Tuesday,  July 5th  7:30 pm 

Theater historian and critic Susan Vaneta Mason will be joined by Bruce Barthol, Joan Holden, and other members of the Tony Award–winning San Francisco Mime Troupe to celebrate the publication of The San Francisco Mime Troupe Reader. This long overdue reader is both a history of the Mime Troupe and a collection of some of its most edgy, hilarious, and imaginative scripts. No history of the psychedelic Sixties in San Francisco can be complete without an account of how the Mime Troupe stirred the social stew of flower power, women’s liberation, civil rights, and conscientious social disobedience.

Wednesday,  July 6th  7:30 pm  

Thais Mazur will present Warrior Mothers: Stories to Awaken the Flames of the Heart, a book that tells the stories of twenty-four women who took the initiative to make positive changes in the world. She will be joined by one of the twenty-four women featured in the book, Leuren Moret, a whistle-blower from Lawrence Livermore Labs who called attention to problems with depleted uranium. Violist Katrina Wreede and cellist Suellen Primost will be begin playing at 7:00 pm, so be sure to come early

Thursday,  July 7th  7:30 pm 

Margot Pepper reads from Through the Wall: A Year in Havana, a memoir from Castro’s post–Cold War Cuba that propels us through the blockade to see the real and sometimes surreal everyday conditions of Cuban life. Root canals, cosmetic surgery, and graduate school are free, but toilet paper is exorbitant. There is no income tax nor homelessness, yet no house paint either. Through the Wall reveals the failures and successes of one of the few functioning alternatives to corporaterun government, and draws out rucial lessons about living outside the globalized capitalist economy.

Monday,  July 11th  7:30 pm 

In Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay, John Wranovics explores the briefly intertwined lives of Chaplin, the greatest silent screen actor of all time, and James Agee, the novelist, screenwriter, and film critic. In 1947, when Chaplin was being attacked by the American press as a Communist sympathizer, Agee defended the actor and the politics of his film Monsieur Verdoux. A friendship ensued in which the two men planned a film about the nuclear age, The Tramp’s New World, the screenplay for which is included in this new book. The author will be showing film clips to illustrate the political power of Chaplin’s films.

Tuesday,  July 12th  7:30 pm 

Mark Bittner’s The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill tells the story of a self-professed “dharma bum” who was living as a homeless street musician in San Francisco and searching for the meaning of life. On North Beach’s Telegraph Hill he discovered the flock of wild parrots who have since given him inspiration and direction. The book, the basis for the popular documentary film, celebrates urban wildness, avian and Bohemian. It is a book about a finding oneself in relationship to a community, even if—or specially when—the members of that community are covered with bright green and red feathers and squawk like banshees.

Wednesday,  July 13th  7:30 pm 

When third-generation Chinese-American Rosemary Gong moved around the corner from her grandparents in San Francisco’s Chinatown, she became avid to learn about her family’s Chinese traditions. The fruits of her inquiries are to be found in Good Luck Life: The Essential Guide to Chinese American Celebrations and Culture, a beautifully written, well-organized guide to festivals that takes the reader through the traditional Chinese year, and also through such rites of passage as births, weddings, and funerals. Rosemary Gong will talk about wedding ceremonies and celebrations for welcoming babies into the family, and bring traditional wedding cakes to sample.

Thursday,  July 14th  7:30 pm 

Black Oak will host an event called “Jewish Encounters: East Coast Meets West Coast,” an exploration of religion, humor, stories, and interfaith communication. Diane Wolkstein will celebrate Judaism by way of storytelling: she will tell Hasidic stories she heard from Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and Biblical stories from her book Treasures of the Heart: Holiday Stories that Reveal the Soul of Judaism. Robert Schoen, author of What I Wish My Christian Friends Knew About Judaism, will talk about stories, histories, and ideas Jews and Christians can share in order to better understand each other in contemporary society.

Saturday,  July 16th  7:30 am to 1:30 pm 

Come to our publication party for
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Monday,  July 18th  7:30 pm 

Consumer capitalist culture bombards us with new products and advertisements to worrisome degrees of psychic supersaturation and overstimulation. And much of the campaign to advertise and sell is focused specifically on children, a special target group for marketers. Psychologists Allen Kanner of the Wright Institute in Berkeley and Susan Linn, who is director of The Media Center in Boston and instructor of psychiatry at the Harvard University Medical School, will be discussing the effects of contemporary commercial culture on the psyche in general and on children especially. Allen Kanner is author of Psychology and Consumer Culture: The Struggle for a Good Life in a Materialistic World. Susan Linn is author of Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood.

Tuesday,  July 19th  7:30 pm 

Israeli-born, Iranian-raised author Dora Levy Mossanen will read from her second novel, Courtesan. This multi-generational historical novel unfolds in Paris and Persia in the Belle Epoque of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of Madame Gabrielle, whose relationship with the Shah of Persia sets in motion a series of dramatic events, of Francoise, who uses her charms to unearth mysteries from the past, and Simone, whose love for a Persian Jew brings her into the world of the diamond trade and clues about ancient Persian culture that she has been seeking.

Monday,  July 25th  7:30 pm 

Roger Gilbert, one of our foremost critics and scholars of modern American poetry, will discuss his new book, Considering the Radiance: Essays on the Poetry of A. R. Ammons. Ammons, who died in 2001, was from the start one of the great voices in American poetry, publishing his first book of poems, Ommateum, in the 1950s. He went on to write some of the most original poetry of the next half century, a poetry marked by a combination of close physical observation, tersely turned formulation, ambitious philosophical argument, and genial, selfmocking wit.

Thursday,  July 28th  7:30 pm

Some of us have had cancer and nearly all of us know someone who has. There is still a lack of common knowledge or agreement about the best ways to deal with serious illness as patient, friend, comforter, or caregiver. Black Oak will be hosting a group discussion about cancer and other serious illnesses led by three local authors who have written on this subject with great insight and wisdom. Lori Hope is author of Help Me Live: 20 Things People with Cancer Want You To Know; clinical social worker Susan Halpern has written The Etiquette of Illness: What to Say When You Can’t Find the Words; and chef Rebecca Katz is author of One Bite at a Time: Nourishing Recipes for People with Cancer, Survivors, and Their Caregivers.