Berkeley author’s book on ‘becoming Gandhi’ has a foreword by the Dalai Lama

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From fanciful works of fiction to deep dives into serious environmental issues, the current crop of new titles runs the gamut. 

Fiction

Last Light by Elizabeth Farnsworth

As the former chief correspondent for PBS NewsHour, Elizabeth Farnsworth covered conflicts in places like Iraq, Iran, Cambodia, Haiti, Chile and Guatemala. She’s a hard-boiled journalist and documentary filmmaker — not one to prefer fantasy over fact, or anything woo-woo. Yet, the idea for her first work of fiction came to her as a vision while sitting at her desk in her South Berkeley home. 

“All of a sudden, I saw a woman with a ponytail and a cowboy hat on. She’s riding a horse and looking through a barbed wire fence. On the other side of the fence is a one-story building and a man looking out at her through a barred window,” Farnsworth said. She sensed that the characters were in Kansas, where she grew up riding horses on the prairie, and thought, “well, those are my characters.”

Like riding horses on the prairie, many of the book’s details are drawn from Farnsworth’s life. She set the novella, a World War II mystery, in familiar territory: the Flint Hills just west of Topeka, Kansas, where the US Army housed ill or injured German prisoners of war in the fictional Buffalo Ridge Army Hospital. 

The woman in her vision, whom she molded into the character Isabelle Graham, speaks German and becomes an interpreter for German-speaking POWs. When she interprets for an amnesiac prisoner who claims to be a corporal but behaves more like a high officer, she is determined to discover his true identity — with dire consequences.

Growing up, Farnsworth knew that POW stone masons had created the Danforth Chapel at the University of Kansas, yet knew little else about the POWs in Kansas during World War II.  To fill out the historical sections, she spent long hours at the Kansas Historical Society and interviewing those who had written about real German spies. Through her research she discovered that “a great deal of information about the German Army came from German POWs,” she said. 

Writing the novella took five years because Farnsworth was working on other journalistic projects, most notably an interview with Chilean investigative journalist Mónica González Mujica for the UC Berkeley Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center blog. Farnsworth met Mujica while producing The Judge and the General (2008), a PBS documentary about the first Chilean judge to indict Augusto Pinochet for murdering and kidnapping political opponents. 

At one point, Farnsworth struggled with the book and considered giving up. Along the way she received “so much help” from friends in the literary circles she travels in, among them the poet Brenda Hillman. Once completed, Farnsworth had a hard time finding a publisher because the book is a novella. She’s glad she persevered.

“Fortunately,” she said, “it’s selling.”

Last Light is Farnsworth’s second book. A memoir, A Train Through Time, explores the connections between her mother’s death when she was 9 and how she came to cover mass death and disaster. The idea for that book also came to her in a vision. 

“This is nothing new for me,” Farnsworth said. “When I was young I had a strong imagination and also had imaginary friends. My cousins would tease me about them.” 

Flint Hills Publishing, 177 pages, $15

Things I want Back from You by Elizabeth Stix

In the fictional Bay Area town of San Encanto, a card club and a pizzeria make up the “downtown.” There’s also a storage facility, a petanque park, the obligatory cul de sac of single-family houses and an apartment complex that houses the newly divorced. 

In the hands of Berkeley short story writer Elizabeth Stix, that seemingly benign suburb becomes the backdrop for the sometimes fantastical and macabre incidents that take place in her debut collection of 20 stories.

San Encanto is where a lonely wife discovers that her oppressive husband has become a dirigible that follows her from the sky, a neglected boy spends his summer unwinding a parasitic Guinea worm from his sister’s belly and an aspiring life coach attends a self-actualization seminar that goes wildly off the rails. 

“Suburban houses are clean and tidy and have a really un-alarming presentation, but they’re set apart from one another and it’s impossible to know what’s going on inside,” said Stix, herself a product of the California suburbs (Mill Valley, Fairfax and La Jolla). “I think suburbia is a ripe setting for exploring family secrets, coming of age, the search for connection and subtexts that are brewing beneath the surface. All the stuff that’s fun to explore in fiction.”

Stories in the collection have previously appeared in such publications as McSweeney’s, Tin House and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. While each stands alone, the stories are linked, so some of their characters reappear in other tales. While Stix enjoys adding surreal or fantastical elements to her storytelling, she also grounds some of them in reality.

“The surreal stories explore the same themes and plots as the literal ones, but from the perspective of the subtext or subconscious” Stix said,” “So I needed to create a world where both realities — the literal and the fantastic — could co-exist. Thus, San Encanto was born.”

