Thursday March 3 7:30 pm
Rachel King, State Campaign Coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, joins us to discuss Capital Consequences: Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories, a companion volume to her earlier book, Don’t Kill in Our Names: Families of Murder Victims Speak Against the Death Penalty. In the debate over the death penalty it is clear that there are serious flaws in the legal system that administers it: racial and economic bias, wrongful convictions, incompetent counsel, juvenile executions, prosecutorial misconduct. With these vivid, passionate, and painful accounts of the families of death row inmates, Rachel King reminds us that there are even broader implications to be considered in the practice of capital punishment.
Monday March 7 7:30 pm
Beautiful Inez is a prequel to Bart Schneider’s previous novel, the acclaimed Secret Love, in which Jake, a civil rights attorney in San Francisco during the 1960s, reflects on the fate of his marriage to Inez. His new novel relates the intriguing, unsettling story of that marriage, which takes place during the era when the traditionalism of the Fifties was beginning to change into the new openness and experimentation of the Sixties. Inez, an accomplished violinist with the San Francisco Symphony, cannot shake the depression that began eight years before with the birth of her son. Into her life comes the much younger Sylvia, a waitress who falls in love with Inez at first sight and uses deception and music to seduce her into a passionate affair.
Tuesday March 8 7:30 pm
On International Women’s Day Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, joins us to discuss a newly revised and expanded edition of Language and Women’s Place. This groundbreaking work, originally published in 1975, was one of the first studies to examine the relation between gender inequality and the language used by and about women. The new edition reprints the full text of the original book, along with a new introduction and annotations. In addition, twenty-six leading scholars of linguistics, anthropology, gender studies, and related fields have contributed essays on the impact Language and Women’s Place had on feminist research at the time and its ongoing relevance for contemporary scholarship and a new generation of readers.
Wednesday March 9 7:30 pm
Pam Houston brings her renowned lyrical exuberance to her long-awaited first novel, Sight Hound. The story, which centers on a playwright named Rae and her beloved Irish wolfhound, Dante, unfolds in a series of alternating narratives by twelve different voices—including that of Dante himself, the most grounded of the lot. As Rae’s friends, lovers, veterinarians, and therapist affectionately comment on her various ill-fated attempts at romance and sympathize with her drive to save Dante’s life, Dante leads Rae through the difficult path of love and loss. Pam Houston’s empathy for all animals (human and otherwise) shines throughout this delightful novel.
Thursday March 10 7:30 pm
Investigative reporter Todd Oppenheimer will discuss The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology, his critical examination of the effect computers are having on public education. After visiting dozens of schools and talking with hundreds of teachers, he concludes that as much as Americans love the idea of an educational “technotopia,” the reality is much more complex.“This is the most important book of its kind since Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, and it carries the same torch—telling us what’s really going on inside the public education system.” Gregg Easterbrook
Sunday March 13 7:30 pm
Have the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, been adequately investigated and reported by government agencies and the mainstream media? This and other questions about 9/11 will be discussed by Peter Phillips, Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University, director of Project Censored, and editor of Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories, and Webster Tarpley, author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA.
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Monday March 14 7:30 pm
Chellis Glendinning, author of My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization, returns to Black Oak with Chiva: A Village Takes On the Global Heroin Trade. This is a gripping account of Chimayó, a small desert town in New Mexico (and the author’s home) that directly confronted the devastation heroin addiction was creating in its community. Glendinning provides an astute analysis of the political and social dimensions of heroin trafficking, mixing into it the story of her own involvement with a local dealer. Ultimately, she finds the links between the personal and the political, relating colonization to addiction, and the possibility for individual recovery to the importance of reclaiming cultural traditions that have nearly become extinct.
Tuesday March 15 7:30 pm
Jonathan Lowy, author of the high-flying novel Elvis and Nixon, has written another colorful saga, this time about the Gilded Age and the assassination of President McKinley at the World’s Fair in Buffalo in 1901. The Temple of Music is a novel of tempestuous events, political intrigue, and millionaire manipulators—in other words, a time not unlike our own. The rich cast of historical characters includes Emma Goldman, William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Carnegie, and William Jennings Bryant. As well as being an author, Jonathan Lowy is Senior Attorney at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and an outspoken advocate of gun control.
Monday March 21 7:30 pm
Ishmael Reed has changed American literature with his own writing and by his support of other, especially younger, writers. His novels, essay collections, and volumes of poetry have become landmarks of the African-American literary canon. On this occasion, he comes to Black Oak as both a poet and promoter of gifted poets. Joining him will be his daughter, the poet Tennessee Reed; Kathryn Waddell Takara, poet and Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaii; and Haitian poet Boadiba. This promises to be an evening that will enlarge, refresh, and reshape our sense of what contemporary poetry can be.
Thursday March 24 7:30 pm
Stanley Crawford reads from his new novel, Petroleum Man, a scathing satire written in Swiftian mode. Leon Tuggs is a self-made arch-capitalist billionaire, inventor of the ubiquitous and environmentally hazardous Thingie®, and author of General Theory of Industrial Sex. Perturbed by his son-in-law’s liberal tendencies, he takes it upon himself to relate a series of lectures to his grandchildren on the way the world actually works, free of any concern with political correctness or moral relativism. Delivered in chapters named after cars (and motorcycles and trains and jets), Tuggs’ discourse recounts the history of his life, his inventions, and his political beliefs to the captive audience of his grandchildren and to the willing audience of this inventive novel’s lucky readers.
Tuesday March 29 7:30 pm
Black Oak takes great pleasure in hosting an evening to remember and honor Thomas Flanagan, who passed away in 2002. Professor of English at UC Berkeley from 1960 to 1978, Thomas Flanagan was a pre-eminent literary scholar and critic who is often cited for creating Irish and Irish-American studies in America. He was also a fiction writer, best known for his historical novels about Ireland: The Year of the French, The Tenants of Time, and The End of the Hunt. His essays on Irish and Irish-American literature and history have recently been collected in a volume called There You Are. We felt it appropriate that this new collection of essays should occasion a celebration of Thomas Flanagan's life and work here in Berkeley, where so much of both the life and work took place. The evening will be led by Thomas Flanagan's friend and colleague Robert Tracy, Emeritus Professor of English and Celtic studies at UC Berkeley. Joining him will be Frederick Crews, Emeritus Professor of English at UC Berkeley and prominent essayist and literary scholar, and Bob Callahan, writer, editor, raconteur, co-publisher of Turtle Island Press, and co-founder of the Before Columbus Foundation. We invite testimonials from others who knew Thomas Flanagan and look forward to a lively and memorable evening.
Thursday March 31 7:30 pm
David Riggs, Professor of Humanities at Stanford, joins us to discuss The World of Christopher Marlowe, his biography of the Elizabethan poet and dramatist, atheist, and spy. In an extraordinary eight years, Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote masterpieces that would transform the Elizabethan stage. His London was one of thieves and prostitutes, plots against the government, and religious upheaval. He was murdered at the age of twenty-nine, and it is unknown to this day whether it was the result of sovereign intrigue or simply a tavern brawl. Stephen Greenblatt praises this “fine, full-blooded biography” that captures both “Marlowe the doomed antihero and Marlowe the brilliant, learned, visionary poet.”
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