Month: April 2005

SARAH VOWELL is one of the great voices of public radio in America today for her work on This American Life. Now she’s gone on the road to find the locations of American political violence — and to ponder their lessons — in her new book Assassination Vacation.

PLUS: Agribusiness in California: it’s both an economic wonder and an intolerable human tragedy — RICHARD WALKER will explain. His new book is The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California. Mike Davis calls it “a magnificent and haunting study.”
READ Jon Wiener’s review of The Conquest of Bread in The Nation Apr. 11: www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050411&s=wiener

ALSO: First came collaboration and resistance in World War II — and then came public justice, and private score-settling. JOSEPH KANON has written about that world in his new thriller Alibi. Kanon has been praised as the next John le Carre’ and the heir apparent to Graham Greene.

MORE INFO: Sarah Vowell works with “826NYC,” a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6-18 with their writing. 826 believes that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success. Their free programs are challenging and enjoyable, and aim to strengthen each student’s power to express ideas effectively, creatively, confidently, and in his or her individual voice. There’s a branch in LA: 826LA.

“Worse than Watergate“: that’s what JOHN DEAN says about the Bush White House practice of secrecy and deception. John Dean of course served as counsel to President Nixon at age 31, a job he did for a thousand days.
SEE John Dean at the BookFest at UCLA, Sat. 1130am, Korn Convocation Hall

Also: MAUREEN DOWD, the New York Times op-ed columnist: she’ll talk about what she calls “Bushworld“: “It’s their reality,” she says. “We just live and die in it.”
SEE Maureen Dowd at the Bookfest at UCLA, Sat. 1130am, Korn Convocation Hall

Plus: VICTOR NAVASKY: he’s the renowned editor, writer, and teacher who has been at the helm of The Nation for almost thirty years. Now he has a new book: A Matter of Opinion, an extraordinary political document: a spirited, provocative argument for independent journals of opinion as vital to the health of democracy — a wonderful book, and a funny one too.
SEE Victor Navasky at the Bookfest at UCLA, Sat. 130pm Rolfe 1200

AT THE BOOKFEST AT UCLA, STOP BY AND SAY HI: Jon Wiener at The Nation Booth 344, Saturday 300pm.

OUR RECENT GUESTS AT BOOKFEST:
SATURDAY
11:30am: Together at Last: John Dean, Maureen Dowd, and Jon Wiener: Korn Hall
12:30pm: Adam Shatz: “Islam Now”: Haines 39
1:30pm: Victor Navasky: “Hollywood and the Reds”: Rolfe 1200
2:00pm: Russell Jacoby, Jonathan Schell, Amy Wilentz: “Outsourcing Democracy”: Haines 39
3:30pm: Chris Hedges: “Covering War”: Haines 39
3:30pm: Richard Steven Street: “California Farmworkers”: Korn Convocation Hall

SUNDAY
10:00am: Katrina vanden Heuvel, “America’s Political Culture”: Moore Hall 100
10:30am: Melissa Boyle Mahle, “The New World Order”: Haines 39
1:00pm: Steve Fraser, Adam Hochschild: “Writing Epic History”: Dodd 147
1:30pm: Marc Cooper: “A Sense of Place” Franz 1178

Complete festival schedule at www.latimes.com/extras/festivalofbooks/ Tickets FREE but REQUIRED: available at Ticketmaster: info at www.latimes.com/extras/festivalofbooks/ticketing.html

Once upon a time — you looked so fine: It’s the 40th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” — GREIL MARCUS will talk about the “explosion of vision and humor that forever changed pop music.” His new book is Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads.
Playlist: Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone” — Highway 61 Revisited
Jimi Hendrix, “Like a Rolling Stone” — Jimi Plays Monterey
Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone” — Live 1966

Also: It’s the 2nd anniversary of the fall of Baghdad to US troops: we’ll speak with Karen Houppert about the lives of military wives, whose ranks range from the gung-ho to the openly rebellious. Karen wrote about “The New Face of Protest” for The Nation; her book is Home Fires Burning: Married to the Military–For Better or Worse.

Plus: VED MEHTA is the essayist who wrote in the New Yorker about his early struggles with blindness–he was a staff writer there for 33 years. He’s been awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships and a MacArthur Genius grant. Now he’s published the 11th volume of his Continents of Exile series: The Red Letters: My Father’s Enchanted Period, about his discovery of his father’s affair with a married woman. The Times Literary Supplement called it “nothing less than a literary masterpiece.”
Ved Mehta will be speaking at the LA Times Festival of Books at UCLA on Sat. Apr. 23, at 1100AM in Haines 39.

Jerusalem and Gaza, Israel and Palestine: as the Israeli government and military prepare to dismantle the Gaza settlements, the settler movement prepares for massive resistance: AMY WILENTZ will be live in-studio with our Mideast update. Her “Letter from Jerusalem” appears in the April 18 issue of The Nation.

Also: Farmworkers in California history: RICHARD STEVEN STREET talks about his prizewinning Beasts of the Field — it’s a magnificent book, beautifully written and exhaustively researched. It demonstrates how much difference, and how much change, can be found in that history. He’s also published a companion volume, Photographing Farmworkers in California.
Read Jon Wiener’s review in The Nation Apr. 11: www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050411&s=wiener

Plus: A park ranger on patrol in the Sierra: JORDAN FISHER SMITH tells his story in Nature Noir. Mike Davis calls it “A walk in the woods like Thoreau never imagined . . . . this astonishing book, with its brilliant interweaving of murder, irony, and natural history, invents a new genre.”

Finally: Our musical tribute to Pope John Paul II from PHRANC, the all-American Jewish lesbian folksinger: “Caped Crusader” — from the CD “Phranc Folksinger” (Phancy Records 2005).