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Sat., Sept. 28 • 10:00-2:00pm • $50 (includes materials & snacks)
This class is for adults only--parents, teachers, and others who want to re-learn how to play on the page. Come reclaim your inner third-grader who isn't afraid to experiment using magic word tickets, word-play, open-ended prompts, and ideas from Karen Benke's newest book Leap Write In! Adventures in Creative Writing to Stretch & Surprise Your One-of-a-Kind Mind.
Sat., Sept. 28 • 10:00-3:00pm • $85
S.F. Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll shares his wit, wisdom, and essay-writing talents. This is a chance to learn personal essay writing from one of the best. One student wrote, "Carroll is witty, patient, knowledgeable, inspiring. He anticipates people's concerns in their questions and problems they can't express. Gives tons of examples..."
Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America, in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor-the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm.
The American Way of Poverty ($26.99) shines a light on this travesty. Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows and, ultimately, suggests ways for moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. Exploring everything from housing policy to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky lays out a panoramic blueprint for a reinvigorated political process that, in turn, will pave the way for a renewed War on Poverty.
It is, Harrington believed, a moral outrage that in a country as wealthy as America, so many people could be so poor. Written in the way of the 2008 financial collapse, in an era of grotesque economic extremes, The American Way of Poverty brings that same powerful indignation to the topic.
Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist. His work has appeared in the Nation, Atlantic Monthly, Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. In 2000 he was awarded a Soros Society, Crime, and Communities Media Fellowship, and he is currently a senior fellow at Demos. He resides in Sacramento, California.
Sat., Sept. 28 • 2:00-5:00pm • $65
True meaning and purpose are found in the deep current of your life. Using poetry for our prompts, we wil use writing exercises to orient ourselves towards our deeper values and aspirations. You will learn to be more aware of your original voice, come closer to the truth of your experience, and deepen your relationship with yourself.
Watch out, you diabolical masterminds! There's a new detective on Pancake Court: Bean! She laughs at danger! She solves even the most mysterious mysteries! What? There aren't any mysteries? Then Bean and her assistant, Ivy, will make some in Ivy & Bean Take the Case ($14.99)!
Annie Barrows is the author of many children's books, including the Ivy & Bean series and The Magic Half, as well as several books for adults, including the bestselling novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two daughters.
Jim Ziolkowski gave up his career in corporate finance to create buildOn, a service-oriented program that goes into high-risk areas around the world to work with students in their communities. Under Jim's leadership, buildOn volunteers have contributed more than 850,000 hours of community service, and the organization has constructed more than 430 schools worldwide, from the South Bronx, to Detroit, Chicago, and Oakland, to Haiti, Senegal, Nicaragua, and Nepal.
Walk in Their Shoes ($25.00) is packed with the ingredients of a powerful bestseller as it traces Jim's story from his transformation from a thrill-seeking twenty-something backpacker, to a Harlem-based idealist trying to launch a not-for-profit organization, and finally to the head of buildOn.
Jim Ziolkowski started the nonprofit organization buildOn to break the cycle of poverty and illiteracy in nations throughout the world. He lives in Stamford, Connecticut.
What is a polarized mind? It is a mind stricken with one absolutist point of view, to the utter exclusion, even demonization, of all others. The polarized mind can appear as bigotry, bullying, tyranny, vengefulness, and arrogance. It is found in fields as diverse as governance, religion, and science, often hidden in plain sight until rearing its ugly head in the morning headlines.
In his latest book, The Polarized Mind: Why It's Killing Us and What We Can Do About It ($21.95), Dr. Kirk Schneider explores why and how estranged killers, corporate swindlers, bullheaded ideologues, and notorious leaders and their followers have become repeatedly polarized throughout history, why it's problematic – even dangerous, and how we can begin to understand and undo it.
Kirk J. Schneider, Ph.D., is a leading spokesperson for contemporary existential-humanistic psychology. Dr. Schneider is the recent past editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology , vice-president of the Existential-Humanistic Institute (EHI), and adjunct faculty at Saybrook University, Teachers College, Columbia University, and the California Institute of Integral Studies.
On the magnificent isle of Capri, an epoch event in the life of Esmeralda Pembrooke, heiress to Italy's largest biotech conglomerate, takes place: she is blackmailed and exposed as an imposter exactly as she launches an international blockbuster film. Bella Figura ($20.89) follows Esmeralda's life as it erupts like a volcano, revealing prejudices of class, religion, race and nationality. Jojo Capece's brilliant cameos of guests at Esmeralda's Villa entwines everyone in a gripping tale of love, greed and intrigue with a finale that will stir the reader long after you have finished the last page.
Jojo Capece is the author of All Roads Lead to Rome. She has received the distinction of Honourable Seref Uyeligi from the Turkish-American University, Master's of Art diploma from Heatherley's Art College, London, Member of President Reagan's Task Force for the Initiative on Women's Business Ownership and was the only American advisor to Prime Minister Thatcher's Committee on Women Into Business.
In Burying Ben, Dot Meyerhoff has barely settled into her new job as a psychologist for the Kenilworth Police Department when Ben Gomez, a troubled young rookie that she tries to counsel, commits suicide without any warning and leaves a note blaming her. Overnight, her promising new start becomes a nightmare. At stake is her job, her reputation, her license to practice, and her already battered sense of self-worth.
This event will be a fundraiser for the First Responders Support Network (FRSN), with a donation from the book's publisher, Aakenbaaken & Kent. The FRSN is a non-profit organization of volunteer clinicians, chaplains, and emergency service peers. Their mission is to offer first responders and their families treatment programs that promote recovery from stress and critical incidents. More information can be found on their website, http://www.frsn.org.
Before it was published, Ellen Kirschman's debut novel, Burying Ben, won first prize for the best not-yet-in-print novel by the Public Safety Writers Association. She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and a contributor to the Mystery Readers Journal. A police psychologist for thirty years, her other books are I Love a Cop: What Police Families Need to Know, I Love a Fire Fighter: What the Family Needs to Know, and the forthcoming Counseling Cops: What Clinicians Need to Know. She lives in Northern California.
In his long-awaited new novel, Norman Rush, author of three immensely praised books set in Africa, including the best-selling classic and National Book Award-winner Mating, returns home, giving us a sophisticated, often comical, romp through the particular joys and tribulations of marriage, and the dilemmas of friendship, as a group of college friends reunites in upstate New York twenty-some years after graduation.
When Douglas, the ringleader of a clique of self-styled wits of "superior sensibility" dies suddenly, his four remaining friends are summoned to his luxe estate high in the Catskills to memorialize his life and mourn his passing. Responding to an obscure sense of emergency in the call, Ned, our hero, flies in from San Francisco (where he is the main organizer of a march against the impending Iraq war), pursued instantly by his furious wife, Nina: they're at a critical point in their attempt to get Nina pregnant, and she's ovulating! It is Nina who gives us a pointed, irreverent commentary as the friends begin to catch up with one another. She is not above poking fun at some of their past exploits and the things they held dear, and she's particularly hard on the departed Douglas, who she thinks undervalued her Ned. Ned is trying manfully to discern what it was that made this clutch of souls his friends to begin with, before time, sex, work, and the brutal quirks of history shaped them into who they are now--and, simultaneously, to guess at what will come next.
Subtle Bodies ($26.95) is filled with unexpected, funny, telling aperçus, alongside a deeper, moving exploration of the meanings of life. A novel of humor, small pleasures, deep emotions. A novel to enjoy and to ponder.
Norman Rush is the author of three previous works of fiction: Whites, a collection of stories, and two novels, Mating and Mortals. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. Mating was the recipient of the National Book Award. Rush and his wife live in Rockland County, New York.
8 Mon., Sept. 30-Nov. 18 • 12:40-2:25pm • $250
In this session, students continue their study of basic Italian grammar. Wendy Walsh has a Ph.D. in Italian Literature from UCB. She has been teaching Italian language, literature, and cooking since 1979, and leads a yearly Language Study Tour Program to Italy. Buy a panino in the cafe and join Wendy before or after your class for informal Italian conversation.
Mon., Sep. 30 • 6:30-8:00 pm • $25/parents, $15/students
Navigate through the world of college choices and how to determine the right academic and social fit for each student. You will learn how to assess a student's portfolio of grades, test scores, activities, community service, and goals.
Leslie Goldgehn Ph.D.has been an Independent College Counselor for over 15 years, and has assisted many students and families through the college application process.
4 Mon.: Sept. 30, Oct. 28, Nov. 25, & Dec. 16 • 7:00-9:00pm • $95
Participants will meet and share an intimate conversation with the authors of a gripping look deep into 1960s and '70s San Francisco; a vivid, intimate tale centered on an intrepid world traveler and her personal baggage; a raucous yet art-learned mystery, by a "sweetly demented" author, in which Toulouse-Lautrec and his sidekick seek Van Gogh's murderer; and a fascinating novel starring a princess in 16th-century Iran, negotiating court politics and tribal animosities with her closest advisor, a eunuch. Pamela Feinsilber is a book editor and writing consultant, and blogs about the arts for Huffington Post and Examiner.com.
Reading List:
September: Season of the Witch, David Talbot ($14.00)
October: Contents May Have Shifted, Pam Houston ($14.95)
November: Sacre Bleu, Christopher Moore ($16.99)
December: Equal of the Sun, Anita Amirrezvani ($17.00)
A powerful novel of sacrifice and redemption set in a tiny community on the edge of the frontier, this spellbinding narrative unfolds around Daniel's struggle to maintain his faith; his young wife, Ruth, who must find her own way; and Mary, the eldest child, who is bound to a runaway slave by a terrible secret. Darkly evocative, The Purchase ($25.95) is as hard-edged as the realities of pioneer life. Its memorable characters, drawn with compassion and depth, are compellingly human, with lives that bring light to matters of loyalty and conscience.
Linda Spalding was born and raised in Kansas. She is the author of three previous novels and two acclaimed works of nonfiction, A Dark Place in the Jungle, which was short-listed for the Trillium Book Award and the Pearson Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, and Who Named the Knife. The Purchase received Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award for English-language fiction. Spalding lives in Toronto, where she is an editor of the literary magazine Brick.
8 Tues., Oct. 1-Nov. 19 • 8:30-10:15am • $250
Wendy Walsh has a Ph.D. in Italian Literature from UCB. She has been teaching Italian language, literature, and cooking since 1979, and leads a yearly Language Study Tour Program to Italy. Buy a panino in the cafe and join Wendy before or after your class for informal Italian conversation.
Traveling Sprinkler ($26.95) is a new novel by bestselling author Nicholson Baker. Readers are reintroduced to feckless but hopeful hero Paul Chowder, whose struggle to get his life together is reflected in his steadfast desire to write a pop song, or a protest song, or both at once.
Nicholson Baker is the author of nine novels, including The Anthologist, Vox, and The Fermata, and five works of nonfiction, including Human Smoke and Double Fold (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award). He lives in Maine with his family.
8 Wed., Oct. 2-Nov. 20 • 9:00-10:45am • $250
Wendy Walsh has a Ph.D. in Italian Literature from UCB. She has been teaching Italian language, literature, and cooking since 1979, and leads a yearly Language Study Tour Program to Italy. Buy a panino in the cafe and join Wendy before or after your class for informal Italian conversation.
8 Wed., Oct. 2-Nov. 20 • 11:00-12:45pm • $250
Students review difficult grammar structure and read short novels by modern Italian writers. Wendy Walsh has a Ph.D. in Italian Literature from UCB. She has been teaching Italian language, literature, and cooking since 1979, and leads a yearly Language Study Tour Program to Italy. Buy a panino in the cafe and join Wendy before or after your class for informal Italian conversation.
Gary Soto is a widely published author of children's and young adult fiction, and he is an acclaimed poet -- often referred to as one of the nation's first Chicano poets. With a sharp sense of storytelling and a sly wit, What Poets Are Like ($14.00) is a memoir of the writing life that shares the keen observation, sense of self and humor of such writers as Sherman Alexie and Nora Ephron.
Gary Soto is the author of eleven poetry collections for adults, most notably New and Selected Poems, a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Award. He is also the author of more than 35 books for young readers, including Baseball in April, Taking Sides, Too Many Tamales, and Chato's Kitchen.
Please note: this event has been cancelled. For more information, contact firstname.lastname@example.com.
In 1998, when community worker Nick Saul became executive director of The Stop, it was like thousands of other food banks, offering canned handouts in a cramped, dreary, makeshift space. Today it is a thriving, internationally respected Community Food Center with gardens, kitchens, a greenhouse, farmers' markets, and a mission to revolutionize our food system. Their message is spreading: Jamie Oliver told his 750,000 Twitter followers that he'd traveled all over the world and never seen anything like The Stop; Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, told Alternet he was "blown away" by this model of an NGO—whose mission is to work for healthy food, strong communities and political empowerment.
In a voice that's "never preachy" (Maclean's), Saul argues that we need a new politics of food in which everyone has a dignified, healthy place at the table. The Stop: How the Fight for Good Food Transformed a Community and Inspired a Movement ($19.95) is a "riveting" personal story (Naomi Klein) about overcoming obstacles and creating lasting change.
Nick Saul was executive director of The Stop Community Food Centre in Toronto from 1998 to 2012 and is a recipient of the prestigious Jane Jacobs Prize and the Queen's Jubilee Medal. He is now president and CEO of Community Food Centres Canada.
Jennifer duBois's debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction and was honored by the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 program. In Cartwheel ($26.00), duBois delivers a novel of propulsive psychological suspense and rare moral nuance. Who is Lily Hayes? What happened to her roommate? No two readers will agree. Cartwheel will keep you guessing until the final page, and its questions about how much we really know about ourselves will linger well beyond.
Jennifer duBois's A Partial History of Lost Causes was one of the most acclaimed debuts of 2012. It was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction and the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and O: The Oprah Magazine chose it as one of the ten best books of the year. DuBois was also named one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 authors. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, duBois recently completed a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Originally from Massachusetts, she now lives in Texas.
In the winter of 1920, a quirky bequest draws Morrie Morgan back to Butte, Montana, from a year-long honeymoon with his bride, Grace. But the mansion bestowed by a former boss upon the itinerant charmer, who debuted in Ivan Doig's bestselling The Whistling Season, promises to be less windfall than money pit. And the town itself, with its polyglot army of miners struggling to extricate themselves from the stranglehold of the ruthless Anaconda Copper Mining Company, seems—like the couple's fast-diminishing finances—on the verge of implosion.
These twin dilemmas catapult Morrie into his new career as editorialist for the Thunder, the fledgling union newspaper that dares to play David to Anaconda's Goliath. Amid the clatter of typewriters, the rumble of the printing presses, and a cast of unforgettable characters, Morrie puts his gift for word-slinging to work. As he pursues victory for the miners, he discovers that he is enmeshed in a deeply personal battle as well—the struggle to win lasting love for himself.
Brilliantly capturing an America roaring into a new age, Sweet Thunder ($27.95) is another great tale from a classic American novelist.
Often called the dean of writers about the American West, Ivan Doig is the author of such national bestsellers as The Whistling Season and The Bartender's Tale. His work has been translated into Spanish, Japanese, German, and Finnish, and his honors include seven regional booksellers awards, the Evans Biography Prize, and the Wallace Stegner Award, among others. He lives in Seattle.
Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution.
Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tóti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard.
Riveting and rich with lyricism, Burial Rites ($26.00) evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place, and asks the question, how can one woman hope to endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others?
Hannah Kent was born in Adelaide in 1985. As a teenager she travelled to Iceland on a Rotary Exchange, where she first heard the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir. Hannah is the co-founder and deputy editor of the Australian literary journal Kill Your Darlings, and is completing her PhD at Flinders University. In 2011 she won the inaugural Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award. Burial Rites is her first novel.
Please note: this event has been cancelled. For more information, contact firstname.lastname@example.com
Sat., Oct. 5 • 9:30-12:30pm • $40
This workshop offers what writers need most -- inspiration and encouragement. Writing exercises help yo uto get started and dig deeper into your material. Veteran writer and teacher Barbara Abercrombie is the author of A Year of Writing Dangerously, which received an award from Poets & Writers Magazine. Class fee includes a copy of her latest book Kicking in the Wall.
In the winter of 1920, a quirky bequest draws Morrie Morgan back to Butte, Montana, from a year-long honeymoon with his bride, Grace. But the mansion bestowed by a former boss upon the itinerant charmer, who debuted in Ivan Doig's bestselling The Whistling Season, promises to be less windfall than money pit. And the town itself, with its polyglot army of miners struggling to extricate themselves from the stranglehold of the ruthless Anaconda Copper Mining Company, seems—like the couple's fast-diminishing finances—on the verge of implosion.
These twin dilemmas catapult Morrie into his new career as editorialist for the Thunder, the fledgling union newspaper that dares to play David to Anaconda's Goliath. Amid the clatter of typewriters, the rumble of the printing presses, and a cast of unforgettable characters, Morrie puts his gift for word-slinging to work. As he pursues victory for the miners, he discovers that he is enmeshed in a deeply personal battle as well—the struggle to win lasting love for himself.
Brilliantly capturing an America roaring into a new age, Sweet Thunder ($27.95) is another great tale from a classic American novelist.
Often called the dean of writers about the American West, Ivan Doig is the author of such national bestsellers as The Whistling Season and The Bartender's Tale. His work has been translated into Spanish, Japanese, German, and Finnish, and his honors include seven regional booksellers awards, the Evans Biography Prize, and the Wallace Stegner Award, among others. He lives in Seattle.
A lively introduction to Indian cooking from the award-winning cooking teacher and food writer, Raghavan Iyer. He shows readers how to create 100 of the cuisine's most popular dishes with the help of step-by-step full-color photos presented as gatefolds throughout the book.
Indian food is ravishing, exotic, addictively flavorful, but has a reputation for being too difficult for the average cook. Not anymore. When Raghavan Iyer moved from Mumbai to Minneapolis, he had to learn how to make all his beloved dishes using supermarket ingredients -and now he shows us his secrets in Indian Cooking Unfolded ($19.95).
Raghavan Iyer, an IACP Award–winning Teacher of the Year, is the author of 660 Curries, Betty Crocker's Indian Home Cooking, and the James Beard Award Finalist The Turmeric Trail: Recipes and Memories from an Indian Childhood. He is also a spokesperson and consultant to General Mills, Target, and other companies. Born in Mumbai, Mr. Iyer lives with his family outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Come join us for a fun afternoon of treats and accessories! We have a huge assortment of new baggallini bags and Che Bella jewelry brought in to tempt you. There will be a drawing to win prizes from baggallini and Che Bella. Refreshments, too!
baggallini Form. Function. Style. With these guiding principles, two flight attendants began baggallini, which has grown into a worldwide leader in beautifully organized bags and accessories.
Che Bella Designs - Formerly with Tiffany & Co., Belinda Wickwire is a local jewelry designer who has been accessorizing clients from all over the world for 15 years. Driven by her passion for antique pieces, she creates jewelry that is delicate and
timeless, yet sustainable and strong.
Renowned through four award-winning books for his gritty and revelatory visions of the Caribbean, Bob Shacochis returns to occupied Haiti in The Woman Who Lost Her Soul ($28.00) before sweeping across time and continents to unravel tangled knots of romance, espionage, and vengeance. In riveting prose, Shacochis builds a complex and disturbing story about the coming of age of America in a pre-9/11 world.
Bob Shacochis's first collection of stories, Easy in the Islands, won the National Book Award for First Fiction, and his second collection, The Next New World, was awarded the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is also the author of the novel Swimming in the Volcano, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Immaculate Invasion, a work of literary reportage that was a finalist for The New Yorker Book Award for Best Nonfiction of the Year. Shacochis is a contributing editor at Outside, a former columnist for Gentleman's Quarterly, and has served as a contributing editor for Harper's and GQ. His op-eds on the US military, Haiti, and Florida politics have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
In these twelve award-winning stories, Kate Milliken unflinchingly shows us what can happen when the uninvited guest of our darkest desires comes to call. Whether surrounded by the white noise of a Hollywood celebration or enduring a stark winter in Maine, the characters of If I'd Known You Were Coming ($17.00) yearn to heal old wounds with new hurts. With a wry wit and a keen eye for emotive detail, the author of this unforgettable collection sets intersections in motion that will leave you both winded and wanting more.
In one story, a mother, driven by greed, unwittingly finds out how far her needs will push her. A hand model surprises himself and everyone else at the birthday party of an old friend's daughter in another. With poetic deftness, a woman evaluates the meaning, the familial stories, that we carry with us from birth. In a story ripped from the headlines, a woman pines for the legs her husband lost in a freak accident at a Santa Monica farmer's market. A medical clerk, restless and alone, takes advantage of a disabled neighbor.
Kate Milliken knows the ties that bind and how tautly we will pull them. These are stories about desire, betrayal, love, regret, and family.
What would you do if you were sitting in school one morning and suddenly found you couldn't see? When it happens to Matt VanFossan during his third year of college, it's the start of a life he hasn't planned on and definitely doesn't want. When he's paired with a new guide dog a few months later, he's still in a state of denial.
But Matt's new companion, named Gilly, isn't one for self-pity -- or modesty, as he describes himself as "one of the handsomest dogs at guide dog school." A keen observer of the human condition, especially his human's condition, Gilly provides a running commentary on Matt's progress. And as Gilly and Matt learn to work together, the two gradually forge a relationship that transcends the ordinary bonds between dog and man.
From dog training school then back to college, from home and on to Brazil, Gilly relates their story with humor and insight. Through Matt's challenging adventures, new friendships, and ultimately, lasting love, Gilly provides him with guidance and companionship for six years -- a lifetime that will last forever.
Through Gilly's Eyes: Memoirs of a Guide Dog ($14.25) is a moving coming-of-age story about a young man and the guide dog who loved him.
By the time Queen Victoria slipped the Mountain of Light diamond on her wrist, claiming it for England, the gem had traveled around the world, changing hands over the centuries from one ruler to another in Persia, Afghanistan, and India.
The fascinating story of this 105-carat diamond opens in 1830, when the Indian Maharaja and founder of the Sikh empire Ranjit Singh takes possession of the massive jewel that has been passed from man to man, king to king, and emperor to emperor, through bloodshed and destruction, since the 1200s. But India in the nineteenth century is a very different place. Now the British Empire has claimed territories all across the country and the colonization of India takes root. When Ranjit Singh dies, four of his sons are slaughtered in wars with the British, and the diamond is left to Prince Dalip Singh, a six-year-old child. The British governor-general orders that the Mountain of Light be secreted out of India in 1850, and the teenage-king Dalip Singh follows the diamond to London to officially present it to the queen as a spoil of the Sikh War. He is feted and petted by the British monarchy for a long while—until he realizes that all that Britain gives him cannot make up for the loss of his country and its celebrated diamond.
