Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Tuesday, August 14
WORDS & PIZZA:
Game Night at The Booksmith
7:00 - 9:00
$20 (includes Club Deluxe pizza and drinks!)
Our favorite local writers, journalists, friends, and you...duke it out over rounds of Three Words, Dictionary, and more engaging, seriously fun, and word-nerd friendly games.
Our dynamic teams battle it out with their well-chosen guest team members joined by randomly chosen audience members, all emceed by Amy (Bookswap) Stephenson.
Audience and teams are highly...and hilariously...interactive. Correct answers win the point; incorrect answers earn the laughs.And if experience holds, points can be earned any old way the audience sees fit.
Great pizza, book raffle, coupons, and hilarity for all who join the wordy merriment!
Announcing the August 14 teams soon!
Tickets must be purchased in advance, in the store or at Brown Paper Tickets online or 800-8368-3006.
Thursday, August 16
RUBEN MARTINEZ
DESERT AMERICA
Boom and Bust in the New “New West”
“Martínez offers reportage beyond the simple binaries of the immigration issue or the drug war. He delivers a lively, compassionate intervention into our collective conception of the Southwest... This thoughtful and well-written account intimately explores the convolutions of racism and class conflict that have come to define a divided America.” -- Publishers Weekly
A brilliantly illuminating portrait of the twenty-first-century West -- as vast, diverse, and unexpected as the land and the people, from one of our foremost chroniclers of migration.
The economic boom -- and the devastation left in its wake -- has been writ nowhere as large as on the West, the most iconic of American landscapes. Over the last decade the West has undergone a political and demographic upheaval comparable only to the opening of the frontier. In DESERT AMERICA, Emmy-winning journalist, Lannan Foundation fellowship recipient, and author of the famed Crossing Over, Rubén Martínez evokes a new world of extremes: outrageous wealth and devastating poverty, sublime beauty and ecological ruin. Martínez shows how the new West will drive America’s future, both demographically and economically.
Far different from our romantic illusions of John Wayne, cacti and cowboys, DESERT AMERICA takes us on a deeply personal tour of the drug addiction, race wars, and front lines of illegal immigration in the New West. Martínez re-creates an enthralling panorama of characters, settings, and stories that explore the unique cultural intersections between native and new inhabitants of the area.
In northern New Mexico, an epidemic of chronic drug use flourishes in the shadow of some of the country's richest zip codes. In Joshua Tree, California, gentrification displaces people and history. In Marfa, Texas, an exclusive enclave triggers a race war near the banks of the Rio Grande. And on the Tohono O'odham reservation, Native Americans hunt down Mexican migrants crossing the most desolate stretch of the border.
With each desert story, Martínez explores his own Mexican and El Salvadorian heritage as well as his love for this most contested region.
“Martínez is one of the brightest voices of a new generation of Hispanic Southern Californian writers. He manages to be both graceful and impassioned; his obsessions with multiculturalism, with the nature of identity and with popular culture are precisely the subjects with which intelligent people today must grapple.” —The Washington Post
Rubén Martínez is an award-winning journalist, author and performer. Among the topics he examines in his courses are mixed-genre writing, post-colonial literatures and disapora, and the peculiar particulars of Los Angeles (his hometown) and the American West. His essays, opinions and reportage have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Village Voice, The Nation, Spin, Sojourners, and Mother Jones. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship in Non Fiction, a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, a Freedom of Information Award from the ACLU, a Greater Press Club of Los Angeles Award of Excellence, and an Emmy Award for hosting PBS-affiliate KCET-TV’s Life & Times. As a musician, Martínez has been featured on albums by Concrete Blonde, Los Illegals, and the Roches, and he has been active in the spoken word and performance scenes for over twenty years. He is the author of Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City, The New Americans, Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail, Eastside Stories, and The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City and Beyond.
Thursday, August 23
7:30 PM
JORJA LEAP
JUMPED IN
What Gangs Taught Me About Violence, Drugs, Love, and Redemption
“I loved school and had good grades. I played every sport—football, basketball, swimming—up to Jordan High,” Ronny Dawson reminisces. But Ronny had little chance of not becoming a gang member. Born in Nickerson Gardens, a housing project in South Los Angeles which encompasses Watts and Compton and is the birthplace of the notorious Bounty Hunter Bloods, Ronny grew up in an apartment with 29 other people. He never knew his father, who was in and out of prison, and rarely saw his mother, a crack addict. Ronny is a third-generation gang member whose family started their own offshoot of the Bounty Hunter Bloods, the Hillbilly Gangsters. “We aren’t just Bloods, this is my blood. They are my family,” he explains.
In JUMPED IN, UCLA professor and gang expert Jorja Leap gives voice to the people who understand the gang problem best—the gang members and the people who try to arrest them, control them, and help them. A noted anthropologist, Leap offers one of the first genealogies of Los Angeles’s oldest and most powerful black and brown gangs, including the Bloods, Crips, Florencia, MS-13, and 18th Street, among others, and breaks down their territories street by street.
Tracing the family trees of gang members back three generations, she shows just how strong the clan mentality really is and how deep the kinship connections run. By hearing their oral histories and conducting personal interviews with active and former gang members, interventionists, police officers, priests, parents and victims, Leap reveals the stories and traumas of gang members born into a life of violence, drugs, guns and sex.
