave the known world behind, he learns that the wealthy owner and the ship’s doctor are both gripped by a terrible delusion: they mean to locate a mythical temperate isle within the polar ice cap. Jeffrey Lent has called this “not simply a novel but an entire world both fabulous and mythic, a world rendered in prose both stark and lovely as the landscape and characters within.”
Sunday February 15 7:30 pm
Anthony Dubovsky joins us to celebrate the publication of Jerusalem: To Know by Living, an exceptionally lovely book from the recently founded El Leon Literary Arts. While visiting Jerusalem in the 1990s, Dubovsky found himself drawn to the historic neighborhood of Mea She’arim, whose people follow traditional ways. As he returned again and again to the old neighborhood, its people settled into accommodating this American with his sketchbook and pens, letting him get to know them by simply going about living. “If all you did was follow the stream of brilliant drawings in the broad margins of this book, you would already have a vivid sense of [this] Jerusalem neighborhood of devout Jews.... The details of daily life are boldly sketched; the accompanying text is as exuberant and generous as the drawings... An illumination for anyone.” Leo Litwak
Monday February 16 7:30 pm
In 1965, when Marilyn Stablein was eighteen years old, she began an adventure many other kids her age only dreamed about: she dropped out of UC Berkeley to travel to India and Nepal. Her new book, Sleeping in Caves: A Sixties Himalayan Memoir, describes how what was to be a brief visit turned into a seven-year journey of discovery and spiritual awakening. “Stablein’s wry voice tells how it was, calmly and clearly, unadorned.... Whether on the ground with sadhus and chapatis or in the sky with diamonds these wise prose poems evoke a last epiphany of the best of east and west.” Keith Dowman |
Wednesday February 18 7:30 pm
Paul Waldman, the former associate director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and the current executive editor of the Internet magazine The Gadflyer, will discuss his new book, Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn’t Tell You. This comprehensive and scathing indictment of both Bush and his political cronies reveals how they cynically developed an intentional policy of lies in order to capture and retain the highest office in the free world. While there have been other compilations of Bush’s misdirections and outright lies, few have been this exhaustively researched, or offer as incisive an analysis of the interplay of politics and media in the last decade.
Thursday February 19 7:30 pm
Poet and social activist Frances Payne Adler harnesses a sense of furious urgency in her new collection of poetry and prose, The Making of a Matriot. “These poems touch and explore the core of human existence--the wars, the illnesses, but also the love, the courage, the defiance, of which her own writing is an example. Her definition of ‘matriot’ alone makes it worthwhile opening the book.” Howard Zinn
Sunday February 22 7:30 pm
Janet Warner, the author of Blake and the Language of Art, combines scholarship with a fine eye for detail in her triumphant first novel, Other Sorrows, Other Joys: The Marriage of Catherine Sophia Boucher and William Blake. Kate Boucher’s story unfolds in her own words, which are often leavened by a quiet wit, both in the form of her diaries and as she reminisces years after William’s death. Although she is an uneducated and simple young woman when she marries Blake, she becomes his equal in many things, including his intense spiritual experiences and skills as an artist. Warner “brings to life what often gets lost in the interstices of biography: the collaborators who have lived in the shadow of their brilliant and visionary partners. [This] excavation, quiet yet transcendental, mirrors Blake’s art and takes us on a meditative journey. It’s a joy to read.” Alev Lytle Croutier
Monday February 23 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 year. 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 February 24 7:30 pm
Jim Garrison, the president of the State of the World Forum and author of numerous books including Civilization and the Transformation of Power, will discuss his new book, America as Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power? Garrison argues that the question of whether America is becoming an empire is moot; it “has become what it was founded not to be.” He believes that Americans must learn to consciously see themselves as a transitional empire, one whose task is not to dominate but to catalyze the next generation of global governance mechanisms that would make the need for empire obsolete.
Wednesday February 25 7:30 pm
Perri Klass wears more than a few hats: she is a practicing pediatrician, a highly acclaimed author of both fiction and memoir, and the medical director of the national literacy program Reach Out and Read. Her compelling and suspenseful new novel, The Mystery of Breathing, is set in a prestigious Boston hospital where Dr. Maggie Claymore, a leading neonatologist, works with the tiniest and sickest patients. Maggie is dedication personified, with no seams in her professional facade, until she begins receiving bizarre anonymous letters accusing her of incompetence, and worse. As her orderly life begins to unravel, Maggie is forced into a fight for survival in which she must come to terms with her own life decisions.
Thursday February 26 7:30 pm
Loolwa Khazzoom, the editor of The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage, will be joined by contributors Julie Iny and Rachel Wahba to read selections from this outstanding new collection. Writing from their unique perspectives, the contributors explore the often-hidden experiences and identities of Jewish women from two rich and varied regions. As they do so, they bridge divisions between East and West, “foreign” and “familiar,” while discussing the impact that historical and contemporary tensions between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity have had on them and their families. “What a treasure this book holds! [It] provides the missing tiles in the mosaic puzzle which is the global story of Jewish women’s lives.” Susan Weidman Schneider
Black Oak is also co-sponsoring two additional events with the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center:
Sunday February 8 2:00 pm
Louise Murphy will read from her recent novel, The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, a poignant transformation of the fairy tale set in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Wednesday February 11 7:30 pm
Donna Rosenthal will discuss her new book, The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land.
Please note that both these events take place at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Call 510-848-0237, x127, for further details.
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