In her inimitable trademark style, Indu Sundaresan's The Mountain of Light ($16.00) is a wondrous and historically rich tale, as clear and as dazzling as a diamond itself.
Indu Sundaresan was born in India and came to the US for graduate school at the University of Delaware. She is the author of two acclaimed novels, The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses.
This class has been changed - please call (415) 927-0960, ext. 230 for more information
Sun., Oct. 20 • 6:00-8:00pm • $50
Writing a one-page memoir jump-starts the writing process and explores the shape that the memoir is taking. The class looks at memoirs focusing on one key character, event, or relationship; memoirs of lists; and memoirs summarizing a life. Then we'll write short exercises and learn self-editing tips.
For examples of Frances Lefkowitz's writing, check out "Watching Sandra Be Loved By God" and two of her pieces of flash fiction here.
Co-Sponsored by Kol Shofar and Shalom Bayit
When Joshua Safran was four years old, his mother--determined to protect him from the threats of nuclear war and Ronald Reagan--took to the open road with her young son, leaving the San Francisco countercultural scene behind. Together they embarked on a journey to find a utopia they could call home. In Free Spirit ($24.99), Safran tells the harrowing, yet wryly funny story of his childhood chasing this perfect life off the grid--and how they survived the imperfect one they found instead.
Joshua Safran is an attorney, writer, speaker, and occasional rabbi, and was featured in the award-winning documentary Crime After Crime, which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and had its television debut as part of the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN)'s Documentary Film Club. He is a nationally recognized champion for women's rights and a zealous advocate for survivors of domestic violence and the wrongfully imprisoned. For his work he has received national media coverage and numerous awards. He lives in Oakland, California.
Please note: this event has been cancelled. Signed copies of Someone will be available. To order online, note your preference for a signed copy in the Comments field of the check out screen or call (415) 927-0960 ext. 1.
An ordinary life -- its sharp pains and unexpected joys, its bursts of clarity and moments of confusion -- lived by an ordinary woman: this is the subject of Someone ($25.00), Alice McDermott's extraordinary return, seven years after the publication of After This. Scattered recollections—of childhood, adolescence, motherhood, old age—come together in this transformative narrative, stitched into a vibrant whole by McDermott's deft, lyrical voice.
Alice McDermott is the author of six previous novels, including After This; Child of My Heart; Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award; and At Weddings and Wakes. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. McDermott lives with her family outside Washington, D.C.
Mon., Oct. 7 • 6:30-8:00 pm • $25/parents, $15/students
Do you qualify for financial aid? Where does a student have the best chance of receiving aid? Essays are often the "tipping point" that can turn a student's application into an acceptance letter. Advanced registration recommended.
Leslie Goldgehn Ph.D.has been an Independent College Counselor for over 15 years, and has assisted many students and families through the college application process.
With the meteoric success of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus placed himself among America's most original and emotionally engaged storytellers. If his first comic novel mapped the late nineteenth-century South, Local Souls ($25.95) brings the twisted hilarity of Flannery O'Connor kicking into our new century.
Left Coast Writers® Salon
In this love story of impossible odds, award-winning writer Tim Z. Hernandez weaves a rich and visionary portrait of Bea Franco, the real woman behind famed American author Jack Kerouac's The Mexican Girl. Set against an ominous backdrop of California in the 1940s, deep in the agricultural heartland of the Great Central Valley, Mañana Means Heaven ($24.95) reveals the desperate circumstances that lead a married woman to an illicit affair with an aspiring young writer traveling across the United States.
Book Passage hosts monthly meetings of Left Coast Writers® at our Corte Madera store. The monthly meetings provide an evening of literary connections, support, counsel, readings, writing tips, literary chat, unabashed networking, and great fun. Each meeting also features a presentation by one of several Bay Area literary figures. LCW has its own lively newsletter and website at www.leftcoastwriters.com/.
Powerful, brilliantly written, and deeply moving Paul Harding has, in Enon ($26.00), written a worthy successor to Tinkers, a debut which John Freeman on NPR called "a masterpiece." Drawn always to the rich landscape of his character's inner lives, here, through the first person narrative of Charlie Crosby (grandson to George Crosby of Tinkers), Harding creates a devastating portrait of a father trying desperately to come to terms with family loss.
Paul Harding is the author of the novel Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. He was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College.
In Conversation with Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom
Introducing an exhilarating new espionage thriller by former CIA ops officer Valerie Plame and thriller writer Sarah Lovett.
Covert CIA ops officer Vanessa Pierson is finally close to capturing the world's most dangerous international nuclear arms dealer: Bhoot, alias the ghost. One of her assets has information about Bhoot's upcoming visit to a secret underground nuclear weapons facility in Iran—in only a few days. But just as Pierson's informant is about to give her the location, they're ambushed by an expert sniper. Pierson narrowly escapes. Her asset: dead.
Desperate to capture Bhoot and the sniper before they inflict more damage, Pierson enlists all of the Agency's resources to find them. But with each day, the pressure of the manhunt mounts, causing her to push her forbidden romance with a fellow ops officer to its limit when she asks him to do the impossible. Despite the risks, she refuses to halt her pursuit of the terrorists, and she puts her cover and her career—and her life—at risk.
With rapid-cut shifts from European capitals to Washington to the Near East, and with insider detail that only a former spy could provide, Blowback ($26.95) marks the explosive beginning of the hunt for Bhoot, the villain whom Vanessa Pierson devotes her life to capturing, dead or alive.
Valerie Plame's career in the CIA included assignments in counterproliferation operations, ensuring that enemies of the United States could not threaten the country with weapons of mass destruction. She and her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, are the parents of twins. Plame and her family live in New Mexico.
"Want to read a thriller about the real CIA and how it actually works? Then dive into this corker from former agent Valerie Plame and Sarah Lovett." —James Patterson
The world's most famous mountain, Everest, remains for serious high-altitude climbers an ultimate goal. Ed Viesturs has gone on eleven expeditions to Everest, reaching the summit seven times. He's spent more than two years of his life on the mountain. No climber today is better poised to survey Everest's various ascents -- both personal and historic. In The Mountain ($27.00), Viesturs delivers just that: riveting you-are-there accounts of his own climbs as well as vivid narratives of some of the more famous and infamous climbs throughout the last century, when the honor of nations often hung in the balance, depending on which climbers summited first. In addition to his own experiences, Viesturs sheds light on the fate of Mallory and Irvine, whose 1924 disappearance just 800 feet from the top remains one of mountaineering's greatest mysteries, and on the multiply tragic last days of Rob Hall and Scott Fischer in 1996, the stuff of which Into Thin Air was made.
Informed by the experience of one who has truly been there, The Mountain affords a rare glimpse into that place on earth where Heraclitus's maxim --character is destiny -- is proved time and again. Complete with gorgeous photos of Everest, many of which were taken by Viesturs himself, and shots taken on some of the legendary historic climbs, this is an immensely appealing book for active and armchair climber alike.
Ed Viesturs is widely regarded as America's foremost high-altitude mountaineer. He is the only American to have climbed all fourteen of the world's 8,000-meter peaks, and only the sixth man to do so without supplemental oxygen. In 1992 he was awarded the American Alpine Club's David A. Sowles Award for his participation in two rescues on K2. He is also the recipient of the Explorers Club's Lowell Thomas Award for outstanding achievement in the field of mountaineering. He lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, with his wife and their children.
This class has been postponed - please call (415) 927-0960, ext. 230 for more information
From the first cry of "Gold" in 1848 to the aftermath of World War II, we shall survey some of the painters and sculptors who responded to changing cultural patterns in the Bay Area. Set up as a nonlinear survey, the class focuses on the highlights: the Arts and Crafts Movement of 1890-1920, the Society of Six, the California colorists, and the Bay Area's abstraction and figurative art, especially that of David Park and Richard Diebenkorn. Close attention will be paid to the large body of sculpture by Ruth Asawa and her commitment to the arts. A map for a self-guided tour of her work will be distributed. We'll finish with Wayne Thiebaud: Pop or Not? Suggested preparation: the exhibit at the de Young Museum on Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years (ends Sept. 29).
We were made to love and be loved. Loving ourselves and others is in our genetic code. It's nothing other than the purpose of our lives-but knowing that doesn't make it easy to do. We may find it a challenge to love ourselves. We may have a hard time letting love in from others. We're often afraid of getting hurt. It is also sometimes scary for us to share love with those around us-and love that isn't shared leaves us feeling flat and unfulfilled. David Richo provides the tools in How to Be an Adult in Love ($21.95) for learning how to love in evolved adult ways-beginning with getting past the barriers that keep us from loving ourselves, then showing how we can learn to open to love others.
David Richo, PhD, is a psychotherapist, teacher, writer, and workshop leader whose work emphasizes the benefits of mindfulness and loving-kindness in personal growth and emotional well-being. He is the author of numerous books, including How to Be an Adult in Relationships and The Five Things We Cannot Change. He lives in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, California.
Please note: this event is sold out. Thank you! We will have signed first editions of David and Goliath available for purchase in-store or online. To inquire about availabiliy, please call (415) 927-0960 ext. 1.
Angelico Hall, Dominican University
Malcolm Gladwell, the #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw, offers his most provocative -- and dazzling -- book yet.
We all know that underdogs can win-that's what the David versus Goliath legend tells us, and we've seen it with our own eyes. Or have we? In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell, with his unparalleled ability to grasp connections others miss, uncovers the hidden rules that shape the balance between the weak and the mighty, the powerful and the dispossessed. Gladwell examines the battlefields of Northern Ireland and Vietnam, takes us into the minds of cancer researchers and civil rights leaders, and digs into the dynamics of successful and unsuccessful classrooms-all in an attempt to demonstrate how fundamentally we misunderstand the true meaning of advantages and disadvantages. When is a traumatic childhood a good thing? When does a disability leave someone better off? Do you really want your child to go to the best school he or she can get into? Why are the childhoods of people at the top of one profession after another marked by deprivation and struggle?
Drawing upon psychology, history, science, business, and politics, David and Goliath is a beautifully written book about the mighty leverage of the unconventional. Millions of readers have been waiting for the next Malcolm Gladwell book. That wait is over.
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. Prior to joining The New Yorker, he was a reporter at the Washington Post. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He now lives in New York.
Private Ocean Wealth Management is the Diamond Lead Sponsor of the Leadership Lecture Series of Dominican and Book Passage.
In Dirty Love ($25.95), a heartbreakingly beautiful book of disillusioned intimacy and persistent yearning, beloved and celebrated author Andre Dubus III explores the bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love.
Slivered by happiness and discontent, aging and death, but also persistent hope and forgiveness, these beautifully wrought narratives express extraordinary tenderness toward human beings, our vulnerable hearts and bodies, our fulfilling and unfulfilling lives alone and with others.
Andre Dubus III is the author of The Garden of Last Days, House of Sand and Fog (a #1 New York Times bestseller, Oprah's Book Club pick, and finalist for the National Book Award) and Townie, winner of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His writing has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family north of Boston.
The Bay School
Event is free and open to the public. Registration encouraged!
Deborah Spar has been invited to be the first speaker for The Bay School's 10th anniversary Speaker Series.
Debora L. Spar never thought of herself as a feminist. Raised after the tumult of the 1960s, she presumed the gender war was over. As one of the youngest female professors to be tenured at Harvard Business School and a mother of three, she swore to young women that they could have it all. "We thought we could just glide into the new era of equality, with babies, board seats, and husbands in tow," she writes. "We were wrong."
In her book, Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection ($27.00)—a fresh, wise, original book— Debora asks why, a half century after the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, do women still feel stuck. In this groundbreaking and compulsively readable book, Spar explores how American women's lives have—and have not—changed over the past fifty years. Armed with reams of new research, she details how women struggled for power and instead got stuck in an endless quest for perfection. The challenges confronting women are more complex than ever, and they are challenges that come inherently and inevitably from being female. Spar is acutely aware that it's time to change course. Both deeply personal and statistically rich, Wonder Women is Spar's story and the story of our culture. It is cultural history at its best, and a road map for the future.
Debora L. Spar is the president of Barnard College, a women'sundergraduate college affiliated with Columbia University. She received her doctorate in government from Harvard University and was the Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Spar is the author of numerous books, including Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Invention, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet and The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception.
8 Wednesdays • Oct. 10 - Nov. 7 • 10:00-12:00pm • $190
Class will be tailored to meet group and individual needs. Text: Advanced Spanish Step-by-Step.
Gloria Lopez Gutierrez is an experienced bilingual teacher as well as College of Marin instructor. She aims to make Spanish language learning a relevant endeavor for each student.
In this groundbreaking exploration of the brain, dreams, and neurology, the reader is thrust into the dark corners and hidden pathways of human consciousness. The Chronicle of Stolen Dreams ($14.95) is alternately profound, hilarious, and provocative as it poses theories of human behavior that challenge all accepted wisdom. The book is part Vonnegut, part Rushdie, part Chabon, and entirely Tarnoff as the author of The Bone Man of Benares and The Thousand Year Journey of Tobias Parker pushes into a whole new universe of ideas. The summer of 1947 will never again be seen the same way.
Terry Tarnoff's first book, The Bone Man of Benares, was published by St. Martin's Press. A one-man show adapted from that book was produced later that year by the Encore Theatre Company in San Francisco. His second book, The Thousand Year Journey of Tobias Parker, was published earlier this year. Terry lives in San Francisco with his wife, artist Tina Tarnoff.
Why are we afraid of death? Should we tell someone they are dying? Is reincarnation true? With depth, clarity, compassion, and even humor, Osho answers the questions we all have about this most sacred of mysteries and offers practical guidance for meditation and support. In The Art of Living and Dying ($19.95), he reveals not only that our fear of death is based on a misunderstanding, but that dying is an opportunity for inner growth. When life is lived consciously and totally, death is not a catastrophe but a joyous climax.
Born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia in 1947, Maneesha James graduated in General Nursing, Midwifery, and Psychiatry. Meeting the Indian mystic, Osho, in 1974 unexpectedly changed the entire course of her life. Appointed by him as his chief editor, James was also lucky enough to be the guinea pig in Osho's early experimentation with meditative methods, a member of his emergency medical team, and the reader-of-questions (on behalf of his people and other seekers) in his daily public discourses. Under the name of Juliet Forman she wrote what he referred to as the 'historical documentation' of his work in the form of a trilogy.
Osho is one of the best-known and most provocative spiritual teachers of our time. The Sunday Times of London has named him one of the "1,000 makers of the 20th century"; the novelist Tom Robbins has called him "the most dangerous man since Jesus Christ." More than two decades after his death in 1990, the influence of his teachings continues to grow, reaching seekers around the world.
In the spirit of The Gospel According to Coco Chanel and How Georgia Became O'Keeffe, Julia Child Rules dissects the life of the sunny, unpretentious chef, author, cooking show star, and bon vivant, with an eye towards learning how we, too, can savor life.
With her characteristic wit and flair, Karen Karbo takes us for a spin through Julia's life: from her idyllic childhood in California to her confusing young adulthood in New York; her years working for the OSS in Sri Lanka; her world class love affairs with Paris and Paul Child; and her decades as America's beloved French chef. Karbo weaves in her own personal experiences and stops for important life lessons along the way: how to live by your whims, make the world your oyster, live happily married, work hard, and enjoy a life of full immersion. It celebrates Julia's indomitable spirit and irrepressible joy, giving readers a taste of what it means to master the art of living.
Karen Karbo's first novel, Trespassers Welcome Here, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a Village Voice Top Ten Book of the Year. Her other two adult novels, The Diamond Lane and Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me, were also named New York Times Notable Books. Her short stories, essays, articles and reviews have appeared in Elle, Vogue, Esquire, Outside, O, More, the New Republic, the New York Times, Salon.com and other magazines. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a winner of the General Electric Younger Writer Award. Karbo is most well known for her best-selling Kick Ass Women series, the most recent of which is How Georgia Became O'Keeffe. How to Hepburn was hailed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as "an exuberant celebration of a great original."
In The Yarn Whisperer: Reflections on a Life in Knitting ($19.95), renowned knitter and author Clara Parkes ponders the roles knitting plays in her life in 22 captivating, poignant, and laugh-out-loud funny essays. Recounting tales of childhood and adulthood, family, friends, adventure, privacy, disappointment, love, and celebration, she hits upon the universal truths that drive knitters to create and explores the ways in which knitting can be looked at as a metaphor for so many other things. Put simply, "No matter how perfect any one sweater may be, it's only human to crave another. And another, and another."
Clara Parkes, a celebrated raconteur, is the bestselling author of The Knitter's Book of Yarn, The Knitter's Book of Wool, and The Knitter's Book of Socks. She is also the founder and publisher of KnittersReview.com, a weekly e-newsletter that explores the pleasures and subtleties of yarn and was described by Folio Magazine as "what Cook's Illustrated is to foodies." She resides in Portland, Maine.
Sat., Oct. 12 • 10:30-1:00pm • $55
Which is better for you? Veteran insider Alan Rinzler lays out the advantages and disadvantages between the traditional method of agents and publishers, as opposed to the potential independence and control of self-publishing. He's held executive positions at Simon & Schuster, Bantam, Macmillan, and Rolling Stone, editing and publishing Toni Morrison, Hunter Thompson, Clive Cussler, and others.
With the world of technology advancing and face-to-face communication becoming less common, it is no wonder the many "manner" and "etiquette" books fall short of reaching young people who are fully enveloped in a digital age. Faye de Muyshondt's socialsklz:-) for Success ($16.00) is not only relevant, touching on topics of email, social networking, cyberbullying, and smartphones, but also breathes life into the basics: how to speak, shake hands, make conversation, and behave in all social settings. Although they are not typically taught in school, research has shown that teaching these skills increases academic scores.
Faye de Muyshondt was an adjunct professor in the Steinhardt School of Communications at New York University with a 13-year business background in public relations and marketing. After seeing her own students' unpolished manners in and outside the classroom, she developed a course titled "The Brand Called You." In 2008, she extended the course to New York Public schools as well as organizations such as the YMCA, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and Girl Scouts of America. Motivated by her younger students' improvement and desire to learn, de Muyshondt began socialsklz:-) tools to thrive in the modern world, a workshop for all ages that opened to the public in October 2009 in New York City. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, daughter, and polite pooch.
Aminatta Forna excels in unmasking the deceptions and betrayals of men in wartime, and in tracing the lingering effects—both obvious and insidious—that haunt their survivors. Forna's previous novel, The Memory of Love, was set in her family's native Sierra Leone, and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book; was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the International Dublin IMPAC Award, and many other accolades. With The Hired Man ($24.00), she has delivered a layered, psychologically rich portrait of a man caught in the crossfire of the Croatian War of Independence, and the secrets and tensions that fester within a town coping with the aftermath of conflict.
Aminatta Forna is the author of two novels, Ancestor Stones and The Memory of Love, and The Devil That Danced on the Water, a memoir of her activist father and of Sierra Leone. With The Hired Man, she has widened her scope beyond Africa and stakes her claim as a truly cosmopolitan talent. She lives in London and will be teaching at Williams College in Western Massachusetts in the autumn of 2013.
Corte Madera Community Center
Tickets: $35 per person in advance, $40 per person at the door
Celebrate the Bounty of Delectable Marin
Please join your fellow community members for an early evening gathering which will include local wines, beer and tasty finger foods made by West Marin caterer Pam Ferrari. It's all locally grown, produced, and prepared. Savor Marin is intended to do what its name suggests: to slow down for just a moment and appreciate Marin — the hard working people, the verdant and productive environment, and the incredible array of local foods and artisan producers.
Dr. Daphne Miller, author of Farmacology ($27.99), will be there to talk about the surprising ways that the ecology of our bodies and the ecology of our farms are intimately and inextricably linked. Venerable Marty Griffin, author of Saving the Marin-Sonoma Coast, one of the founding fathers of the Environmental Forum of Marin, and a Marin County treasure — will be there too. So please bring your sustainable foodie friends and come join in the fun!
For more information, visit the Savor Marin event page.
Left Coast Writers Book Launch®
The Whale Song Translation ($16.95) is a story about sound: sounds of language, sounds of songs, and the sounds that kill. When the Navy's controversial sonar experiments begin destroying Maui's whales, an unlikely hero emerges. Howard Pines' remarkable novel follows professor David Damitri as he races to save the humpback whales with time running out.
PLEASE NOTE: Due to Jhumpa Lahiri's nomination for a 2013 Man Booker Prize, she will be unable to appear at Dominican University. We congratulate Ms. Lahiri on her nomination and apologize to our patrons who were looking forward to this event as much as we were.
We will have a limited quantity of signed first editions of her book, The Lowland. Pre-order one with the button below, and be sure to note in the comments field your preference for a signed copy. For those who've already purchased tickets, please call (415) 927-0960, ext. 233 for refund information.
Two brothers bound by tragedy. A fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past. A country torn by revolution. A love that lasts long past death. An extraordinary new novel, set in both India and America, that expands the scope and range of one of our most dazzling storytellers: the best-selling author of The Namesake and Unaccustomed Earth.
Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan-charismatic and impulsive-finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty; he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother's political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America. But when Subhash learns what happened to his brother in the lowland outside their family's home, he goes back to India, hoping to pick up the pieces of a shattered family, and to heal the wounds Udayan left behind-including those seared in the heart of his brother's wife.
Masterly suspenseful, sweeping, piercingly intimate, The Lowland is a work of great beauty and complex emotion; an engrossing family saga and a story steeped in history that spans generations and geographies with seamless authenticity. It is Jhumpa Lahiri at the height of her considerable powers.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of three previous works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake and, most recently, Unaccustomed Earth. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, a PEN/Hemingway Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012.
Private Ocean is the Diamond Lead Sponsor of the Leadership Lecture Series of Dominican and Book Passage.
In the same format as The Elements by Theodore Gray comes the most complete, fascinating, and beautiful book ever written on color and how it affects everything in the universe in profound ways.
The Secret Language of Color ($29.95) is organized by chapters that cover broad topics, such as the Physics and Chemistry of Color, the Universe, the Earth, Flora, Animals, and Humans. These chapters alternate with chapters devoted to each hue in the visible spectrum Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet presenting them in singular and in-depth detail. It also includes dozens of information graphics and visual exercises that clearly demonstrate the amazing principles behind the science of color.
