Tuesday,  November 1st  7:30 pm  

(please note: this event will be at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut Street, Berkeley) George Lakoff, author of the bestselling Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, has been a pioneer in applying cognitive science and linguistics to the study of how politicians use, and how electorates are swayed by, metaphorical language and the linguistic "framing" of issues. He has written extensively on how conservatives use metaphors of "family values" to promote their political agendas, and is now working on a book that will focus on the way conservatives are using the idea of "freedom." The conservative and fundamentalist coalitions that dominate our government are currently in turmoil. It remains to be seen whether progressives can find the political rhetoric by which to take advantage of this turmoil and promote a more liberal, progressive polity in America.

Wednesday,  November 2nd  7:30 pm  

Join us for a fantastic evening of Italian travel and food writing with Doris Muscatine, author of The Vinegar of Spilamberto and Other Italian Adventures with Food, Places, and People. In 1958 Doris Muscatine's husband, a scholar of medieval literature, received a Fulbright to do research in Italy; it was an introduction to the belle paese (beautiful country) to which they would return often. The Vinegar of Spilamberto is the enchanting story of their experiences. Residing in various places—a house in Venice, a medieval tower in Tuscany, and a villa on the Appia Antica with its own catacombs—and visiting small towns such as Populonia and Rovescala and bigger ones, such as Riace and Dozza, the family immersed themselves in the Italy that lies off of the typical tourist track. Chapters are devoted to the Italian slow food movement and to special products such as truffles and authentic balsamic vinegar, the vinegar of Spilamberto. The reading will be followed by a reception around the corner at Vintage Berkeley, 2113 Vine Street, featuring their Italian wines, along with samples of Italian cuisine courtesy of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse.

Thursday,  November 3rd  7:30 pm 

In her moving new book, All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated, award-winning journalist Nell Bernstein takes an intimate look at parents and children torn apart by the American penal system. Speaking with people on every side of this issue—parents, children, police, corrections officials, and extended families—she comes to the conclusion that the system is failing millions of innocent children and fostering a perpetual cycle of imprisonment that will be likely to repeat itself from one generation to the next. She looks at how the current system weakens family bonds in the poorest communities, and worsens problems of unemployment and substance addictions. Jailing parents for drug crimes, she argues, stigmatizes people without helping to cure the roots of their problems, making it more likely that the incarcerated will return to prison after they are released. This book makes its case both statistically and by way of powerful personal accounts of children of incarcerated parents.

Friday,  November 4th  7:30 pm 

We're delighted to announce the return of Bluegrass Night at Black Oak. Come listen to an eveningful of excellent down-home music with Sandy Rothman, Alan Senauke, and Brian Godchaux.

Sunday,  November 6th  7:30 pm 

David Wolman reads from A Left-Hand Turn Around the World: Chasing the Mystery and Meaning of All Things Southpaw. In a quest to prove his premise of southpaw superiority, Wolmans's travels take him from the halls of history to the halls of science, as he visits a Scottish castle with a staircase designed for left-handed swordfighting, and a California operating room where he watches cataract surgery performed by a left-handed doctor. He confers with primatologists about whether chimps' hand preference for throwing could show an evolutionary link between coordination and language ability. He searches for the mystical significance of leftiness at a handwriting analysis conference and a palmistry workshop. Along the way, he meets colorful Southpaws such as Diabolos Rex, follower of the ancient religion of the Left Hand Path, and members of the National Association of Left-Handed Golfers of Japan.

Monday,  November 7th  7:30 pm 

Between December 16, 1811, and late April 1812, a catastrophic series of earthquakes shook the Mississippi Valley. Towns were destroyed, an eighteen-mile-long lake was created, and the Mississippi River temporarily reversed its course. In When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes, journalist Jay Feldman sheds light on the pivotal period between the Revolutionary and Civil wars, uncovering the era's dramatic geophysical, political, and military turmoil, and painting a vivid picture of how these powerful earthquakes made an impact on every aspect of frontier life.

