Tuesday July 6 7:30 pm
Is it possible to have a scientific outlook on life and hold, at the same time, a mystical sense of life’s meaning? In Rediscovery of Awe: Splendor, Mystery, and the Fluid Center of Life, Kirk J. Schneider, Ph.D., presents the case for what he believes is an emerging form of humanistic spirituality, an “enchanted agnosticism” that, as Rabbi Michael Lerner characterizes it,“welds the skepticism of science and the exaltation and zeal of religion, the veneration of mystery [and] the solemnity of responsibility.”
Wednesday July 7 7:30 pm
JoAnn Levy’s Unsettling the West: Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby in Frontier California tells the fascinating story of two women, famous in their time as writers and lecturers on abolition, women’s suffrage, spiritualism, and prison reform, who came to Gold Rush California to work the Santa Cruz farm that Farnham’s husband had bequeathed her. Together they built a house, explored California on horseback, criss-crossed America giving sold-out lectures on the perfectibility of humankind, and along the way invented a new kind of frontier woman.
Thursday July 8 7:30 pm
In her highly praised debut novel, Back Roads, Tawni O’Dell captured perfectly the maddening confusion of adolescence. Her new novel, Coal Run, which takes place in the same Pennsylvania coal-mining region as Back Roads, begins with Ivan Zoschenko’s riveting childhood memory of a mine explosion that will haunt the town of Coal Run and its inhabitants for decades. Ivan, who has grown up to become Coal Run’s hapless, charming deputy, will over the period of one week be forced to confront demons from his past and learn the value of ordinary grace.
Monday July 12 7:30 pm
Golden Mountain: Beyond the American Dream recounts the history of four generations of Chinese women struggling to define themselves amid cultural oppression and familial abuse. Irene Kai begins in nineteenth-century China with the story of her great-grandmother, who has seen her first two babies put to death because they were girls. Throughout the years, and down through the generations, beatings, drug addiction, depression, and alienation all take their toll. Finally, in present-day California, Kai, already a wife and mother, begins to throw off this legacy and create her own distinct destiny as an artist and a woman. “That her story is true makes this ingenious and beautiful work all the more compelling.” Jean Houston
Tuesday July 13 7:30 pm
Sisterhood is one of the most complicated relationships a woman can have. Throughout their lives, sisters are confidants, competitors, and sometimes each other’s harshest critic. In The Perfect Sister: What Draws Us Together, What Drives Us Apart, Marcia Millman examines the sister bond in all its manifestations, finding that the key to improving relations is in understanding that each sister has had a different experience growing up and remembering to relate to the present sister, not the sister of the past.
Wednesday July 14 7:30 pm
Black Oak welcomes Andrew Sean Greer, who will read from his beautifully imagined novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Max, born as a baby in an old man’s body, grows older as his body grows younger. He falls in love with his neighbor Alice and, because of his peculiar condition, he is allowed to pursue her again and again over the years, each time as a seemingly different person. John Updike has called this story of love, time, and relativity “enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov.”
|
Thursday July 15 7:30 pm
In Imperial Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire, Roger Burbach and Jim Tarbell argue that the Bush administration has fundamentally changed America’s place in the world for the worse. The nation that once broke free from an empire is becoming an empire itself. Citing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a never-ending fear of terrorism, mushrooming defense expenditures, and the slow and steady erosion of civil liberties at home, the authors consider whether it is still possible for Americans to change direction and restore America’s reputation as the shining “city on the hill.”
Monday July 19 7:30 pm
Vermeer in Bosnia: A Reader collects two decades of writing by the superb Lawrence Weschler. Weschler’s curiosity ranges wide as he interviews Art Spiegelman, David Hockney, and Roman Polanski, and discusses earthquakes and the peculiar quality of light in Los Angeles. In the title piece he compares the peaceful atmosphere found in Vermeer’s paintings with the war-torn context in which they were created. He includes a meditation on the complexities of the father-daughter relationship that develop over time, as well as a poignant memoir about his grandfather, Ernst Toch, a famous composer in Weimar Berlin.
Tuesday July 20 7:30 pm
Jonathan Ames and the McSweeney’s house band, One Ring Zero, join us for an exhilarating evening of drollery and music. Ames’s new novel, Wake Up, Sir!, is a subversive homage to P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels. Alan Blair, a young alcoholic writer, lives by the motto “Live and don’t learn.” Kicked out of his aunt and uncle’s house, Alan hits the road, drunkenly creating havoc everywhere he goes. Fortunately for him, he is attended to by his valet, Jeeves. But does this Jeeves actually exist? And whether he exists or not, will he save the day? Sarah Vowell has praised Wake Up, Sir! as “very funny and altogether elegant.”
Thursday July 22 7:30 pm
Dream Songs and Ceremony: Reflections on Traditional California Indian Dance, by the Wintu artist Frank LaPena, combines his vibrant paintings with commentary on the history and meaning of Wintu sacred tradition. In his painting “Ribbon Doll,” LaPena depicts the secret transmission of government-banned ceremonies through the use of puppets and dolls. Commenting on “The World Is a Gift,” he explains that “it is in our respect for life that we sense the possibilities for the future. When we are forgetful of our elders’ teachings, they are given back to us in our dreams.” LaPena, a dancer, singer, and ceremonial leader as well as professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, has produced a work that is “brilliant testimony—of cultural endurance and transformation—all done in such stupendous beauty.” Greg Sarris
Wednesday July 28 7:30 pm
In So Late, So Soo, D’Arcy Fallon offers an irreverent, fly-on-the-wall view of the Lighthouse Ranch, a Christian commune she called home for three years in the early 1970s. More than just a memoir about living an isolated religious existence on a California sea cliff, this book is about being 18 and alone and hitchhiking around the country and getting taken in by Jesus people who loved the Lord and made their own donuts. She writes of a series of harrowing and heartbreaking decisions that led her away from the ranch and into her own life one step at a time.
Thursday July 29 7:30 pm
To our great delight, Lawrence Ferlinghetti--poet, publisher, and founder of City Lights Bookstore--joins us to read from the recently published Americus: Book I, the first part of his epic poem of American consciousness. Embracing everyone from Lord Buckley to Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and George M. Cohan, with nods to Howard Zinn and Wendell Berry, Ferlinghetti has described this work as “ a descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction,” which uses “universal texts, snatches of song, murmuring of love or hate, sayings and shibboleths...”
|