Arielle Eckstut is the author of 8 books including The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published. She is co-founder of The Book Doctors with her husband David Henry Sterry, a company dedicated to helping writers successfully publish their books. She is also co-founder of the iconic company, LittleMissMatched, which has become a national brand with stores all over the United States including Disneyland, Disney World, and Fifth Avenue in New York City. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
Joann Eckstut is a leading color consultant who works with a wide range of professionals including architects, developers, and manufacturers of name brands. She is founder of The Roomworks, a prominent NYC interior design firm and is one of 12 designers chosen by the Color Association of the United States to create the yearly interior/environmental forecast that is bought by major industries to keep up with color trends. She is the author of Room Redux: The Home Decorating Workbook and The Color Palette Primer: A Guide to Choosing Ideal Color Combinations for Your Home. She lives in Rensselaerville, New York.
Featured Litquake Event!
In conversation with Isabel Allende
Set in a turbulent futuristic society, this provocative drama follows one woman's investigation into the dark forces unleashing chaos around the world—a thrilling ride that will mesmerize until the end.
In 2082, a catastrophic explosion rocks the dedication ceremony of the new United Nations in New York City. Security Director Julia Moro is on the job, chasing after the misogynistic leader of Patria, a long-disbanded international terrorist organization now being whispered about again on the streets. This dangerous, shadowy figure has been linked to several bombing attempts and vicious attacks on women, including the Women of Peace--an organization headed by thirteen bold women who have risked their lives to restore worldwide peace. As Julia's investigation unfolds, a deep secret from her past threatens to strip her of everything she cherishes and plunge her into unrecoverable darkness.
The Circle of Thirteen ($26.95) is a gripping narrative, weaving back and forth in time, from an act of domestic violence that created the disturbed personality of the Patria mastermind, to the two weeks leading up to the bombing at the UN, to events half a century before the bombing that directly influence it. The strong, relatable women and the unbreakable bond between them provide an emotionally grounded window into the future's unforgettable history.
William Petrocelli is the co-owner, with his wife Elaine, of the famed independent San Francisco Bay Area Book Passage bookstores. As a former Deputy Attorney General for the State of California and a poverty lawyer in Oakland, Petrocelli has long been an advocate for women's rights. The Circle of Thirteen is his first novel.
Isabel Allende is the author of ten works of fiction, four memoirs, and three young adult novels, which have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages with more than fifty-seven millions copies sold. Two of her novels were made into major motion pictures. In 2004 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Allende is the 2012 recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award. Born in Peru and raised in Chile, she lives in California.
Even at birth, everyone is unique. Can heredity alone account for the complex differences in people's temperaments and styles? The Michael teachings, an extraordinary body of channeled work, propose that we are each unique souls who deliberately take on a specific combination of traits to give us the experiences we seek. In this fascinating book, Shepherd Hoodwin expertly discusses these teachings from his vantage point as a Michael channel.
These teachings address many age-old questions, such as "How did we become who we are?" "Why are we here?" "Where are we going?" and "How does the universe work?" In addition, Journey of Your Soul ($19.95) sheds light on the channeling process itself, answering questions such as "How does channeling work?" "Why do different channels receive conflicting information?" and "What does it take to become a channel?" Hoodwin shows us that it is possible, and indeed beneficial, to engage all parts of the human consciousness. His unique analytical approach to channeling will help readers gain a firm intellectual understanding of what is involved.
Shepherd Hoodwin has been channeling since 1986. He specializes in the Michael teachings, and practices healing, mediumship, past-life readings and therapy, counseling, and coaches others to channel.
7 Mon., Oct. 14-Dec. 9 (no class Nov. 18) • 3:30-5:30pm • $230
Prerequisite: Intermedium to Advanced German
This class has been cancelled - please call (415) 927-0960 for further information
This multimedia and interactive conversation class discusses topics around modern life in Germany. Wiebke Meineke is a native German. In 1999 she relocated to California and now lives in Tiburon. She has been teaching for 30 years.
7 Mon., Oct. 14-Dec. 9 (no class Nov. 18) • 6:00-8:00pm • $230
This class has been cancelled - please call (415) 927-0960 for further information
Join us for this bilingual, interactive, and fun German class and learn important words and phrases which will help you to master daily life situations as a traveler in Germany. Wiebke Meineke is a native German. In 1999 she relocated to California and now lives in Tiburon. She has been teaching for 30 years.
Join Linda Watanabe McFerrin and the Left Coast Writers® for an evening of poetry.
Book Passage hosts the monthly meetings of Left Coast Writers® at our Corte Madera store. This Literary Salon is led by author/teacher Linda Watanabe McFerrin. The monthly meetings provide an evening of literary connections, support, counsel, provocative readings, writing tips, literary chat, unabashed networking, and great fun. Each meeting also features a presentation by one of several Bay Area literary figures. The fee includes membership in Left Coast Writers®, a group of new and experienced writers. LCW has its own lively newsletter and website at www.leftcoastwriters.com/.
From acclaimed author Richard North Patterson comes Loss of Innocence ($26.95), a sweeping family drama of dark secrets and individual awakenings, set against the backdrop of the tumultuous summer of 1968.
America is in a state of turbulence, engulfed in civil unrest and uncertainty. Yet for Whitney Dane -- spending the summer of her twenty-second year on Martha's Vineyard -- life could not be safer, nor the future more certain. Educated at Wheaton, soon to be married, and the youngest daughter of the all-American Dane family, Whitney has everything she has ever wanted, and is everything her all-powerful and doting father, Charles Dane, wants her to be.
But the Vineyard's still waters are disturbed by the appearance of Benjamin Blaine. An underprivileged, yet fiercely ambitious and charismatic figure, Blaine is a force of nature neither Whitney nor her family could have prepared for.
Richard North Patterson is the author of twenty bestselling novels, including Degree of Guilt and Silent Witness. He has made appearances on "Good Morning America," "Hardball," and "The CBS Morning Show," and his articles on politics, literature, and law have been published in the London Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News. He lives in Martha's Vineyard, Cabo San Lucas and San Francisco with his wife, Dr. Nancy Clair.
Tickets: $50.00
Please join San Domenico School for the 10th Annual Author Luncheon featuring Karen Joy Fowler. The lunch as always will also feature top notch 8th grade wait staff!
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club, We Are Completely Besides Ourselves ($26.95) is the story of an American family, middle class in middle America, ordinary in every way but one. But that exception is the beating heart of this extraordinary novel.
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and our narrator, Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined by this one fact: that I was raised with a chimpanzee," she tells us. "It's never going to be the first thing I share with someone. I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren't thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern's expulsion, I'd scarcely known a moment alone. She was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half, and I loved her as a sister."
Rosemary was not yet six when Fern was removed. Over the years, she's managed to block a lot of memories. She's smart, vulnerable, innocent, and culpable. With some guile, she guides us through the darkness, penetrating secrets and unearthing memories, leading us deeper into the mystery she has dangled before us from the start. Stripping off the protective masks that have hidden truths too painful to acknowledge, in the end, "Rosemary" truly is for remembrance.
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of three story collections and six novels, including The Jane Austen Book Club, which was on the New York Times bestsellers list for thirteen weeks. Her novel Sister Noon was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and most of her titles have been New York Times Notable Books. Born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, she holds an undergraduate degree from University of California, Berkeley and earned her MA from University of California, Davis.
Any questions? Contact: email@example.com
Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance. So when an acquaintance informs him that he would make a "wonderful" husband, his first reaction is shock. Yet he must concede to the statistical probability that there is someone for everyone, and he embarks upon The Wife Project. In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which he approaches all things, Don sets out to find the perfect partner. She will be punctual and logical—most definitely not a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver.
Yet Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is also beguiling, fiery, intelligent—and on a quest of her own. She is looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might be able to help her with. Don's Wife Project takes a back burner to the Father Project and an unlikely relationship blooms, forcing the scientifically minded geneticist to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that love is not always what looks good on paper.
The Rosie Project ($24.00) is a moving and hilarious novel for anyone who has ever tenaciously gone after life or love in the face of overwhelming challenges.
Graeme Simsion is a former IT consultant with an international reputation. His screen adaptation of The Rosie Project won the Australian Writers Guild/Inscription Award for Best Romantic Comedy Script and has been optioned to Sony Pictures. Graeme lives in Australia with his wife Anne, a psychiatrist who writes erotic fiction, and their two children.
In conversation with James Dalessandro
On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, an uncompromising young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie O, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless marriage or follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier, in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling the stories of the dead, Vivien not only helps others cope with their grief but also begins to understand the devastation of her own terrible loss. The surprising connection between Claire and Vivien will change the life of one of them in unexpected and extraordinary ways. Part literary mystery and part love story, The Obituary Writer ($15.95) examines expectations of marriage and love, the roles of wives and mothers, and the emotions of grief, regret, and hope.
Ann Hood is the best-selling author of The Knitting Circle, The Red Thread, and Comfort, among other works. Her most recent novel is The Obituary Writer. She has been the recipient of a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, a Best American Food Writing Award, a Best American Travel Writing Award, the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, and two Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
James Dalessandro is the author of Bohemian Heart and the co-author of Citizen Jane.
Osher Marin JCC
FREE - no registration necessary.
Imagine if your childhood bedtime stories were of the Holocaust. With blunt honesty, Alan Kaufman shares his harrowing life journey in his book, Drunken Angel: A Memoir ($18.95), from the streets of NY and SF to the battlefields of Israel—through alcoholism and recovery. His narrative of loss, addiction and redemption explores the intersection of alcoholism, his Jewish lineage and the Holocaust—and what it may mean for us today.
4 Wed., Oct. 16-Nov. 6 • 6:00-8:00pm • $175
This class has been cancelled - please call (415) 927-0960 for further information
Are you excited about putting stories onto paper but intimidated by the blank computer screen? Whether you're just starting or have some writing experience, learn structures and techniques that will bring your fiction or nonfiction to life. This class will include handouts, take-home assignments, and in-class writing. Tanya Egan Gibson is the author of the novel How to Buy a Love of Reading.
Angelico Hall, Dominican University
Tickets: $35 (includes signed copy of The Signature of All Things)
In Conversation with Kelly CorriganIn The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery. Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker—a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry's brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits both her father's money and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable gifts herself. As Alma's research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she falls in love with a man named Ambrose Pike who makes incomparable paintings of orchids and who draws her in the exact opposite direction—into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical. Alma is a clear-minded scientist; Ambrose a utopian artist—but what unites this unlikely couple is a desperate need to understand the workings of this world and the mechanisms behind all life.
Exquisitely researched and told at a galloping pace, The Signature of All Things soars across the globe—from London to Peru to Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam, and beyond. Along the way, the story is peopled with unforgettable characters: missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses, and the quite mad. But most memorable of all, it is the story of Alma Whittaker, who—born in the Age of Enlightenment, but living well into the Industrial Revolution—bears witness to that extraordinary moment in human history when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce, and class were exploding into dangerous new ideas. Written in the bold, questing spirit of that singular time, Gilbert's wise, deep, and spellbinding tale is certain to capture the hearts and minds of readers.
Elizabeth Gilbert is an award-winning writer of both fiction and nonfiction. Her short story collection, Pilgrims, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her novel, Stern Men, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her 2002 book, The Last American Man, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which has been published in more than thirty languages; a film based on the memoir, starring Julia Roberts, opened in August 2010. Her most recent book, the memoir Committed: A Love Story, appeared in 2010. In 2008, Time magazine named Gilbert one of the most influential people in the world.
Private Ocean Wealth Management is the Diamond Lead Sponsor of the Leadership Lecture Series of Dominican and Book Passage.
In conversation with Sylvia Boorstein, founder of Spirit Rock.
From the best-selling author of Devotion and Slow Motion comes a witty, heartfelt, and practical look at the exhilarating and challenging process of storytelling. At once a memoir, meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Still Writing ($24.00) is an intimate and eloquent companion to living a creative life.
Through a blend of deeply personal stories about what formed her as a writer, tales from other authors, and a searching look at her own creative process, Dani Shapiro offers her gift to writers everywhere: an elegant guide of hard-won wisdom and advice for staying the course. "The writer's life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks." Writers—and anyone with an artistic temperament—will find inspiration and comfort in these pages. Offering lessons learned over twenty years of teaching and writing, Shapiro brings her own revealing insights to weave an indispensable almanac for modern writers.
Like Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, and Stephen King's On Writing, Dani Shapiro's Still Writing is a lodestar for aspiring scribes and an eloquent memoir of the writing life.
Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and has been widely anthologized. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School and Wesleyan University, and she is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She is a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure.
The Los Angeles Times has described Kim Dower's poetry as, "sensual and evocative lyrical snapshots of life's bittersweet moments, seamlessly combining humor and heartache." Slice of Moon ($18.95) is her second poetry collection . Kim's work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Seneca Review, Barrow Street, Eclipse, and Two Hawks Quarterly. Two of the poems in Slice of Moon were finalists for the Rattle Poetry Prize.
Kim Dower grew up in New York City and studied Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston. Her first collection, Air Kissing on Mars, was published by Red Hen Press in 2010 and appeared on the Poetry Foundation's Contemporary Best Sellers list.
Please note: this event is sold out! For signed first editios of The Heart of the Plate, request a signed copy in the comments field at check-out or call (415) 927-0960 ext. 1.
Greens Restaurant, San Francisco
The New York Times has hailed Mollie Katzen as "one of the best-selling cookbook authors of all time." Katzen has helped Americans change the way we eat and brought vegetarian cuisine into home kitchens with her award winning Moosewood Cookbook popularity. In her new cookbook, The Heart of the Plate, readers will find a repertoire of 250 flavorful, lighter, vibrant recipes. In assembling this huge collection, she has included her most loved recipes. She also includes 35 menu's of which 15 are vegan. Katzen's hallmark has always been her drawings and illustrations in her cookbooks and this one is no exception. Her latest work is filled with line drawings, illustrations and stunning full color photographs.
The Black Russian ($25.00) is the incredible story of Frederick Bruce Thomas, born in 1872 to former slaves who became prosperous farmers in Mississippi. A rich white planter's attempt to steal their land forced them to flee to Memphis, where Frederick's father was brutally murdered. After leaving the South and working as a waiter and valet in Chicago and Brooklyn, Frederick sought greater freedom in London, then crisscrossed Europe, and—in a highly unusual choice for a black American at the time—went to Russia in 1899. Because he found no color line there, Frederick made Moscow his home.
He renamed himself Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas, married twice, acquired a mistress, and took Russian citizenship. Through his hard work, charm, and guile he became one of the city's richest and most famous owners of variety theaters and restaurants. The Bolshevik Revolution ruined him, and he barely escaped with his life and family to Constantinople in 1919. Starting from scratch, he made a second fortune by opening celebrated nightclubs that introduced jazz to Turkey. However, the long arm of American racism, the xenophobia of the new Turkish Republic, and Frederick's own extravagance landed him in debtor's prison. He died in Constantinople in 1928.
Vladimir Alexandrov received a Ph. D. in comparative literature from Princeton. He taught Russian literature and culture at Harvard before moving to Yale, where he is B.E. Bensinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He is the author of books on Bely, Nabokov, and Tolstoy, and has published numerous articles on various other Russian writers and topics.
There is nothing inherently threatening about Melissa, a young evangelist hoping to write the definitive paper on intelligent design. But when she implores Andy Waite, a biology professor and a hardcore evolutionist, to direct her independent study, she becomes the catalyst for the collapsing house of cards surrounding him. As he works with Melissa, Andy finds that everything about his world is starting to add up differently. Suddenly there is the possibility of faith. But with it come responsibility and guilt-the very things that Andy has sidestepped for years.
Professor Waite is nearing the moment when his life might settle down a bit: tenure is in sight, his daughters are starting to grow up, and he's slowly but surely healing from the sudden loss of his wife. His life is starting to make sense again-until the scientific stance that has defined his life(and his work) is challenged by this charismatic student.
In a bravura performance, Lauren Grodstein dissects the permeable line between faith and doubt to create The Explanation of Everything ($24.95), a fiercely intelligent story about the lies we tell ourselves, the deceptions we sustain with others, and how violated boundaries-between students and teachers, believers and nonbelievers-can have devastating consequences.
Lauren Grodstein is the author of the bestselling A Friend of the Family, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, a New York Times Editor's Pick, and an Indie Next selection; the collection The Best of Animals; and the novel Reproduction Is the Flaw of Love. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.
Sat., Oct. 19 • 10:00-12:30pm • $50
If you want to get published, you'll need an agent. This class discusses the agent's role in trade publishing, finding the right agent, your agent's expectations from you, and your expectations from your agent. One student said, "I liked Andy's style -- timely, on task, focused, direct, funny..." Andy Ross is a literary agent in Oakland. Before that, he was owner of Cody's Books in Berkeley.
Sat., Oct. 19 • 10:00-2:00pm • $60
This class has been postponed - call (415) 927-0960 for details
48-hour advance registration • Limit of six
You've written a brilliant story and can't wait to hear what others think. You're stuck and need a critique. What to do? Bring your manuscript, or even just an idea, to this on-thespot workshop, and we'll critique it. Amy Novesky is a children's book editor, author, and experienced workshop leader.
Tickets: $21 (includes book, coffee, & tea)
What's wrong with the US food system? Why is half the world starving while the other half battles obesity? Who decides our food issues, and why can't we do better with labeling, safety, or school food? These are complex questions that are hard to answer in an engaging way for a broad audience. But everybody eats, and food politics affects us all.
Marion Nestle, whom Michael Pollan ranked as the #2 most powerful foodie in America (after Michelle Obama) in Forbes, has always used cartoons in her public presentations to communicate how politics—shaped by government, corporate marketing, economics, and geography—influences food choice. Cartoons do more than entertain; the best get right to the core of complicated concepts and powerfully convey what might otherwise take pages to explain.
In Eat, Drink, Vote, Nestle teams up with The Cartoonist Group syndicate to present more than 250 of her favorite cartoons on issues ranging from dietary advice to genetic engineering to childhood obesity. Using the cartoons as illustration and commentary, she engagingly summarizes some of today's most pressing issues in food politics. While encouraging readers to vote with their forks for healthier diets, this book insists that it's also necessary to vote with votes to make it easier for everyone to make healthier dietary choices.
Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. She is the author of three prize-winning books: Food Politics, Safe Food, and What to Eat. She writes a monthly Food Matters column for the San Francisco Chronicle and blogs daily at FoodPolitics.com. She lives in New York City.
Introduction by David Corbett
Every man has his dark side...Spero Lucas confronts his own in The Double ($26.00), the most explosive thriller yet from George Pelecanos, one of America's best-loved crime writers.
The job seems simple enough: retrieve the valuable painting -- "The Double" -- Grace Kinkaid's ex-boyfriend stole from her. It's the sort of thing Spero Lucas specializes in: finding what's missing, and doing it quietly. But Grace wants more. She wants Lucas to find the man who humiliated her--a violent career criminal with a small gang of brutal thugs at his beck and call.
Lucas is a man who knows how to get what he wants, whether it's a thief on the run--or a married woman. In the midst of a steamy, passionate love affair that he knows can't last, in pursuit of a dangerous man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants, Lucas is forced to decide what kind of man he is--and how far he'll go to get what he wants.
George Pelecanos is the author of several highly praised and bestselling novels, including The Cut, What It Was, The Way Home, The Turnaround, and The Night Gardener. He is also an independent-film producer, an essayist, and the recipient of numerous international writing awards. He was a producer and Emmy-nominated writer for The Wire and currently writes for the acclaimed HBO series Treme. He lives in Maryland.
Budapest, 1956. In this darkest year in the modern history of Hungary, a national uprising against Soviet occupiers and their reign of terror is underway. Eleven year old Evike and her firebrand mother steal deep into battle zones in support of civilian freedom fighters armed only with primitive weapons and desperate courage against the heavy artillery of trained Russian troops. Taken in for interrogation by the secret police, little Evike spins a story to deflect attention from her mother's revolutionary activities. A story that will irrevocably alter a number of lives and reach its tentacles, thirty years later, into the life of Ildiko Palmay.
Chicago, 1986. Ildiko, 37, a librarian and ESL teacher, the American-born daughter of Hungarian refugees, is caught in a web of guilt and regret over her mother's mystifying death. Unsettled by her life and her romantic failures, she finds herself suddenly and unexpectedly drawn back to her roots, first to the Hungarian neighborhood of her youth in Chicago--and eventually to the Russian-occupied city of Budapest. Along the way, she meets a magnetic man who may not be what he seems, uncovers a trail of secrets and betrayals that eventually intersect with the tangled knot of the mother-daughter participants in the Revolution--and she discovers the shocking truth about her mother's death.
Triptych ($24.95) is the suspenseful unfolding of two parallel stories of mother and daughter relationships forged in the brutalities of the 1956 Hungarian revolution.
Margit Liesche is the daughter of Hungarian refugees who arrived in the States in 1947 following years of missionary service in war-torn central China. Weaned on her parents' tales of isolation, adventure, and escape, intrigue is part of her DNA. She is the author of Lipstick and Lies and Hollywood Buzz, WWII homefront mysteries featuring the engaging WASP pilot Pucci Lewis and highly praised for their authenticity. Margit lives in Marin County, CA.
Comprehensively, and for the first time, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of a public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields of our 21st century pastime. Everyone knew that football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn't know -- and what the league sought to shield from them -- is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern football; that the very essence of the game could be exposing these players to brain damage.
In a fast-paced narrative that moves between the NFL trenches, America's research labs and the boardrooms where the NFL went to war against science, League of Denial ($26.00) examines how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research -- a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco's fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. It chronicles the tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he fantasized about shooting NFL executives; and former Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of an unseemly scientific battle between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents and private emails, this is the story of what the NFL knew and when it knew it –- questions at the heart of a crisis that threatens football, from the highest levels all the way down to Pop Warner.
Mark Fainaru-Wada is an investigative reporter for ESPN. With his colleague Lance Williams, he co-authored the New York Times best-seller Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports. He lives in Petaluma, California, with his wife Nicole, son Max and daughter Ella.
Steve Fainaru is an investigative reporter for ESPN. While covering the Iraq war for the Washington Post, he received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his investigation into the U.S. military's reliance on private security contractors. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife Maureen Fan, and son Will.
Raymond Francis' first book, Never Be Sick Again, helped thousands of people with "incurable" diseases and enabled thousands more to shed excess weight, improve their cholesterol profiles, and achieve peak immunity from disease. Now Francis brings his revolutionary approach to anyone who wants to enjoy robust health and wellness and reverse accelerated aging.
