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8th ANNUAL DINNER AUTHORS DINNER
Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Authors

Rabih Alameddine, engineer and painter, was born in Amman, Jordan to Lebanese parents, and grew up in Kuwait and Lebanon. He weaves his Middle Eastern background into his stories. The Hakawati (Arabic for storyteller), his third novel, tells a multi-generational family story threading together tales of contemporary Lebanon with timeless Arabic fables.

Writer Mir Tamim Ansary’s West of Kabul, East of New York, was one of the first books about the Muslim world published after 9/11. Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes explains the events behind the modern-day hostilities that plague Western and Islamic societies. This book is a must-read for anyone continuing to try to understand current religion-based conflicts.

Berkeley’s Andrew Beahrs is an archeologist by training (at UC Berkeley) and an historical novelist by design. His book, The Sin Eaters, depicts both Jacobean England and the Virginia colony in 1621 by following Sarah and Bill, two sin eaters, people down on their luck paid to assume the transgressions of others. His much awaited forthcoming book, Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens, will be published in June.

Bill Berkson is an award-winning poet who has written over a dozen books of verse. Portrait and Dream is a collection of new and selected poems spanning his fifty-year writing career. Berkson is a writer of art criticism ArtNews, Art in America, and Artforum and has curated art exhibits such as Facing Eden: 100 Years of Northern California Landscape Art at the M.H. de Young Museum.

Alan Black grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, playing tough victory-at-all-cost soccer…now he’s in America coaching a bunch of pampered suburban eight-year-olds. Kick the Balls: An Offensive Suburban Odyssey is his abrasive, irreverent, and very hilarious read. Black is also the bartender/muse at the Edinburgh Castle Pub in San Francisco.

Sylvia Brownrigg writes intelligent well-crafted novels and short stories. Booklist calls her fourth novel, Morality Tale a “mordant tale of modern marriage” portraying a “once firey relationship that fizzles in the harsh light of day.” Brownrigg is married to radio host Sedge Thompson and lives in Berkeley.

Ernest Callenbach began his career at UC Press, became the editor of Film Quarterly, and founded Banyan Tree Books in 1975 when 25 publishers rejected his classic utopian novel, Ecotopia. His Ecology: A Pocket Guide, Revised and Expanded aims to increase ecological literacy of the chemistry of air, the usefulness of bacteria, and the effects of industrial pollution.

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer is the tale of turning a vacant lot in Oakland into a working mini-farm. Food writer Novella Carpenter enthusiastically describes urban bee and poultry keeping, owning a brace of pigs, her turkeys Harold and Maud, and vegetable gardening amidst the inner-city grit of overhead highways, prostitutes, and homeless.

Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, makes his third appearance at the Authors Dinner with his autobiographical musings about what it means to be a man and a father today. Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son is a series of linked essays that is at once “dazzling, hilarious, and moving.”

Waiting for the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Faith and Family is Veronica Chater’s powerful tale of her father’s religious obsession and how it lead the family into financial ruin. Charters, a short story and magazine writer, reminds us how easy it can be for ordinary people to get caught up in religious fervor.

Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California is the story of author Frances Dinkelspiel’s great-great-grandfather. The financier who changed California forever, Hellman founded 17 banks, stabilized the financial panic of 1893, invested money with Henry Huntington and Harrison Gray Otis, led in the building of Los Angeles’ first synagogue, helped start USC, and much, much more.

David Ewing Duncan is the chief correspondent of NPR’s Biotech Nation. Experimental Man: What One Man’s Body Reveals about His Future, Your Health, and Our Toxic World chronicles his being tested for hundreds of chemicals and genes associated with disease, emotions, and other traits and what science can and cannot tell us about our future health.

Joyce Goldstein, former chef and owner of San Francisco’s Square One restaurant, continues her cookbook writing with Mediterranean Fresh: A Compendium of One-Plate Salad Meals and Mix-and-Match Dressings. Goldstein, long a champion of Mediterranean cuisines, shares over 140 recipes for salads and small plates, many of which can serve as hearty meals.

Alison Gopnik’s work as a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley focuses on children—a group long neglected by the psychological world. In The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, she reveals the latest scientific discoveries, many of them quite surprising, about the complicated and agile minds of young children.

The Enthusiast: A Novel is about Henry, a college dropout, who moves from editor at a series of fringe magazines to editing specialty publications with such disparate themes as crocheting, ice climbing, and conspiracy theories. Henry is a romantic innocent. Author Charlie Haas is a Hollywood screenwriter, and this is his first novel.

