Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Tuesday, February 2 Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie 7:30 PM
SLOW DEATH BY RUBBER DUCK
Pollution is no longer just about belching smokestacks and ugly sewer pipes--now, it's personal. The most dangerous pollution, it turns out, comes from commonplace items in our homes and workplaces. To prove this point, for one week authors Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie ingested and inhaled a host of things that surround all of us. Using their own bodies as the reference point to tell the story of pollution in our modern world, they expose the miscreant corporate giants who manufacture the toxins, the weak-kneed government officials who let it happen, and the effects on people and families across the globe.
Slow Death by Rubber Duck -- the testimony of their experience -- exposes the extent to which we are poisoned every day of our lives, from the simple household dust that is polluting our blood to the toxins in our urine that are created by run-of-the-mill shampoos and toothpaste. Ultimately hopeful, the book empowers readers with some simple ideas for protecting themselves and their families, and changing things for the better.
"This book is a powerful reminder that what we do to Mother Earth, we do directly to ourselves. Read it to see why we have to change the way we live and get off our destructive path." -- David Suzuki
“Fantastically important—an indispensable guide to surviving in an industrial age..” -- Tim Flannery, author of Now or Never and The Weather Makers
Rick Smith is a prominent Canadian author and environmentalist and Executive Director of Environmental Defence Canada (since 2003), where he has established a reputation as one of the country’s leading environmental campaigners with efforts such as the high-profile Toxic Nation campaign.
A biologist by training, Rick completed his doctoral research on an endangered subspecies of freshwater harbour seal in arctic Quebec with a nearby community of Cree hunters. From 1997 to 2002 Rick was Executive Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare's Canadian office and acting Director of the Fund's UK office for a year. While at the Fund, Rick created high-profile and successful public efforts to end Ontario's spring bear hunt, won a groundbreaking Supreme Court of Canada ruling striking down the patenting of higher life forms and spurred the adoption of Canada's first federal Species At Risk Act.
Bruce Lourie is an influential leader and thinker in Canada's environment sector. His 20 year career is built on creating collaborative solutions to challenges facing non-profits, government and the private sector. Bruce is President of Ivey Foundation, a private charitable foundation focusing on environmental policy change. He is a Director of the Ontario Power Authority and a Director of the Ontario Trillium Foundation, one of Canada's largest community funding agencies. He is Chair of the Board of Environmental Defence Canada.
Wednesday, February 3 Carol Sklenicka 7:30 PM
RAYMOND CARVER: A Writer’s Life (One of The New York Times’ Top 10 of 2009)
Raymond Carver was the most beloved American short-story writer of the late twentieth century. Two decades after his death, this definitive biography tells the story of Carver's uncanny ambition, legendary life, and enduring work.
When Raymond Carver died at age fifty, readers lost a distinctive voice in its prime. Carver was, the Times of London said, "the Chekhov of middle America." His influence on a generation of writers and on the short story itself has been widely noted. Not so generally known are how Carver became a writer, how he suffered to achieve his art, and how his troubled and remarkable personality affected those around him.
Carol Sklenicka's meticulous and absorbing biography re-creates Carver's early years in Yakima, Washington, where he was the nervous, overweight son of a kindly, alcohol-dependent lumbermill worker. By the time he was nineteen, Ray had married his high school sweetheart, Maryann Burk. From a basement apartment where they were raising their first child and expecting their second, they determined that Ray would become a writer. Despite the handicaps of an erratic education and utter lack of financial resources, he succeeded.
Maryann's belief in Carver's talent was unshakable, as was her willingness to support the family and see her experiences transformed in his fiction. Sklenicka reveals the entwined histories of this passionate, volatile marriage and Carver's career. She describes his entry into the literary world via "little magazines" and the Iowa Writers' Workshop; his publication by Esquire editor Gordon Lish and their ensuing relationship; his near-fatal alcoholism, which worsened even as he produced many of the unforgettable stories collected in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Sklenicka examines Carver's warmhearted friendships with scores of writers, including Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, John Gardner, Joy Williams, Al Young, William Kittredge, Leonard Michaels, Chuck Kinder, and Hayden Carruth; she shows how his stories about unemployment, drinking, marital trauma, divorce, troubled children, and suburban malaise, dubbed "minimalist" by critics, won readers with their precise and humane portrayal of ordinary lives. She examines the dissolution of his first marriage and his partnership with poet Tess Gallagher, who helped him enjoy the full measure of his success. Ever grateful that he'd been able to renounce alcohol, Carver shunned pity and considered himself a "lucky man" as he faced death from lung cancer in 1988.
Carol Sklenicka draws on hundreds of interviews with people who knew Carver, prodigious research in libraries and private collections, and all of Carver's poems and stories for Raymond Carver, which took ten years to write. Her portrait is generous and wise and shows how Carver's quintessentially American life fostered the stories that knowing readers have cherished from their first publication until the present day.
Tuesday, February 9 Jim Powell 7:30 PM
SUBSTRATE
Poet Jim Powell’s first collection in twenty years examines the indigenous habitat of Northern California, treating history as a kind of sediment. Powell, fascinated by the first person, turns to eyewitness historical accounts and primary witnesses to create a portrait assembled of samples from twenty-five ‘strata’ in the ‘substrate’ of the region.
