Tuesday March 2 7:30 pm
Christos Papadimitriou, C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and the author of many books on computational theory, will read from his first work of fiction, Turing: (A Novel about Computation). Alexandros, a melancholy archaeologist, is still reeling from a passionate idyll with an American woman named Ethel who abandoned him on the island of Corfu. Despite half-knowing that he will never be able to find her, he starts a search on the Internet, where he encounters an interactive teaching program named for (and possibly emanating from) Alan Turing, the father of computer science. “Combining storytelling and brilliant exposition in the Enlightenment tradition, Turing is at once a moving postmodern love story and one of the best introductions to theoretical computer science available; an enchanting offer to the intelligent reader.” Apostolos Doxiadis
Thursday March 4 7:30 pm
Nanos Valaoritis, one of the most celebrated contemporary Greek poets, and Thanasis Maskaleris, the director emeritus of the Center for Modern Greek Studies at San Francisco State University, are the co-editors and principal translators of the masterful new anthology, Modern Greek Poetry. While this anthology includes generous selections from internationally celebrated poets including Cavafy, Elytis, and Seferis, it also represents many younger poets who are beginning to play a major role in the literary world. A major contribution to our understanding of world poetry, it makes clear the powerful role Greek poets have played in the creation of both modern and postmodern literature.
Monday March 8 7:30 pm
David Bornstein, an award-winning journalist who specializes in writing about social innovation, showcases a generation of independent and creative leaders in his new book, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. These stories of ordinary people who are having extraordinary success in solving the world’s most pressing social problems include that of an American man who has single-handedly helped thousands of low-income high school students get into college, a Brazilian who helped bring electricity to remote rural residents, and a South African woman who developed a home-based model for AIDS patients that changed government health policy. “This is a wonderfully hopeful and enlightening book.” Nelson Mandela
Wednesday March 10 7:30 pm
Jean Thompson confirms our faith in her as a writer with great compassion and skill in her new novel, City Boy, set during a simmering Chicago summer. Jack and Chloe are a handsome young couple settling into both a new apartment and their marriage. They have made an arrangement: Jack will stay home to write his novel, while Chloe supports them as a management trainee in the world of finance. But as self-doubt begins to undermine Jack’s sense of himself, and Chloe’s office flirtations with her boss deepen into something more serious, they find the fabric of their marriage unraveling in an atmosphere of mutual distrust, misunderstanding, and blame. “Few fiction writers working today have more successfully rendered the sensation of solid ground suddenly melting away….” The New York Times Book Review
Wednesday March 17 7:30 pm
Suzy Becker had already published a bestselling book (All I Need to Know I Learned from My Cat), organized the country’s first AIDS bike-a-thon, and established a school when a series of terrifying seizures led to a diagnosis of a tumor in her brain. An operation to remove the tumor was only partially successful: the surgeons got the tumor but the procedure left her without the power of speech. She recounts her often harrowing voyage into illness and back again in her amazingly hilarious new book, I Had Brain Surgery, What’s Your Excuse?: An Illustrated Memoir. “Becker’s thoroughly enjoyable book defies classification. Written and illustrated with a sly, irreverent wit, it is genuinely funny and intelligent, without a trace of sentimentality or forced emotion.” Stephen Pinker
Thursday March 18 7:30 pm
Jonathan Kirsch returns to Black Oak to discuss God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism. In this new book, the author of the highly acclaimed The Harlot by the Side of the Road explores the religious diversity and tolerance that were the core values of paganism, and how monotheism introduced the terrors of true belief, including holy war, martyrdom, and inquisitions. “Kirsch tackles the central issue bedeviling the world today--religious intolerance. Filled with fascinating anecdotes, [he] focuses on the tipping points in history when people began to kill other people solely because they held different religious beliefs. A timely book, well written and researched.” Leonard Shlain
Sunday March 21 7:30 pm
Ruth Frankenberg explores the remarkably diverse nature of modern religious life in the United States in her fascinating new book, Living Spirit, Living Practice: Poetics, Politics, Epistemology. While providing a nuanced consideration of the making and living of religious lives, Frankenberg undertakes a sociocultural analysis of her compelling in-depth interviews with fifty men and women. By tracing the complex interweaving of sacred and secular languages in the way her interviewees make sense of the everyday and the extraordinary, she explores modes of communication with the divine, the role of the body and geography, and the relation of sex to spirituality.
|
Monday March 22 7:30 pm
Lauren Slater, the author of Welcome to My Country and Lying, A Metaphysical Memoir, is a psychologist who also happens to write like an angel. Her latest book, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, not only describes exactly how the experiments were conducted, but their etiology, the often complex personalities involved, and the implications of their results. Whether describing Skinner’s work on operant conditioning, Stanley Milgram’s disturbing and controversial investigations into why we obey authority or David Rosenhan’s chilling expose of mental hospitals, Slater is unfailingly witty, engaging, and full of startling insights.
Tuesday March 23 7:30 pm
Edward Ball’s first two books, Slaves in the Family (which won the National Book Award) and The Sweet Hell Inside, made valuable contributions to the study of race relations in the American South. His new book, Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love, is something else altogether: the deliciously intriguing tale of how a wealthy young Englishman named Gordon Langley Hill established himself in society in Charleston, South Carolina, and then caused a sensation by changing his name to Dawn, dressing as a woman, and undergoing sex-change treatments. Further scandal was still in store, as Dawn arranged a very public marriage to a young black mechanic and, a few years later, apparently gave birth to an obviously mixed-race baby. “Dawn Langley Simmons--stoic, charming, and utterly bizarre—was one of the great, taboo-trashing eccentrics of our time. Edward Ball carefully unravels the mystery and explains the fantasy in fascinating detail.” John Berendt
Wednesday March 24 7:30
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 presidency. 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 the media in the last decade.
Thursday March 25 7:30 pm
When Tony Kushner described the book Keeping Passover as “remarkable, indispensable, delightful and erudite,” he might as well have been describing its author, Ira Steingroot. Ira joins us for a special event which will explore the multisensual, even synesthetic nature of the Passover seder. Beginning with recordings of some of the greatest Jewish voices ever recorded, and a sampling of a variety of exotic types of charoset, the evening will also include a slide show of illustrations of Passover art of the last seven centuries, which range from the sumptuous and breathtakingly beautiful medieval Spanish Golden Haggadah to a simple and poignant seder plate made from scrap material in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Monday March 29 7:30 pm
As a young girl growing up in Southern California, Ana Maria Spagna used to doodle fir trees on her school notebooks. She has spent most of her adult life doing seasonal maintenance on remote hiking trails in the Pacific Northwest, often the only woman on raucous all-male crews. Her wonderful new book of essays, Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw, describes the various journeys, both exterior and interior, that led her from childish daydreaming to a deeply lived passion for the landscape of the North Cascades. “Spagna’s essays are as stubborn, compact, and densely grained as a whitebarked pine at timberline. Each achieves its wholeness honestly, earning every twig and needle. The best will firmly root themselves in the literature of the Pacific Northwest.” John Daniel
Tuesday March 30 7:30 pm
Kate Wenner explores how storytelling changes us, and how we change our stories, in her profoundly moving new novel, Dancing with Einstein. After years of purposeless travel, Marea Hoffman, the daughter of an emigre Jewish nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, returns to New York City determined to settle a question that has haunted her for years: was her beloved father’s death truly an accident, or was it suicide? True to form, she drifts into working with four different therapists at the same time, and through this seemingly unworkable kaleidoscope finally begins to confront the silent angry ghosts of her childhood. |
