Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Friday, September 10, 7:30 PM
MARKOS MOULITSAS
American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right
Markos Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos, America’s largest online political community. His publications include the acclaimed Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics and Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era. He is a frequent guest on cable news and shows like Meet the Press and Real Time with Bill Maher, a weekly columnist for The Hill, and a former Newsweek contributing columnist.
America’s main international enemy -- Islamic radicalism -- favors theocracy, curtails civil liberties, embraces torture, represses women, reviles homosexuality, subverts science and education, and reveres force over diplomacy. In American Taliban, Markos Moulitsas shows how the American right shares those very same traits. He argues that our domestic jihadists are a greater threat to American democracy than any Islamic terrorist.
“I can’t remember a time in my life when anti-intellectualism and intolerance has been more pervasive. From America’s prejudice against evolutionary science to its reactionary condemnation of a scholarly African American president, the time has never been more ripe for a book such as this, which reminds us that fanaticism isn’t always an import.” -- Brett Gurewitz, Bad Religion
“It isn’t possible to understand American politics now without understanding the worldview and arguments of Markos Moulitsas. If you still believe the beltway caricature of the squishy, compromising, conciliatory American left, American Taliban should disabuse you of that notion.” -- Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show
“Markos writes with a conscience and armed with facts to let you know: no, you’re not crazy. What you suspected all along was true—America’s right wing lives on a myth of self-constructed lies about the Other, with a juvenile disregard for reality, and Obama’s presidency has further radicalized an already radical conservative movement.” -- Janeane Garofalo, comic and actor
“Moulitsas alerts us to a clear and present danger in America: radical zealots who disregard our Constitution and our freedoms, and who disguise themselves as patriots.” -- Roger Ebert, film critic
“A thorough compendium of right-wing hypocrisy and selective memory that is either hilarious or tragic, depending on your mood. And it’s all lovingly couched in outrage and profanity.” -- David Cross, I Drink for a Reason
Sunday, September 12, 4:00 PM
MELISSA STEIN
Rough Honey
Rough Honey is suffused with a dark tenderness. These poems speak of fragility and power, the contradictions of pleasure, the bruises we bear. With remarkable range, they carry us from a whitewater rafting calamity to the “torrents of wheat” on a family farm; from a bathysphere’s color-starved depths to a butcher’s blood-soaked counter; from a peepshow’s “manageable storm of boredom and sex” to a passionate fall from grace in an orchard. By turns buoyant and forlorn, Rough Honey’s characters both long for and abandon hope of true connection, of home, in a world where “everything is rented.” But their struggles are rendered in language so radiant, so mellifluous, it can’t help but hint at the possibility of transcendence, the sheer sweetness in being alive.
“Rough Honey is a miracle of a first collection. Melissa Stein’s sensuous articulation of the world from the inside out puts her poems into a kind of freefall—back into a pulsing, primal language. Her electric apprehensions throb with this nearly preverbal knowing . . . Above all, they define and redefine the lyric poem, giving it myriad protean identities. Stein is a new poet of the first order.” -- Molly Peacock
“Openness—of form, and of the receptive and longing body—is Rough Honey’s central subject, and its oxymoronic title suggests the sweet and fierce character of desire, that compelling and dangerous sustenance . . . Stein’s poems are lit by a restless and flashing verbal intelligence . . . Her sentences are beautifully
choreographed; they start and stop the motion of her poems with a nearly invisible, effortless authority.” -- Mark Doty, from the Introduction
Melissa Stein has published poems in The Southern Review, New England Review, Best New Poets 2009, Harvard Review, North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Foundation.