As Francis explains, just like an automobile, the body ages as a result of accumulated repair deficits, or a lack of maintenance. Fortunately, the human body is a self-repairing system, and in this latest book, Francis shows readers how to stay in good repair and keep the aging process at bay. His revolutionary approach counters the one-size-fits-all approach of most conventional anti-aging treatments on the market by targeting specific imbalances that manifest through "aging" symptoms. Botox injections, plastic surgery, and even hormone-replacement therapies don't yield meaningful results because they fail to activate the body's self-repair mechanisms; what's more, sometimes these treatments compound the problem by introducing additional toxins into the body. Never Feel Old Again ($15.95) provides a fundamental understanding of why we experience accelerated aging and teaches readers to look and feel their best and be healthy at any age.
Join Lavinia Spalding, Abbie Kozolchyk, Natalie Baszile, Kimberly Lovato, and Jenna Scatena as they celebrate the release of The Best Women's Travel Writing, Vol. 9 ($19.95). This title is the ninth in an annual series that presents stimulating, inspiring, and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves.
Lavinia Spalding is the author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler, and coauthor of With a Measure of Grace: The Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant. Her work has also appeared in such publications as Sunset Magazine, Yoga Journal, Inkwell, and Post Road Magazine. She grew up in New Hampshire and Flagstaff, Arizona and graduated from the University of Arizona creative writing program. She has kept travel journals throughout thirty countries on five continents, and is the editor of The Best Women's Travel Writing 2011 and The Best Women's Travel Writing 2012.
From the first Rockefeller woman to write a personal family memoir comes an inspiring and courageous story that gives readers an intimate look at one of the most important families in American history.
In Being a Rockefeller, Becoming Myself ($27.95), Eileen Rockefeller, the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller and the daughter of David and Peggy Rockefeller, shares personal stories connecting the extraordinary experience of being a Rockefeller to the universal one of finding identity and purpose.
Eileen Rockefeller is the youngest daughter of David and Peggy Rockefeller, and a great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller. She is the founding chair of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers and the Growald Family Fund. She lives in Vermont with her husband.
Lose inches while
enjoying pan-seared steak? Restore your health and boost your energy
through chipotle mashed sweet potatoes and sautéed Brussels sprouts?
Absolutely. Millions of people are embracing the health benefits of the
Paleo movement and transitioning to a diet based on protein, healthy
fats, and fresh fruits and vegetables. Charles and Julie Mayfield's
easy, inspiring recipes from Quick & Easy Paleo Comfort Foods: 150 Delicious Gluten-Free Recipes ($25.95) will have healthy, delicious meals on the table,
without spending hours in the kitchen.
These are simple-to-make dishes that soothe the soul after a stressful day—food you'll want to share with family and friends. Gorgeously illustrated and written by home cooks for home cooks, Quick & Easy Paleo Comfort Foods helpfully instructs on cooking techniques, pantry staples and must-have kitchen equipment. With these warm and engaging authors as your guides, healthy eating becomes less complicated and infinitely more pleasurable and satisfying.
Charles and Julie Mayfield…simply two home cooks with an immense joy of growing, cooking and eating fantastic food. They love sharing what they learn along the way with others. As the saying goes "give a man a fish and feed him for a day…teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime." Their adventure into eating real, natural and nutrient dense food started in 2008. Since then, theye have spent hours refining recipes and coming up with unique and fun ways to prepare food to make it really tasty.
Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice ($26.95), written by veteran Boston Globe reporters Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy, is the first authoritative look at the real Whitey Bulger, cutting through the myths, legends, and hearsay and offering the cold truth about Whitey's life of violence and his disturbing collusion with the FBI. It is a true crime epic of the highest caliber as well as the most intimate, relentlessly well-researched, real-time look at the man who, following the death of Osama bin Laden, became America's most wanted criminal.
James "Whitey" Bulger is to crime in the latter half of the twentieth century what Al Capone was to the first: a mythic figure, a legendary hood, a bogeyman. Whitey's criminal associates have published memoirs about him, some serving up spurious claims and self-serving reminiscences. Hollywood has been inspired by him, most notably in the character of Irish mob boss Frank Costello in Martin Scorsese's 2006 movie The Departed. Each attempt has done more to obscure Whitey's true story than to reveal it.
Until now, no book has come close to giving us a complete, three-dimensional portrait of Bulger, from his criminal beginnings as a neighborhood tough who would "take two punches to land one" to his nine years in federal prison—including Alcatraz—for bank robbery. No work has told the whole story of how a wiry ne'er-do-well from the South Boston projects became the most wanted person in America and evaded capture for nearly two decades.
Kevin Cullen, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who has written for the Boston Globe since 1985, was the first to raise questions about Bulger's relationship with the FBI. Shelley Murphy, winner of the George Polk Award, has covered organized crime since 1985, beginning at the Boston Herald and moving to the Globe in 1993. Cullen lived in South Boston during much of Whitey's reign. Murphy was born and raised in Dorchester and attended South Boston High School. Together, Cullen and Murphy have been pursuing Whitey Bulger for over fifty years.
Since Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) introduced his constitutional amendment to redress the implications of Citizens United vs. FEC, and the Supreme Court rules on the Voting Rights Act, John Nichols and Robert McChesney have become the go-to journalists to discuss exactly how the electoral process has been corrupted by the fabulously wealthy individuals and corporations who've been legally freed to attempt to buy elections outright.
In their new book, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America ($25.99), Nichols and McChesney -- two leading media experts -- examine the forces that have sapped elections of their meaning and stolen America's democratic potential. When Barack Obama was reelected, some pundits argued that, despite unbridled campaign spending, here was proof that big money couldn't buy elections. However, Nichols and McChesney have crunched the numbers and found that the exact opposite was the case. The 2012 election was a quantum leap: it was America's first $10 billion election campaign. U.S. elections have never been perfect, but America is now hurtling toward a point where the electoral process itself ceases to function as a means for citizens to effectively control leaders and to guide government policies.
Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author or editor of sixteen books. He is the President and co-founder of Free Press, a national media reform organization and hosts "Media Matters" on WILL-AM radio. He lives in Madison, WI.
John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Nation's Online Beat since 1999 is their Washington DC correspondent contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times, he is also the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers and he is a frequent guest on radio and television programs as a commentator on politics and media issues. Nichols lives in Madison, WI and Washington DC.
With cinematic power and beauty, bestselling author David Laskin mines his own genealogy to tell the spellbinding tale of the three drastically different paths that his family members took across the span of 150 years.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century Laskin's great-great-grandfather, a Torah scribe named Shimon Dov HaKohen, raised six children with his wife, Beyle, in a yeshiva town at the western fringe of the Russian empire. The pious couple expected their sons and daughters to carry the family tradition into future generations. But the social and political upheavals of the twentieth century decreed otherwise.
The HaKohen family split off into three branches. One branch emigrated to America and founded the fabulously successful Maidenform Bra Company; one branch went to Palestine as pioneers and participated in the contentious birth of the state of Israel; and the third branch remained in Europe and suffered the Holocaust.
In tracing the roots of his own family, Laskin captures the epic sweep of twentieth-century history. A modern-day scribe, Laskin honors the traditions, the lives, and the choices of his ancestors: revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, scholars and farmers, tycoons and truck drivers. The Family ($32.00) is an eloquent masterwork of true grandeur -- a deeply personal, dramatic, and universal account of a people caught in a cataclysmic time in world history.
David Laskin is the author of The Children's Blizzard, which won the Washington State Book Award and Midwest Booksellers' Choice Award for nonfiction. He is the author of several other books of nonfiction and also writes for The New York Times and The Washington Post. He lives in Seattle.
Donna Tartt, author of the classic bestsellers The Secret History and The Little Friend returns with a brilliant, highly anticipated new novel.
Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch ($30.00) is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthralling force and acuity. It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, who miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.
As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love -- and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle. The Goldfinch is a novel of shocking narrative energy and power. It combines unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and breathtaking suspense, while plumbing with a philosopher's calm the deepest mysteries of love, identity, and art. It is a beautiful, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.
Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi and is a graduate of Bennington College. She is the author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend, which have been translated into thirty languages.
In conversation with Joel Riddell
Co-sponsor with Israeli Consulate
Einat Admony is a 21st-century balaboosta (Yiddish for perfect housewife ). She's a mother and wife, but also a chef busy running three bustling New York City restaurants. Balaboosta ($29.95), her debut cookbook features 140 of the recipes she cooks for the people she loves her children, her husband, and the many friends she regularly entertains. Here, Einat s mixed Israeli heritage (Yemenite, Persian) seamlessly blends with the fresh, sophisticated Mediterranean palate she honed while working in some of New York City s most beloved kitchens.
The result is a melting pot of meals for every need and occasion: exotic and exciting dinner-party dishes (harissa-spiced Moroccan fish, beet gnocchi), meals just for kids (chicken schnitzel, root veggie chips), healthy options (butternut squash and saffron soup, quinoa salad with preserved lemon and chickpeas), satisfying comfort food (creamy, cheesy potatoes, spicy chili), and so much more.
Joel Riddell is the award winning host and producer of Dining Around on Talk 910 Saturday from 10:00am-1:00pm.
In 2010, scientists led by J. Craig Venter became the first to successfully create "synthetic life"—putting humankind at the threshold of the most important and exciting phase of biological research, one that will enable us to actually write the genetic code for designing new species to help us adapt and evolve for long-term survival. The science of synthetic genomics will have a profound impact on human existence, including chemical and energy generation, health, clean water and food production, environmental control, and possibly even our evolution.
In Life at the Speed of Light ($26.95), Venter presents a fascinating and authoritative study of this emerging field from the inside -- detailing its origins, current challenges and controversies, and projected effects on our lives. This scientific frontier provides an opportunity to ponder anew the age-old question "What is life?" and examine what we really mean by "playing God." Life at the Speed of Light is a landmark work, written by a visionary at the dawn of a new era of biological engineering.
J. Craig Venter is best known for sequencing the human genome. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of the J. Craig Venter Institute, a not-for-profit research organization dedicated to genomic research. He is also the founder and CEO of Synthetic Genomics, Inc., as well as the author of A Life Decoded. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, including the 2008 United States National Medal of Science, and twice been named one Time's 100 most influential people. He lives in La Jolla, California. Visit jcvi.org.
Peju Winery, Rutherford (Napa Valley)
Tickets (Book Included): $120 per person, $200 per couple
Please note: this event is currently waitlist only. To inquire about ticket availabiliy, please call (415) 927-0960 ext. 1.
Check-in and registration from 5:00 - 6:00 pm, with sit down dinner to immediately follow
Anne Burrell has worked at top restaurants in New York, studied food in Italy, and battled alongside Mario Batali on the Food Network's Iron Chef. She gives kitchen tips in her Food Network series Secrets of a Restaurant Chef. Own Your Kitchen has recipes that let home cooks take charge when they're cooking. Burrell shows how to let flavors work together, how to make things early, and how to feel confident and stress free in the kitchen.
We are proud to launch a partnership with Peju Winery, a family owned and operated winery in the heart of the Napa Valley.
In his first fully illustrated work, David Thomson breaks new ground by focusing in on a series of moments -- which his readers will also experience in beautifully reproduced imagery -- from seventy-two films across a 100-year-plus span. An indispensable counterpart to both his classic Biographical Dictionary of Film (called "a miracle" by Sight and Sound) and his lauded recent history, The Big Screen ("a pungently written, brilliant book" according to David Denby), Moments That Made The Movies ($39.95) takes readers on an unprecedented visual tour, where the specifics of the imagery the reader is seeing are inextricably tied to the text. Thomson's moments range from a set of Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering photographs to sequences in films from the classic -- Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, The Red Shoes -- to the unexpected -- The Piano Teacher, Burn After Reading.
Based in San Francisco, David Thomson is the film critic for The New Republic and has written regularly for The Guardian, The Independent, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, and Movieline.
During the last two decades, the annual San Francisco Author's Luncheon has grown into the Bay Area's premier literary event. This year is no different: the National Kidney Foundation celebrate its 25th annual luncheon on Saturday, October 26 with seven nationally known, best-selling authors: Lidia Bastianich, Daniel Boulud, Sherri Duskey Rinker, Anne Lamott, Amy Tan, Jess Walter, and Simon Winchester. Master of Ceremonies is Michael J. Krasny, PhD, host of KQED public radio's Forum. Book Passage is proud to be a part of this major literary event.
Nearly 2 million people in Northern California suffer from chronic kidney disease, including 1 million living in the Greater Bay Area. Luncheon proceeds support the work of the National Kidney Foundation to directly enhance the lives of people in our community who are either dialysis or transplant patients, or at risk for developing kidney disease.
Individual Tickets are $135, Individual Tables are $1,200 before September 1st, and Table Sponsorships begin at $2,500. Reserve individual seating, a reader's table, or become a sponsor today! For more information, please call 415.543.3303 or visit this webpage.
Will you be the next to break the world record?
Anything is possible with The New World Champion Paper Airplane Book ($16.99), the newest collection of designs and theories of flight from John M. Collins, the man behind the Guinness World Record–breaking distance plane. Featuring twenty-two unique airplane designs with step-by-step instructional photos, plus tear-out models printed on regulation-weight paper stock, this entertaining and informative guide promises hours of flying fun.
John M. Collins, also known as "The Paper Airplane Guy," is the author of The Gliding Flight and Fantastic Flight and has taught hundreds of thousands of people how to make better paper airplanes. Collins is a television producer and on-camera talent and has his own production company. Visit www.ThePaperAirplaneGuy.com.
A brilliantly imagined, irresistible below-stairs answer to Pride and Prejudice: a story of the romance, intrigue, and drama among the servants of the Bennet household, a triumphant tale of defying society's expectations, and an illuminating glimpse of working-class lives in Regency England.
The servants at Longbourn estate -- only glancingly mentioned in Jane Austen's classic -- take center stage in Jo Baker's lively, cunning new novel. Here are the Bennets as we have never known them: seen through the eyes of those scrubbing the floors, cooking the meals, emptying the chamber pots. Our heroine is Sarah, an orphaned housemaid beginning to chafe against the boundaries of her class. When the militia marches into town, a new footman arrives under mysterious circumstances, and Sarah finds herself the object of the attentions of an ambitious young former slave working at neighboring Netherfield Hall, the carefully choreographed world downstairs at Longbourn threatens to be completely, perhaps irrevocably, up-ended. From the stern but soft-hearted housekeeper to the starry-eyed kitchen maid, these new characters come vividly to life in this already beloved world. With Longbourn ($25.95), Jo Baker shows us what Jane Austen wouldn't in a captivating, wonderfully evocative, moving work of fiction.
Please note: this event has been postponed. For updates on our rescheduled date, please email email@example.com
The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s won an unprecedented and unmatched four Super Bowls in six years. A dozen of those Steelers players, coaches, and executives have been inducted into the Hall of Fame, and three decades later their names echo in popular memory: Mean Joe Greene, Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Mike Webster, Jack Lambert, Lynn Swann, and John Stallworth. In ways exhilarating and heartbreaking, they define not only the brotherhood of sports but those elements of the game that engage tens of millions of Americans: its artistry and its brutality. In 1981, when the Steelers failed to make the playoffs for the first time in nine years, acclaimed author Gary M. Pomerantz, then a sportswriter for The Washington Post, interviewed them in training camp. At that time, Pomerantz asked himself, "What will life be like for these guys when they're sixty?" Without knowing it, he began writing his book.
The heroes of those days sat with Pomerantz for new interviews. Greene, in his living room, explained Super Bowl IX, when the Steel Curtain held the Vikings to 2.4 feet per carry. In his man cave, Count "Frenchy" Fuqua recounted the "Immaculate Reception." Dan Rooney came to the den of his childhood home to tell of the profound influences of his father, team founder Art Rooney, Sr., and of why he fired his brother Art Jr., mastermind of the NFL's most successful draft ever. In Hollywood, Bradshaw strained to explain his falling out with Coach Chuck Noll, his kinship with old teammates. The result is Pomerantz's richly textured story of a team and a sport. The book shows in full what the game gave these men, and what it took from them.
Intimate, poignant, and thrilling, Their Life's Work: The Brotherhood of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, Then and Now ($26.99) does for football what Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer did for baseball. It is a story of victory, fortitude, renown, and, above all, the brotherhood of players who said they'd do it again—all of it.
Gary M. Pomerantz is a nonfiction author and journalist and has served the past seven years as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Pomerantz has written four books, including the New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn.
It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Resurrection (1980), Poltergeist (1982), Beetlejuice (1988), Ghost (1990), Groundhog Day (1993), The Sixth Sense (1999) - these are only a few of the influential movies in recent decades dealing with the afterlife. But beyond entertainment, do they mean anything? The authors of Death at the Movies: Hollywood's Guide to the Hereafter ($16.95) believe so. They explore how popular motion pictures, from Outward Bound (1930) to Hereafter, play a perhaps unconscious role in guiding humanity toward its evolutionary comprehension of the meaning and purpose of death. They draw on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Buddhism, and depth psychology to review some of the most spiritually powerful films ever made. Death is, say the authors, at once the most immediate locked door and the ultimate frontier, a staggering paradox that invites us to search for deeper understanding based upon a level of consciousness beyond thought. After reading this book, you'll never view Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz the same way again.
Lyn Davis Genelli has been a psychotherapist, consultant, and workshop leader for over forty years. She is the co-founder of the Bay Area Institute for Integrative Body Psychotherapy. She also teaches hatha yoga and yoga nidra, and is a long-time practitioner of meditation. Tom Davis Genelli cut his media teeth as third base cameraman for the Philadelphia Phillies before ascending to New York to become an independent film producer/director and an instructor in film production at New York's New School for Social Research. Returning to San Francisco for a Ph.D. in Psychology, he met Lyn, married and settled into a twenty-six year career as a therapist and Clinical Director for Conard House, Inc., a large, progressive mental health agency. He now writes a little, cooks and grows cacti.
The Genellis share a profound conviction that the purpose of life is self-realization for the benefit of all. In the course of their respective careers, they began writing and publishing articles dealing with the cross-fertilization of film, psychology and spirituality as a way of expressing their joint conviction. Their articles have appeared in journals of psychology and popular culture, including Yoga Journal and Vogue.
Sat., Oct. 26 • 10:00-4:00pm • $105
Adair Lara shows all the elements of the memoir: the arc, reflective voice, scene vs. narrative, fact vs. truth, and writing about famiy members. She shows what it takes to get published. There will be in-class exercises. Writers of fiction and essays are welcome. A former S.F. Chronicle columnist, Lara is the author of twelve books, including Naked, Drunk, and Writing, her guide to essay and memoir.
Come join the California Writers Club and Michael David Lukas!
Ushered into the world by a mysterious pair of Tartar midwives late in the summer of 1877 in the town of Constanta on the Black Sea, Eleonora Cohen proves herself an extraordinarily gifted child—a prodigy—at a very young age. When she is eight years old, she stows away aboard a ship, following her carpet merchant father, Yakob, to the teeming and colorful imperial capital of Stamboul where a new life awaits her.
In the narrow streets of this city at the crossroads of the world, intrigue and gossip are currency, and people are not always what they seem. But it is only when she charms the eccentric Sultan Abdulhamid II—beleaguered by friend and foe as his unwieldy realm crumbles—that Eleonora will change the course of an empire. The Oracle of Stamboul ($13.99) is a marvelously evocative, magical historical novel that will transport readers to another time and place—romantic, exotic, yet remarkably similar to our own.
Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright scholar in Turkey, a late-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv and a Rotary scholar in Tunisia. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Maryland, and his writing has been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, National Geographic Traveler and the Georgia Review. Lukas lives in Oakland, California, less than a mile from where he was born. When he isn't writing, he teaches creative writing to third- and fourth-graders. Visit him online at www.michaeldavidlukas.com.
Suggested donations: $5 for California Writers Club Members, $10 for Non-Members
A nonprofit 501c3 educational corporation, California Writers Club–Marin sponsors events that are open to the public. Learn more at http://www.cwcmarinwriters.com.
Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober are professionals, wives, and mothers with five young children between them. They understand the challenges and rewards of two-career households. They also know that families thrive not in spite of working mothers but because of them. You can have a great career, a great marriage, and be a great mother. The key is tapping into your best resource and most powerful ally—the man you married.
After interviewing hundreds of parents and employers, surveying more than a thousand working mothers, and combing through the latest government and social science research, the authors have discovered that kids, husbands, and wives all reap huge benefits when couples commit to share equally as breadwinners and caregivers. Mothers work without guilt, fathers bond with their kids, and children blossom with the attention of two involved parents. Getting to 50/50: How Working Parents Can Have It All ($18.95) presents real-world solutions for parents who want to get ahead in their careers and still get to their children's soccer games.
Sharon Meers leads strategy for Magento, eBay's global e-commerce platform. Formerly, Meers was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, where she worked for 16 years and was co-chair of the Women's Network in the Investment Management Division. Joanna Strober is the Founder and CEO of an online company developing a platform and tools to help fight and prevent childhood obesity. Formerly, she was a direct venture capital investor and private equity investor for over 20 years. Sharon and Joanna both live in the San Francisco Bay Area with their husbands and children.
Encourage creativity with this wildly entertaining picture book mash-up from the minds of Jon Scieszka and Mac Barnett.
Alex has been given a saccharine, sappy, silly-sweet picture book about Birthday Bunny that his grandma found at a garage sale. Alex isn't interested -- until he decides to make the book something he'd actually like to read. So he takes out his pencil, sharpens his creativity, and totally transforms the story! Birthday Bunny becomes Battle Bunny, and the rabbit's innocent journey through the forest morphs into a supersecret mission to unleash an evil plan -- a plan that only Alex can stop.
Featuring layered, original artwork that emphasizes Alex's additions, Battle Bunny ($14.99) is a dynamic exploration of creative storytelling that's sure to engage and inspire.
Jon Scieszka is the creator of Trucktown, including the New York Times bestselling Smash, Crash!, and the author of The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, the Time Warp Trio series, Caldecott Honor Book The Stinky Cheese Man, and many other books that inspire kids to want to read. He has worked as an elementary school teacher and is the founder of GuysRead.com, a literacy initiative for boys.
Mac Barnett has written thirteen books, including Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem, Mustache!, Chloe and the Lion and the New York Times best-selling, Boston Globe Horn Book Award-winning Extra Yarn. He also writes the Brixton Brothers series of mysteries.
Left Bank Restaurant, Larkspur
Please note: online sales are now closed. To inquire about waitlist availability, please call (415) 927-0960 ext. 1.
The New York Times says "Patricia Wells is a genuine phenomenon." We couldn't agree more. To put it in perspective, Patricia Wells is the only foreigner and only woman to serve as a restaurant critic for a major French publication, L'Express. She was the global restaurant critic for the International Herald Tribune for 25 years. She is also the award winning author of 12 cookbooks and has won four James Beard awards. The French Kitchen Cookbook features delicious recipes from her famous cooking school in France. For several weeks each year, Patricia and her husband open their 18th Century Provencal home for personalized cooking classes for a small group of cooking enthusiasts who are eager to share in the food, wine, and culture of one of France's most blessed regions. Wells is the author of The Provence Cookbook, The Paris Cookbook, The Food Lover's Guide to Paris and many more.