The author Jonathan Lethem describes the collection as “rueful, lyrical, incisive, and funny as hell,” while fellow Bay Area writer Vanessa Hua calls it “by turns hilarious and heartbreaking.”

Black Lawrence Press, 179 pages, $22.95

California Dreaming by Noa Silver

Noa Silver’s debut novel, dubbed a “millennial bildungsroman,” is not autobiographical, although she and her protagonist, Elena, do share a teaching background and that generational label.

The Berkeley author taught English on the Marshall Islands and then got her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State before working as an editor on various oral histories. 

California Dreaming’s protagonist, Elena, arrives in the Bay Area as an idealistic Teach for America instructor. When Elena ends up a disillusioned project manager at a tech company, she must reconcile the person she imagined herself to be with the person she really is. 

Like Elena, Silver is a millennial and in the book explores the defining social and environmental events of her generation, as filtered through Elena’s perspective: the Occupy and #MeToo movements, the 2016 presidential election and California’s worsening fire season. She did not intend Elena to represent millennials. Instead, Silver is intrigued by “how place and time impact us and how we are of our contexts,” she said. 

She Writes Press, 312 pages, $17.95

The Goldilocks Genome by Elizabeth Reed Aden

Elizabeth Reed Aden’s debut novel leverages the Berkeley resident’s doctorate in biomedical anthropology, which led to her career in pharmaceuticals and biotech.

A mystery thriller, the novel follows Dr. Carrie Hediger, a fearless FDA epidemiologist in San Francisco who stumbles upon a web of inexplicable deaths. To solve the mysteries, Hediger assembles an eclectic team: a quirky pharmacologist, a cunning chemist and an enigmatic FBI agent “who ignites more than just her professional curiosity,” according to the synopsis. 

As the team navigates a labyrinth of data, a startling revelation emerges: the “Goldilocks Effect,” which causes individuals to seek the “just right” dosage in prescription drugs. The effect turns out to lie at the heart of the mysterious deaths. 

The book has garnered a five-star review on the website Readers’ Favorite: “It’s packed with gripping suspense and painful truths about the limitations of standard psychiatric treatment practices. The author powerfully illustrates the need for personalized medicine and its benefits.”

SparkPress, 296 pages, $17.95

Poetry

A Speaker is a Wilderness: Poems on the Sacred Path from Broken to Whole by Anna Goodman Herrick

The cover of Anna Goodman Herrick’s new book of poetry includes a paper-cut with Hebrew ceremonial text made by Eastern European immigrants overlaid with disco balls and plenty of pink. Such imagery hints at what’s important to this poet: diaspora, immigration, spirituality and ancestral wisdom, along with a pop aesthetic that aligns with her pink hair. 

The granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor who left home at 14, Herrick, who now lives in Berkeley, has been a New York City club kid, MTV writer-producer, Vedanta nun and student of Hasidic rabbis. In addition to being a poet, she is also a writer, filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist. 

The book’s title comes from a poem that references the Torah’s Ba Midbar, which means “in the wilderness, or desert,” and her ancestor’s ritual practice of elevating language, roots and folk etymology as spiritual meditation.

Much of Herrick’s subject matter examines familial legacy and struggle. In “But What If Generational Trauma ‘Is’ Generational Wisdom,” a teenage speaker confesses to her mother that she suffers from a sadness she can’t understand. 

Her mother seeks to explain the feeling by providing a litany of family tragedies — from her great aunt who survived Auschwitz but then got shot dead in a taxi ride to Bucharest to “women/who buried themselves/in men who buried themselves/in factory jobs and who made your mother/practice hiding in a New York City apartment/for when they come for us.” 

Ultimately, Herrick confronts this legacy of sadness, embracing it like a sleeping child in her arms. “It looks/just like you, you almost believe it came from you. You almost/believe it’s yours.” 

Monkfish, 81 pages, $17.99

Nonfiction

Taking Privacy Seriously: How to Create the Rights We Need While We Still Have Something to Protect by James B. Rule

Who gets to look into our medical records? What kinds of records are schools accumulating on our children? Which of our travels are being tracked through automated license plate readers or technologies that locate our cell phones?

These are some of the privacy questions the Berkeley author James B. Rule thinks we should all be asking ourselves. His new book, Taking Privacy Seriously: How to Create the Rights We Need While We Still Have Something to Protect, examines the origins of today’s privacy-eroding practices. The 11 key reforms he outlines are intended to help redress the balance of power between ordinary citizens and data-hungry corporate and government institutions.

