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Laurel Book Store
1423 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94612
Mon-Th 10-6 Fri-Sat 10-7
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Dear Reader,
These are two books that you can order from this email and we'll get them for you!
I hope you're enjoying this weather! We have plenty of gardening books to get you in the spirit and start planning out your garden, if you haven't already.
I want to extend a special invitation to our newsletter friends to come to an event on
Saturday night. At
6pm please come to meet Shobha Rao who has authored her first book and we're launching it in the east bay. It consists of paired short stories set in the time around Partition in India and Pakistan and what effect that had on many women.
An Unrestored Woman is a beautifully written collection of often harsh stories that will stay with you long after the book is closed. It will be a natural for
book groups with discussions of history of the region, women's lives and what it took to survive, or the stories of those who didn't.
Happy Reading,
Luan
3-17-16
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Rightful Heritage; Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America by Douglas Brinkley $35 starts us off this week. Douglas Brinkley's The Wilderness Warrior celebrated Theodore Roosevelt's spirit of outdoor exploration and bold vision to protect 234 million acres of wild America. Now, in Rightful Heritage, Brinkley turns his attention to another indefatigable environmental leader Theodore's distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt chronicling his essential yet undersung legacy as the founder of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the premier protector of America's public lands. FDR built state park systems and scenic roadways from scratch. Through his leadership, pristine landscapes such as the Great Smokies, the Everglades, Joshua Tree, the Olympics, Big Bend, and the Channel Islands were forever saved.
Live Happy, Ten Practices for Choosing Joy by Deborah K. Heisz $25.99 Who doesn't want a little more happy? We are all increasingly hungry for soul-deep happiness. All over the globe, from the hallways of Harvard, where the university's most popular course is a class on positive psychology, to the United Nations resolution naming March 20th the International Day of Happiness, the question of how to be authentically happy concerns millions of lives today. But what if the secret of lasting happiness is actually . . . simple? Now, in Live Happy, the editors of Live Happy magazine, the first lifestyle publication dedicated to the timeless quest to achieve authentic happiness, reveal that true happiness is all about the big impact of small acts of everyday happiness.
The Abundance, Narrative Essays Old and New by Annie Dillard $25.99 In recognition of this Pulitzer prize winning author's lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work the abundance includes the best of Annie Dillard's essays, delivered in her fierce and muscular prose, filled with absorbing detail and metaphysical fact. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life a commuter chases snowball-throwing children through backyards, a bookish teenager memorizes the poetry of Rimbaud with beauty and irony. These essays invite readers into sweeping landscapes, to join Dillard in exploring the complexities of time and death, often with wry humor. On one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.
Hood by Alison Kinney $16.95
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, laborers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone who's ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinney's "Hood "explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of this everyday garment and political semaphore, which often protects the powerful at the expense of the powerless-with deadly results. Kinney considers medieval clerics and the Klan, anti-hoodie campaigns and the Hooded Man of Abu Ghraib, the Inquisition and the murder of Trayvon Martin, uncovering both the hooded perpetrators of violence and the hooded victims in their sights.
Eat Your Drink, Culinary Cocktails by Matthew Biancaniello $22.99 One of the fastest-rising and most unique talents in the world of bartending, Biancaniello crafts exciting new drinks based on farm-fresh, seasonal, organic ingredients. A complement to farm-to-table dining, his fresh take on cocktails is ushering in a new age of drinking: farm-to-glass, and with the addition of his foraging and gardening methods, ground to glass. Captured in gorgeous full-color photographs, the libations in Eat Your Drink are both aesthetically beautiful and delicious.
An now for something not new but I couldn't resist it. I'm thinking there will be those who will feel the same.
The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions by Kenji Kawakami $14.95 In Japan, Kenji Kawakami is famous for his tireless promotion of Chindogu: the art of the unuseless idea. Kawakami has developed an entire philosophy around these bizarre and logic-defying gadgets and gizmos, which must work but are actually entirely impractical. Created in the spirit of anarchy, unuseless inventions are not allowed to be patented or sold. Fans of the unuseless will love this completely absorbing collection of 200 Chindogu, including the Drymobile (your laundry dries as you drive), the Solar-Powered Torch (never runs low on batteries), Duster Slippers for Cats (now the most boring job around the house becomes hours of fun...for your cat ). I defy anyone not to be utterly amused by this book. It would make a great gift for a DIY or Maker fan.
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Younger Readers
Yellow Brick War
by Danielle Page $18.99 If you've been following this series, begun with Dorothy Must Die and then The Wicked Will Rise, then you're looking forward to this third installment! Amy's job as assassin didn't work out as planned: Dorothy's still alive, the Order's vanished, and the home she couldn't wait to leave behind might be in danger. Great series of books for those familiar with The Wizard of Oz - 14 and up.
Hour of the Bees by Lindsay Eagar $16.99 Things are only impossible if you stop to think about them. . . .
While her friends are spending their summers having pool parties and sleepovers, twelve-year-old Carolina - Carol - is spending hers in the middle of the New Mexico desert, helping her parents move the grandfather she's never met into a home for people with dementia. At first, Carol avoids prickly Grandpa Serge. But as the summer wears on and the heat bears down, Carol finds herself drawn to him, fascinated by the crazy stories he tells her about a healing tree, a green-glass lake, and the bees that will bring back the rain and end a hundred years of drought. As the thin line between magic and reality starts to blur, Carol must decide for herself what is possible - and what it means to be true to her roots. Readers who dream that there's something more out there will be enchanted by this captivating novel of family, renewal, and discovering the wonder of the world. 12 and up.
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The first meeting is tonight, March 17 and we will talk about Bel Canto by Ann Patchett since most have already read it so that we can practice talking about a book in
getting to know each other.
The next book in the club is The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson and the Discussion is April 19.
An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family
Maggie Nelson's "The Argonauts "is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.
Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
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Are you a Mama who Writes?
Would you appreciate even just a little dedicated time to do it?
We're going to have a Mama's Writing Retreat each
Tuesday morning in April.
Click here for more information and to sign up!
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Events
Join us to meet authors in person.
March 17 6:15 to 7:30
Book Group
Discussing Bel Canto or anything by Ann Patchett this time.
We will choose the next three at this meeting.
Saturday March 19 @ 6pm
Shobha Rao
An Unrestored Woman
**literary short stories**
The Main Library Youth Room will host Alex Gino and the book
George on Saturday, March 19 at 3pm.
March 24 @ 6pm
Aleta George, author of
Ina Coolbrith: The Bittersweet Song of
California's First Poet Laureate
March 26 @ 6pm
Gene Anderson who has created
Legendary Locals of Oakland
April 5 @ 7pm
Sarah Schulman, author of the soon to be released
The Cosmopolitans
in conversation with
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
April 12 @ 6pm
Local Lawyers and Daunting Documents Meet three attorneys who will outline the importance of several of the documents that will help protect your family.
Prenups, adoptions, living trusts, wills, and more!
If you don't have your affairs in order, here's a chance to get some questions answered.
Check the
website for more events!
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March's Featured Artists are students
and instructors from Feather River Art Camp 2015
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See what's happening on our social sites:
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