8 Tuesdays • Oct. 29-Dec. 17 • 6:30-8:30pm • $320
Are you ready to commit to completing your book? Use the support of fellow writers and well-timed feedback to move through resistance and finish your work. Keenan provides incisive feedback as well as structural and publishing advice as needed. Restricted registration – call for information.
What do we do when life lurches out of balance? How can we reconnect to one other and to what's sustaining, when evil and catastrophe seem inescapable?
These questions lie at the heart of Stitches ($17.95), Anne Lamott's profound follow-up to her New York Times–bestselling Help, Thanks, Wow. In this book Lamott explores how we find meaning and peace in these loud and frantic times; where we start again after personal and public devastation; how we recapture wholeness after loss; and how we locate our true identities in this frazzled age. We begin, Lamott says, by collecting the ripped shreds of our emotional and spiritual fabric and sewing them back together, one stitch at a time.
It's in these stitches that the quilt of life begins, and embedded in them are strength, warmth, humor, and humanity.
Anne Lamott is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Help, Thanks, Wow; Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B; and Traveling Mercies, as well as several novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.
In conversation with Andrew Sean Greer
Jayne Anne Phillips's debut collection, Black Tickets, galvanized critics and readers when it was published in 1979 and announced her as one of the great new voices of her generation. Her four novels, prizewinners and reader favorites, have secured her place as one of America's most celebrated storytellers. In Quiet Dell ($28.00), Phillips re-imagines a gruesome crime in a tiny West Virginia community not far from where she grew up.
Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of Lark and Termite, Motherkind, Shelter, and Machine Dreams, and the widely anthologized collections of stories, Fast Lanes and Black Tickets. A National Book Award and National Book Critic's Circle Award finalist, Phillips is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She is currently Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey, where she established The Writers At Newark Reading Series.
Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of five works of fiction, including The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an "inspired, lyrical novel," and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named a best book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the O Henry Award for short fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in San Francisco. His latest novel is The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells.
8 Thursdays • Oct. 31-Dec. 19 • 6:30-8:30pm • $320
Restricted registration - please call for information
Make space for your writing. Making commitments and setting goals is one way to find the consistency you need. The habit of writing is what helps us access our creativity. Use the support of other writers and Keenan's guidance and techniques to keep moving forward.
3 Fridays • Nov. 1-15 • 10:00-12:00pm • $100
John Singer Sargent, expatriate American, Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida of Spain, and Anders Zorn of Sweden are recognized as brilliant portraitists. It is, however, their scenes of everyday life and the luminosity that results from their handling of paint that deserve our attention. All three were widely traveled and their paintings reveal much about the locales they explored. This class was inspired by the exhibit opening at the Legion of Honor on Nov. 9 about Anders Zorn. Students may arrange a group field trip to the museum. Field trip not included in fee.
Kerrin Meis taught art history at SFSU for ten years and now lectures for the College of Marin and Dominican University. She leads study tours in Europe. Her Book Passage classes have been big favorites for years.
The ticket price of $55 includes lunch and a signed book
Call (415) 927-0960 ext. 1 or click the button below to register.
Survival Lessons provides a road map of how to reclaim your life from this day forward, with ways to reenvision everything-from relationships with friends and family to the way you see yourself. As Alice Hoffman says, "In many ways I wrote Survival Lessons to remind myself of the beauty of life, something that's all too easy to overlook during the crisis of illness or loss. I forgot that our lives are made up of equal parts of sorrow and joy, and that it is impossible to have one without the other. I wrote to remind myself that despite everything that was happening to me, there were still choices I could make."
Wise, gentle, and wry, Alice Hoffman teaches all of us how to choose what matters most.
Alice Hoffman has published twenty-one novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her books have been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions. Her novels, many of which have been New York Tiimes bestsellers, have received mention as notable books of the year by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People magazine. Alice's advance from Survival Lessons will be donated to the Hoffman Breast Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Book Passage hosts literary luncheons with celebrated authors at our Marin store. These events are catered by the outstanding Insalata's Restaurant of San Anselmo.
V.I. Warshawski's closest friend in Chicago is the Viennese-born doctor Lotty Herschel, who lost most of her family in the Holocaust. Lotty escaped to London in 1939 on the Kindertransport with a childhood playmate, Kitty Saginor Binder. When Kitty's daughter finds her life is in danger, she calls Lotty, who, in turn, summons V.I. to help. The daughter's troubles turn out to be just the tip of an iceberg of lies, secrets, and silence, whose origins go back to the mad competition among America, Germany, Japan and England to develop the first atomic bomb. The secrets are old, but the people who continue to guard them today will not let go of them without a fight in Critical Mass ($26.95).
Sara Paretsky is the author of nineteen books, including her renowned V. I. Warshawski novels. She was named 2011 Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and is also the recipient of the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award given by the British Crime Writers' Association. She lives in Chicago.
Celebrating a nearly universal character flaw, The Art of Procrastination ($12.95) is a wise, charming, compulsively readable book—really, a tongue-in-cheek argument of ideas. Perry offers ingenious strategies, like the defensive to-do list ("1. Learn Chinese . . .") and task triage. He discusses the double-edged relationship between the computer and procrastination—on the one hand, it allows the procrastinator to fire off a letter or paper at the last possible minute; on the other, it's a dangerous time suck (Perry counters this by never surfing until he's already hungry for lunch). Or what may be procrastination's greatest gift: the chance to accomplish surprising, wonderful things by not sticking to a rigid schedule. For example, Perry wrote this book by avoiding the work he was supposed to be doing—grading papers and evaluating dissertation ideas. How lucky for us.
John Perry is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford University and currently teaches at UC Riverside.
He is the co-host of the nationally syndicated public radio program Philosophy Talk, and winner, in 2011, of an Ig Nobel Prize in Literature for the essay "Structured Procrastination." He lives with his wife in Palo Alto, California.
Originally published in 1987, The Book of Questions ($8.95), a New York Times bestseller, has been completely revised and updated to incorporate the myriad cultural shifts and hot-button issues of the past twenty-five years, making it current and even more appealing. This revised edition includes more than 100 all-new questions that delve into such topics as the disappearing border between man and machine. The Book of Questions may be the only publication that challenges and even changes the way you view the world, without offering a single opinion of its own.
Gregory Stock is a biophysicist, bestselling author, biotech entrepreneur, and the former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLA's School of Medicine. His interests lie in the scientific and evolutionary as well as ethical, social, and political implications of today's revolutions in the life sciences and in information technology and computers. He lives in Houston, Texas.
Set in an unnamed, South American country in the aftermath of war, At Night We Walk in Circles ($27.95) shares the tone and masterful prose of the work of Roberto Bolaño, and is driven by a suspenseful plot that makes it impossible to put down. The story centers around a young actor, Nelson, who becomes a part of a radical guerilla theater troupe he's long aspired to join. Nelson becomes hopelessly entangled with the group and we learn about Nelson's rise and downfall through the investigation of our narrator, a man obsessed with uncovering Nelson's mysterious story. In sharp, vivid and beautiful prose, Alarcón delivers a compulsively readable narrative and a provocative meditation on fate, identity, and the large consequences that can result from even our smallest choices.
Daniel Alarcón is author of War by Candlelight, a finalist for the 2005 PEN-Hemingway Award, and Lost City Radio, named a Best Novel of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post, among others. His writing has appeared in McSweeney's, n+1, and Harper's, and he has been named one of the New Yorker's 20 under 40. He lives in San Francisco, CA.
Humans have explored their relationship to animals from the dawn of poetry. Barry Kraft has assembled a rich selection of poems that explores the agony and ecstasy of this relationship.
Barry Kraft has been a professional actor for 46 years. He has acted in all 38 of Shakespeare's plays, playing more than 100 roles in 85 full productions. In addition to decades at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, he has had seasons with San Diego's Old Globe, Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Utah Shakespearean, Marin Shakespeare, and A.C.T. Barry is also a dramaturg, guest lecturer, educator, an avid Chess and Go player, and a poetry lover.
In Wounded Prey ($14.99), a young girl is snatched in broad daylight from outside her school and later found brutally murdered and hanging from a tree. When recently retired San Francisco Police Inspector Bob Farrell sees this on the news, he realises his worst nightmare has just come true. The same brutal killer a government agency stopped him from putting away twenty years before is once more on the loose. As the killer wreaks a trail of blood and destruction across North America, Bob Farrell sets out to track him down. But Farrell's not playing by the rules any more than the killer is, and soon the FBI have both of them in their sights.
Sean Lynch was born and raised in Iowa, in a Civil War-era brick farmhouse restored by his family. When not outdoors shooting his BB guns, Sean could be found reading crime and science fiction, paranormal and military non-fiction, and trying to persuade his parents to let him stay up past bedtime to watch the late-show creature feature. After high school, Sean obtained a Bachelor of Sciences degree and served in the U.S. Army as an enlisted Infantryman. He migrated to Northern California.
Rape has never had a universally accepted definition, and the uproar over "legitimate rape" during the 2012 U.S. elections confirms that it remains a word in flux. Redefining Rape ($35.00) tells the story of the forces that have shaped the meaning of sexual violence in the United States, through the experiences of accusers, assailants, and advocates for change. In this ambitious new history, Estelle Freedman demonstrates that our definition of rape has depended heavily on dynamics of political power and social privilege. Freedman narrates the victories, defeats, and limitations of these and other reform efforts. The modern civil rights and feminist movements, she points out, continue to grapple with both the insights and the dilemmas of these first campaigns to redefine rape in American law and culture.
Estelle Freedman is Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History at Stanford University.
3 Sun., Nov. 3, 10, & 17 • 6:00-8:00pm • $150
Please note: this class has been cancelled. For information on possible rescheduling, please contact Esme Rabin at firstname.lastname@example.com
This workshop focuses on re-interpreting stories you've always been told about who you are and where you came from. We'll add layers of context and reflection to turn those stories into literature. Bring a notebook or laptop, and be ready to rewrite history.
For examples of Frances Lefkowitz's writing, check out "Watching Sandra Be Loved By God" and two of her pieces of flash fiction here.
Compiled by the editor of Living Life as a Thank You and collaborator on the runaway bestseller Attitudes of Gratitude, Brenda Knight has employed the practice of gratitude for years. Grateful Table ($15.95) is not your grandmother's book of graces. Filled with fresh voices and contemporary expressions of thankfulness in a gorgeously gift-able hardcover, this book of blessings makes every occasion more meaningful.
Brenda Knight is the author of Sheroes, The Poetry Oracle, Wild Women and Books, and the American Book Award–winning Women of the Beat Generation.
Nina Lesowitz is co-author of The Party Girl Cookbook and the bestselling Living Life as a Thank You.
7 Mondays • Nov. 4 - Dec. 16 • 8:30-10:15am • $220
The advance class makes extensive use of contemporary materials, including newspaper articles and novels.
Gisella Petrone has a Masters degree from the University of Calabria. She has taught English, Italian, Latin, Roman History, and Italian cooking.
7 Mondays, Nov. 4 - Dec. 16 • 10:00-12:00pm • $220
Lisez à la maison un livre, des textes d'actualité puis discutez en classe et cultivez votre français en échangeant des idées. Révision de grammaire selon vos besoins. Josette Charbit Schwartz has taught French in Marin at the Lycee Francais, The Branson School, and French American International in San Francisco. Born in Paris, Josette has lived in Marin County for 30 years and has a degree in Bilingual Education from France. Josette's classes often read poems, break out in song, and discuss the joys of French culture.
7 Mon., Nov. 4 - Dec. 16 • 1:00-3:30pm • $220
This course gives the essentials of everyday topics: salutations, food, and communicating in simple, correct sentences. Josette Charbit Schwartz has taught French in Marin at the Lycee Francais, The Branson School, and French American International in San Francisco. Born in Paris, Josette has lived in Marin County for 30 years and has a degree in Bilingual Education from France. Josette's classes often read poems, break out in song, and discuss the joys of French culture.
Ties That Bind ($25.95) honors the people who nourish and strengthen us. StoryCorps founder Dave Isay draws from ten years of the revolutionary oral history project's rich archives, collecting conversations that celebrate the power of the human bond and capture the moment at which individuals become family. Between blood relations, friends, coworkers, and neighbors, in the most trying circumstances and in the unlikeliest of places, enduring connections are formed and lives are forever changed.
The stories shared in Ties That Bind reveal our need to reach out, to support, and to share life's burdens and joys. We meet two brothers, separately cast out by their parents, who reconnect and rebuild a new family around each other. We encounter unexpected joy: A gay woman reveals to her beloved granddaughter that she grew up believing that family was a happiness she would never be able to experience. We witness lifechanging friendship: An Iraq war veteran recalls his wartime bond with two local children and how his relationship with his wife helped him overcome the trauma of losing them.
Dave Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and the recipient of numerous broadcasting honors, including six Peabody awards and a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. He is the author/editor of numerous books that grew out of his public radio documentary work, including three StoryCorps books: Listening Is an Act of Love, Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps, and All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps -- all New York Times bestsellers.
In Japantown ($25.00), a fresh and engaging thriller, an American antique dealer-turned-reluctant-private eye must use his knowledge of Japanese culture to unravel a major murder in San Francisco, even as he and his daughter become targets for the same mysterious killer.
Jim Brodie, a San Francisco antique dealer with ties to a Tokyo-based
private investigation firm, receives a call one night from a friend at
the SFPD: an entire family has been senselessly gunned down in the
Japantown neighborhood of the bustling city. As an American born and
raised in Japan, Brodie has advised the local police in the past, but
when he arrives at the crime scene, the near-perfect murder offers only
one clue—an unreadable scrap of paper that has devastating personal
consequences not only for the victims but for Brodie himself.
With his array of Asian contacts and fluency in Japanese, Brodie follows leads gathered from a shadow powerbroker, a renegade Japanese detective, and the elusive tycoon at the center of the Japantown murders along a trail that takes him from the crime scene in California to terrorized citizens and informants in Japan. Step by step, he unravels a web of intrigue stretching back centuries and unearths a deadly secret that threatens not only his life but also those of his entire circle of family and friends.
Drawing on a wealth of insider information on Japanese culture, Japantown offers a riveting read and a terrific new series character in Jim Brodie.
Barry Lancet has lived in Japan for more than twenty-five years. His former position as an editor at one of the nation's largest publishers gave him access to the inner circles in traditional and business fields most outsiders are never granted, and an insider's view that informs his writing.
Left Coast Writers® Salon
This month's speaker will be none other than our favorite bookseller—Book Passage co-owner and debut novelist, William Petrocelli. William's new novel, The Circle of Thirteen ($26.95), is set in a future in which a misogynistic terrorist organization called Patria carries out relentless and vicious attacks on women. Standing between Patria and its nefarious agenda is an organization called the Women of Peace, led by thirteen women who strive for world harmony. The book begins with the bombing of the United Nations building in New York City by Patria and follows Security Director, Julia Moro, on a chase after the leader of Patria.
William Petrocelli is the co-owner, with his wife Elaine, of the our favorite independent Bay Area bookstore, Book Passage, with locations in Corte Madera and San Francisco. As a former Deputy Attorney General for the State of California and a poverty lawyer in Oakland, Petrocelli has long been an advocate for women's rights. The Circle of Thirteen is his first novel.
Book Passage hosts monthly meetings of Left Coast Writers® at our Corte Madera store. The monthly meetings provide an evening of literary connections, support, counsel, readings, writing tips, literary chat, unabashed networking, and great fun. Each meeting also features a presentation by one of several Bay Area literary figures. LCW has its own lively newsletter and website at www.leftcoastwriters.com/.
Left Bank Restaurant, Larkspur
Tickets (Book Included): $120 per person, $185 per couple
Since her James Beard Award-winning first book, Sunday Suppers at Lucques, Suzanne Goin and her Los Angeles empire of restaurants have blossomed and she has been lauded as one of the best chefs in the country. Now, she is bringing us the recipes from her sophomore restaurant, A.O.C., turning the small-plate, shared-style dishes that she made so famous into main courses for the home chef. Among her many recipes, you can expect her addictive Bacon-Wrapped Dates with Parmesan; Duck Sausage with Candied Kumquats; Dandelion and Roasted Carrot Salad with Black Olives and Ricotta Salata; California Sea Bass with Tomato Rice, Fried Egg, and Sopressata; Lamb Meatballs with Spiced Tomato Sauce, Mint, and Feta; Crème Fraîche Cake with Santa Rosa Plums and Pistachios in Olive Oil; and S'Mores with Caramel Popcorn and Chocolate Sorbet.
But The A.O.C. Cookbook is much more than just a collection of recipes. Because Goin is a born teacher with a gift for pairing seasonal flavors, this book is full of wonderful, eye-opening information about the ingredients that she holds dear. She takes the time to talk you through each one of her culinary decisions, explaining her palate and how she gets the deeply developed flavor profiles, which make even the simplest dishes sing. More than anything, Goin wants you to understand her techniques so you enjoy yourself in the kitchen and have no problem achieving restaurant-quality results right at home.
Suzanne Goin was born and raised in southern California and graduated from Brown University. In 2006 she was the recipient of two awards from the James Beard Foundation (Best Chef California and Best Cookbook from a Professional Viewpoint for Sunday Suppers at Lucques), and she has received five concurrent nominations for Outstanding Chef of the Year. Goin is the chef and owner of Lucques, A.O.C., Tavern, and The Larder, all in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, David Lentz.
Set against a dramatic backdrop of war, spies, and nuclear bombs, An Atomic Love Story ($27.95) unveils a vivid new view of a tumultuous era and one of its most important figures. In the early decades of the 20th century, three highly ambitious women found their way to the West Coast, where each was destined to collide with the young Oppenheimer, the enigmatic physicist whose work in creating the atomic bomb would forever impact modern history. His first and most intense love was for Jean Tatlock, though he married the tempestuous Kitty Harrison—both were members of the Communist Party—and was rumored to have had a scandalous affair with the brilliant Ruth Sherman Tolman, ten years his senior and the wife of another celebrated physicist. Although each were connected through their relationship to Oppenheimer, their experiences reflect important changes in the lives of American women in the 20th century: the conflict between career and marriage; the need for a woman to define herself independently; experimentation with sexuality; and the growth of career opportunities. Beautifully written and superbly researched through a rich collection of firsthand accounts, this intimate portrait shares the tragedies, betrayals, and romances of an alluring man and three bold women, revealing how they pushed to the very forefront of social and cultural changes in a fascinating, volatile era.
Shirley Streshinsky is the critically acclaimed author of three works of nonfiction and four historical novels. As a journalist and travel essayist, she has written extensively for Redbook, Glamour, Preservation, American Heritage, The American Scholar, and Condé Nast Traveler and has been featured on NPR. She is the recipient of the Society of Magazine Writers' Award for Excellence and the National Council for the Advancement of Education Writing Award.
Patricia Klaus received her PhD in Modern British History from Stanford where she specialized in women's studies, the history of marriage, and the study of war and literature. She has taught at Yale, Stanford, and the University of Virginia and has published scholarly papers on the subject of women.
7 Wednesdays., Nov. 6 - Dec. 18 • 10:00-12:00pm • $220
Further study of tenses and grammatical concepts through simple dialogues, as well as reviewing regular and irregular verbs. Josette Charbit Schwartz has taught French in Marin at the Lycee Francais, The Branson School, and French American International in San Francisco. Born in Paris, Josette has lived in Marin County for 30 years and has a degree in Bilingual Education from France. Josette's classes often read poems, break out in song, and discuss the joys of French culture.
7 Wednesdays • Nov. 6 - Dec. 18 • 1:15-3:00pm • $220
Students will start reading short novels by modern Italian writers, as well as reviewing difficult grammar structures and the subjunctive tense. Material will be provided.
Gisella Petrone has a Masters degree from the University of Calabria. She has taught English, Italian, Latin, Roman History, and Italian cooking.
Wednesday, Nov. 13 • 6:00-8:30pm • $65
Please note the date change
Literary Agent Amy Rennert demystifies the publishing process. She shows how to write query letters and proposals, develop relationships with editors, and make sure books reach the widest audience possible. She also discusses agency agreements and contracts, as well as self-publishing and e-book options. Her clients includeJimmy Buffett, Michael Krasny, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, and Jacqueline Winspear.
In conversation with David Corbett
Set in a turbulent futuristic society, this provocative drama follows one woman's investigation into the dark forces unleashing chaos around the world—a thrilling ride that will mesmerize until the end.
In 2082, a catastrophic explosion rocks the dedication ceremony of the new United Nations in New York City. Security Director Julia Moro is on the job, chasing after the misogynistic leader of Patria, a long-disbanded international terrorist organization now being whispered about again on the streets. This dangerous, shadowy figure has been linked to several bombing attempts and vicious attacks on women, including the Women of Peace--an organization headed by thirteen bold women who have risked their lives to restore worldwide peace. As Julia's investigation unfolds, a deep secret from her past threatens to strip her of everything she cherishes and plunge her into unrecoverable darkness.
The Circle of Thirteen ($26.95) is a gripping narrative, weaving back and forth in time, from an act of domestic violence that created the disturbed personality of the Patria mastermind, to the two weeks leading up to the bombing at the UN, to events half a century before the bombing that directly influence it. The strong, relatable women and the unbreakable bond between them provide an emotionally grounded window into the future's unforgettable history.
William Petrocelli is the co-owner, with his wife Elaine, of the famed independent San Francisco Bay Area Book Passage bookstores. As a former Deputy Attorney General for the State of California and a poverty lawyer in Oakland, Petrocelli has long been an advocate for women's rights. The Circle of Thirteen is his first novel.
David Corbett is the author of four novels: The Devil's Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, icluding the Edgar), and Do They Know I'm Running? David's short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He lives in Vallejo, CA.
From acclaimed author Susan Conley comes Paris Was the Place ($25.95), a novel that gives us a luminous emotional portrait of a young woman living abroad in Paris in the 1980s and trying to make sense of the chaotic world around her as she learns the true meaning of family.
