Chico author's thanksgiving for six-man football

You don't have to be from Nebraska to appreciate Dick Cory's latest, "I Played Too! Six-Man Football: A Collection of Memories From Those Who Played the Game and Lived In Rural America" ($20 in paperback from the author at ubangarang@sbcglobal.net).

Anyone with small-town sensibilities will resonate with "those Friday nights when six did the work of eleven. . . . // farm boys and town boys finding common ground / in August heat and two hundred pounders plowing into / tender flesh and bone . . . seniors teaching freshmen not to whine. . . . " These are the words of Larsen Bowker, one of thirty-six contributors who, writes Cory, "played, cheerled, refereed and were fans of six-man football."

Cory will be signing "I Played Too!" this Saturday from 1:00 - 3:00 p.m. at Chico's ABC Books, 868 East Avenue (Walgreens Center).

In an email, the author writes me that "six-man football was the brainchild of Stephen Epler, who designed football for schools too small, too poor, or too distant to be consolidated to provide eleven-man. While teaching at Chester, Nebraska high school, he staged the first high school game on September 26, 1934."

Cory remembers his own high school days. "Community spirit and pride were wrapped up in the game," he tells me. "This spirit has all but vanished in these mid-America communities, which now resemble ghost towns. . . . Al Darby, who starred at Durham, represents California and Duane Falk played at Stanton, Iowa. All the rest came from Nebraska at a time where participation peaked at 189 teams in 1953, my senior year."

Cory includes a chapter on the rules of the game, one of which says that "When one team is 45 or more points ahead at the end of the first half . . . the game is ended immediately." These were the days before plastic helmets and faceguards.

As Falk notes in his chapter, "My wife tells me that our sports exploits have gotten better with the years. We seem to win more games by wider margins as the years pass by and of course we are instrumental in our team's success." Replete with old black-and-white photographs, "I Played Too!" lets the reader in on some of those stories.

Northstate author on how the mind can heal the mind

The premise of Patt Lind-Kyle's new book, "Heal Your Mind, Rewire Your Brain" ($26.95 in hardcover from Energy Psychology Press) is simple: "The brain's inherent transformational process can serve as a model or guide for how we can train our mind to be less intense and busy, and free from chaos, fear, pain, and inner wounds."

For the Nevada County therapist, effective training blends Buddhist meditation; the results of research on brain waves and neurotransmitters; and the use of the "enneagram" (a chart showing nine areas of personality structure popularized in the West by the Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff).

Lind-Kyle will be discussing her techniques this Saturday at the Chico Barnes & Noble from 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.

"Heal Your Mind" is subtitled "Applying the Exciting New Science of Brain Synchrony for Creativity, Peace and Presence." "Synchrony," Lind-Kyle writes, "is what integrates the neural pathways. When you are in stress, your emotional responses stop the Flow."

She identifies "four brain-wave frequencies--beta, alpha, theta, and delta," each associated with a neurotransmitter, such as serotonin with delta waves or dopamine with beta. The first half of the book investigates these relationships; the second part is a practical guide to deep meditation aimed specifically at each of the four frequencies. (A series of guided meditations, voiced by the author, is available on CD or in mp3 format from www.brainchangebook.com.)

The author writes that human brains evolved, adding "new brain centers" to the original "reptilian or old brain." These centers ought to work in harmony, directed by the prefrontal neocortex, the newest part of the brain, but there is "a fundamental flaw: The brain has not been redesigned after the addition of new brain centers at each stage of its evolutionary development, leaving us with a somewhat inelegant design. The result is that there are communication flaws that affect the natural energy flow circulating within the brain." That makes it hard to switch off the old fight reflex in stressful situations even though it's counterproductive.

Lind-Kyle believes that intentional mind training can help the brain rewire neuronal pathways, thus making it possible for all the brain centers to act in harmony and for various personality types to find "peace, kindness and happiness." It's food for thought.

Sacramento author on falconry and life: Who is the predator? Who is the prey?

When Rebecca K. O'Connor was eight, her grandfather pointed out a peregrine falcon on a rooftop in Riverside. "She's a falconry bird," he said. "Hear the bells? Look at the leather straps on her legs. They're called 'jesses.'"

Decades later, having endured an absentee mother and abusive stepfather, O'Connor (www.rebeccakoconnor.com) has a peregrine of her own. Though she has flown other birds, "falconry is different. Hunting with a bird is harder, more dangerous," and many fly away or are killed.

Her story is told in "Lift" ($18.95 in paperback from Red Hen Press). Like the talons of a raptor, the deeply felt words of the memoir dig into the reader and won't let go.