Journalist and author Katie Hafner writes primarily about computers and technology. Now with A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano, she turns to the music world with this biography of the quirky Canadian pianist Gould, a story that includes a history of the Steinway piano company and a portrait of Charles Verne Edquist, Gould’s nearly-blind piano tuner.

Minal Hajratwala, a former writer and editor at the San Jose Mercury News, chronicles her family’s history in Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents. She connects current Indian Americans to a huge diaspora that started in the nineteenth century. Her own life began in Michigan, moved to Stanford where she came out as a lesbian as an undergraduate, and has her settled in San Francisco.

The New York Times calls Mollie Katzen one of the best-selling cookbook authors of all time. She has over six million books in print including the classic Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Her new book, Get Cooking: 150 Simple Recipes to Get You Started in the Kitchen, is geared towards those just beginning to cook and is Mollie’s first book for vegetarians and omnivores alike.

Library Journal calls Dacher Keltner’s Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life “a landmark book in the science of emotions and its implications for ethics and human universals.” Keitner, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, asserts that positive emotions—gratitude, amusement, awe, and compassion—are at the core of human nature.

Michael Lewis joins the Authors Dinner for the third time and is this year’s Honorary Chairperson. Author of Liar’s Poker, Next: The Future Just Happened, and Moneyball, Lewis is one of the finest and funniest chroniclers of our times. His latest—The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine—is an account of how the U.S. economy fell over a cliff even though we were all led to believe that the free fall of the American economy was impossible.

Malcolm Margolin is this year’s Cody Award winner for his significant contribution to Berkeley’s rich literary life. He is a writer (The East Bay Out), a book designer (The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories, and Song), and publisher at his own publishing house, Heyday Books. Margolin founded Heyday in 1974 to celebrate the history, literature, and environment of California.

A medical student turned novelist, Daniel Mason wrote his first novel, The Piano Tuner, while studying at the University of California at San Francisco. Mason’s second novel, A Far Country, featured this year, is set in a rural Catholic area of an unnamed country and is a meditation on poverty, development, and the unwavering strength of family ties.

Alva Noë, a philosopher at UC Berkeley, turns Descartes’ famous statement, “I think, therefore, I am” on its head in Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. Noë makes the case that mind and awareness are processes that arise from interactions with our surroundings.

Geoff Nunberg explores common language and its changing nature on NPR’s Fresh Air. In The Year of Talking Dangerously, he writes, “There has never been as age as wary as ours of the tricks words can play” and he deftly decodes such words as “progressive,” “elite,” “torture,” and “liberal.” Nunberg teaches at UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

Ramparts magazine turned the Sixties on its head with its combination of avant-grarde satire and gumshoe investigative reporting. In A Bomb In Every Issue, Peter Richardson reminds us that Ramparts published the first conspiracy theory of JFK’s assassination, the Che Guevara diaries, and Eldridge Cleaver’s prison writings, and that its contributors included Cesar Chavez, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag.

Michelle Richmond has taught in the MFA writing program at both the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and the University of San Francisco. Following 2007’s best-selling Year of Fog, No One You Know is the story of Ellie Enderlin who has never recovered from the murder of her sister, a Stanford math prodigy: it explores the lasting effects of loss and survivor guilt.

Dashka Slater has said of herself “I often say that I suffer from Writer’s ADD because I work in many genres—fiction, journalism, and children’s books.” The Sea Serpent and Me is a picture book about a creature who drops out of the bathroom faucet and befriends the little girl in the bathtub…a story she first wrote when she was 10 years old.

Two Sloughs is a novel about a small Sacramento River town and its various descendents--the Chinese who built the levees, itinerant “Oakies,” Japanese farmers just returned from relocation camp, and local farmers who have all survived World War II…more or less. It is a fictional recollection of author Sally Small’s own childhood.

A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century: A Memoir examines the life of novelist Jane Vandenburgh, a fifth-generation Californian. The book covers her Southern California childhood, her bisexual father who disgraces the family by being arrested in lowlife bars, her mother who goes crazy, and being sent to live with a fervent Christian aunt.

Abraham Verghese was born in Ethiopia, went to medical school in Madras, India, and is an author because “writing has many similarities to the practice of internal medicine—both require astute observation and a fondness for detail.” Cutting for Stone: A Novel mines Verghese’s own life and follows the lives of twin boys, Shiva and Marion, both of whom become doctors. Verghese is a professor at Stanford’s Medical School.

To purchase tickets or receive information about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Amy at the Foundation office, 510-981-6115 or admin@bplf.org

We hope to see you at the Central Library on Saturday, February 6 at 6:30 pm!

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