When Willie Pears agrees to teach at a Parisian center for immigrant girls who have requested French asylum, she has no idea it will utterly change her life. She has lived in Paris for six months, surrounded by the most important people in her life: her beloved brother, Luke, her funny and wise college roommate, Sara, and Sara's do-gooder husband, Rajiv. And now there is Macon Ventri, a passionate, dedicated attorney for the detained girls. Theirs is a meeting of both hearts and minds--but not without its problems. As Willie becomes more involved with the immigrant girls who touch her soul, the lines between teaching and mothering are blurred. She is especially drawn to Gita, a young Indian girl who is determined to be free. Ultimately Willie will make a decision with potentially dire consequences to both her relationship with Macon and the future of the center. Meanwhile, Luke is taken with a serious, as-yet-unnamed illness, and Willie will come to understand the power of unconditional love while facing the dark days of his death. Conley has written a piercing, deeply humane novel that explores the connections between family and friends and reaffirms the strength of the ties that bind.
Susan Conley is the author of The Foremost Good Fortune, a book that won the Maine Literary Award for memoir and was a Goodreads Choice Award Finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, The Paris Review, The Harvard Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband and their two sons.
6 Thursdays, Nov. 7 - Dec. 19 (no class Nov. 28) • 11:15-1:15pm • $190
Improve your French with current events, varied texts, and dialogues. The class goes further with grammar and verb tenses. Josette Charbit Schwartz has taught French in Marin at the Lycee Francais, The Branson School, and French American International in San Francisco. Born in Paris, Josette has lived in Marin County for 30 years and has a degree in Bilingual Education from France. Josette's classes often read poems, break out in song, and discuss the joys of French culture.
6 Thursdays • Nov. 7 - Dec. 19 • 11:30-1:15pm • $190 (no class Nov. 28)
Students will continue to study basic Italian grammar as well as present and past tense. Textbook is Studio Italiano.
Gisella Petrone has a Masters degree from the University of Calabria. She has taught English, Italian, Latin, Roman History, and Italian cooking.
James Beard Award-winning chef, John Sundstrom, has written a culinary homage to the Pacific Northwest, which is his home and the source of inspiration that is showcased at his Seattle restaurant, Lark. His new self-published cookbook Lark: Cooking Against the Grain ($50.00), celebrates the distinctly moody and majestic Northwest and its bounty of ingredients, telling the story through over 140 recipes with full color photographs.
John Sundstrom was named one of Food & Wine Magazine's Best New Chefs for 2001, is a two-time Seattle winner of the popular Cochon 555 heritage pork cooking competition (2009 & 2010), and was awarded the prestigious James Beard award for Best Chef Northwest in 2007.
Angelico Hall, Dominican University
Tickets: $30 (includes signed copy of Aimless Love)
Please note: online sales for this event have closed. Tickets may be available at the door. Call (415) 927-0960 ext. 1 for details.
"Billy Collins puts the 'fun' back in 'profundity.' "—Alice Fulton
From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first compilation of new and selected poems in twelve years. Aimless Love combines more than fifty new poems with selections from four previous books -- Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins's unmistakable voice, which brings together plain speech with imaginative surprise, is clearly heard on every page, reminding us how he has managed to enrich the tapestry of contemporary poetry and greatly expand its audience.
His work is featured in top literary magazines such as The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Atlantic, and he sells out reading venues all across the country. Appearing regularly in The Best American Poetry series, his poems appeal to readers and live audiences far and wide and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. By turns playful, ironic, and serious, Collins's poetry captures the nuances of everyday life while leading the reader into zones of inspired wonder. In the poet's own words, he hopes that his poems "begin in Kansas and end in Oz." Touching on the themes of love, loss, joy, and poetry itself, these poems showcase the best work of this "poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan grace" (The New Yorker).
Billy Collins is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. A distinguished professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College, he was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and Poet Laureate of New York State from 2004 to 2006.
Private Ocean Wealth Management is the Diamond Lead Sponsor of the Leadership Lecture Series of Dominican and Book Passage.
Are you saying "no" to dessert because of food allergies or health concerns? Or saying "no" when your kid asks for a cupcake at a birthday party? If so, Sweet Debbie has a Chocoholic Cupcake for you! With her own son allergic to "every food in the USDA pyramid," Debbie Adler took matters into her own kitchen. Today, her wildly popular, allergen-free bakery, Sweet Debbie's Organic Cupcakes, has Hollywood's A-list celebrities lining up for her delicious, nutritious muffins, brownies, cookies, cupcakes, donut holes and breads. Now Sweet Debbie is sharing all her delectable secrets for fifty scrumptious treats with Sweet Debbie's Organic Treats ($19.95).
If you're a vegan, diabetic, have celiac disease, a food allergy or an intolerance, or are simply interested in boosting your health via your baking tins, set the oven to "preheat" and sit down with Sweet Debbie's Organic Treats. Your sweet tooth will thank you for it.
Debbie Adler opened her allergen-free, vegan bakery, Sweet Debbie's Organic Cupcakes, in Los Angeles in 2006. Adler has appeared on NBC's evening news, and Sweet Debbie's has been featured in Pilates Style magazine and on InStyle online and E! Online. Adler lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and son. Visit her at www.sweetdebbiesorganiccupcakes.com.
Join David Schuemann, author of 99 Bottles of Wine, for a delightful wine tasting at Book Passage!
Ticket: $10.00
Fifty years ago, no one dreamed that America could make great wine - that was the exclusive province of France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. There has been a revolution, and today America is not only making amazing wines but is also at the forefront of wine research, science, technology, design, and innovation. 99 Bottles of Wine ($49.50) tells the story of contemporary wine packaging, bringing readers and wine lovers an illuminating perspective on what makes for a successful brand. It is not just the quality of wines that has made America a world leader, it is also the fresh and innovative look and feel of the labels, bottles, and packaging that are now influencing the world wine industry.
Along with a foreword by Agustin Huneeus Sr., the renowned creator of Quintessa wine, 99 Bottles of Wine offers wine lovers, serious collectors, and design aficionados a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how contemporary packaging and innovative design are driving the success of today's leading wine brands.
Author David Schuemann is the owner and creative director at CF Napa Brand Design, a leader in the wine packaging and design industry for over 35 years.
Our national park and land conservation movement is something Americans can all be proud of. Yosemite National Park is one of the crown jewels of this effort, and it appeals to conservationists, environmentalists, naturalists, scientists, backpackers, hikers, climbers, travelers, and photographers on a national and international level. Yosemite National Park alone hosts 4 million visitors per year from around the world.
While the concept of national parks now seems a given, 150 ago it was not a foregone conclusion that a nation's most special landscapes would be saved. Seed of the Future: Yosemite and the Evolution of the National Park Idea ($27.00) honors the 150th Act, a bill signed by Abraham Lincoln that is the first instance of scenic, wilderness lands being preserved specifically for public use, resort, and recreation by action of the U.S. federal government. Dayton Duncan's compelling narrative, lavishly illustrated with more than one hundred archival images and full-color landscape photographs, is sure to inspire future generations to do their part for Yosemite and all protected areas. Through the efforts of visionaries such James Mason Hutchings, Galen Clark, Frederick Law Olmsted, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt, among others, the world learned of Yosemite, flocked to it, nearly destroyed it, and finally saved it. These fascinating characters and their enduring stories are skillfully woven together in this lively portrayal of the beginnings of the preservation movement. The idea of preserving special places grew into the national park idea, and it started on its course from a seed, a seed planted in Yosemite in 1864.
Dayton Duncan is an award-winning writer and documentary filmmaker. He has served on the boards of the National Park Foundation, the Student Conservation Association, and the Conservation Lands Foundation, and was appointed by President Clinton as chair of the American Heritage Rivers Advisory Committee. For more than twenty years he has been making documentaries for PBS with Ken Burns, including "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," for which he won two Emmy awards as writer and producer, and was named honorary park ranger by the director of the National Park Service.
This class has been cancelled - please call (415) 927-0960, ext. 230 for more information
Writers sit a lot—quietly. Little movement, little sound. In this workshop of discovery and surprise, you will access images and ideas catalyzed by movement and/or voice. Drawing on my decades in theatre, the arts, and various movement modalities, Nina Solomita leads students to writing with enlivened bodies and oxygenated brains. Dare to explore the treasures of your imagination in new ways.
Sat., Nov. 9 • 10:00-2:00pm • $60
48-hour advance registration • Limit of six
You've written a brilliant story and can't wait to hear what others think. You're stuck and need a critique. What to do? Bring your manuscript, or even just an idea, to this on-thespot workshop, and we'll critique it. Amy Novesky is a children's book editor, author, and experienced workshop leader.
In their new book, Peruvian Power Foods: 18 Superfoods, 101 Recipes and Anti-aging Secrets from the Amazon to the Andes ($18.95), Manuel Villacorta and Jamie Shaw share the fruits of their labor. Returning to his birthplace and culinary roots, Villacorta set out on a cross-country adventure with Shaw to discover the origins of and best uses for the most incredibly potent foods. Armed with the latest scientific research and a hearty appetite, he traveled from the fertile farmlands of the Andes, where over 3,000 kinds of potatoes and 200 species of corn are grown, to the depths of the Amazonian jungle, where thousands of amazing fruits, nuts and seeds originate. Along the way, he visited open markets, restaurants, humble food stands, and family kitchens, stopping to gather the stories and favorite recipes of local chefs, food bloggers, farmers, fishermen, and abuelitas. In between savoring dishes packed with phenomenal disease-fighting, immunity strengthening ingredients, he took over 2,000 photographs of stunning landscapes and delicious masterpieces. In vibrant color and eye-opening detail, Peruvian Power Foods introduces 18 incredible edibles—all native to Peru but now widely available across America—showcased in 101 delicious recipes.
Manuel Villacorta, MS, RD, is a nationally recognized, award-winning registered dietitian with more than 16 years of experience. The author of Eating Free and the founder of Eating Free, an international weight management and wellness program, he is a trusted voice in the health and wellness industry. A national media spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics from 2010-2013, he is also a health blog contributor for the Huffington Post and an on-air contributor for the Univision and Fox News Latino. He is the owner of a San Francisco-based private practice, MV Nutrition, and the recipient of five "Best Bay Area Nutritionist" awards from the San Francisco Chronicle, ABC7, and Citysearch. Born and raised in Peru, he lives in San Francisco. His coauthor, Jamie Shaw is a writer and brand expert who specializes in food.
In conversation with Pam Mandel
One of the most seasoned and accomplished astronauts in history, Colonel Chris Hadfield captivated the world earlier this year when he released a series of breathtaking photographs and educational videos about life in space. His music video, a zero-gravity version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," received over 10 million views in its first three days online and has received more than 16 million views to date. He's logged nearly 4,000 hours in space, knows how to perform basic surgery in zero gravity, and has broken into a space station with a Swiss Army Knife. Now, in An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything ($28.00), Hadfield shows how the lessons he's learned in space can improve our everyday lives—at work and at home.
Colonel Chris Hadfield is one of the most seasoned and accomplished astronauts in the world. In May, Hadfield returned to Earth after serving as Commander of the International Space Station, where he and his crew lived for six months (it was his third trip). The top graduate of the U.S. Air Force test pilot school in 1988 and U.S. Navy test pilot of the year in 1991, Hadfield was selected to be an astronaut in 1992. He served as Director of NASA Operations in Star City, Russia from 2001-2003, Chief of Robotics at the Johnson Space Center in Houston from 2003-2006 and Chief of International Space Station Operations there from 2006-2008. The former President of the Association of Space Explorers (2007-2011), Hadfield is also a fully qualified flight engineer cosmonaut, is fluent in Russian, and is designated a "specialist" on all Space Station systems, meaning that he has earned the highest qualification level possible for every imaginable task onboard.
Pam Mandel wrote a series of letters to Col. Chris Hadfield that were published on SKYE on AOL. Pam is a freelance writer and photographer. She's written travel stories for Conde Nast Traveler online, Afar, World Hum, Gadling, Perceptive Travel, and a handful of food, travel, and in-flight magazines. She's worked on two guidebooks -- British Columbia and Hawaii -- for Thomas Cook.
After The Belvedere Club, Briana Kaleigh returns to Marin County. In Bolinas Bongo ($12.95), journalist Briana Kaleigh rips off her East Coast shackles and moves to California to start a new life, but inadvertently gets her only friend, Marin detective Dusty Arkansas, kidnapped. Now, while hiding from the authorities in the secretive beach town of Bolinas, Briana and her high-strung poodle must ferret out a cojones-collecting serial killer before he starts snipping off parts of Dusty.
Nicola Trwst has a gypsy heart. She currently resides in California, but has lived in Virginia, Georgia, France, and Canada. She loves languages and speaks several, including Pig Latin. Due to an overactive imagination, her stories thread many genres such as mystery, thriller, paranormal, and contemporary. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies. Bolinas Bongo is her third novel. Discover Nicola's work at www.nicolatrwst.com.
Wise, Happy and Feeling Good ($14.25) is a compilation of quotes from the popular website Gratitude Twenty Four Seven. Each refreshing message is packed with valuable insight and humor to help you find greater fulfillment and happiness. Whether or not you're conscious of it, you create well-being or distress by the thoughts you entertain and the feelings that result from them. This should come as no surprise since modern medicine consistently confirms the harmful health impacts of thought-induced stress and depression.
Repeatedly thinking about something can hypnotize you into believing that your perceptions are actually true. Negative thinking can prevent you from taking action, while positive and constructive thoughts support you in attempting and succeeding at ventures that others who are equally capable might never dream possible. You also feel a whole lot better. When you think of your thoughts as food, you get a clear idea of their importance in your mental health and physical well-being. The thoughts you feed yourself may actually be more important than the food you eat.
Wise, Happy and Feeling Good encourages you to explore your thought patterns in a light, engaging way and invites you to think outside your habitual box so you can rock your life.
Jarl Forsman and Steve Sekhon are married and living (gratefully) on a houseboat in Sausalito, California. A long practice of Tai Chi as well as other forms of meditation, spiritual counseling, dream work, daily journal writing, personal inquiry and help from many teachers have informed their paths of self-discovery. Jarl teaches Tai Chi and Qigong and maintains a diverse counseling clientele. Together they co-founded Gratitude Twenty Four Seven, an undertaking that produces resources to help themselves and others increase self-awareness, fulfillment and love for life.
Twice Heroes ($45.00) is a story of true American heroes, portrays a chapter of history known to few countrymen. In the panic following the December 1941, Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese American citizens were prohibited from joining the U.S. armed forces, and along with their families, many faced forced incarceration in bleak internment camps. They took up the fight for their country, for civil liberties, for the freedom of their families and recognition for themselves as full American citizens. Along the way, they became the most decorated military unit in United States history, fought their own civil rights battle and championed Hawaii statehood and acceptance of Asian Americans into our society.
Tom Graves shares the experiences of Japanese American veterans before, during and after World War II. He spent hundreds of hours interviewing scores of veterans around the country and then translated the results into individual stories of the human spirit overcoming obstacles of race, poverty and warfare.
Tom Graves is a San Francisco photographer and writer with over 30 years' professional experience. Born in Princeton, N.J., he was originally in business there and in New York City, before moving to San Francisco in 1991. He studied portraiture with Philippe Halsman and taught for seven years at Parsons School of Design/The New School (now New School University) in New York. He works for clients including AT&T, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Cisco Systems, IBM, Merrill Lynch, The New York Times, People, and Time. Photography has taken him to five continents and to all 50 states.
Michael Samuels M.D. will talk about how to heal yourself, others, community and the earth with art (visual arts, word, music, dance and ceremony. He will be accompanied by visual artists, and dancers who will share art making experiences with you during the book signing event.
Acclaimed by hospitals and caretakers from around the world, Healing with the Arts $18.00) brings
a tried and true program out of the medical field and into your home
and neighborhood. Improve your physical, mental, emotional, and
spiritual health in just 12 weeks. Whether you are ill, suffering from
emotional trauma, or looking to unite your community, the arts become
the conduit to restore your wellness and thrive in life.
Dr. Michael Samuels and Dr. Mary Rockwood Lane created and developed this unique and powerful process to help anyone heal. Through innovative art projects—from the visual arts, movement and dance, writing, and music—along with spiritual practices and guided imagery, readers learn to get in touch with their inner muse and inner healer. Based on years of research and experience in the medical community, Healing with the Arts sets the stage for a more meaningful and healthier existence.
Michael Samuels, MD, is the founder and director of Art as a Healing Force and currently teaches at San Francisco State University in the Institute of Holistic Studies. He is the author of nineteen books, including the bestsellers The Well Body Book and The Well Baby Book.
Mary Rockwood Lane, PhD, is a professor, painter, and nurse. In addition to her role as cofounder and codirector of the Arts in Medicine process at the University of Florida, Gainseville, she is an assistant professor of nursing there with an emphasis on creativity and spirituality in healthcare.
Left Coast Writers® Book Party at the Ferry Plaza
Focusing for the first time on why attorney general Robert F. Kennedy wasn't killed in 1963 instead of on why President John F. Kennedy was, Mark Shaw offers a stunning and provocative assassination theory in his latest book The Poison Patriarch: How the Betrayals of Joseph P. Kennedy Caused the Assassination of JFK ($24.95) that leads directly to the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy. Mining fresh information and more than forty new interviews, Shaw weaves a spellbinding narrative involving Mafia don Carlos Marcello; Jack Ruby (Lee Harvey Oswald's killer); Ruby's attorney, Melvin Belli; and, ultimately, the Kennedy brothers and their father.
Mark Shaw is a California attorney turned author after careers as a Midwestern criminal defense lawyer, newspaper co-publisher, and television personality. He has written over 20 books such as Stations Along the Way: The Spiritual Transformation of Former Hitler Youth Leader Ursula Martens, Down for the Count, and Larry Legend.
Tickets: $33 (includes signed copy of We Are Water)
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Hour I First Believed and I Know This Much Is True, comes a disquieting and ultimately uplifting novel about a marriage, a family, and human resilience in the face of tragedy
In middle age, Anna Oh -- wife, mother, outsider artist -- has shaken her family to its core. After twenty-seven years of marriage and three children, Anna has fallen in love with Vivica, the wealthy, cultured, confident Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success.
Anna and Viveca plan to wed in the Oh family's hometown of Three Rivers in Connecticut, where gay marriage has recently been legalized. But the impending wedding provokes some very mixed reactions and opens a Pandora's Box of toxic secrets-dark and painful truths that have festered below the surface of the Ohs' lives.
We Are Water ($29.99) is an intricate and layered portrait of marriage, family, and the inexorable need for understanding and connection, told in the alternating voices of the Ohs -- nonconformist Annie; her ex-husband, Orion, a psychologist; Ariane, the do-gooder daughter, and her twin, Andrew, the rebellious only son; and free-spirited Marissa, the youngest Oh. Set in New England and New York during the first years of the Obama presidency, it is also a portrait of modern America, exploring issues of class, changing social mores, the legacy of racial violence, and the nature of creativity and art.
Wally Lamb is the author of four previous novels, including the New York Times and national bestseller, The Hour I First Believed and Wishin' and Hopin', a bestselling novella. His first two works of fiction, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, were both number one New York Times bestsellers and selections of Oprah's Book Club. He is the editor of Couldn't Keep It To Myself and I'll Fly Away, two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women's prison in Connecticut, where he has been a volunteer facilitator for fifteen years. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Christine. The Lambs are the parents of three sons.
Bellman & Black ($19.99) is a dark and mesmerizing ghost story guaranteed to haunt you to your very core. As a boy, William Bellman commits one small, cruel act: killing a bird with his slingshot. Little does he know the unforeseen and terrible consequences of the deed, which is soon forgotten amidst the riot of boyhood games. By the time he is grown, with a wife and children of his own, William seems to be a man blessed by fortune—until tragedy strikes and the stranger in black comes. Then he starts to wonder if all his happiness is about to be eclipsed. Desperate to save the one precious thing he has left, William enters into a rather strange bargain, with an even stranger partner, to found a decidedly macabre business. And Bellman & Black is born.
Diane Setterfield is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Thirteenth Tale, and a former academic, specializing in twentieth-century French literature, particularly the works of Andre Gide. She lives in Yorkshire, England.
In conversation with Harold McGee.
With 50 Foods: The Essentials of Good Taste ($35.00), noted authority Edward Behr has created the definitive guide to the foods every food lover must know. A culinary Baedeker, 50 Foods will delight and inform the connoisseur as well as the novice.
Like Behr's celebrated magazine, The Art of Eating, 50 Foods presents simple, practical information about buying, using, preparing, and enjoying. Behr focuses on aroma, appearance, flavor, and texture to determine what "the best" means for each food. He tells you how to select top quality—signs of freshness and ripeness, best season, top varieties, proper aging. If the way to prepare, serve, or eat something is little known, then he explains it (how to open an oyster, why the best way to cook green beans is boiling, how to clean a whole salted anchovy, when to eat and when to discard the rind of a cheese). Behr also names the most complementary foods and flavors for each of these fifty marvelous foods and the wines that go with them.
Edward Behr is the founder of the acclaimed food magazine The Art of Eating. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, and the Financial Times. He lives in Vermont.
Harold McGee writes about the chemistry, technique, and history of food and cooking and has written two seminal books on kitchen science including, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.
One of the iconic investigators of contemporary fiction, Arkady Renko—cynical, analytical, and quietly subversive—has survived the cultural journey from the Soviet Union to the New Russia, only to find the nation as obsessed with secrecy and brutality as was the old Communist dictatorship. In Tatiana ($25.99), Martin Cruz Smith's most ambitious novel since Gorky Park, the melancholy hero finds himself on the trail of a mystery as complex and dangerous as modern Russia herself.
Martin Cruz Smith's novels include Stalin's Ghost, Gorky Park, Rose, December 6, Polar Star, and Stallion Gate. A two-time winner of the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers and a recipient of Britain's Golden Dagger Award, he lives in California.
6 Wednesdays • Nov. 13 - Dec. 18 • 1:00-3:00pm • $190
This class is for beginners and those who have previously had some exposure to German.
Hamid Emami has a Masters from the University of Hamburg, and he is fluent in German, English, French, Spanish, and Farsi. He has taught German for many years.
Left Bank Restaurant, Larkspur
Tickets (Book Included): $110 per person, $185 per couple
Please note: this event is sold out.
David Tanis was the chef of Chez Panisse in Berkeley for nearly 25 years. He is the acclaimed author of A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes and Heart of the Artichoke and other Kitchen Journeys. In his new One Good Dish, Tanis offers 100 delicious recipes that make perfect little meals. Chapters include "Bread Makes a Meal," "Strike While the Iron is Hot," and "Vegetables to Envy." Tanis writes the weekly City Kitchen column for the New York Times.
A grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them ($29.95) reveals the underlying causes of modern conflict and lights the way forward. Drawing inspiration from moral philosophy and cuttingedge science, this book shows us when to trust our instincts, when to reason, and how the right kind of reasoning can move us forward.