Until then, however, individuals have few ways to protect their privacy online. “One would have to avoid most uses of the internet, pay only in cash, seek housing under an assumed name,” Rule writes in a publisher’s Q&A. “The more pertinent question, it seems to me, is what sorts of legal and institutional changes could we imagine that would take the greatest meaningful steps toward a more private world?” 

Rule has been writing about the control of personal information since his first book, Private Lives and Public Surveillance (1974), which revealed the operations of five information systems in the U.S. and the U.K. that collect and dispense personal data.

University of California Press, 328 pages, $24.95

Intertwined: Women, Nature, and Climate Justice by Rebecca Kormos

All over the world, women are disproportionately impacted by climate change — in some cases making up almost 90% of casualties from floods, droughts and extreme temperatures, according to Intertwined, a new book by Rebecca Kormos. 

The Berkeley author is a primatologist, wildlife biologist, conservationist, filmmaker, writer, National Geographic Explorer and one of the co-founders of the Women in Nature Network. 

Women also make up the majority of displaced people in the aftermath of dangerous climate events, yet are underrepresented at every level of decision-making about the future of the planet. Kormos sees womens’ involvement as key to the future of the planet. 

Intertwined joins the ranks of recent books like All We Can Save and Braiding Sweetgrass, that showcase women’s voices in the movement to combat climate change. Kormos takes this endeavor one step further with a global, intersectional narrative of how women and gender nonconforming individuals are doing the crucial work to reframe how we think about environmental activism. Ultimately, Intertwined seeks to prove that climate justice is inextricable from gender equality.

Intertwined is Kormos’ first book. 

The New Press, 336 pages, $27.99

Hugging My Father’s Ghost by Zack Rogow

Growing up, the Berkeley writer Zack Rogow heard stories about his parents’ glamorous lives in postwar New York. His father, Lee, cut a dashing figure. A World War II Navy captain who commanded a submarine chaser, he would become a drama critic for the Hollywood Reporter and a well-published short story writer after the war. He and his wife, who dressed in Dior, spent evenings in Manhattan, dancing the rumba to live bands at the Roseland Ballroom or the “Copa” and winning contests for their smooth steps.

The family’s fairy tale beginnings, however, ended tragically. Lee was killed in a plane crash when Zack was 3 years old. 

Hugging My Father’s Ghost is Rogow’s attempt to “solve the mystery of who my father really was.” Rogow does that by piecing together his own memories with his father’s writings, both published and personal, interviews and family photos. 

“I’m also imagining conversations between me and my dad, to try to understand him better, and to see him in the context of the times he lived in,” Rogow writes. “This book is a bit of a mish-mosh soup in some ways, but that method feels like the best way to get all the ingredients in the same pot.”

The publisher describes the book as a “gripping story of his family and the pressures of the Jewish American immigrant experience, with all its triumphs, beauty, humor — and tragedy.”

The poet Robert Pinsky calls the book a “moving story of grief, genius and laughter, beautifully told.” 

Rogow is also an editor, translator and playwright. His co-authored play, Colette Uncensored, premiered at the Kennedy Center in 2015 and has been performed on three continents since, running for several months at The Marsh in San Francisco and Berkeley in 2016, and then in London, Catalonia and Indonesia.

Spuyten Duyvil, 233 pages, $25

Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert by Sunaura Taylor

As one reviewer put it, Sunaura Taylor has brought disability into landscape studies and landscape into disability studies. Her new book, her second, is Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert. 

Taylor, who now lives in Berkeley, spent the first six years of her life in what she describes as “a wounded desert” in Tuscon, near a contaminated Superfund Site where Hughes Aircraft had been dumping poisonous chemicals since 1952. When the site overflowed, it would kill nearby cottonwood and mesquite trees and all other plant life in its wake and eventually seep down into Tuscon’s aquifer. The contaminated aquifer has largely affected the largely Mexican American community living above. 

“The story I grew up with was that this contamination was likely what led to my disability,” Taylor told KJZZ, an NPR member station in Phoenix, in June. Instead of writing about her own disability, which she does not name, Taylor has been more interested in understanding what would become her obsession: disability as a concept and a way of thinking about nature. 

Her groundbreaking work lies at the intersection of disability studies, environmental justice, multi-species studies and art practice. At UC Berkeley, she is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. 

In a March 5 talk at the university, Taylor said her first book, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (2017) aimed to challenge the ways the disability movement and animal movements have been pitted against each other. The book also created “an opening” that led to her latest book.

Taylor returns to Tuscon’s injured landscape and follows its “disabled ecology,” the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and altered. What she finds are entanglements that stretch far beyond the Sonoran Desert: stories of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries but also of alternative modes of connection, solidarity and resistance — an “environmentalism of the injured.” 