Tuesday, September 14, 7:30 PM
HAIGHT ASHBURY GUIDE & MAP CELEBRATION
For several years, our Haight Ashbury neighbors and long-time residents Jack and Gay Reineck (Rufus Graphics) have been working on a project to design and publish a new, concise but thorough, history and guide to the Haight Ashbury. The project stemmed from a local discussion about a Haight Ashbury Museum; in lieu of a museum, not possible at this time, they’ve created a nifty little “paper museum” that tells the story of the Haight from before the 1906 earthquake through the 60s (including sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll) and to today. With a fascinating text, and a detailed Haight Ashbury map, accompanying over 100 photographs, many of them historical, and some from contemporary photographers including Lisa Law and Herbie Green, this is a terrific book for visitors and residents alike.
Tonight we celebrate our neighborhood’s history with Jack and Gay!
Wednesday, September 15, 7:30 PM
MARK HASKELL SMITH
Baked
Mark Haskell Smith, who “writes like Carl Hiassen’s oversexed cousin” (Booklist), is back with Baked, a charming comic suspense novel that is a hybrid cross-breed of The Big Lebowskiand Half Baked with The Orchid Thief and Weeds thrown in.
With marijuana well on its way to being legalized in California, Smith takes on the subject of cannabis with typically oddball results. Meet Miro Basinas, an experimental botanist, a gentleman farmer who sells his rarefied product to an educated clientele. Only he’s not growing heirloom tomatoes or making organic wine – he’s growing weed. His greatest creation, a blend called Elephant Crush that tastes like mangoes, has his loyal customers, who need medical marijuana for their anxiety disorders and restless leg syndrome, clamoring for more. Months earlier, Miro had entered Elephant Crush in Amsterdam’s prestigious Cannabis Cup and won, but upon his return to Los Angeles, he is shot and his weed is taken, in a brutal blow to ganjaficionados everywhere.
Baked, complete with a typically Smith-ian cast of lovably quirky characters, takes readers on a truly hilarious ride through LA, the world of medical marijuana and competitive pot-growing, all while trying to solve the mystery of who shot Miro and trying to recover the fabled Elephant Crush.
Mark Haskell Smith is an award-winning screenwriter and author of three prior novels, Moist, Delicious, and Salty. He covered the real Cannabis Cup for the Los Angeles Times last fall, and as California speeds towards the ballot initiative to legalize marijuana, he has fashioned himself into a kind of expert on the state’s number one crop. He lives in Los Angeles, close to the Rambo taco truck.
Thursday, September 16, 7:30 PM
DR. DAVID SMITH
Unchain Your Brain: 10 Steps to Breaking the Addictions That Steal Your Life
Dr. David Smith, the founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, asks, along with his co-author Dr. Daniel Amen, “Are you chained to your addiction to smoking? Drinking? Sugar? Drugs? Good? Prescription painkillers? Caffeine? Internet porn? Gambling? Sex?” – and answers everyone who says “Yes”: with tools to optimize one’s brain.
Smith says brain dysfunction is the number-one reason why people fall victim to addiction, why they can’t break the chains of addiction, and why they relapse. He and Amen offer strategies to find lasting motivation to changes, ways to lock up the craving monster, tips for eating right, thinking right, and healing from an addiction, and ways to prevent relapse (including brain science). They offer 7 steps parents can take now to help prevent addictions for their children; 10 daily behaviors that will enhance brain function; 15 strategies for dealing with the people who try to sabotage recovery; 5 natural supplements that can soothe the brain and reduce craving; 4 areas of life one needs to address to prevent relapse; and 1 decision that will change one’s life.
Join the discussion about rediscovering the pleasure of developing satisfying relationships with family and friends, regaining health, finding greater energy, and exploring the amazing world in which we live.
As if founding the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic wasn’t enough, Dr. Smith is a Fellow and Past President of the American Society for Addiction Medicine and a Fellow of the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology. He is an inaugural Diplomate of the American Board of Addiction medicine, and serves as Chair of Adolescent Addiction Treatment at Newport Academy, Medical Director of Center Point, and Adjunct Professor of Medicine at UCSF. He has authored and co-authored over 350 professional articles and over tow dozen books, including Drugfree: A Unique, Positive Approach to Staying Off Alcohol and Other Drugs, It’s So Good, Don’t Even Try It Once: Heroin in Perspective, The Physician’s Guide to Psychoactive Drugs, and Clinician’s Guide to Substance Abuse. He is the founder and publisher of The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs.
