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Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Monday, February 14
7:00 PM
A little wine, a little chocolate, and
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR LOVER
Dr. Rhonda, relationship expert, wants to help you apply the scientific method to your relationship in a one-hour lecture, demonstration and performance workshop for singles and couples. Based on her forthcoming book, How To Train Your Lover in Five Easy Steps, the workshop promises to “provide answers to some of the stickiest questions people ask about relationships,” says Rhonda.
“Most people think, ‘all I have to do is be nice, and I’ll be loved and rewarded’,” Dr. Rhonda points out. “They couldn’t be more wrong. Isn’t it always the nicest people who get hurt in relationships?”
The bombshell psychiatrist says she has spent years researching scientific methods for regaining power and control in abusive relationships. “In my workshop, participants will learn how to come out on top in their love lives,” she says. “I cover meeting the right kind of prospect, establishing an advantage from the beginning, and how to maintain the upper hand throughout the relationship.”
Dr. Rhonda notes that all of the skills she teaches have been used on her.
“I’ve developed a foolproof plan that enables meek and timid lovers to preemptively prevent abusive relationship patterns from becoming a problem for them,” Dr. Rhonda maintains. “All you need is the confidence to drive the bus, and my workshop will help you build that confidence.”
How To Train Your Lover In Five Easy Steps illustrator REBECCA MIGDAL will be on hand to sign books, including Last Gasp’s new anthology Best Erotic Comics #3, which also features her artwork. Migdal’s work appears in many of the semi-annual World War 3 volumes, Rosetta Stone Comics, Crime and Punishment, The Yes Men in Judgment Day, and many other comics platforms.
We assure you a most useful and pleasurable, and, may we say, hilarious, Valentine’s evening. Please make plans to be our Valentine and join us!
Wednesday, February 16
7:30 PM
Words from The Translator:
DAMION SEARLS on Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse
Called "the new Ibsen" in the German press, and heralded throughout Western Europe, Jon Fosse is one of contemporary Norwegian literature's most important writers. In 2000, his novelMelancholy won the Melsom Prize, and Fosse was awarded a lifetime stipend from the Norwegian government for his future literary efforts.
In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their whole life together, and beyond: the bonds of one family and their battles with implacable nature stretching back over five generations, to Asle's great-great- grandmother Aliss. In Jon Fosse's vivid, hallucinatory prose, all these moments in time inhabit the same space, and the ghosts of the past collide with those who still live on. Aliss at the Fire is a haunting exploration of love, ranking among the greatest meditations on marriage and loss.
Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English. He has translated many of Europe's greatest writers, including Proust, Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Kurt Schwitters, Peter Handke, Jon Fosse, and Nescio, edited a new abridged edition of Thoreau's Journal, and produced a lost work of Melville's.
Searls grew up in New York City, studied German philosophy at Harvard and American literature at UC Berkeley, and has received writing and translating awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, the Netherland America Foundation, the University of California, and the Austrian, Belgian, and Dutch governments.
This evening, Scott Esposito (The Quarterly Conversation; the Center for the Art of Translation) talks with Damion about all things translation.
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation
Thursday, February 17
7:30 PM
MICHAEL DAVID LUKAS
The Oracle of Stamboul
Celebrate with us an elegantly crafted, utterly enchanting debut novel set in a mystical, exotic world, in which a gifted young girl charms a sultan and changes the course of an empire's history
Late in the summer of 1877, a flock of purple-and-white hoopoes suddenly appears over the town of Constanta on the Black Sea, and Eleonora Cohen is ushered into the world by a mysterious pair of Tartar midwives who arrive just minutes before her birth. "They had read the signs, they said: a sea of horses, a conference of birds, the North Star in alignment with the moon. It was a prophecy that their last king had given on his deathwatch." But joy is mixed with tragedy, for Eleonora's mother dies soon after the birth.
Raised by her doting father, Yakob, a carpet merchant, and her stern, resentful stepmother, Ruxandra, Eleonora spends her early years daydreaming and doing housework—until the moment she teaches herself to read, and her father recognizes that she is an extraordinarily gifted child, a prodigy.
When Yakob sets off by boat for Stamboul on business, eight-year-old Eleonora, unable to bear the separation, stows away in one of his trunks. On the shores of the Bosporus, in the house of her father's business partner, Moncef Bey, a new life awaits. Books, backgammon, beautiful dresses and shoes, markets swarming with color and life—the imperial capital overflows with elegance, and mystery. For in the narrow streets of Stamboul—a city at the crossroads of the world—intrigue and gossip are currency, and people are not always what they seem. Eleonora's tutor, an American minister and educator, may be a spy. The kindly though elusive Moncef Bey has a past history of secret societies and political maneuvering. And what is to be made of the eccentric, charming Sultan Abdulhamid II himself, beleaguered by friend and foe alike as his unwieldy, multiethnic empire crumbles?
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, less than a mile from where he was born. When he isn't writing, he teaches creative writing to third- and fourth-graders.
AUTHOR EVENT JUST ADDED!
