Monday,  October 3rd  7:30 pm  

Fourth Uncle in the Mountain: A Memoir of a Barefoot Doctor in Vietnam is the true story of Quang Van Nguyen, who was adopted as an orphaned infant in Vietnam by Thau Van Nguyen, a legendary Buddhist monk and traditional healer. Marjorie Pivar, who co-wrote this memoir with Quang Van Nguyen, came to know him when he saved her own son's life. She joins us tonight to share what Ken Burns has called "a magical, mesmerizing story; a complicated tale of Vietnam's anguished history, of healing and faith, and of a young boy's miraculous coming of age."

Tuesday,  October 4th  7:30 pm 

Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally is an anthology of original essays by young American women all of whom are either foreign-born or have at least one foreign-born parent. They describe in various ways how they feel caught between two worlds—neither wholly American nor wholly a part of another heritage. In a time in which one in five residents is either an immigrant or child of an immigrant, these stories are central to our national identity. We will be joined by editor Angela Jane Fountas (Greek American) and contributors Tina Lee (Chinese American), Jenesha de Rivera (Filipina American), and Amy André (Haitian American).

Wednesday, October 5th  7:30 pm  

Education theorist Edward L. Davis, author of Lessons for Tomorrow: Bringing America's Schools Back from the Brink, is a pioneer in computer-based instruction and in applying cognitive science to learning design. He is joined by Jay Cross, a leading theorist on computer-based education, to discuss how public education in America has become an obsolete, entrenched, bureaucratic machine, disconnected from our real educational needs, and how we should redesign our approaches to teaching both children and adults.

Thursday, October 6th  7:30 pm 

Rebecca Solnit, one of our leading writers on the history and landscape of the American West, comes to Black Oak along with photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe to celebrate their new book, Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers. Klett, Wolfe, and Solnit spent three summers in Yosemite, re-photographing classic images taken by Eadweard Muybridge, Carleton Watkins, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams. Tonight's talk will include a slide show of many of these images. Yosemite in Time is also the subject of an exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum through December 23.

Sunday,  October 9th  4:00 - 6:00pm 

Black Oak Books is co-sponsoring this commemoration of the death of the brilliant and courageous journalist, Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in Pakistan in 2002. The musical event features mezzo-soprano Sylvie Braitman performing a piece called "My Father's Journey," which weaves together Yiddish, Hebrew, French, and Russian songs with the story of her father's survival during the Holocaust. Black Oak will feature two books related to the life and legacy of Daniel Pearl: the anthology I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl, which was edited by Daniel Pearl's parents, Judea and Ruth Pearl, and A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, which was written by Daniel Pearl's wife Mariane Pearl.

Sunday,  October 9th  7:30 pm  

Jamaican writer Marlon James reads from John Crow's Devil, a novel about religious struggle in the remote Jamaican town of Gibbeah. James's use of fantasy and political allegory in this phenomenal first novel has garnered comparisons with the works of Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez. He is joined by Trinie Dalton, who reads from Wide Eyed, her collection of wild, charming, and original stories that take place in a surreal dream world in which psychic communion with rock star and animal minds, botanical religion, and horror film apocalypses are normal aspects of the imagination's curiously nightmarish but beautiful landscape.

Monday, October 10th  6:30 pm 

Boston College sociology professor Charles Derber will talk about Hidden Power: What You Need to Know to Save Our Democracy. In this new book Derber argues that the corporate system of rule in America weaves together the interests of many large companies and enables them to effectively influence, if not control, American media, political parties, education, health care, and the military. Citizens of the United States, he says, have the power to change this system of rule, but this change will not come from merely replacing one political party with the other.

Tuesday,  October 11th  7:30 pm  

Among the most venerated classical conductors of his generation, Joseph Eger has distilled a half-century of musical, personal, and eclectic intellectual experience into a new collection of essays, Einstein's Violin: A Conductor's Notes on the Nature of Music. In this book Eger contemplates the nature of music in relation to theoretical physics, and also writes of how music can serve as an agent of social change. Tonight's talk will include a video recording of Eger conducting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Thursday,  October 13th  7:30 pm 

Evolutionary biologist Elisabeth A. Lloyd's new book, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, has provoked tremendous controversy among feminists, sexologists, and biologists. In it she argues that female orgasm is not, in itself, a "useful adaptation," but a by-product of male orgasm. It is, in her view, a trait that evolved in correspondence with the adaptation of orgasm in men, in much the same way that male nipples evolved in correspondence with female nipples, but without a similar purpose. We are delighted that Professor Lloyd will be with us to explain her findings, clarify her views, and answer questions about her work.

Sunday,  October 16th  7:30 pm 

David Vogel, professor of business ethics at the Haas School of Business and of political science at UC Berkeley, will talk about The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility. David Vogel is a leading expert on the movement among some corporations to voluntarily act in more socially responsible ways. In surveying this movement he finds that there have been some significant successes in the fields of human rights, labor laws, and environmental conditions, but he doubts that self-regulation will significantly change the overall pattern of corporate behavior, suggesting instead that to bring about more profound change, voluntary corporate responsibility needs to be bolstered by government laws and regulations.

Monday,  October 17th  7:30 pm 

Ray Bourhis is a champion of insurance policy-holders rights and a sharp critic of insurance companies. In his new book, Insult to Injury: Insurance, Fraud, and the Big Business of Bad Faith, he sets out to reveal the back-room strategies and illegal practices of insurance companies, showing the ways they try to prevent insurance cases from coming to trial and manipulate data in the cases that do. Additionally, he explains the regulatory oversights and the problems in the legal system that may actually encourage fraud.

Tuesday,  October 18th  7:30 pm 

Bay Area poet Jack Marshall will read from his new memoir, From Baghdad to Brooklyn: Growing Up in a Jewish-Arabic Family in Midcentury America. Son of an Iraqi-Jewish father and Syrian-Jewish mother, Jack Marshall grew up in the 1930s and '40s in Brooklyn's close-knit Sephardic community. He tells of living in the shadow of cosmopolitan New York, but in a household ruled by traditional Arabic and Jewish culture, and recounts his struggles to reconcile his family's traditions with his own attraction to science and modern poetry, of the siren songs of Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas, which finally won out over Yeshiva and Jewish orthodoxy. Jack Marshall's memoir is deeply personal yet also an archetypal story of the young artist reluctantly and painfully abandoning his parents' expectations.

Wednesday, October 19th  7:30 pm 

Jean Shinoda Bolen is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California Medical Center, a Jungian analyst in private practice, and one of the most renowned authors writing today about Jungian psychology and the power of the female principle. She comes to Black Oak to discuss Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World, a call to all of us to bring the powers of nurturing and caring to a world torn apart by violence. She discusses a UCLA study that showed that an urge to nurture—triggered by the presence of oxytocin, the maternal bonding hormone—increases in women under stress, as opposed to the aggression that stress tends to bring out in men. Bolen believes that these biologically based, characteristically female powers of compassion and healing are the answers to the global epidemic of conflict, if we can bring those powers to consciousness and into the political arena. "Bolen has given us all an assignment: Gather, circle, act. Mother Earth is asking for our help. How can we not respond?"—Terry Tempest Williams

Thursday,  October 20th  7:30 pm 

San Francisco, the scene of film-noir classics, is the setting here for a collection of hard-boiled mystery stories written by many of the Bay Area's best and favorite writers. The editor of San Francisco Noir, Peter Maravelis, will be joined by contributors Robert Mailer Anderson, Kate Braverman, David Corbett, Eddie Muller, Peter Plate, and Michelle Tea. Their stories cover the city of fog and grit from Hunter's Point to the Haight-Ashbury, Chinatown to Fisherman's Wharf. Come discover malice and mystery in the alleys and back ways where guide books never go in what Rebecca Solnit calls "this gorgeous anthology of San Francisco noir."

Friday,  October 21st  7:30 pm 

Black Oak and the Institute for the Study of Natural and Cultural Resources are co-hosting a benefit for the Oxfam/America Katrina Relief Fund featuring Cajun and Creole music with Suzy Thompson, Eric Thompson, and Agi Ban of the group Aux Cajunals, and readings with Maxine Hong Kingston, Michael Chabon, and Ayelet Waldman, among others. Treats are being provided by our neighbors Masse's Bakery and Vintage Wine. Special thanks to Lee Swenson. Donation: $10 and up. At the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut Street, Berkeley.

Sunday, October 23rd  7:30 pm 

Authors and literary bloggers Laila Lalami, Kevin Smokler, Michelle Richmond, and Frances Dinkelspiel will discuss writing, blogging, and publishing in an age of electronic media. Laila Lalami is the author of a new book of fiction, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, about four characters linked by their desire to emigrate from Morocco to Spain. She is also the author of the popular lit-blog Moorish Girl. Kevin Smokler is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, a collection of original essays by young authors about writing in the twenty-first century; he is the author of the lit-blog Where There's Smoke. Michelle Richmond's novel Dream of the Blue Room, tells of a woman's trip up the Yangtze River to grieve and scatter the ashes of a friend murdered twelve years before; she writes the lit-blog Michelle's Daily Dose for Writers. Frances Dinkelspiel is the author of the forthcoming book Towers of Gold: Isaias Hellman and the Creation of California, the story of her great-great-grandfather, the Pacific Coast's premier banker in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; her lit-blog is called Ghost Word.

Tuesday,  October 25th  7:30 pm 

Black Oak hosts a discussion of sustainable design with two eminent thinkers in the field. Andres Edwards, who specializes in sustainability and biodiversity projects, is the founder of EduTracks, a firm focused on green building and sustainable education programs. His new book, The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift, articulates what he sees as a radical shift in the way we look at design and conservation. One-time California State Architect Sim Van der Ryn is a world leader in ecologically sensitive design whose work has led to the adoption of stricter energy standards and higher disability access standards for state buildings and parks. In Design for Life: The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn, he proposes a philosophy of design based on natural patterns that reconnect us organically to our surroundings.

Wednesday,  October 26th  7:30 pm 

Byron Belitsos will discuss One World Democracy: A Progressive Vision for Enforceable Global Law, which he co-wrote with Jerry Tetalman. This new book is an appeal to progressive thinkers to accept nothing less than a radically changed international system focused on enforceable global law as the only way to abolish war and militarism, halt the spread of global epidemics, preserve the environment, deal with the problem of poverty, and limit the activities of global corporations.

Thursday,  October 27th  7:30 pm 

Alice Medrich founded Cocolat, the groundbreaking Bay Area chocolate and dessert company, in 1977. In the following years she radically revised our standards for making desserts with her emphasis on superior ingredients used with greater finesse, sophistication, and care. In 1990 Berkeley's favorite chocolate maven and dessert chef turned her talent and precision to writing cookbooks that have won a cornucopia of prizes. She will come to Black Oak to celebrate two of her acclaimed cookbooks, Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate and Chocolate Holidays: Unforgettable Desserts for Every Season. Our friends at the store Vintage Wine will supply the beverages; Alice Medrich will bring samples of her desserts

Saturday,  October 29th  7:30 pm 

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and television commentator Haynes Johnson will discuss The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism. For five long years in the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his anti-communist crusade dominated the American political scene, intimidated politicians, and destroyed the lives of thousands. Haynes Johnson revisits that time of crisis, writing of President Eisenhower, who hated McCarthy but would not attack him; of the Republican senators who cynically used McCarthy to win their own elections; of Edward R. Murrow, whose courageous TV broadcast began McCarthy's downfall; and of mild-mannered lawyer Joseph Welch, who finally shamed McCarthy into silence. His masterful narrative also encompasses the story of his father, journalist Malcolm Johnson, whose articles on terrorism and murder led to the movie On the Waterfront—and whose life was forever changed by charges that he was a communist.

Sunday,  October 30th  2:00 pm 

Black Oak celebrates El Día de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead), a Mexican holiday that honors ancestors and acknowledges death as fundamental to the continuity of life. Join us for a fiesta that will include such traditional crafts as decorating sugar skulls and constructing skeleton figures, as well as stories, snacks, music, and fun.

Sunday,  October 30th  7:30 pm 

Kay Cordell Whitaker wrote her classic tale The Reluctant Shaman after a thirteen-year apprenticeship with two native shaman from the central eastern Andes. Their teachings included their traditional psychology, storytelling, shamanic medical training, and spiritual practices of their culture. Tonight she will talk about her new book, Sacred Link: Joining Fortunes with the Unknown, in which she urges us to awaken to the spirit of the created world, reunite our minds with our bodily senses, and find communion with a living, pulsing, responsive world. "Sacred Link sent chills up my spine — what a compelling, empowering story." —Christiane Northrup

Monday,  October 31st  7:30 pm 

Journalist Heather Rogers will discuss Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. This book explores the history and politics of garbage, a substance both hidden and omnipresent. To investigate the roots of our waste-addicted culture, Rogers excavates the history of garbage handling from the 1800s to the post-WWII golden era of consumption and up through the contradictions of modern-day recycling. She uncovers the links between modern industrial production, consumer culture, and our disposable lifestyle. Her treatment of the subject is serious yet wryly humorous; and while garbage is ugly, Rogers discovers a strange and fascinating beauty in the production of waste. Most importantly, she grapples with the questions of why we produce so much trash and what can be done about it. We will be showing a short documentary film the author made as a companion to the book.