Tuesday, September 21, 7:30 PM
SKIP HORACK
The Eden Hunter
In 1816, five years after being captured and sold into slavery, Kau, a pygmy tribesman, flees south into the Florida wilderness, determined to find a place where he can once again live in harmony with nature. Both haunted and driven by his memories of Africa, he embarks on an epic quest through the treacherous pinewoods, swamps, and river bottoms of the southern frontier. Encountering renegades and thieves, traitors and mercenaries, and the dark prophetic magic of the forest before he finally finds himself within the walls of a remote fort on the Apalachicola River, he becomes the reluctant companion of several hundred runaway slaves once recruited by the British to fight in the War of 1812, then abandoned to fend for themselves against the American forces intent on destroying their remarkable stronghold.
Inspired by actual historical events, at turns both violent and beautiful, The Eden Hunter is the amazing story of a man’s journey into the turbulent forces of a torn and garmented America.
“…a stylish, fast-paced, historical narrative…” – Publishers Weekly
Skip Horack is the author of the story collection The Southern Cross (about which Colm Toibin wrote, “These stories evoke places with a sharp, sensuous and at times magical skill. They also dramatize characters and states of mind with a fierce truthfulness and sense of understanding. Horack’s style has a beautiful edge to it; the range of his sympathy makes this a wonderful collection.”). He is a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford, and was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He practiced law for five years in Louisiana and now lives in Burlingame.
Wednesday, September 22, 7:00 PM
RACHEL SAUNDERS
The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook
“[Once] I became hooked on jam making, several years of intense experimentation ensued. I slaved away in my tiny kitchen, gradually developing my own techniques in my quest for perfect results. Over time, I grew to understand fruit. I also, through the course of these several years, formed my own vision of what the ideal textures were for different jams and marmalades.”
The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook represents the distillation of jam aficionado Rachel Saunders’ 10-year exploration of everything fruit. In her unflinching search for the perfect balance of flavor, texture and appearance, Saunders
brings a modern sustainable eye to the age-old nostalgia of the jam-maker’s kitchen. The same sentiment reigns at her Bay Area jam company, Blue Chair Fruit, which sources only from local organic farmers and produces its small-batch wonders in traditional French copper kettles. The resulting cookbook is a vast overview of the art of jam, dressed up with clear descriptions of preserving techniques, stunning photography and over 100 recipes.
Saunders’ passion for fresh, seasonal and local fruits informs every pearl of the long sought wisdom she shares – only plant-ripened produce provides a natural intensity and sweetness that requires less sugar while delivering more flavor. Thus, recipes are chronicled seasonally by fruit, with recipes arranged month-to-month to ensure the book remains a gem throughout the year. April examines rhubarb and strawberry, while July taps sour cherry, currant and Meyer lemon. The dead of winter fares just as well, with bergamot and grapefruit in January and orange and kumquat in early spring. Far from a traditionalist, Saunders also explores a variety of herbs, spices and spirits to produce nuanced flavor combinations that range from basic to complex: Brandied Red Cherry Conserve, White Guava & Meyer Lemon Marmalade, Italian Prune & Cardamom Conserve, even Strawberry Jam with Aged Balsamic & Black Pepper.
Saunders also shares her conviction that preserving is an aesthetic as much as a
technical endeavor. Each recipe includes suggestions for variation, encouraging home cooks to prepare unique creations that express their own style. Informed by her background in art history and French culture (she studied at Smith College as well as La Sorbonne in Paris), Saunders fills every page with the sense
of sheer fun, adventure and imagination that have inspired the book’s creation.