Disabled Ecologies ultimately urges readers to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment and assistance this age of disability requires.

University of California Press, 368 pages, $24.95

Becoming Gandhi: My Experiment Living the Mahatma’s 6 Moral Truths in Immoral Times by Perry Garfinkel

Truth, nonviolence, vegetarianism, simplicity, faith and celibacy. These six key principles championed by Mahatma Gandhi so interested the Berkeley journalist Perry Garfinkel that he attempted to follow them on a daily basis for a year. His experiment, which ended up taking 18 months, forms the basis of his new book.

Though the idea came to him more than a decade ago, it took Garfinkel another 12 years to build up the confidence — and the funding — to begin a journey that would require travel to three continents and challenge the core beliefs of his own mind. 

“I knew the hard part of this goal would be living these principles day in and day out on a personal level,” he writes. But Garfinkel also gives himself some slack. “If I ‘fell off the wagon,’ I would forgive myself quickly and get right back on it.”

Vegetarianism, for one, is one principle that did not stick. Garfinkel is a self-described “pescatarian.”

To become Gandhi, Garfinkel travels to the Mahatma’s former homes: in India, England and South Africa, and American communities “where Ghandi’s spirit endures,” such as Skokie, Illinois, where a large Indian community, one of the 10 biggest in the U.S., erected a Gandhi statue to show their strength. In Rochester, New York, he interviews one of Gandhi’s grandsons, who established the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence. 

In addition to his own reportage and observations, the book includes a timeline of Gandhi’s life and a chart on his 4 a.m.-9 p.m. daily schedule, along with a foreword by none other than the Dalai Lama. “The author provides readers with an opportunity to discover the many ways in which Gandhi-ji contributed to making the world a better place and what each of us may learn from his example,” he writes. 

This is not Garfinkel’s first foray into Eastern philosophies. He is also the author of the bestselling Buddha or Bust  from 2007. 

Sounds True, 256 pages, $27.99

Toxic Water, Toxic System: Environmental Racism and Michigan’s Water War by Michael Mascarenhas

The United Nations recognizes access to safe, potable, accessible and affordable water as a human right. All over the world, countries struggle to fulfill that right. Here in California, the state’s water supply is residents’ No. 1 environmental concern. 

So when the state of Michigan failed to provide safe and affordable water to thousands of residents in Detroit, Flint, Benton Harbor and other majority Black cities in the state, “many asked how this could happen in a country that prides itself on being a champion of human rights and where access to water remains a leading public concern,” Michael Mascarenhas writes in the preface to his new book, Toxic Water, Toxic System: Environmental Racism and Michigan’s Water War. 

Mascarenhas, a Berkeley resident and UC Berkeley professor of environmental science, policy and management, exposes the consequences of “a seemingly anonymous authoritarian state willing to maintain white supremacy at any cost — including poisoning an entire city and shutting off water to thousands of people,” according to the book’s summary. 

The book weaves together narratives of frontline activities with archival date, drawing from three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Flint and Detroit. In particular, Mascarenhas highlights the activism of African American women, whose experiences and activism are frequently overlooked. 

The book “is not just the story of how the state failed Black communities in Michigan — poisoning an entire city and shutting off water to thousands of people,” he writes. “It’s an invitation to scholars and activists to think more deeply about the methods they use, the frameworks that guide their analysis, and their politics regarding environmental justice.”

Mascarenhas is also the author of New Humanitarianism and the Crisis of Charity: Good Intentions on the Road to Help  and Where the Waters Divide: Neoliberalism, White Privilege and Environmental Racism in Canada.

University of California Press, 276 pages, $27.95

Children’s

Wrong Way Home by Kate O’Shaughnessy

Berkeley author Kate O’Shaughnessy is a self-described book nerd who traded in her chef’s toque for a career writing children’s books. The book Wrong Way Home, for ages 10 and up, is her third.

Wrong Way Home tells the story of 12-year-old Fern, who lives in an off-the-grid, sustainable community called the Ranch in upstate New York. When her mother sneaks them away in the middle of the night, telling her the Ranch’s leader is dangerous, Fern doesn’t believe it. Suddenly thrust into a treacherous and toxic outside world, Fern only thinks about how to get home again. 

As time goes by, however, Fern realizes that life in the outside world isn’t so bad and that some of the things she learned at the Ranch were just not true. So she must decide how much she is willing to give up to return to the Ranch. Does she live a life based on the values of the Ranch or chart out a course of her own?

Penguin Random House, 336 pages, $17.99

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