Sunday May 2 7:30 pm
Debra Bloomfield, an award-winning photographer who has taught extensively throughout the Bay Area, joins us with a presentation of slides to celebrate the publication of her luminous new collection, Four Corners. Bloomfield first journeyed to the Four Corners area of the Southwest in 1989, and found herself returning year after year, drawn by its vast emptiness and ever-changing weather. In 1997, shortly after the death of her sister, she began to also photograph the small churches of the area, some of which are over 200 years old. Her new book evokes, in mysterious and painterly images, both the landscape and the deep sense of spirituality with which it has always been filled. “In these soulful works, nature and humanity seem to be of one piece, or perhaps more accurately, one dream.” Lawrence Rinder
Monday May 3 7:30 pm
Nicole Stansbury follows the success of her widely acclaimed first novel, Places to Look for a Mother, with a collection of short stories which explore the feverish dark side of domesticity. In the title story of The Husband’s Dilemma, a desperate man resorts to desperate (and dangerous) measures in an attempt to revive his wife’s dormant libido and gratify his own; the young mother in “The Activist” has become so obsessed with child safety that she spends all her time writing badgering letters to corporations whose products fall below her standards; and the painfully self-aware housewife in “A Woman Sweeping” falls into a strangely charged relationship with her roofer. “Beautifully wrought, carefully crafted....Anyone who has ever had a child, or a spouse, will see her or himself in these pages.” Lauren Slater
Tuesday May 4 7:30 pm
Bryan Sykes, professor of genetics at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University, and the author of the bestselling The Seven Daughters of Eve, will discuss his intriguing new book, Adam’s Curse: A Future Without Men. It is a testimony to Sykes’s skills both as a teacher and a writer that he is able to patiently guide the reader through the intricate workings of genetic evolution to his startling conclusion that the human male is well on its way to becoming extinct. The fault, Sykes explains, lies in the fiercely ambitious and rapidly decaying Y chromosome which has fallen victim to its own design, and to mutation. He also discusses possible solutions to this disastrous development, including female cloning.
Wednesday May 5 7:30 pm
Susan Moon, the editor of Not Turning Away: The Practice of Engaged Buddhism, will be joined by contributors Melody Ermachild Chavis, Norman Fischer, Robin Hart, and Alan Senauke in readings from this important new anthology. The term “engaged Buddhism” was first coined by Thich Nhat Hanh during the Vietnam War to demonstrate that Buddhism should not be passive or otherworldly, but deeply, compassionately involved with every aspect of society where suffering arises. This collection of articles originally published in the journal Turning Wheel, provides a history of the engaged Buddhism movement, with an emphasis on practical activism, and on reports from those who are deeply involved in working for social change.
Thursday May 6 7:30 pm
James Dalessandro’s new novel, 1906, draws on recently uncovered facts about the San Francisco earthquake and fire and combines them with richly conceived fictional characters to create a tale of political corruption, romance, rescue and murder. Told by Annalisa Passarelli, a young reporter who is witness to many of the events following the disaster, the story centers on the battle, fought as the city burns, between incompetent and unscrupulous politicians against a coalition of honest police officers and citizens.
Monday May 10 7:30 pm
Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich will discuss their latest collaborative work, One With Ninevah: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future, in which they expose with their customary clarity and directness the three elephants in our proverbial living room--overpopulation, overconsumption, and political and economic inequity--that are determining the course of today’s politics and shaping humankind’s future. Demonstrating how these often-neglected factors influence each other, the authors reveal how we can begin to create a better and more lasting world if we take them seriously into account.
Tuesday May 11 7:30 pm
Douglas Unger, whose novel Leaving the Land was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, will read from his powerful new collection of short stories, Looking For War. Themes of secrecy, grief, and fear run throughout these sharp-edged, compelling stories which tell of a lab assistant’s bond to a burnt-out rhesus monkey, a collection of seashells carried home from the tropics harboring a devastating illness, a guerilla raid which turns gruesome, quelling a journalist’s fascination with war. Richard Ford observes that they “portray what much of contemporary writing affects not to--wonder, and a high, complex and unironic regard for humankind in our inevitable and persistent moments of moral mystery.”
Sunday May 16 7:30 pm
Brad Herzog combines a keen eye for the everyday eccentricities of his fellow Americans with a refreshing, openhearted generosity in his delightful new book, Small World: A Microcosmic Journey. After the events of September, 2001, Herzog’s response to the rising tide of patriotism was to embark on a road-trip through the backwaters of the United States, a “global expedition of sorts,” visiting only small towns with grandiose names. And so he found himself visiting a guru in Calcutta, West Virginia, awash in beer and Czech pride in Prague, Nebraska, and discovering a succession of King Davids in Jerusalem, Arkansas; all of which he captures in descriptions that are both hilarious and endearing.
Monday May 17 7:30 pm
Noah Levine returns to Black Oak to read from his highly acclaimed memoir, Dharma Punx, which has recently been published in paperback. Levine pulls no punches as he chronicles his disastrous teenaged years as a skateboarding punk in Santa Cruz whose painful spiral to the bottom was fueled by alcohol, drugs of every variety, and a suicidal rage. His first attempt at mindfulness meditation took place in a padded cell, and proved to be the transformative step towards building a life of spiritual practice and service, while retaining the will to combat injustice that informed his love of punk. “Fierce and disarming in its honesty, raw and true in its expression...This is not your average spiritual autobiography!” Norman Fischer |
Tuesday May 18 7:30 pm
Rebecca Solnit’s many award-winning books have all displayed her uniquely impassioned and wholly original intelligence, but it has never been so welcome as it is in her new book, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. This exploration of optimism in an era of seeming defeat and cultural pessimism throws out the crippling assumptions with which many activists proceed, proposing instead a new vision of how change actually happens. By recounting historic victories that have already been forgotten, including the rescue of Mono Lake, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, Solnit traces the rise of a sophisticated, supple, and nonviolent new activism that is making its own future.
