Monday  May 2  7:30 pm 

Poet, physician, and NPR commentator David Watts reads from Bedside Manners: One Doctor’s Reflection on the Oddly Intimate Encounters Between Patient and Healer. The relationship between doctor and patient is one of the most personal and charged we experience. This relationship requires levels of trust and honesty we usually share only with those closest to us, yet it is conducted between people who are neither friends nor relatives. David Watts describes the conversation between patient and healer as coming into “a clearing.” He writes about the doctor-patient relationship with wit and humanity; in doing so he uncovers the beauty of healing along with some of the disturbing aspects of the medical process. Now that HMOs and insurance companies are defining medical practice in terms of business models and profit margins, it is especially important for us to think about what kind of relationship we want this to be. 

Thursday  May 5  7:30 pm 

New York Times contributor David Kirby discusses Evidence of Harm—Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy. This urgent and unsettling book investigates the evidence that mercury additives in vaccines may be fueling an epidemic of autism, ADD, speech delay, and other disorders in American children. Since the 1990s, reported autism cases among American children has jumped from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in just 166. Meanwhile, a rider to the 2002 Homeland Security bill would release pharmaceutical companies from liability in lawsuits pertaining to the mercury-based preservative thimerosal now used in many vaccines and suspected by researchers of contributing to the national rise in autism. 

Monday  May 9  7:30 pm  

Political satirist and monologist extraordinaire Josh Kornbluth will appear at Black Oak to celebrate a new edition of his memoir Red Diaper Baby and the television screening of his movie Haiku Tunnel, the sweetly droll saga about life as an office temp. He has won critical acclaim and peals of laughter with his performances of Love and Taxes, which wittily explores the absurdities of the U.S. tax code, and Ben Franklin Unplugged. He is Berkeley’s own answer to Woody Allen and Will Rogers combined in one lovely comedic talent.

Tuesday  May 10  7:30 pm  

PEN West will be holding their annual translation event at Black Oak Books. The subject this year is the translation of ancient, classical, and sacred texts. The panel is comprised of three of our most eminent local scholars and translators: Robert Alter, translator of The Five Books of Moses (from Hebrew), Robert Goldman, translator of The Valmiki Ramayana (from Sanskrit), and H. Mack Horton, translator of The Journal of Socho (from Japanese). This will be a superb opportunity to discuss classic texts and the art of translation with world-class scholars, and to meet with members of PEN, the largest worldwide organization of writers.

Thursday  May 12  7:30 pm 

Susan Wheeler, author of three award-winning volumes of poetry, will read from her novel Record Palace. The most important parts of our education are sometimes the ones we don’t plan. Cindy, a white girl from the Los Angeles suburb Thousand Oaks goes to Chicago to study art history. Her musical background is rooted in singers like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. A few blocks from the Loop in Chicago she wanders into Acie’s Record Palace where she learns about jazz, black life in Chicago, and the depths of friendship. Susan Wheeler brings her poetic talent for atmosphere and first-person candidness to this diary-like novel. “An exquisitely crafted recollection of music, at a pivotal time for both jazz and Chicago.”—Steve Martin

Tuesday  May 17  7:30 pm  

Into the second month of the baseball season we will be visited by USF Professor of Law and Politics, editor of Peace Review, and one-time semi-pro baseball player Robert Elias. In 2001 he edited Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class, Gender, and the American Pastime, which was nominated for the annual Sporting News Book Award. His debut novel, The Deadly Tools of Ignorance, features protagonist Debs Kafka, a disillusioned graduate student in criminology who is willing to give up academic security to take a shot at his long-time dream of playing in the big leagues. At the same time he becomes obsessed with the murder of a priest he knew. In the final days of a tight pennant race Debs grows frantic as the murderer threatens to kill his teammate, the star pitcher for the San Francisco Giants. The Deadly Tools of Ignorance mixes murder and baseball with witty jabs at academic and clerical life. “Rob Elias has slammed a homer his very first time up!”—Darryl Brock

Wednesday  May 18  7:30 pm  

Rosemary Radford Ruether, Professor of Feminist Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, will discuss Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History, a study of how gender has evolved in religion since ancient Mesopotamia. Professor Ruether explains that the notion of matriarchal social structures systematically displaced by patriarchies offers too simplistic an account of the complex historical relations between male and female divinity. She believes that ancient figures of female divinity suggest positive appreciation of female worth, but should not be mistaken for models of how women should value themselves in contemporary culture. At the same time she finds that there is much common ground that can be shared by feminist Christians and neo-pagans, who hold similar progressive values for shaping the present and the future.

Thursday  May 19  7:30 pm 

Black Oak hosts a special event on “Epic Tales of California,” featuring three prominent writers of California history: Lauren Coodley, editor of Land of Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclair’s California, Gray Brechin, author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, and Richard A. Walker, author of The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California. These writers will be talking about the invisible landscape bequeathed to us by FDR’s New Deal and the way it expanded the concept of public domain in America. The legacy of the New Deal is an especially important topic now that it is under attack. We will be showing slides for this event.

Tuesday  May 24  7:30 pm 

David Skibbins will read from his new mystery, Eight of Swords. This book won the Malice Domestic/St. Martin’s Press First Mystery Award and features one of the most entertaining protagonists you will ever hope to meet in a novel. Warren Ritter is a tarot-reading, motorcycle-riding, aikido-plying, manic depressive refugee from the 1960s Weather Underground who likes to hang out and shop at a local bookstore—Black Oak Books in Berkeley. We are delighted to find ourselves figuring prominently in this funny, surprising, enjoyable story.

Wednesday  May 25  7:30 pm   

Jorge Emmanuel, Abe Ignacio, Enrique de la Cruz, and Helen Toribio will discuss The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons. This book features eighty-eight color plates that illustrate how the American press used racist cartoons of Filipinos in order to win American consensus for America’s war in the Philippines—possibly the least discussed and understood of all American wars—which took place between 1899 and 1914. It began as a conflict between America and Spain but developed into an American campaign against “insurgent” Filipinos. The Forbidden Book explores the destructive consequences that fifteen-year war has had on Filipino culture and the Philippine people ever since.

Thursday  May 26  7:30 pm 

Retort is a gathering of writers and activists based for two decades in the Bay Area. Their broadside “Neither Their War Nor Their Peace,” composed for the antiwar demonstrations of spring 2003, has now been expanded into a book, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. The four who did the main writing—Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts—come to Black Oak to discuss their account of world politics since September 11, 2001, in particular the new turn to what Retort calls “military neo-liberalism,” and the related themes of blood for oil, permanent war, the US-Israel relationship, the state and the spectacle, revolutionary Islam, and modernity and terror. Noam Chomsky describes Afflicted Powers as a “provocative and wide-ranging inquiry.”

Tuesday  May 31  7:30 pm

Black Oak welcomes Vanilla Queen Patricia Rain, an acknowledged authority on everything that has to do with vanilla as well as a culinary historian and lecturer, a vanilla broker, and the owner of The Vanilla Company, a socially responsible wholesale business that provides vanilla products to some of the best restaurants in the Bay Area. Her mission is to educate the world about the joys and wonders of vanilla. She follows the success of The Vanilla Cookbook with her second book, Vanilla: A Cultural History of the World’s Favorite Flavor and Fragrance. Our friends at Chez Panisse and the Vintage Berkeley wine store on Vine Street will be with us to show us how creatively one can cook with vanilla and pair those dishes with wines.