Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
News from Our Friends at The Rumpus:
December 14 at The Makeout Room, 3225 22nd St., 7pmPlease join us for a night of literature, music, and comedy featuring:
Andrew Leland from The Believer Magazine
James Nestor, author of Get High Now
Michelle Gagnon, author of The Gatekeeper
Robert Mailer Anderson, author of Boonville
Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Story of a Marriageand The Confessions of Max Tivoli
With comedy by W. Kamau Bell
Music by Michael Mullen of The Size Queens
and a special performance by Dan Wolf from Felonious$10, cheap! You can’t afford not to go
Also prizes, giveaways, the chance to kiss someone you’ve never met(And we’ll be there, too!)
Hosted by Rumpus editor and author of The Adderall Diaries Stephen Elliott
NOTE: No one under 21 years old will be admitted..
Jason Myers - THE MISSION
Tuesday, January 5 - 7:30 PMWake up and do something! Kaden Norris's life is shattered when his older brother -- his best friend and hero -- is killed in Iraq. All Kaden has left of Kenny is a letter, urging him to break away from his sheltered life and to go to San Francisco to visit his cousin, James. Kaden is blown away, as James introduces him to a life filled with drugs, sex, and apathy. He goes from extreme high to extreme low, having no idea what to expect. And when Kaden uncovers secrets about his family that have been kept from him for years, his entire world comes crashing down. This may not be the trip his brother had envisioned for him, but it's one Kaden will never forget.
Jason Myers was born in 1980 and raised on a farm outside of Dysart, Iowa. After high school, he studied film at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. His first novel, exit here, was published in 2007, and is in it's fifth printing. The Mission is his second novel. He lives and works in San Francisco. More information about this author and book can be found at www.jasonmyersauthor.com
Stewart Levine - GETTING TO RESOLUTION
Thursday, January 7 - 7:30 PMWhat is the greatest impediment to productive and satisfying business and personal relationships? According to empowerment guru Stewart Levine, it's inadequate conflict resolution. Levine's seven-step model integrates two skills essential for success - collaboration and conflict resolution - and emphasizes the importance of a shift in attitude, assumptions, and approaches when facing a problem.
“If you want to resolve conflict and build relationships while connecting at a profound level, read Getting to Resolution. It gives you new language and practices for transforming your communication so you can lead at a higher level.”
Victoria Halsey PhD, Vice President of Applied Learning, The Ken Blanchard Companies and coauthor of The Hamster Revolution and The Hamster Revolution for MeetingsStewart Levine is a lawyer, management consultant, mediator, and trainer. His clients and students include American Express, Caterpillar Corporation, Chevron, ConAgra, General Motors, Oracle, and others. He has been a partner in two law firms and served as Deputy Attorney General for the state of New Jersey. Visit www.resolutionworks.org.
Raj Patel - THE VALUE OF NOTHING: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy
Saturday, January 9 - 7:30 PMNaomi Klein writes, “With great lucidity and confidence in a dazzling array of fields, Patel reveals how we inflate the cost of things we can (and often should) live without, while assigning absolutely no value to the resources we all
need to survive. This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness—argued with so much humor and humanity that the enormous tasks ahead feel both doable and desirable. This is Raj Patel’s great gift: he makes even the most radical ideas seem not only reasonable, but inevitable. A brilliant book.”At the heart of THE VALUE OF NOTHING is a question: If economics is about choices, who gets to make them? Raj Patel shows how prices mislead us and how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. Part One examines the economic history that got us into this mess; by showing how land and labor originally came to be commoditized, Patel reveals the hidden costs of goods, the real price of a hamburger ($200!), and how government has been captured by corporate interests. Patel argues that in order to truly understand our current economic crisis we need not only to rethink our economic model but the very meaning of democracy. Where other books on these issues end by stating the problem, Patel goes on in Part Two to show how social organizations here in America and around the globe are already successfully reining in markets and, in doing so, creating a new kind of participatory democracy, one in which people, not simply governments, play the crucial role in deciding how we value our world and its resources..
Raj Patel, the author of Stuffed and Starved, is an activist and academic who has been hailed as “a visionary” for his prescience about the food crisis. Raj has worked for the World Bank and the WTO and has protested against them on four continents. He is currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, an honorary Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. Learn more at www.rajpatel.org. And watch the book trailer here!
Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser - IT ALL CHANGED IN AN INSTANT: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure
Monday, January 11 - 7:30 PMIn a world where technology has shrunk our attention spans but made it easier for us to communicate, SMITH Magazine has found a medium perfectly suited for contemporary memoirists. Through www.smithmag.net, founder Larry Smith and memoir editor Rachel Fershleiser have collected all new Six-Word Memoirs, cutting to the quick in personal stories of fear, hope, excitement and reflection. In their latest collection IT ALL CHANGED IN AN INSTANT they continue to champion six-word memoirs by civilians and celebrities alike, cultivating a community of people who are empowered to write their own stories and granted access to the tales of others. More than 1750,000 people have submitted Six-Word Memoirs at SMITH Magazine and its younger cousin, SMITH Teens.
Thanks to SMITH, people around the world have been sharing terse true tales of romance, parenthood, friendship, ambition, failure, haircuts, and french fries. Thanks to the devoted admiration of writers, critics and educators alike, the six-word memoir concept has spread to classrooms, dinner tables, and tens of thousands of blogs.
Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive, IT ALL CHANGED IN AN INSTANT contains a thousand new six-word sagas. From acclaimed authors Wally Lamb, Isabel Allende, Frank McCourt, Junot Diaz, Amy Tan and James Frey, and celebrities Ann Coulter, Yogi Berra, Melissa Etheridge, Sarah Silverman, Suze Orman, Neil Patrick Harris, Tony Hawk, Terrell Owens, Leonard Nimoy and Chelsea Handler, to ordinary folks around the world, everyone has a six-word story to tell.
That means you, too, and we invite you to enter your own six-word memoir in Booksmith’s Big Contest! Send your pithy memoir – in six words – to events@booksmith.com between now and January 8. Larry and Rachel will choose six winners, who’ll each receive an intriguing prize pack – and we’ll invite you to read your winning entries this evening!
Robin Ekiss - THE MANSION OF HAPPINESS
Tuesday, January 12 - 7:30 PMRobin Ekiss's meditations on memory and mortality are a canary in the coal mine of imagination. With disembodied dolls, dank Parisian catacombs, the gilded interior of a Fabergé egg, and the unfathomable edge of Niagara Falls as the dominion of these poems, reading Ekiss's work is like peering into the perfectly still world of a diorama or daguerreotype: an experience both uncanny and uncompromising.
Ekiss is the recipient of a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for Emerging Women Writers. Her poems have appeared widely, in the Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco.
"Charmed by the curious, the miniature, and the grotesque, Robin Ekiss understands where such fascinations lead. ‘In the nautilus,’ she writes, ‘each turn of light/ leads into darkness.’ And into the dire complexities of feeling, recorded here with subtle formal intelligence and a deft control of tone that leads this poet's readers to remember that even dark enchantments are enchantments still." -- Mark Doty
"These darkly beautiful poems are unswerving in their search for a place where the inner and outer world edit one another. Robin Ekiss writes with force and elegance. The content is always there; the craft is never sacrificed. The combination makes this book a superb debut." -- Eavan Boland
David Kessler - PUTTING THE FOOD INDUSTRY ON TRIAL
Booksmith @ the SFJCC: Thursday, January 14 - 8 PM at the JCCSF
Information and tickets - http://www.jccsf.org/content_main.aspx?catid=535#3255Don Lattin - THE HARVARD PSYCHEDELIC CLUB
Tuesday, January 19 - 7:30 PMThe 1950s -- a decade defined by conformity, consumerism, and conservatism --were coming to a close, and a new era of social, spiritual, sexual, and psychological revolution was beginning. By the end of the century, Americans would have a new outlook on religion and new ways of practicing medicine, and the Mind/Body/Spirit movement would make things like yoga, organic produce, and alternative medicine commonplace.
This is the story of how it all began. Three brilliant scholars and one ambitious undergrad -- widely known today as leaders in the fields of spirituality (Ram Dass), world religions (Huston Smith), hallucinogenics (Timothy Leary), and holistic medicine (Andrew Weil) -- came together in the winter of 1960-61 around the Harvard Psilocybin Project, an infamous series of experiments with psychedelic drugs. Seeking spiritual enlightenment, their research brought them together before bitterness and betrayal tore them apart, and as they forged their own paths and changed their own lives, they would also transform the culture of America.
In The Harvard Psychedelic Club takes readers into the heart of the 1960s and back into this era of “peace, love, and joy.” With cameos by some of the best known and most beloved cultural figures of the era—including John Lennon, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, Ken Kesey, Joan Baez, Keith Richards, and Aldous Huxley—this book presents a comprehensive and compelling picture of a nation undergoing great and lasting change, and the four men who took us there.
Don Lattin is the author of Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, where he covered the religion beat for nearly two decades. Lattin has also appeared on Dateline, Good Morning America, Nightline, Anderson Cooper 360, and PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.