Wednesday May 19 7:30 pm
Alice Jones and Timothy Liu join us for an evening of readings of poetry from their new books. Paul Hoover has observed that in the ingenious book-length prose poem sequence Gorgeous Mourning, “Alice Jones reminds us that poetry is a precise means of uncertainty, through which we renew experience without the willful attempt to clarify it.” Frank Bidart has called Liu’s Of Thee I Sing, “a book that is the ‘flesh canoe’ of liberty, American liberty. By his eloquent, memorable, unappeased example, Liu enjoins us to do what Ginsberg did, put our queer shoulders to the wheel.”
Thursday May 20 7:30 pm
Although California didn’t get its first major league baseball team until 1958, the sport itself arrived a century earlier, brought by New Yorkers drawn west by the Gold Rush. From the sandlot games of the 1850s through the present, this has been the birthplace and proving ground for more major league players than any other state, and a list of some of the greats who have called California home ( Jackie, Casey, Lefty, the Schnazz, Joltin’ Joe, Sparky, Teddy Ballgame, the Singing Cowboy, Turkey, Sandy, Chief, El Goofy, Minnie, Babe, Chick, and Ping) has the ring of an ecstatic incantation. Kevin Nelson captures 120 years of this glorious history in his new book, The Golden Game: The Story of California Baseball, which is both richly illustrated and impeccably researched.
Sunday May 23 7:30 pm
Steve Almond, the aptly named author of Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, is (as he will freely confess) completely obsessed with candy: he still maintains a hoard of the elusive dark chocolate Kit-Kat. Almond turns this obsession to the reader’s great good fortune in this hilarious tour of some of this country’s last small candy companies, companies whose candy bars bear names like Twin Bing, Idaho Spud, Valomilk, and the Abba-Zaba. Along the way, he hears of closely guarded secret recipes, encounters the subtly erotic majesty of the chocolate enrobing machine, and above all, meets the candy makers themselves who, even when poised on the edge of failure, remain happy, indulgent, and childlike. “Fascinating, even compelling, and, often as not, guffaw-out-loud funny. Steve Almond is the Dave Eggers of food writing.” John Thorne
Monday May 24 7:30 pm
Three contemporary, local Russian writers, the poets Polina Barskova and Masha Gutkin (who left Moscow “when she was the size of a large thermos”), and fiction writer Margarita Meklina, will read from their recent works. Joining them will be Marian Schwarz, who will read from her translations of Nina Berberova, and a new translation of Yuri Olesha’s Envy.
Tuesday May 25 7:30 pm
Stephen Altschuler, the author of Sacred Paths and Muddy Places, and Hidden Walks in the East Bay and Marin, will read from his wonderful new book, The Mindful Hiker: On the Trail to Find the Path. This unique trail guide takes the reader on two simultaneous paths: the exterior, a hike along the Sky Trail in Point Reyes National Seashore, and the interior, a spiritual quest for mindfulness and insight. Filled with thought-provoking contemplative exercises, poems, and observations of nature, Altschuler’s book is destined to find a place in the backpacks and pockets of all those who love the landscapes of Point Reyes.
Wednesday May 26 7:30 pm
There is a word in French which perfectly describes Hilton Obenzinger’s remarkable aunt, Zosia Goldberg; débrouillarde: one who can run through fire without getting burned. Zosia had just turned twenty-one when the Germans invaded Warsaw, and was trapped in the Jewish ghetto along with most of her family. Escaping through the sewers, Zosia embarked on a desperate and audacious plan: passing as a Gentile, she got herself arrested on purpose and was shipped to Germany, where she spent the rest of the war doing forced labor. Obenzinger will be joined by two actors, Kendra Arimoto and Audrey Hannah, in readings from Goldberg’s powerful memoir, Running Through Fire: How I Survived the Holocaust, which he created from tapes of her reminiscences.
Thursday May 27 7:30 pm
Marilyn Yalom, the author of numerous highly-acclaimed books including A History of the Wife, returns to Black Oak to read from her fascinating new book, Birth of the Chess Queen: A History. When chess was first invented, the piece we now known as the queen not only had very limited power, but was male in gender. The chess queen first appeared in southern Europe around 1000 A.D.; by tracing its evolution over the next 500-year period, Yalom shows how the queen’s ascendance to the most powerful player on the board reflects the ascent of female rulers to positions of power during the same period. This entertaining and enlightening look at Medieval Culture is enhanced by beautiful illustrations throughout.
Black Oak is also co-sponsoring three additional events with the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center:
Monday May 3 7:30 pm
Christine Benvenuto will read from Shiksa: The Gentile Woman in the Jewish World.
Tuesday May 4 7:30 pm
Marvin Korman will read from In My Father’s Bakery: A Bronx Memoir.
Monday May 17 7:30 pm
Carla Blank will read from Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America, 1900-2000.
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.
|