The author's multi-media presentation, "Winging It: Living a Life Shaped by Birds and Words," will be featured Saturday at 7:00 p.m. at Lyon Books in Chico.

She calls her bird "Anakin." As in Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader. He "is so light on my glove. We weigh them in grams, because ounces aren't precise enough to judge the incremental changes in their airy bodies. He is slightly smaller than a crow. . . . I've bought him to hunt desert doves."

O'Connor deftly weaves flashbacks with her sometimes fumbling attempts to train Anakin. "Predator worship is an odd thing, " she writes, "but perhaps not so odd for a woman. I am aware that I am more prey than predator. . . . I am no stranger to being stalked."

It is early on in training (and who, precisely, is being trained?) "The falcon and I look at each other, both startled. Then he bows his head slightly over the bird in his feet, snaps the neck and looks back up. He allows me to meet his gaze, seeing deep into his falcon's eyes and I understand that I could keep this predator on a line forever, but he will never be my pet. Over that shared look our relationship changes just a bit, because suddenly, we both grasp an obvious truth. I am looking into the eyes of a wild peregrine. It's so soon, only ten days, but it's time to let him fly free."

There's a lesson here, and it's not just about falcons.

Chicoan's graphic novel asks tough questions

Graphic novels are comic books for grown-ups. Full length, immersive, complex, they meld a particular (or peculiar) illustrative style with words that take on the big issues of life. Thus it is with "Spirit Armageddon" ($20.95 in paperback from www.iuniverse.com) by Zacheas Hertz, the pen name of twenty-year-old Chico writer Travis Henderson. Coupled with the manga-influenced design and black-and-white illustration of Serpentwitch, the story is the first in a planned series exploring a terrible human paradox: Is it the case that one must become violent to stop violence?

Henderson writes in a news release that he is a civilian pilot, recently enlisted in the Air Force, whose "true calling is with flight, but I find my pen has the strange ability to fly over paper" as well. "In both endeavors I lose myself to the awe and wonder of the grand scheme." The author will be signing copies of "Spirit Armageddon" at Lyon Books in Chico on Thursday, November 19 from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. as part of the bookstore's gathering of local writers, dozens of whom will be honored at the store through early December.

Zacheas imagines an earth in which falling asteroids are having a strange effect. As one character explains, "Random people from all over the world have been gaining powers. . . . The power we receive has an unfortunate side effect in many people, insanity fed by their own hate, fear, greed or what is most commonly called evil."

These "medians" ("it is what the media called the first ones and the name kinda stuck") wreak violence everywhere, and the government's Armageddon Project must stop it. Some medians can be rehabilitated, relocated, but others must be killed. "No therapist can fix them, no jail can hold them, all we have left is to consider the well being of the people around them." And so young Mino, herself imbued with the asteroid's powers, despised by others from her childhood, must now consider saving the very people who hate her.

There are lighter moments in the story, but many panels depict stylized violence, and the sounds--zziing, dharr, sett, sett, sett, srakh--rattle in the reader's head as power confronts power. The final question continues to resonate: "What have we all gotten ourselves into?"

Something in the fish: Chico State University alumna writes on the dangers of mercury

"When I began investigating my patients' elevated blood mercury," writes Jane Hightower, "I sought to gain a clear understanding of how mercury affects one's health. When information was not at my fingertips, I wondered why. What began as an investigation to help me diagnose mercury-related symptoms in my patients grew into another diagnosis--that of a broken, misused, and abused regulatory system."

Hightower, a Chico State University graduate, is a board certified San Francisco-based physician specializing in internal medicine. Her quest began with a patient in 2000 who exhibited fainting spells, "intermittent stomach upset, headache, fatigue, trouble concentrating, and hair loss." Other patients had similar complaints, and one other similarity: They all seemed to be fish lovers. Hightower, "who had a penchant for sorting out unusual or difficult cases," found herself embroiled in controversy beyond what she might have imagined.

The story is told in "Diagnosis Mercury: Money, Politics & Poison" ($24.95 in hardcover from Island Press) by Jane M. Hightower, MD. The author, recently in Chico for a book signing at Barnes and Noble and a talk at the university, became suspicious when she found that the various agencies charged with protecting public health disagreed among themselves about the dangers of mercury.

"Why did the EPA say that less than 5 mcg/l (micrograms per liter) of mercury in blood was our protective level, while the authorities in the California Public Health Department told me that you could have a level of up to 200 mcg/l will no ill effects? As for the FDA," there apparently was no "standard for human blood levels on its Web site. That was particularly disturbing because . . . the FDA had jurisdiction over all of commercial fishing." Some of the numbers were based on mercury poisoning incidents in Iraq decades ago, some on judicial fiat, and all on very little science.