Largely narrative, Powell’s poems embrace the tradition, borrowing tools from prose and contemporary oral narration. His title poem summons twenty-five witnesses from oral and documentary history, ethnology, archeology, ethnobotany and linguistics, all providing a composite cultural history of California. Substrate is a vivid, multifaceted volume dazzling in its lush imagery and its linguistic richness.
Jim Powell is the author of It Was Fever That Made the World and the translator ofThe Poetry of Sappho and Catullan Revenants. He received a CCLM Younger Poets Prize in 1986 and a MacArthur Fellowship (1993-1198), and was the Sherry Poet and Lecturer at the University of Chicago in 2005. He is a fourth generation California native and lifelong resident of the Bay Area.
See David Ulin’s Los Angeles Times’ review.
Wednesday, February 10 Christine Carter 7:30 PM
RAISING HAPPINESS: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents
“This is THE parenting book. This is the one to read over and over. So much wisdom and empathy, all based in real science. My children owe Christine Carter big time.” -- Kelly Corrigan, author of The Middle Place
“The learning curve for all parents is in failure analysis—where and how we went off course—and how we can do better the next go round. Enter Raising Happiness, a compendium of ideas and suggestions on how to do better and how to increase happiness and joy in all families. Read it, enjoy, and most importantly, put it into practice.” -- Mike Riera, Ph.D., author Field Guide to the American Teenager andRight From Wrong
“Raising Happiness is an elegant, funny, and rigorous handbook for the humbling task of raising joyful children. Brimming with brilliantly distilled science, poignant stories from her family, and what parents so urgently seek – clear, practical, and informed guidance – it is an encyclopedia of wisdom for raising children in today’s multitasking, multimedia world.” -- Dacher Keltner, author Born To Be Good: The Science of A Meaningful Life, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley
Christine Carter Ph.D., a sociologist, Executive Director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and mother of two young children herself, reveals ten simple principles, distilled from years of fascinating research, to help parents foster the skills, habits, and mindsets that will set the stage for positive emotions now and into their adolescence and beyond.
Psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists study happiness through single focus lenses, but when you put together their disparate research -- as Carter does at the Greater Good Science Center -- you see proof that happiness is a skill; it is a muscle any parent can help their child build and maintain. In her new book, Carter covers the day-to-day pressure points of
Parenting -- how best to discipline, get kids to school and activities on time, and get dinner on the table -- as well as the more elusive issues of helping children build healthy friendships and develop emotional intelligence.
Bring your questions and observations and join the discussion this evening!
Christine Carter is a regular on ABC's “View from the Bay” talk show, has been profiled in the San Francisco Chronicle and quoted in dozens of national publications including The New York Times, the Boston Globe, American Baby, and Parenting.
Thursday, February 11 Sara Houghteling 7:30 PM
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION
A Finalist in Fiction for the National Jewish Book Awards
Set in a Paris darkened by World War II, Sara Houghteling's sweeping and sensuous debut novel (just now in paperback) tells the story of a son's quest to recover his family's lost masterpieces, looted by the Nazis during the occupation.
Born to an art dealer and his pianist wife, Max Berenzon is forbidden from entering the family business for reasons he cannot understand. He reluctantly attends medical school, reserving his true passion for his father's beautiful and brilliant gallery assistant, Rose Clement. When Paris falls to the Nazis, the Berenzons survive in hiding. They return in 1944 to find that their priceless collection has vanished: gone are the Matisses, the Picassos, and a singular Manet of mysterious importance. Madly driven to recover his father's paintings, Max navigates a torn city of corrupt art dealers, black marketers, Resistants, and collaborators. His quest will reveal the tragic disappearance of his closest friend, the heroism of his lost love, and the truth behind a devastating family secret.
Written with tense drama and a historian's eye for detail, Houghteling's novel draws on the real-life stories of France's preeminent art-dealing families and the forgotten biography of the only French woman to work as a double agent inside the Nazis' looted art stronghold. Pictures at an Exhibition conjures the vanished collections, the lives of the artists and their dealers, the exquisite romance, and the shattering loss of a singular era. It is a work of astonishing ambition and beauty from an immensely gifted new novelist.
"In times like this, one turns to books like "Pictures at an Exhibition" for their exhilarating sense of wonder and ambition. No other book I have read in a long time has such depth of history and intelligence, setting art as antidote for suffering, and love as both a cause and remedy for pain." -- Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli
""Pictures at an Exhibition" is remarkably self-assured, astute, worldly, and well-informed; in fact, it does not look like a first novel at all. Its subject-matter-stolen paintings, and Nazis, and the insatiable hunger for beauty-requires both erudition and brilliance, and Sara Houghteling has plenty of both, along with a sense of humor and a warm heart." -- Charles Baxter, author of The Soul Thief
Sara Houghteling graduated from Harvard College in 1999 and received her master's in fine arts from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to Paris, first prize in the Avery and Jules Hopwood Awards, and a John Steinbeck Fellowship. She currently lives in California, where she teaches high school English.