4 Wednesdays • Nov. 13, 20, Dec. 4, & Friday, Dec. 6 • 3:00-5:00pm • $120
**Please note the date change
This new class on the art and architecture of the Serene Republic of Venice features Byzantine mosaics, Venetian Gothic architecture,Renaissance paintings by Carpaccio, Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, Andrea Palladio's churches, and a whole string of country villas. The heavenly 18th century frescoes of Tiepolo and his gifted son, Giandomenico and the delightful genre scenes of Guardi and Longhi will also be discussed in the context of piety, politics, and commerce of the Queen of the Adriatic.
Kerrin Meis taught art history at SFSU for ten years and now lectures for the College of Marin and Dominican University. She leads study tours in Europe. Her Book Passage classes have been big favorites for years.
5 Wednesdays • Nov. 13 - Dec. 18 • 3:30-5:30pm • $155 (no class Nov. 27)
Silvia Iannelli
is a private Italian tutor who was born and raised in Rome. She creates
a fun and welcoming environment for her students, motivating them
through activities and exercises. Her personal quote is: "La traduzione della parola e' nel cuore ~ The translation of a word is in the heart."
How does Isa Chandra Moskowitz make flavorful and satisfying vegan meals from scratch every day, often in 30 minutes or less? It's easy! In Isa Does It ($30.00), the beloved cookbook author shares 150 new recipes to make weeknight cooking a snap. Mouthwatering recipes like Sweet Potato Red Curry with Rice and Purple Kale, Bistro Beet Burgers, and Summer Seitan Saute with Cilantro and Lime illustrate how simple and satisfying meat-free food can be. The recipes are supermarket friendly and respect how busy most readers are. From skilled vegan chefs, to those new to the vegan pantry, or just cooks looking for some fresh ideas, Isa's unfussy recipes and quirky commentary will make everyone's time in the kitchen fun and productive.
Isa Chandra Moskowitz is the best-selling author of the hit books Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook, Vegan with a Vengeance, and many other titles. Her website, Post Punk Kitchen, is beloved by millions. Isa has been cooking up a vegan storm for over two decades and has been named favorite cookbook author in VegNews for seven years running.
Fun-filled activities start at 5:00pm, Book Signing starts at 6:00pm
Please join us for a celebration of Jeff Kinney's new book — Diary of a Wimpy Kid book 8, Hard Luck ($13.95)! It releases on November 5, 2013, and we are thrilled to announce that Jeff Kinney will be at Book Passage to sign books on November 13, 2013. Please join us to meet Jeff and for special Hard Luck activities which will start at 1 hour before the book signing and run throughout it.
Check out the new installment in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series! In Hard Luck, Greg Heffley's on a losing streak. His best friend, Rowley Jefferson, has ditched him, and finding new friends in middle school is proving to be a tough task. To change his fortunes, Greg decides to take a leap of faith and turn his decisions over to chance. Will a roll of the dice turn things around, or is Greg's life destined to be just another hard-luck story?
Jeff Kinney is an online game developer and designer, and a #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Jeff was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Please note: this will be a multimedia performance!
Written and designed by award-winning author/artist Warren Lehrer, A Life In Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley ($34.95) is an extraordinarily original, funny, heartwarming and heart-wrenching exploration of one man's use of books as a means of understanding himself, the people around him, and a half-century of American/global events. Rich with stories that spring from other stories, this genre-defying novel orchestrates a multicultural symphony of characters from Bleu's life and books: lovers, mothers, children, friends, enemies, teachers, students, runaways, rebels, thinkers, dreamers, believers, skeptics, the displaced and dispossessed. It celebrates the mysteries and contradictions of the creative process, and grapples with the future of the book as a medium, and the lines that separate truth, myth, and fiction. This four-color, full-length novel-containing over 101 hilarious and scrumptious book cover designs (and book-like objects)-fuses art and literature, and distinguishes itself as one of those books you'll want to hold in your hands, feast your eyes on, read and re-read, share with friends, and treasure for years to come.
Warren Lehrer is a writer and designer, acclaimed for capturing the shape of thought and reuniting the traditions of storytelling with the printed page. Known internationally as a pioneer in the fields of visual literature and design authorship, he has received many awards for his books and multimedia projects, including the Brendan Gill Prize, the Innovative Use of Archives Award, three AIGA Book Awards, two Type Director's Club awards, the International Book Design Award, and a Media That Matters Award. His work is in many collections including MoMA, LA County Art Museum, the Getty Museum, Georges Pompidou Centre, and Tate Gallery. Lehrer is also a performer and playwright. He is a professor at Purchase College, SUNY, and a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author grad program at SVA. Together with Judith Sloan, Lehrer co-authored Crossing the BLVD and co-founded EarSay, a non-profi t arts organization in Queens, NY.
Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium
Tickets: $39.00 - $42.00
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls ($27.00) is the new collection of essays from #1 New York Times bestselling author David Sedaris, who has been called "the preeminent humorist of his generation" (Entertainment Weekly).
A guy walks into a bar car and...
From here the story could take many turns. When this guy is David Sedaris, the possibilities are endless, but the result is always the same: he will both delight you with twists of humor and intelligence and leave you deeply moved. Sedaris remembers his father's dinnertime attire (shirtsleeves and underpants), his first colonoscopy (remarkably pleasant), and the time he considered buying the skeleton of a murdered Pygmy. With Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, David Sedaris shows once again why his work has been called "hilarious, elegant, and surprisingly moving" (Washington Post).
David Sedaris is the author Barrel Fever and Holidays on Ice, as well as collections of personal essays, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and When You Are Engulfed in Flames, each of which became a bestseller. There are a total of seven million copies of his books in print and they have been translated into 25 languages. He was the editor of Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories. Sedaris's pieces appear regularly in The New Yorker and have twice been included in "The Best American Essays." His newest book, a collection of fables entitled Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary (with illustrations by Ian Falconer), was published in September 2010 and immediately hit the New York Times Bestseller Fiction List.
San Francisco's Playland at the Beach: The Golden Years ($22.95) presents Playland as it is best remembered today — a playground where families experienced endless days of fun in San Francisco's glorious postwar boom. Illustrated by over 200 rare black-and-white and color photographs — including many images never before published — San Francisco's Playland at the Beach: The Golden Years takes the reader back in time to experience the rides, attractions, restaurants and behind-the-scenes operations of the great amusement park at the height of its glory.
California historian James R. Smith is the author of San Francisco's Lost Landmarks, The California Snatch Racket, and San Francisco's Playland at the Beach: The Early Years, as well as numerous historical articles. A well-respected authority in California history, he has spent years chronicling the stories of San Francisco and the California Gold Country. Smith is a frequent lecturer and discussion leader at universities, historical societies, libraries and bookstores.
5 Thursdays • Nov. 14 - Dec. 19 • 6:00-8:00pm • $155 (no class Nov. 28)
Silvia Iannelli is a private Italian tutor who was born and raised in Rome. She creates a fun and welcoming environment for her students, motivating them through activities and exercises. Her personal quote is: "La traduzione della parola e' nel cuore ~ The translation of a word is in the heart."
Cavallo Point Cooking School, Sausalito
Registration (Book Included): $125 per person • 6:30 - 9:30 pm
Please note: onlines sales for this event are now closed. To inquire about waitlist availability, please call (415) 927-0960 ext. 1.
This is a dynamic hands-on cooking class with a menu inspired by M.F. K. Fisher's time in Provence, 1970. Guests will be making food for the evening as well as hearing the author discuss his book, Provence 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard & the Reinvention of American Taste. Luke Barr, grand nephew of MFK Fisher, tells the story of the memorable weeks in the hills of Provence with culinary greats M.F.K. Fisher and her friends, Julia Child and James Beard. Through a combination of journals, never before revealed letters, research, and interviews, comes a story that shares conversations, meals, debates and philosophies from culinary legends who influenced food in America. Luke Barr is an editor at Travel and Leisure.
Tickets: $33 (includes signed copy of Double Down)
From the authors of the number one New York Times bestseller Game Change, an explosive account of the 2012 presidential election, pulling back the curtain to reveal the exhilarating, newsbreaking story behind the headlines for the first time
John Heilemann and Mark Halperin set the national conversation on fire with their bestselling account of the 2008 presidential election, Game Change. In Double Down: Game Change 2012 ($29.95), they apply their unparalleled access and storytelling savvy to the 2012 election, rendering an equally compelling narrative about the circuslike Republican nomination fight, the rise and fall of Mitt Romney, and the trials, tribulations, and Election Day triumph of Barack Obama.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews with the people who lived the story, Heilemann and Halperin deliver another reportorial tour de force that reads like a fast-paced novel. Character driven and dialogue rich, replete with extravagantly detailed scenes, Double Down offers a panoramic account of a campaign at once intensely hard fought and lastingly consequential. For Obama, the victory he achieved meant even more to him than the one he had pulled off four years earlier. In 2008, he believed, voters had bet on a hope; in 2012, they passed positive judgment on what he'd actually done, allowing him to avert a loss that would have rendered his presidency a failed, one-term accident. For the Republicans, on the other hand, 2012 not only offered a crushing verdict but an existential challenge: to rethink and reconstitute the party or face irrelevance—or even extinction. Double Down is the occasionally shocking, often hilarious, ultimately definitive account of an election of singular importance.
Mark Halperin is an editor at large and a senior political analyst for Time magazine, and a senior political analyst for MSNBC. Halperin, who has covered seven presidential elections, received his B.A. from Harvard University and resides in New York City with Karen Avrich.
John Heilmann is the national affairs editor for New York magazine and a political analyst for MSNBC. An award-winning journalist and author of Pride Before the Fall, he is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, Wired, and The Economist. He lives in Brooklyn.
Book Passage Cafe will host a Honey and Cheese Pairing with recipes from Taste of Honey.
Taste of Honey: The Definitive Guide to Tasting and Cooking with 40 Varietals ($19.99) offers curious cooks a better understanding of all things honey — beginning with bees, and ending with sweet and savory recipes. Readers will better understand the life of a bee, and how its habitat influences both the color and the flavor of the honey it produces. A comprehensive glossary of 40 different honey varieties highlights the uniqueness of each, and lists the color, texture, taste, and uses to better equip home cooks when selecting honey at the grocery store or farmers' market. Marie Simmons — an award-winning cookbook author — showcases the distinctly different honeys with 60 simple recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and everything in between. In addition to recipes, Taste of Honey offers readers easy and accessible ways to incorporate healthful honey into their everyday snacks — like dressing a salad with fresh lemon juice and honey for a quick oil-free dressing. Whether sweetening old favorites or exploring the flavorful world of honey pairing, this cookbook is the most comprehensive guide available for learning about different varietals, cooking, and snacking with Earth's natural sweetener.
Marie Simmons is a food writer, cooking school teacher, and award-winning cookbook author of over 20 cookbooks including Fig Heaven, Rice: the Amazing Grain, Things Cooks Love, The Good Egg, and Fresh & Fast Vegetarian. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Alcatraz Island in the 1930s isn't the most normal place to grow up, but it's home for Moose Flanagan, his autistic sister, Natalie, and all the families of the guards. When Moose's dad gets promoted to Associate Warden, despite being an unlikely candidate, it's a big deal. But the cons have a point system for targeting prison employees, and his dad is now in serious danger. After a fire starts in the Flanagan's apartment, Natalie is blamed, and Moose bands with the other kids to track down the possible arsonist. Then Moose gets a cryptic note from the notorious Al Capone himself. Is Capone trying to protect Moose's dad too? If Moose can't figure out what Capone's note means, it may be too late.
Al Capone Does My Homework ($17.99) is the last heart-pounding installment in the New York Times bestselling, Newbery Honor-winning Alcatraz trilogy is not to be missed!
Gennifer Choldenko is a full-time writer and the author of many picture books and middle grade novels, including the Newbery Honor winning Al Capone Does My Shirts. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband and two children.
Peter Arnett spent a lifetime covering wars and international crises for major American news organizations, most recently 2003's Gulf War 11 and the long bloody aftermath. Arnett is best known for his live television reporting from Baghdad during the first Gulf War in 1991. Millions of viewers tuned in around the world to watch his dramatic accounts of the intense bombing campaign -- and his interview with President Saddam Hussein -- winning Arnett a television Emmy for that assignment.
Santiago Lyon is Vice President and Director of Photography of The Associated Press, responsible for the AP's global photo report and the hundreds of photographers and photo editors worldwide who produce it. He has 29 years' experience in news service photography and has won multiple awards for his own photographic coverage of conflicts around the globe. Under his direction the AP has won three Pulitzer Prizes for Breaking News Photography. He sits on the boards of the Overseas Press Club in NY, the Eddie Adams photography Workshop and RISC, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing safety training for freelance photographers Lyon was a 2012 Sulzberger Fellow at Columbia University, exploring ways to enhance AP's photo business.
Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut joined The Associated Press in Saigon at age 14, after his brother, accomplished AP photographer Hyunh Thanh My, was killed covering the Vietnam War in 1965. He would soon become a highly respected photographer in his own right, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his iconic photo of 9-year-old Kim Phuc, severely burned in a misdirected South Vietnamese air raid. But his photos from that day would have a lasting impact, going on to win multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the World Press Photo of the Year.
Since joining the AP, Julie Jacobson has traveled around the United States covering floods in the Midwest, hurricanes in Florida, as well as premier sporting events such as golf's majors, the World Series and Super Bowls. Her international assignments include covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Haiti earthquake, the last six winter and summer Olympic games, the Pan American games as well as the men's and women's FIFA World Cups.
Sat., Nov. 16 • 10:00 - 2:00pm • $55
Please note this class has been postponed - call (415) 927-0960 for further information
Through targeted exercises and craft discussions, this class will pinpoint the trouble in your writing's engine and get you back on the road, eager to move full speed ahead. Kate Milliken is the author of If I'd Known You Were Coming, winner of the 2013 Iowa Short Fiction Award.
Dashiell Hammett was one of the most legendary crime writers of the 20th century. A unique literary publication, The Hunter and Other Stories ($25.00) includes new Hammett stories gleaned from his personal archives, screen treatments long buried in film-industry files, unpublished and rarely published fiction, and intriguing unfinished narratives. Hammett is regarded as both a pioneer and master of hard-boiled detective fiction, but these dozen and half stories that explore failed romance, courage in the face of conflict, hypocrisy, and crass opportunism show him in a different light.
Julie Rivett is Dashiell Hammett's granddaughter. She is an excellent speaker about her grandfather's work and provided her notes and editing skills for this new book.
Richard Layman is an Edgar-Award-nominated Hammett scholar.
Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste ($26.00) is about a singular historic moment. In the winter of that year, more or less coincidentally, the iconic culinary figures James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Richard Olney, Simone Beck, and Judith Jones found themselves together in the South of France. They cooked and ate, talked and argued, about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste, and the limits of snobbery. Without quite realizing it, they were shaping today's tastes and culture, the way we eat now. The conversations among this group were chronicled by M.F.K. Fisher in journals and letters—some of which were later discovered by Luke Barr, her great-nephew. In Provence, 1970, he captures this seminal season, set against a stunning backdrop in cinematic scope—complete with gossip, drama, and contemporary relevance.
Luke Barr is the grandnephew of M.F.K. Fisher and an editor and news director at Travel + Leisure magazine, where he has been on staff since 2003. He had been executive editor of Gear and senior editor at Brill's Content/Inside.com. Raised in the Bay Area, he went to school in Switzerland and graduated from Harvard. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, architect Yumi Moriwaki, and their two daughters.
In conversation with Tom Franco
When Jesse Lucas, a troubled, magnetic acting major, touches the sculpture Meditation in Stanford's Rodin Sculpture Garden, he burns his finger on the bronze. By the time he returns to the garden that night, an eighteen-year-old girl has emerged from the statue, naked and disoriented. It is 2008, yet her mind is swimming with vivid, fractured memories of her volatile past in nineteenth-century Paris--of serving as Rodin's muse, of her passionate affair with the acclaimed artist, and of her own creations.
So begins Betsy Franco's extraordinary and imaginative novel, Naked ($16.99). Stranded in the sculpture garden, Camille--or Cat, as she insists on being called--forms a deep bond with Jesse, who is soon leaving for college and is as lonely and disturbed as she. As Jesse encourages Cat to confront the sinister memories that afflict her, she helps him overcome the fury he has toward his abusive father and find peace within himself. Rich, inventive, and told with a compelling mix of grace and wry humor, Naked is a bold debut that explores love, loss, and the power of art.
Betsy Franco is the author of over eighty books. She is the recipient of a number of awards, including the New York Public Library Notable Book award, the ALA Best Book award for Young Adults, and the Northern California Independent Booksellers Book of the Year award. Betsy is also a screenwriter and playwright, and has acted in indie films and on TV, most notably as her son James Franco's mother on General Hospital.
The Smithsonian Institution is America's largest, most important, and most beloved repository for the objects that define our common heritage. Now Under Secretary for Art, History, and Culture Richard Kurin, aided by a team of top Smithsonian curators and scholars, has assembled a literary exhibition of 101 objects from across the Smithsonian's museums that together offer a marvelous new perspective on the history of the United States. Beautifully designed and illustrated with color photographs throughout, The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects ($50.00) is a rich and fascinating journey through America's collective memory, and a beautiful object in its own right.
Richard Kurin serves as the Smithsonian Institution's Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture, with responsibility for most of its museums and many of its educational programs. He is an anthropologist and cultural historian, a former Fulbright fellow with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including Hope Diamond: The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem, and his scholarship and museological work have been recognized by the International Council of Museums, UNESCO, and Harvard's Peabody Museum. Awarded the Smithsonian Secretary's Gold Medal for Exceptional Service, he represents the Smithsonian on the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the White House Historical Association, and numerous other boards.
Angelico Hall, Dominican University
Tickets: $40 (includes signed copy of Giada's Feel Good Food)
In conversation with Joel Ridell, host of Dining Around on Radio 910
Please note: Online sales are now closed. Tickets will be available at the door.
Food Network's most beautiful star reveals her secrets for staying fit and feeling great in this gorgeous, practical book with healthy recipes including nutritional information, and personal lifestyle and beauty tips.
Finally answering the question her fans ask most often, "How do you stay so trim?," Giada De Laurentiis shares the delicious easy recipes and tips she uses to maximize energy and remain fit. Here are 120 recipes for breakfasts, juices, lunches, snacks, dinners, and desserts that can be combined into 30 days of delicious feel-good meals. So that everyone can enjoy these dishes, many are gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, and/or vegan, with helpful icons to call them out—and, for the very first time, each recipe includes a calorie count and nutritional analysis. Special sections delve into Giada's everyday life, including her beauty and exercise routines, how she satisfies sugar fixes, what's always in her bag, and her ordering tips for eating in restaurants. With 100 color photographs, Giada's Feel Good Food is a beautiful guide to staying on track while still eating everything and enjoying life to its fullest.
Giada de Laurentiis is the Emmy award-winning star of Food Network's "Everyday Italian," "Giada at Home," and "Giada in Paradise;" a judge on Food Network Star; a contributing correspondent for NBC's Today show; and the author of six New York Times bestselling books. She attended the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and worked at Wolfgang Puck's Spago restaurant before starting her own catering company, GDL Foods. Born in Rome, she grew up in Los Angeles, where she now lives with her husband, Todd, and their daughter, Jade.
Private Ocean Wealth Management is the Diamond Lead Sponsor of the Leadership Lecture Series of Dominican and Book Passage.
Enter to win a FREE vacation in Vermont by signing up for the Mud Season West Coast Book Tour raffle! Enter to win vouchers for a romantic "Vermonty" four-night stay at the Equinox Spa and Resort in Manchester, VT (and lots more!).
In self-deprecating and hilarious fashion, Mud Season ($23.95) chronicles Ellen Stimson's transition from city life to rickety Vermont farmhouse. When she decides she wants to own and operate the old-fashioned village store in idyllic Dorset, pop. 2,036, one of the oldest continually operating country stores in the country, she learns the hard way that "improvements" are not always welcomed warmly by folks who like things just fine the way they'd always been. She dreams of patrons streaming in for fresh-made sandwiches and an old-timey candy counter, but she learns they're boycotting the store. Why? "The bread," they tell her, "you moved the bread from where it used to be." Can the citified newcomer turn the tide of mistrust before she ruins the business altogether?
Follow the author to her wit's end and back, through her full immersion into rural life--swapping high heels for muck boots; raising chickens and sheep; fighting off skunks, foxes, and bears; and making a few friends and allies in a tiny town steeped in history, local tradition, and that dyed-in-the-wool Vermont "character."
Ellen Stimson lives in a beautiful old farmhouse nestled in a high valley in the mountains of Vermont with her wild pack of children,not-so-wild husband, and completely civilized group of chickens, sheep, dogs, and cats. She has a not-at-all-fashionable collection of muck boots. This is her first book.
Please join the California Wrtiers Club for a discussion panel about the memoir.
Memoir resonates with all of us. The genre has many forms - taking us through a single life-changing incident to a chronicle of one's life. We look at memoir from a wide variety of perspectives, from craft and inspiration to the actual journey. Each panelist will focus on one of these areas. The three panelists that will be speaking are Linda Joy Meyers, Lynn Henrikson, and Francine Brevetti.
Suggested donations: $5 for California Writers Club Members, $10 for Non-Members
A nonprofit 501c3 educational corporation, California Writers Club–Marin sponsors events that are open to the public. Learn more at http://www.cwcmarinwriters.com.
Over six hundred years ago, in an enclosure attached to a church in Norwich, England, a woman known only as Julian wrote a book detailing sixteen mystical encounters with Christ on the cross. At the time few women could read or write, and the writing or teaching of theology by "unlettered" lay people in the vernacular was strictly forbidden. Today, however, Julian's Revelations are studied along with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Her theological insights and spiritual direction are compared to those of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. The twentieth century monk Thomas Merton called her "one of the most wonderful of Christian voices."
But who was Julian? While her writings have increased greatly in popularity, the woman herself has remained a mystery. In Julian's Gospel: Illuminating the Life & Revelations of Julian of Norwich ($38.00), Veronica Mary Rolf draws on extensive research and interpretation to reconstruct Julian's life and times. First, Rolf introduces the world of fourteenth century Norwich, and the political, religious, and cultural context: the Hundred Years' War, the Great Plague, the Peasants' Revolt, the Papal Schism, and the hugely popular Corpus Christi mystery plays. Rolf traces Julian's likely ancestry, recreating her childhood, education, and adulthood as wife, mother, widow, and finally, enclosed anchoress. Then, Rolf interprets the Revelations themselves, in a new and highly accessible translation from the Middle English that includes a complete chapter-by-chapter spiritual companion to the texts.