RESERVED SEAT TICKETS AVAILABLE WITH PURCHASE OF BOOK, while supplies last*
Sunday, February 20
4:00 PM
SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE
The Emperor of All Maladies:
A Biography of Cancer
The Booksmith is extremely pleased to present the author of the “sweeping, erudite, and challenging” The Emperor of All Maladies, the new, uniformly praised “biography” of the shape-shifting and formidable disease that has plagued and riddled humanity for thousands of years.
From the first known reference to cancer on an ancient Egyptian scroll to the epic modern battles to conquer it, Mukherjee, a leading cancer physician and researcher, approaches this crucial subject with the passion and fixation of a biographer and the flourish of a novelist. The Emperor of All Maladies is a story that touches on the brilliance and tenacity that frequently make scientific history—and also on the serendipitous discoveries.
Mukherjee introduces readers to key figures such as Sidney Farber, the father of modern chemotherapy, holed up in the cellar of a Boston hospital and characterized by a colleague as a “cancer maniac,” and William Halsted, bewhiskered, obsessive, and addicted to cocaine, who created and perfected the radical and super-radical mastectomies that became the norm in cases of breast cancer for decades. We learn about the accidental discovery during World War I of mustard gas as a method for killing cancer cells, and from there the experimental evolution into the specialized chemicals that are just deadly enough to kill cancerous cells without killing normal cells.
Mukherjee tells these stories with the grand sweep that marks The Emperor of All Maladies as a work of major literature, seamlessly weaving significant moments in cultural history into the narrative. It is also something more personal: readers will be moved by Mukherjee’s observations about his own coming of age as a physician—especially in his thoughtful and compassionate consideration of his patients as they soldier through toxic, bruising, and draining regimens to battle a relentless disease that fully envelops their lives.
In the past 50 years, Americans have watched as various strategies in the “War on Cancer” have earned the attention of politicians, physicians, the media and, of course, the public. Cancer is now projected to become the leading cause of death worldwide. Cases of cancer doubled globally between 1975 and 2000, and will double again by 2020, nearly tripling by 2030. In America, one in two men and one in three women will get cancer during their lifetime; one in four will die. The Emperor of All Maladies could not be more timely nor essential reading, and Mukherjee writes with such clarity and verve that we feel enlightened, even uplifted, despite those grim figures.
SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE, M.D., Ph.D., is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital. A Rhodes Scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School and was a Fellow at theDana Farber Cancer Institute and an attending physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron, Journal of Clinical Investigation, The New York Times, and The New Republic. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters.
* you may request a reserved seat ticket when you purchase a copy of The Emperor of All Maladies at or by phoning The Booksmith, or online at Booksmith.com by noting “reserved seat requested” in the notes field of your order. All seats so reserved must be taken no later than fifteen minutes before Dr. Mukherjee’s talk; otherwise, they will be given to others.
A New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2010
Daily Beast 20 Must Reads
“It’s hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion. “The Emperor of All Maladies” is an extraordinary achievement.” – The New Yorker
“All patients begin as storytellers, the oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee observes near the start of this powerful and ambitious first book.…It is an epic story that he seems compelled to tell, the way a passionate young priest might attempt a biography of Satan.” – The New York Times Book Review
“With this riveting and moving book, Siddhartha Mukherjee joins the first rank of those rare doctor-authors who can wield a pen as gracefully as a scalpel: Jerome Groopman, Atul Gawande, Richard Selzer. A magisterial, wise, and deeply human piece of writing.” -- Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains“An elegant … tour de force. The Emperor of All Maladies reads like a novel … but it deals with real people and real successes, as well as with the many false notions and false leads. Not only will the book bring cancer research and cancer biology to the lay public, it will help attract young researchers to a field that is at once exciting and heart wrenching … and important.” -- Donald Berry, Ph.D., Anderson Cancer Center, University of Texas
“Sid Mukherjee’s book is a pleasure to read, if that is the right word. Cancer today is widely regarded as the worst of all the diseases from which one might suffer — if only because it is fast becoming the most common. Dr. Mukherjee explains how this perception came about, how cancer has been regarded across the years and what is now being done to treat its protean forms. His book is the clearest account I have read on this subject. With The Emperor of All Maladies, he joins that small fraternity of practicing doctors who can not just talk about their profession but write about it.” -- Tony Judt, author of Postwar and Ill Fares the Land
“Siddhartha Mukherjee has done something that should not have been possible: he has managed, at once, to write an authoritative history of cancer for the general reader, while always keeping the experiences of cancer patients in his heart and in his narrative. At once learned and skeptical, unsentimental and humane, The Emperor of all Maladies is that rarest of things—a noble book.” -- —David Rieff, author of Swimming in a Sea of Death
“The Emperor of All Maladies beautifully describes the nature of cancer from a patient’s perspective and how basic research has opened the door to understanding this disease.” -- Bert Vogelstein, Director, Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins University
“Rarely have the science and poetry of illness been so elegantly braided together as they are in this erudite, engrossing, kind book. Mukherjee’s clinical wisdom never erases the personal tragedies which are its occasion; indeed, he locates with meticulous clarity and profound compassion the beautiful hope buried in cancer’s ravages.” -- Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon