"Human Harvest"

The place: San Francisco, near Civic Center, in the midst of the pandemic. There's a village of tents housing the unhoused, set up by the city with daily management outsourced to a nonprofit called Archemy, short for "Architectural Alchemy." The city, we are told in the new novel by Chico State grad Phil Semler, "wanted to get out of the business."

Those who run the village are ex-cons, chief among them Jack Roderick ("Rod"), out of prison "after serving twenty years for second-degree murder." Armed with a sociology degree earned during his stay he soon finds work overseeing the village with its yearly budget of $15 million.

Enter the shady operation called The Harvester Network dealing in the buying and selling of organs, preying on those in tents, enticing them to "donate" a kidney in return for money. 

The organization brokers organs for customers rich enough to pay the extravagant prices. A "doctor" performs the transplant in a room somewhere, and if the donor doesn't survive, the doctor chops them up and sends the parts to a landfill. Or so it happens in "Human Harvest" ($4.99 in paperback, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle).

Semler, a San Francisco resident for some forty years, majored in Philosophy at Chico State back in the 70s. His novel raises ethical questions, certainly, but in some sense it's about the mystery of time. 

For Rod, in prison, "the days go on, they roll out, flatten, and in their heap, you finally get used to the poison of time by taking lesser amounts to get used to the poison of time. This was called many things. Resilience, mutability, getting used to not getting used, becoming a prisoner, lying in bed on a warm summer evening, unable to sleep, listening to the guttural rumble of long-haulers on Highway 50 fixated on time's flow."

Lyricism gives way to love, found and lost (mostly lost), and gross violence. As one character observes, the story is about "forgers, money launderers, murderers, unlicensed physicians, loan sharks, smugglers, cleaners, pimps, fraudsters, drug dealers, organ traffickers, arms dealers, disposers of corpses, assassins, and god knows what."

By the end, readers will be ready for a long, hot shower.

"English Composition: Writing For An Audience (20th Anniversary Edition)"

Longtime Shasta College English instructor Peter Berkow, who two decades ago developed an innovative PBS television series on writing, is now making those episodes available through an ebook.

As Berkow told me in a recent Zoom conversation, ebooks lacked the capacity to stream video but his project changed all that, most notably for the millions of libraries worldwide that subscribe to the popular EBSCO ebooks database. Librarians can easily license the book for patrons, or interested readers can purchase it directly from Amazon.

"English Composition: Writing For An Audience (20th Anniversary Edition)" ($40 in Amazon Kindle format from Peter Berkow Productions) offers twenty chapters, each streaming a half-hour video Berkow created for PBS. 

The book-and-video package covers all the expected topics of an English comp course (narrative writing, comparison-and-contrast, research, editing, and even "writing under pressure"). What sets this book apart is that it's downright fun (and funny) to view (and read). 

Berkow emphasizes writing "in the real world"; each video features interviews not only with Butte College, Chico State, and Shasta College instructors, but locals in a variety of occupations, from police work to engineering--not to mention NFL football coach Bill Walsh, rock icon Joe Satriani, or Academy Award winning writer-director Peter Farrelly emphasizing written expression. 

Chapters introduce the video topic and then consider themes in detail, drawing on interviews with writers including Frank McCourt, Sue Grafton, Charles Johnson and Chitra Divakaruni. Of special note are interviews with Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore (in their twenty-year-younger selves), each defining "welfare" in starkly different terms and thus opening up a persuasive writing discussion.

Berkow, former editor of this newspaper's "Off the Record" supplement, admits that the book "takes a rather mischievous approach to learning grammar, spelling, and punctuation rules." He finds special resonance with humorist Dave Barry, and warns students not to take Barry too seriously when Barry says of the comma, "wherever you just take a breath, you put a comma in. So, people who are in good aerobic shape hardly ever use commas."

This is the most uniquest book on English comp you'll ever view (just don't ever let Professor Pete hear you say that).

"Running From The Fire"

"My parents emigrated from Ukraine and wound up in East LA, where I grew up in the '40s and '50s." Little Phillip I. Elkins, "a skinny Jewish kid who needed glasses," learned to "pass" as Latino in order to survive in an area "rapidly becoming the largest Latino community outside of Mexico City."

He did so by "becoming a 'cholo' (or a 'pachuco,' or a low rider or street tough).... I dressed like a cholo and talked with a Mexican accent; I stopped hanging out with the white kids and all my friends were Mexican." His nickname was (and still is) Señor Felipe, who these days hosts "LA Sounds with Sr. Felipe" on Chico's KZFR.org. (Earlier he managed Chico Natural Foods and produced a line of organic salsas.)

How Elkins got from there to here is the subject of a series of autobiographies. The latest is "Running From The Fire" ($16 in paperback, published by Señor Felipe Press, P.O. Box 364, Forest Ranch, 95942; djsrfelipe@aol.com) taking Elkins from his early years through high school and some community college, and then, in 1966, being drafted into the Army at nineteen. As the book ends, he is preparing for Vietnam.

It's a raw yet oddly wistful tale of friendships, fistfights, girlfriends, making out, pregnancies, marriages, screwups and mishaps, seasoned with enough barnyard cussing to fill an oversized duffel bag. "Ahh, the joys of becoming an adult," Elkins writes. "What a long, difficult, complicated, and confusing road that seems to be."

Outside his circle he wasn't much accepted by the Mexican community, but he also didn't "know much about being Jewish" (apart from rampant anti-Semitism). His parents were a presence in his life (mostly his mom) but he leaned to fend for himself, more or less. At times, mostly less.

"All I really got out of basic training," Elkins writes, "was experiencing what it was like to be constantly tormented and threatened with 'going over to the jungles of Vietnam where many of you will die, hopefully as quickly and as painlessly as possible.'" His sadistic drill sergeant did not have a way with words.

But Elkins does. Saucy and savory, they tell an amazing story.

"Your Faithful Brain: Designed For So Much More!"

"Joy," writes Christian counselor Leonard Matheson, "is the designated state of a faithful brain, fully integrated with God, within itself and with others. Joy erupts as we're fully engaged in the moment."

After retiring from Washington University in St. Louis, and teaching graduate students in counseling at Covenant Theological Seminary, Matheson and his wife Mary moved to Chico where he is now in private practice, the founding director of Chico-based EPIC Neurorehabilitation & Psychology Services.

Drawing on his work in occupational therapy and neurology, Matheson views Christian spirituality through the lens of brain science. Published in 2014, "Your Faithful Brain: Designed For So Much More!" ($19.95 in paperback from WestBowPress; also for Amazon Kindle), by Leonard Matheson, PhD, is a popular (and very personal) exploration of his findings.

Chapters explore characteristics of the faithful brain (grace-blessed, loving, truth-guided) and include summaries and discussion questions. 

Though Matheson had pushed faith away, he writes that "God was placing in my life people who eventually would draw me back to Jesus, including Danny Munday" whom he met in "Rancho Los Amigos Hospital on the first day of my career, February 3, 1970." 

Shrunken with spinal muscular atrophy (he would die at 15), Danny was totally dependent on others to remove the mucous from his lungs before he choked to death. Yet Danny was joyful; his goal in life was to kiss Jane Fonda (and it actually happened). Matheson learned of "the potential for joy up close to death."

Though people make decisions, not brains, a key insight into more faithful decision-making is the neuroplasticity of the brain; it can change and adapt. "As we practice following Jesus," Matheson writes, "our values begin as ideas we can consider and then test. ... As this process repeats, neuroplasticity gradually creates neural patterns of values that permeate the brain," developing "our character to gradually reflect the character of Jesus."

Such alignment is never perfect; we can't fathom all the possible neural combinations, Matheson says, since there are a "Godzillion" of them. But he is convinced that our brains can be rehabilitated and that we can live a life of joy, even up close to death.