Tuesday,  November 8th  7:30 pm 

Black Oak hosts three young women poets whose debut collections concern the communities in which they were raised. Southern-born poet Rebecca Black, who won the 2004 Juniper Prize for poetry, will read from Cottonlandia, which moves through American myth and landscape, beginning in the deep South's "shimmer and tar" and ending in the "soot and orange dolor" of the California desert. Chun Yu will read from Little Green: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a book that tells us of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (now referred to in China as "The Ten Years' Great Calamity") as she saw it: from the perspective of a child. Shaunna Oteka McCovey, of California's Yurok and Karuk tribes, will read from The Smokehouse Boys, a volume that gives a poetic account of growing up along the Klamath River in a world of rushing rivers, blackberry wine, ancient forests, barroom seductions, maidenhair, and heroin.

Wednesday,  November 9th  7:30 pm 

The 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, was a watershed moment in labor history as significant as the Haymarket bombing in Chicago and the Triangle fire in New York. In Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream, veteran journalist Bruce Watson provides a long-overdue account of the strike that began when textile workers stormed out of the mills in Lawrence on a frigid January day. Despite owners' predictions to the contrary, the walkout soon became a protracted drama that included twenty-three thousand strikers from fifty-one nations singing as they paraded through Lawrence, bayonet-toting militiamen patrolling the streets, and the daring evacuation of the strikers' tattered and hungry children to Manhattan, where they lived with strangers and wrote loving letters to their parents on the picket line.

Thursday,  November 10th  7:30 pm 

Seth Kantner reads from his novel Ordinary Wolves, which is based on his childhood in the Alaskan tundra. Cutuk lives with his brother, sister, and father, (Abe—"our best friend, and no dad at all") in an igloo in remote Alaska. Outside caribou, bears, moose, and ravens move under frozen pastel skies. In a village a day's journey away lives Cutuk's adopted family, the Wolfgloves: Enuk a legendary hunter; his son Melt, savaged by alcohol; Melt's wife, Janet; and their daughter Dawna, an Eskimo princess. Barbara Kingsolver calls Ordinary Wolves "an astonishing book: exotic as a dream, acrid and beautiful and honest as life."

Sunday,  November 13th  7:30 pm 

Ghazal Omid reads from her memoir, Living in Hell: A True Odyssey of a Woman's Struggle in Islamic Iran Against Personal and Political Forces, a riveting account of her fight against what she describes as the social, political, and religious injustice being practiced in the name of Islamic law. Ghazal Omid survived the Islamic Revolution and the eight-year war with Iraq. With the help of sympathetic university and embassy personnel and black market documents, she made her way through France and Holland to become a refugee in Canada, where she is now a citizen. In Living in Hell, she provides an insider's view of world-changing events, theorizes about the links between terror, poverty, and ignorance, and cautions the world about a nuclear Iran and a government that, she says, has executed tens of thousands of its own citizens.

Monday,  November 14th  7:30 pm 

(Please note: this event will be at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center at 1414 Walnut Street, Berkeley) Black Oak hosts a discussion with three leading experts on the American constitution and the rules by which the United States implements foreign policy and conducts war. Our panelists are Gordon Silverstein from the UC Berkeley Department of Political Science and author of Imbalance of Powers: Constitutional Interpretation and the Making of American Foreign Policy; Peter Irons, professor of political science at UC San Diego and author of War Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution; and John Yoo, Professor of Law at Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley and author of The Powers of War and Peace: Foreign Affairs and the Constitution After 9/11. Topics will include how the constitution provides for going to war, conducting wars, and ending wars; how "the war on terror" is like or unlike other wars the US has fought; and how international treaties and agreements are or are not binding for the US in its conflict with al Queda. The panel will be moderated by Jeffrey S. Brand, Dean of the Law School at the University of San Francisco.

Tuesday,  November 15th  7:30 pm 

Noria Jablonski reads from her debut collection of nine short stories. In Human Oddities, Jablonksi presents to us the human body imperfect, diseased and deformed: conjoined and separated Siamese twins, cancerous bodies, and tummy-tuck operations. Her stories dwell among the social margins that fascinated photographers such as Weegee and Arbus. Jablonski writes of the socially as well as the biologically deformed: drag queens, seedy hospital orderlies, and a corpse washed up on the beach. As her characters cope with their bodies and the feeling of being marked as different, Jablonski shows us how their passions and longings are made more poignant by being housed in bodies that place them in doubtful relation to others. The apparently monstrous among us turn out to be supremely human, awakened by their struggles with their bodies to awareness of compassion, dignity, and hope.

