Thursday November 4 7:30 pm
In Iraq, Inc., journalist Pratap Chatterjee investigates the role American corporations such as Halliburton and Bechtel are playing in the ongoing war in Iraq. He details the connections between these corporations and the government officials who made the decision to go to war, and points out that of all the participants in the war, private contractors seem so far to be the only winners. "A powerful combination of investigative research and on-the-ground reporting, Iraq, Inc. is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has really gone wrong in Iraq." Naomi Klein
Monday November 8 7:30 pm
What makes a city wonderfully livable? In The Political Edge, twenty-five writers and activists recount the various ways local politics can transform and improve transportation, housing, employment, the environment, and other crucial aspects of city-dwelling. Join editor Chris Carlsson and contributors Iain Boal, Annalee Newitz, Joel Pomerantz, and Steven Bodzin to discuss specific ways that Berkeley and the East Bay can organize to reimagine the urban experience.
Tuesday November 9 7:30 pm
Ivan Eland is a leading expert on U.S. defense policy and national security who has worked for both the Congressional Budget Office and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, he criticizes America's continuing expansion and military intervention around the world, which began with the acquisition of the Philippines and Guam during the Spanish-American War, continued through both World Wars and the Cold War, and finally has come to the current administration's expansion of U.S. strategic influence and occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Eland's analysis "should greatly influence the debate in this country about how to restore a Constitutional foreign policy." Chalmers Johnson
Thursday November 11 7:30 pm
Michael N. Nagler, professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, where he founded and still teaches in the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, explores the history of nonviolence and looks at the possibilities ahead in The Search for a Nonviolent Future. Drawing on the experience of activists, political visionaries, and spiritual leaders, he lays out the reasons he feels nonviolence is the effective response to the political, social, and moral turmoil we find ourselves immersed in as we begin the twenty-first century. "Every political leader and every teacher should be required to read this book." Rabbi Michael Lerner |
Monday November 15 7:30 pm
That poet, that performer, that teacher, that disciple, that wild and wonderful fast speaking woman Anne Waldman comes to Black Oak to read from her new collection, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble. Her inspiration is the Stupa of Borobudur in Java, built in the ninth century to be in part a holy road map for the Bodhisattva path of compassion. She quotes the Tibetan teacher Milarepa: "That I am a singer of little songs, / Proves that I have learned to read the world as a book." Tonight she will read some of that book to you.
Tuesday November 16 7:30 pm
Co-editor Greil Marcus (author of Lipstick Traces and Mystery Train) and contributor Cecil Brown (author of last year's Stagolee Shot Billy) read from The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad, an engaging collection of articles by artists and writers on the rich and enduring impact ballads have had on American culture. Delia, Pretty Polly, Barbara Allen, Frankie and Albert (sometimes known as Frankie and Johnny), the cuckoo, John Brown's body, and the foggy, foggy dew are among the many subjects of well-loved songs that get a new appraisal in this wonderful anthology.
Wednesday 17 7:30 pm
Mary Catherine Bateson returns to Black Oak with her new collection of essays, Willing to Learn: Passages of Personal Discovery. She begins with pieces on her parents, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, including a moving recollection of her father's death, which took place at the San Francisco Zen Center. She then examines such diverse topics as the rhetoric of good and evil, the beauty of confusion and ambiguity, the changing nature of marriage and commitment, and the way the attacks of 9-11 have brought to the fore urgent questions about tolerance, trauma, politics, and community.
Thursday November 18 7:30 pm
John R. Searle, Mills Professor in the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley, joins us to discuss Mind: A Brief Introduction, recently published as part of the Oxford Fundamentals of Philosophy Series. He writes that "the philosophy of mind is unique among contemporary philosophical subjects in that all of the most famous and influential theories are false." He then proceeds to dismantle these theories, and in that process offers striking new insights into the nature of consciousness and mind. |