The wife of a veteran LAPD officer, Leap spent years on the ground building the trust of gang interventionists and gaining access to the inner gang world. Reporting from their living rooms and street corners, Leap paints a gritty, authentic portrait of life inside the gangs, and explains the forces that pull people into them and keep them there. Trayvon Jeffers was jumped into a gang by age eleven—the gang was his only family. “My granny’s been doin’ heroin since I was born; my mother’s gone from PCP to cocaine to heroin. She’s got HIV now, but she’s still an addict. I never really knew my father,” he confesses. Leap sheds light on the many problems plaguing gang members, ranging from domestic violence and mental illness to post traumatic stress disorder. As a woman, Leap is particularly drawn to the female gang members, the homegirls. Most come from toxic, abusive families, and are revictimized in the gangs, she reports. “There are stepfathers who demand blowjobs or cousins who force them to have anal sex,” writes Leap. She hears stories of girls getting “sexed in” or gangraped as a form of initiation. “In one rumored initiation rite,” the author reveals, “aspiring homegirls were forced to have sex with a gang member who was HIV-positive.” Despite the sexual and physical abuse they will likely face in the gangs, Leaps believes that these girls who make the deliberate choice to join gangs do so as a form of empowerment and a way to re-gain control. For many homegirls, life in the gang is no different than life outside the gang. “I don’t know what it would be like to have love without pain,” says homegirl Vanity “Dimples” Benton.
While the cyclical violence of gang life is a reality, Leap shows that redemption is not impossible. Throughout the book, she spends much of her time at Father Greg Boyle’s gang intervention and reentry program, Homeboy Industries. It is at Homeboy Industries where Leap encounters hopeful exiting gang members reaping the benefits of Boyle’s “Jobs, Not Jails” program. Readers meet Reverend Mike Cummings, a.k.a. Big Mike, a former “original gangster” and the founder of Project Fatherhood who now practices street peace ministry and plays the role of father figure to neighborhood kids. “I love these children. Every last one of them. The badder they are, the more I love them. I was one of them,” he shares with Leap. About six feet tall and close to 300 pounds, Big Mike was notorious in Watts in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Now, Big Mike spends his days in the hood trying to save children from the life he lived. “They need fathers,” he urges. The father rarely plays a role in the family narrative, Leap reports. “Fathers remain offstage and absent—dead, incarcerated, or with another woman.”
Ultimately, through her observations from the field, Leap shares a rare and honest look into a world many fear and few understand, and presents the possibility of hope.
“Her view is both “aerial” and “in the weeds” while always staying heartbreakingly
compassionate and true. Her work gives me hope.”
-- Gregory J. Boyle, S.J. Founder and Executive Director, Homeboy Industries
Jorja Leap has been on the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles Department of Social Welfare since 1992. A recognized expert in gangs, violence, and crisis intervention, she has worked nationally and internationally in violent and postwar settings. Dr. Leap is currently the senior policy advisor on Gangs and Youth Violence for the Los Angeles County Sheriff.
Wednesday, August 29
7:30 PM
MARTIN LEE
SMOKE SIGNALS:
A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific
As ubiquitous as it is controversial, marijuana has emerged as a prominent economic and cultural force in North America despite massive government opposition. Although it is prohibited by federal law in the United States, half of all Americans have tried marijuana and tens of millions use the herb regularly for recreational as well as medicinal purposes.
Smoke Signals is a panoramic, character-driven, social history of marijuana and its shifting role in the American narrative. It tells the story of a grassroots countercultural movement that began in the 1960s and grew into a widespread populist revolt against conventional medicine and extraconstitutional authority.
In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 215, legalizing medical marijuana. Similar laws have followed in more than a dozen other states, but not without antagonistic responses from federal, state, and local law enforcement.
Martin A. Lee, an award-winning investigative journalist, draws attention to underreported scientific breakthroughs that are reshaping the therapeutic landscape, including the discovery of a nonpsychoactive component of marijuana that protects the brain against alcohol poisoning, stimulates adult stem cell growth, and shrinks malignant tumors. (And it doesn't get you high.) By mining the plant’s rich pharmacopoeia, medical researchers have developed promising treatments for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, chronic pain, and many other conditions that are beyond the reach of conventional cures.
Colorful, illuminating, and irreverent, Smoke Signals is a fascinating read for patients and weekend smokers, students and doctors, musicians and accountants, Baby Boomers and their kids, and anyone who has ever wondered about the secret life of this remarkable plant.
“Smoke Signals is an important, serious-minded look at the role cannabis has played in American history. [Lee] tackles the hard issues of marijuana prohibition with keen insight and righteous indignation. I agree with Lee’s central premise that our marijuana laws are draconian. Every American should read this landmark book!” -- Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University and author of Cronkite
Martin A. Lee is the author of three books, including Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond and The Beast Reawakens. He is the cofounder and director of Project CBD, an educational service that monitors and reports on developments in cannabidiol science and therapeutics, and associate editor of O’Shaughnessy’s, the journal of cannabis in clinical practice. Lee is also co-founder of the New York-based media research group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) and former editor of FAIR’s magazine Extra! His articles have appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad, including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique, Christian Science Monitor and Mother Jones. He has been a guest on CBS' 48 Hours, CNN, CNBC, C-Span, the History Channel, NPR’s Fresh Air, and has lectured at numerous colleges and universities.