Unique among studies of Julian of Norwich, this work creates a strong, dramatic arc for the Revelations, interweaving Julian's personal sufferings and burning theological questions with her visionary experiences, producing a compelling spiritual biography of one of Christianity's most extraordinary voices.
An independent scholar of medieval studies and comparative literature, Veronica Mary Rolf was educated at Columbia University, New York. She has spent her life in the professional theatre as a performer and playwright, including more than two decades training and directing actors as a Master Teacher of Dramatic Arts at the Stella Adler Studio (New York City), The Actors' Centre (London), Teatro Andamio '90 (Buenos Aires) and Berkeley Repertory Theatre (California). Currently, she presents a lecture series, Mornings with Julian of Norwich, and writes frequently on her website: JuliansVoice.com.
The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s won an unprecedented and unmatched four Super Bowls in six years. A dozen of those Steelers players, coaches, and executives have been inducted into the Hall of Fame, and three decades later their names echo in popular memory: Mean Joe Greene, Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Mike Webster, Jack Lambert, Lynn Swann, and John Stallworth. In ways exhilarating and heartbreaking, they define not only the brotherhood of sports but those elements of the game that engage tens of millions of Americans: its artistry and its brutality. In 1981, when the Steelers failed to make the playoffs for the first time in nine years, acclaimed author Gary M. Pomerantz, then a sportswriter for the Washington Post, interviewed them in training camp. At that time, Pomerantz asked himself, "What will life be like for these guys when they're sixty?" Without knowing it, he began writing Their Life's Work:The Brotherhood of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, Then and Now ($26.99).
Intimate, poignant, and thrilling, Their Life's Work does for football what Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer did for baseball. It is a story of victory, fortitude, renown, and, above all, the brotherhood of players who said they'd do it again—all of it.
Gary M. Pomerantz is a nonfiction author and journalist and has served the past seven years as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Pomerantz has written four books, including the New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn (1996).
Book Passage loves you, and as a small token of appreciation for all the wonderful work you do we'd like to throw you a party. Come by our store for a presentation on all the new children's and young adult books that we love, and take home free books and lots of other goodies!
And please sign up for our 25% teacher discount! (to buy books for your classrooms)
Please note: this event is sold out. Thank you! For any questions, please call (415) 927-0960 ext. 1.
Coi Restaurant, San Francisco
This event is a book launch and reception to celebrate the cookbook Coi: Stories and Recipe. Rather than a sit down dinner, Patterson is preparing a sampling of his recipes, served with wine.
Daniel Patterson is the head chef/owner of Coi (pronounced "Kwa"), a two Michelin star restaurant in San Francisco. At Coi, Patterson mixes modern culinary techniques with local, wild, and cultivated ingredients to create original dishes that speak of place, memory, and emotion. His approach has earned him a worldwide reputation as pioneer of a new Californian cuisine. Also renowned for his food writing, Patterson has been published in The New York Times, Food & Wine, and Lucky Peach. Now, in his highly anticipated new book Coi: Stories and Recipes, Patterson shares a personal account of the restaurant, its dishes, and his own unique philosophy on food and cooking. Patterson begins by examining his relationship with California after his arrival from the East Coast and as he began to feel more at home throughout the years. He then takes readers into the Coi kitchen with 70 of the restaurant's original dishes, including Chilled Spice Ratatouille Soup; Carrots Roasted in Coffee Beans; Monterey Bay Abalone with Nettle-Dandelion Salsa Verde; Inverted Cherry Tomato Tart; and Lime Marshmallow with Coal-Toasted Meringue. The dishes are explained through a series of personal essays and narrative recipes, offering insight into Patterson's life, philosophy, and inspirations.
Daniel Patterson was born in Massachusetts and moved to California in 1989, where he now has three restaurants: Coi (2006) in San Francisco, and Plum (2010) and Haven (2011) in Oakland. He is the winner of many awards, including "Best New Chef" by Food & Wine Magazine and "Chef of the Year" by San Francisco Magazine. He has been nominated for five James Beard Awards including "Best Chef: West" in 2013. Coi holds 2 Michelin stars, and is ranked #58 on the San Pellegrino World's Best Restaurants list.
Join award-winning cookbook author Judith Choate in the kitchen and at the table as she and her family of foodies celebrate the new American home cooking with her new book An American Family Cooks: From a From a Chocolate Cake You Will Never Forget to a Thanksgiving Everyone Can Master ($45.00) Within its beautifully photographed and delightfully illustrated pages, one will find a sophisticated, yet cook-friendly variety of recipes that meld influences from the fundamentals of traditional home cooking, classic follow-to-the-letter French techniques, contemporary California cuisine, exciting ethnic dishes, holiday classics and the most simple and satisfying of family meals.
Judith Choate is a writer, chef, and pioneer in the promotion of American food and author and co-author of over 100 books. Additionally, through her company, Custom Cuisine, Judie works as a consultant in product development, most specifically creating lines (both recipes and actual production) of restaurant quality specialty food products and entrées for commercial distribution as well as in marketing, restaurant development, and culinary presentations. She has been consultant to many internationally-known chefs, among them, Charlie Trotter, David Burke, and Charlie Palmer as well as to companies such as Heinz, Starbucks, and Costco.
Please note: this event is sold out. Thank you! For any questions, please call (415) 927-0960 ext. 1.
Introduction by Isabel Allende
Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto examines her deepest commitments: to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband in This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Together these essays, previously published in The Atlantic, Harper's, Vogue, and the Washington Post, form a resonant portrait of a life lived with loyalty and with love.
This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage takes us into the very real world of Ann Patchett's life. Stretching from her childhood to the present day, from a disastrous early marriage to a later happy one, it covers a multitude of topics, including relationships with family and friends, and charts the hard work and joy of writing, and the unexpected thrill of opening a bookstore.
As she shares stories of the people, places, ideals, and art to which she has remained indelibly committed, Ann Patchett brings into focus the large experiences and small moments that have shaped her as a daughter, wife, and writer.
Ann Patchett is the author of six novels and two books of nonfiction. She is the winner of the PEN/ Faulkner Award, England's Orange Prize, and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee.
Book Passage hosts literary luncheons with celebrated authors at our Marin store. These events are catered by the outstanding Insalata's Restaurant of San Anselmo.
Mill Valley Community Center
Ticket: $69 (price includes appetizers and wine tasting).
Please join Book Passage and Shasta Nelson for this wonderful event in the Speak to Me series.
Science tells us that friendships are more critical than ever to our long-term health and well-being, but in today's fast-paced, digitally connected world we are seeing increasing incidents of depression and isolation. Shasta will enlighten us with surprising solutions to this uniquely 21st century phenomenon.
In Friendships Don't Just Happen! ($18.95),
Shasta Nelson, friendship expert and CEO of GirlFriendCircles.com,
reveals the most important proven steps, processes, and secrets vital to
establishing the five different levels of friendships, or Circles of
Connectedness, that women—no matter their age or relationship status—are
longing for in today's stressful and mobile culture. This
revolutionary, engaging guide will also benefit women who already feel
rooted to fabulous friends, with insightful principles that will help
them maintain and enhance their current friendships.
Visit the Speak to Me event page for more information: http://speaktomeevents.com/
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was murdered in front of hundreds of onlookers. Everything was over in mere seconds, but the events of that day have been the subject of heated debate for five decades. The presidential commission tasked with finding the truth, headed by then-Chief Justice Earl Warren, published its findings the following year--Oswald had acted alone--but the report did little to quell conspiracy theorists. Many seized on what they saw as inconsistencies in the report and branded the whole investigation a cover-up. Warren himself calmly dismissed the criticism, assuring his fellow commission members that "history will prove us right."
Now, in this eye-opening new account of the Commission and its findings, Howard Willens sets out to prove that Warren's advice was prescient in his book, History Will Prove Us Right ($29.95) Willens, one of the few surviving staff members of the Warren Commission, supervised the investigation from the very beginning and has waited until now to silence the critics and well-intentioned armchair detectives. Drawn from Willens' own journals and extensive notes on the investigation--which have never before been published--History Will Prove Us Right tells the true and complete story, perhaps for the first time, of every aspect of the investigation into one of the century's most harrowing events from a uniquely first-person perspective.
Howard Willens is the only surviving member of the three-person supervisory staff of the Warren Commission. After the commission's report was published, he left the Department of Justice and in 1965 served as the Executive Director of the President's commission on Crime in the District of Columbia. In 1967, he joined a private law firm, where he has worked for over forty years. He lives in Washington, D.C.
5 Tuesdays • Nov. 19 - Dec. 17 • 6:00-8:00pm • $155
Silvia Iannelli is a private Italian tutor who was born and raised in Rome. She creates a fun and welcoming environment for her students, motivating them through activities and exercises. Her personal quote is: "La traduzione della parola e' nel cuore ~ The translation of a word is in the heart."
Whether it's Major League All Stars like Bryce Harper, Buster Posey, Jason Heyward, Joe Mauer, Josh Hamilton, Hanley Ramirez, and Tim Lincecum in the dugout, or the incredible scenery of baseball's finest ballparks like Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, and AT&T Park, or the art of baseball seen by many but recognized as photo-worthy by few like hot dogs on a grill, the freshly rubbed-in baseball, helmets in their cubbies, or bullpen phones and baseball bats - Brad Mangin utilizes the incredibly beloved yet accessible photo technology of Instagram to document all of these subjects in Instant Baseball: The Baseball Instagrams of Brad Mangin ($18.95). Brad currently has 3,300
followers on Instagram, all tuning in to see Mangin's "Instant Baseball"
photography as he sets out to revolutionize the world of sports
Brad Mangin is a freelance sports photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area where he regularly shoot assignments for Sports Illustrated and Major League Baseball Photos. Brad's first book, Worth the Wait, was recently published about the 2010 San Francisco Giants world championship season.
Southern Italian Desserts ($29.99) is an authentic guide to the festive, mouthwatering sweets of Southern Italy, featuring regional specialties that are virtually unknown in the United States as well as variations on well-loved desserts such as cannoli, biscotti, and gelato. As a follow-up to her acclaimed My Calabria, Rosetta Costantino has gathered 76 favorite desserts and master recipes from her Southern Italian homeland, including the regions of Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Puglia, and Sicilia. These areas have a history of rich traditions and tasty, beautiful desserts, many of them tied to holidays and festivals.
Organized by region, with each chapter showcasing the area's best offerings, the recipes range from simple home desserts to cutting-edge creations of Southern Italy's finest restaurants and pastry shops. All of the most classic and regionally important desserts are featured, as well as new creations (like the delicious cannoli ice cream that burst on the Italian scene just last summer). Beyond its unique and fascinating topic, and a package full of striking photos—the book's recipes are extraordinary. With fail-proof recipes and information on the desserts' cultural origins and context, Southern Italian Desserts illuminates the previously unexplored confectionary traditions of this enchanting region. And like the region itself, this captivating cookbook will entice all who discover it to return again and again.
Author and cooking instructor Rosetta Costantino was born and raised in Verbicaro, a small wine-producing hill town in Calabria, at the southern tip of Italy. She is the author (with Janet Fletcher) of My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking from Italy's Undiscovered South, which was nominated for an IACP award in 2011. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
How can I become more disciplined? How do I know if I'm talented? Should I self-publish? These are just a few of the perennial and contemporary questions addressed in The Creative Compass: Writing Your Way from Inspiration to Publication ($14.95). The authors - from different generations and writing genres - first help the reader assess where they are on their path. They then walk aspiring writers through five universal stages - Dream, Draft, Develop, Refine, and Share. While these stages apply to writers of every stripe, the emphasis is always on the reader navigating his or her own challenges, process, and goals. Insight-producing prompts and the wisdom of diverse artists (from Steinbeck and Thoreau to Spike Lee, Marilyn French, and Tom Clancy) help make every writer's journey of creation as rewarding as its destination.
Dan Millman is the author of 17 books read by millions of people in 29 languages. He teaches worldwide and lives in Northern California. His dauther, Sierra Prasada is a freelance journalist, editor, and teacher; the author of Creative Lives; and the founder of the 20th Century Project. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Book Passage loves you, and as a small token of appreciation for all the wonderful work you do we'd like to throw you a party. Come by our store for a presentation on all the new children's and young adult books that we love, and take home free books and lots of other goodies!
And please sign up for our 25% teacher discount! (to buy books for your classrooms)
Traveling With Spirits ($18.95) is a exciting, nuanced novel about an unpredictable journey across continents, cultures and values. This is a story of deep, abiding friendship, surprising romance, political conspiracy, physical challenge and emotional courage.
Doctor Monica Murphy quits her Minneapolis medical practice to work at Catholic medical mission in a decaying hill station in northern India. There, she confronts questions about the nature of faith, religious imperialism, the troubled position of Westerners in developing countries, and the growth of individual consciousness.
Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of thirteen books. Her novels include After Eden, Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter's Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in Stories and Murder in the English Department. Miner's work has appeared in the Georgia Review, Salmagundi, New Letters, Ploughshares, the Village Voice, Prairie Schooner, the Gettysburg Review, Conditions, the T.L.S., the Women's Review of Books, the Nation and other journals. Miner is now an artist-in-residence at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and a professor at Stanford University, contributing to the Feminist Studies Program and English Department.
Leonardo da Vinci – a brilliant artist, scientist, mathematician, inventor, and even musician. The quintessential Renaissance man, but also, according to Fritjof Capra, profoundly modern. In Learning from Leonardo ($29.95), Capra outlines seven key characteristics of da Vinci's genius and more than forty innovations Leonardo made that weren't rediscovered until centuries later. Capra provides an overview of Leonardo's massive contributions to a variety of fields, from aerodynamics to embryology, and illuminates da Vinci's vibrant, unified perception of the world. This book illustrates Leonardo's holistic approach, and provides profound insights into how best to address the challenges of the 21st century.
Fritjof Capra, PhD, physicist and systems theorist, is a founding director of the center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, which advances sustainability schooling. Dr. Capra is on the faculty of the Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program of the University of California, Berkeley, and also teaches at Schumacher College, an international center for ecological studies in England.
Joins us for a fast-paced and irreverent evening, showcasing new work from the students of the San Francisco Writer's Grotto writing classes. On November 15th, both fiction and nonfiction writers will read their work — but only for 3 minutes each! Their instructors (Grotto authors) will enforce the time limit. Join us for wine, fun, and fresh new writing.
The author of the acclaimed Sala's Gift delivers the definitive biography of Josephine Marcus Earp, a Jewish woman from New York who became the common-law wife of famed lawman and gambler Wyatt Earp. For nearly fifty years, she lived with the most famous lawman of the Old West; yet Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp has nearly been erased from Western lore. In this fascinating biography, The Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp ($27.99), Ann Kirschner brings Josephine out of the shadows of history to tell her full story--a spirited and colorful tale of ambition, adventure, selfinvention, and romance reflective of America itself, from the post-Civil War years to World War II.
Ann Kirschner is University Dean of Macaulay Honors College at The City University of New York. She began her career as a lecturer in Victorian literature at Princeton University, where she earned her Ph.D. A writer of wide-ranging interests, she is the author of Sala's Gift (Simon and Schuster, 2006) and an innovator in education, media, and technology.
Sat., Nov. 23 • 10:00-2:00pm • $55
The concept is simple: no essay works if the opening paragraph is weak. In this course, we'll work on that introductory paragraph until it's compelling, and only then will we move on to the body of the piece. There's always resistance to this process—students hate going back over and over to revise one paragraph—but the ones who complain loudest are always the ones who say it changes their entire writing process.
Sat. Nov. 23, 10:00-4:00pm & Sun., Nov. 24, 10:00-1:00pm, $165
Aristotle believed that plot was the most important and difficult challenge the writer faced. But by plot he meant the architecture of change in the hero's fortunes. Character and structure are inextricably linked, and it is through structure that most of a story's meaning is imparted. In this two-day class and workshop, David Corbett will demonstrate how the architecture of story, when properly understood, deepens our understanding of character, and how integrating character with story helps the writer avoid both formulaic plotting and episodic meandering. Special attention will be paid to individual student projects, with the goal of fashioning a strong narrative arc for each student's work-in-progress.
Fronted by the charismatic but doomed vocalist and
brilliant slide guitarist Lowell George, the band recorded such classic
studio albums as Sailin' Shoes and Dixie Chicken, as well as Waiting for Columbus, which many consider to be one of the best live albums of all time.
Acclaimed journalist Ben Fong-Torres-working with Little Feat's surviving members, their friends, and associates-wrote Willin': The Story of Little Feat ($26.99) based on hours of brand new interviews with the key players. The result? The first definitive biography of this beloved rock 'n' roll institution.
Ben Fong-Torres is a journalist, author, and broadcaster, best known for his work in Rolling Stone and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the author of nine books and lives in San Francisco.
War-Toys: Israel, West Bank, Gaza Strip ($32.00) by Brian McCarty is a photo essay that uniquely explores the perspectives of children living in war zones using principles of play and art therapy. Girls and boys who have been affected by conflict become art directors for McCarty's narrative photographs of locally available toys, placed and posed against war-torn locations to recreate witnessed events and shared fears. Using proceeds from the sale of his book, McCarty will be exanding the
War-Toys project to include the perspectives of children living in
additional areas of conflict, including Southwest Asia, Africa, and
South America.
The first volume of War-Toys chronicles McCarty's collaborations over the course of two years with Israeli and Palestinian children. Working with humanitarian organizations including the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and the Israel Trauma Coalition, McCarty gathered children's firsthand accounts in classrooms, clinical settings, and even bomb shelters.
Brian McCarty is an internationally exhibited artist and toy industry veteran based in West Hollywood, California. McCarty is featured in several books including Vinyl Will Kill, Dot Dot Dash, and Toys: New Designs from the Art-Toy Revolution. His first monograph, titled Art-Toys, was released in 2010 by Los Angeles based Baby Tattoo Books. His work has earned notable praise from such places as CNN.com, the New York Times, L'Uomo Vogue, the Telegraph UK, ABC World News, and XLR8R Magazine. His commercial photography roster includes pop-culture clients such as Disney, Hasbro, MTV, Kidrobot, Rockstar Games, and Cartoon Network. In 2007, McCarty's work was featured in the first museum exhibition to focus solely on toys as a purposeful means of artistic expression.
We call California the Granola State — a place where everyone is a fruit, a flake, or a nut. They don't get any fruitier, flakier or nuttier than the people profiled in the new humorous history California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts: True Tales of California Crazies, Crackpots, and Creeps ($14.95).
With stories both hilarious and heartbreaking, California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts is a freewheeling catalog of misfits, eccentrics, and failed dreamers — 48 bizarre personalities who exemplify the Golden State's well-deserved reputation for nonconformity. Presenting a wealth of historical information that had long been swept away and forgotten, this book is a uniquely entertaining look at the dark and disreputable corners of California history.
David Kulczyk (pronounced Coal-check) is a Sacramento-based historian, freelance writer and award-winning author of short fiction. His previous books include California Justice and Death in California.
During the holidays many of us who have lost loved ones are particularly sad. We see their missing chair at the holiday dinner table. We feel our lose more than ever.
If you or someone close to you has lost someone dear, perhaps you're ready to take another look at what is possible. That's what happened to Physician Elisa Medhus, MD, who never believed in life after death—that is until her son died and began communicating with her, her family, and those who have become followers of her extremely popular blog, ChannelingErik.com. As an accomplished physician, Dr. Medhus always placed her faith in science. An internist, daughter of atheists, and a self-proclaimed skeptic, she was not one who believed in the afterlife.
Now, based upon her blog, which is growing in readership every day with those seeking hope and answers about loved ones who have passed, Dr. Medhus is sharing her true story in her new book, My Son and the Afterlife ($16.00). Whether we believe in the afterlife or not, Elisa's story will resonate with anyone who has lost someone close and will offer new hope for the healing process. This is a story of pain and loss, and how the power of discovering faith can bring healing and understanding.
Elisa Medhus, MD, is a physician and mother of five who has practiced internal medicine for over thirty years. She is the author of three award-winning parenting books, including Raising Children who Think for Themselves, which is the recipient of three highly prestigious awards – The 2002 Parent's Choice Award, The NAPPA Gold Award and the National Parenting Center Seal of Approval – and she has lectured on parenting for schools, parent groups, and corporations.
Travel writer and longtime California resident Stuart Thornton covers the best of Coastal California, from hiking through redwoods in Big Sur to lounging on the famous beaches of Malibu. Thornton is the perfect tour guide, offering unique trip ideas for a wide variety of travelers including Pacific Coast Highway Road Trip and a complete tour of California's best beaches. Including expert advice on visiting the Channel Islands and enjoying the nightlife of LA and San Francisco, as well as updated maps and several brand new chapters, Moon Coastal California ($19.99) gives travelers the tools they need to create a more personal and memorable experience.
San Francisco Friends School
Tickets: $40
Join The San Francisco Friends School as they welcome bestselling author Chip Conley to discuss his book Emotional Equations. Ticket comes with a light breakfast and a copy of the book.
Using brilliantly simple math that illuminates universal emotional truths, Emotional Equations crystallizes some of life's toughest challenges into manageable facets that readers can see clearly—and bits they can control. Popular motivational speaker and bestselling author Chip Conley has created an exciting, new, immediately accessible visual lexicon for mastering the age of uncertainty. Making mathematics out of emotions may seem a counterintuitive idea, but it's an inspiring and incredibly effective one in Chip Conley's hands.
Veteran CEO Chip Conley has created more boutique hotels than anyone in the world. Founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which he grew into America's second largest boutique hotel company, he speaks around the world on how to find meaning at the intersection of business and psychology.
In three novels, Bill Broder follows a group of friends who left their blood families in the East and formed close relationships in the San Francisco Bay Area—a family formed in exile. The annual reunion of this "family" takes place at Thanksgiving dinners. Crimes of Innocence ($14.29), Esau's Mountain ($15.39), and What Rough Beast?($14.29), each complete in itself, explore significant aspects of California: a vision of possibilities, a sense of exile and mobility, and a respect for the past—aspects that have contributed greatly to the development of American culture as a whole in the last fifty years.
Bill Broder has published three works of fiction: The Sacred Hoop, Remember This Time, and Taking Care of Cleo, which was chosen as a Michigan Notable Book by Michigan's Library Foundation. Broder has also completed a memoir, A Prayer for the Departed, and a number of full-length plays. Two of his plays were chosen for readings at two annual California Studies Conferences. Professionally, Broder has worked extensively as a free-lance writer, specializing in the writing, design, and production of educational materials for museums, schools, exhibitions, and publishing companies. He and his wife have lived in Sausalito for fifty years.