Wednesday,  November 16th  7:30 pm 

Mary Felstiner, professor of history at San Francisco State University, is author of the much-praised biography of Charlotte Saloman, To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era. She comes to Black Oak to read from her new memoir, Out of Joint: A Private and Public Story of Arthritis, in which she writes candidly about her own experiences of rheumatoid arthritis, and about the history and treatment of this disease which afflicts more than two million Americans. "Felstiner brings a feminist's eye and a historian's tool kit to this narrative of her decades-long struggle with rheumatoid arthritis. . . . [Her] story is as much about the complexities of belonging—as a woman, a feminist, a Jew, an intellectual—as it is about her illness."—Publishers Weekly

Thursday,  November 17th  7:30 pm 

Michael Chorost became a cyborg on October 1, 2001, the day his new ear was booted up. Born hard of hearing in 1964, he went completely deaf in his thirties. Rather than live in silence, he chose to have a computer surgically embedded in his skull to artificially restore his hearing. His memoir, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, is a brilliant dispatch from the technological frontier as well as an ode to the meaning of sound. From the first, the author finds his new body mystifyingly mechanical: kitchen magnets stick to his head; he can plug himself directly into a CD player; and his hearing is routinely upgraded with new software. Whether Chorost is adjusting his software in a desperate attempt to make the world sound "right" again, exploring the neurobiology of the ear, or reflecting on the simple pleasure of his mother's voice, he invites us to think about what we hear—and how we experience the world—in an altogether new way.

Sunday,  November 27th  3:00 pm 

In 2003, the mann-und-froy (husband-and-wife) team of Celeste Sollod (a veteran publisher) and Zackary Sholem Berger (a widely published writer in English and Yiddish), published their first book, Di Kats der Payats, a Yiddish translation of The Cat in the Hat. As hilariously rhymed in Yiddish as in English, Di Kats der Payats was a resounding success (kayn ayne horeh—against the evil eye!). Leonard Wolf called it "utterly charming, witty, and droll" and Conan O'Brien joked about it on his TV show. The mishugge, chutzpanik cat has now been joined by a tsuris- (trouble-) seeking simian: George der Naygeriker, Curious George in Yiddish, has just been published to a enthusiastic and kvelling reception. Zack and Celeste, who brought both the Yiddish Cat and the Yiddish Monkey into the world, will be reading George der Naygeriker in Yiddish and English, dramatic flourishes and monkey noises included.

Monday,  November 28th  7:30 pm 

Black Oak is proud to host PEN West's annual Freedom to Write event. This year the theme will be war, censorship, and the press, and will feature Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and Norman Solomon, author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. The event will be moderated by award-winning journalist, Ruth Rosen, who is Professor Emerita at University of California, Davis, and known for her groundbreaking work on society and gender.

Tuesday,   November 29th  7:30 pm 

Acclaimed novelist David Leavitt will talk about his new biography, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer. To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary programmable calculating machine. But the idea of actually producing a "Turing machine" did not crystallize until he and his brilliant Bletchley Park colleagues built devices to crack the Nazis' Enigma code, thus ensuring the Allies' victory in World War II. In so doing, Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, formulating the famous (and still unbeaten) Turing Test that challenges our ideas of human consciousness. But Turing's postwar computer-building was cut short when, as an openly gay man in a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was apprehended by the authorities and sentenced to a "treatment" that amounted to chemical castration, and which led to his suicide. With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity—his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor—while elegantly explaining his work and its implications.

Wednesday,  November 30th  7:30 pm 

Physicist and editor Ralph Leighton reads from Classic Feynman, an omnibus edition of Richard Feynman's writings that also includes an hour-long CD. Richard Feynman (1918–1988) thrived on outrageous adventures. In the phenomenal national bestsellers "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist recounted in an inimitable voice his adventures trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and Bohr and ideas on gambling with Nick the Greek, painting a naked female toreador, accompanying a ballet on his bongo drums, solving the mystery of the Challenger disaster, and much else of an eyebrow-raising, hugely entertaining, and astounding nature. Now packaged with a CD of the 1978 "Los Alamos from Below" lecture, Classic Feynman offers readers a chance to finally hear a great tale in the orator's own voice.