Elevated levels of methylmercury (the organic form of the element) were finding their way into the human population. "Bodybuilders and dieters who consumed large quantities of canned albacore tuna and other large fish were also on top of the mercury gauge among patients in my practice."

The book is measured, data-driven, careful in its recommendations, and scarier than any Halloween goblin.

Paradise Town Manager find his muse in poetry and story

Chuck Rough, Paradise Town Manager for more than a dozen years now, is also a creative artist. His first published book, a collection of poems, short stories and the first ten chapters of a new novel, will be christened tonight at a book launch party in Paradise, and then sent out into the world. (For more information, contact the author at clroughjr@sbcglobal.net.)

"Private Roads in Autumn" by Charles Rough ($19.99 in paperback from Xlibris Corporation, www. xlibris.com), available at Lyon Books in Chico, is about perspectives. The story that ends the collection, "Sitting At the Bus Stop (In the Sun)," offers a coda of sorts for the rest. Somewhere, "on the corner of Fifth and Broadway," a man from "the old country," recently homeless but now a dishwasher living in a shared flat, waits for the crowded bus.

Others gather at the corner; "most kept to themselves and waited, staring blankly into the day ahead. . . . Each person had their own story to tell, to hide, or to change as the mood, situation, or years dictated--a story that was unfolding with the ending still in doubt, or more certain than any other truth in their lives."

In "Journey's End," the poet picks up the theme, making it more personal, at a "weather-beaten pier" somewhere near the Pacific Coast: "Looking upward, / the first glimpse of a new day's sky / struggles to break through the darkness; / its fate in this part of the world / presiding over an ocean, / whose calm surface betrays / a relentless undercurrent. // And all the while, / the restless heart of a poet / finds itself struggling, / to navigate a course / that holds itself in check."

The stories feature restless hearts suffused with loss. In Honorable Intentions, set in 1962, Sergeant Jefferson must deliver devastating news to a soldier's family. There is another soldier in "Journeys," though he is not what he seems to be. In "Second Chance," a man knows where the bodies are buried. Literally. In "Conversation with a Troubadour," the narrator gets his groove back. By turns meditative and suspenseful, Rough's work takes the reader down twisty autumn roads, multiplying delight as the leaves--and pages--turn.

Upcoming radio interview to discuss "Book in Common"

This year's Book in Common project, which officially began last month with a presentation at Chico City Plaza, continues through the spring with book club discussions and a variety of other community activities.

The featured book, "The Soloist" ($15 paperback from Berkley Books) is by Steve Lopez, a columnist with the L.A. Times. It recounts Lopez' growing friendship over a two year period with a paranoid schizophrenic street musician, Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, who had played classical bass at Julliard thirty years before. (A film of the same name stars Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.)

This coming Wednesday, Oct. 21, your humble columnist is scheduled to co-host a discussion of the book with Nancy Wiegman in a special edition of her "Nancy's Bookshelf" program on KCHO (Northstate Public Radio, 91.7 FM) from 10:00 - 11:00 a.m. Guests include Book in Common representatives from Butte College and Chico State University, though many other organizations are participating this year. (Updates are available at http://www.norcalblogs.com/soloist/.)

Much has been made of the themes of homelessness and mental illness that pervade the book, but readers should know that it is also about self discovery. As Lopez says, "one reason I write a column is for the privilege of vicariously sampling other worlds, dropping in with my passport, my notebook and my curiosity." Fair enough, but the musician gets under his skin: "Nathaniel turns my gaze inward. He has me examining what I do for a living and how I relate to the world as a journalist and as a citizen."

There is more: "I experienced the simple joy of investing in someone’s life, and the many frustrations have made the experience all the more rewarding and meaningful. I might not have always made the right choices in trying to help, but I came by each one honestly. I worked through the arguments for and against commitment. I wrestled with definitions of freedom and happiness, and wondered at times who was crazier—the man in the tunnel who paid no bills and played the music of the gods, or the wrung-out columnist who raced past him on the way home from sweaty deadlines to melt away the stress with a bottle of wine."

A haunting question, and not just for columnists.

Orland novelist's tale of Mayan intrigue has a contemporary moral

In 1990 Orland resident Ronald Petty explored the Mayan temple Xunantunich, "in Belize, near Guatemala," he writes, pronounced "SHOO-nahn-TOO-neech." Later, as an encouragement to his daughter, facing an illness that would take her life, Petty wrote a story about a Mayan princess, also afflicted, who must find the meaning of her days.

That story has become "War Star Rising! The Legend of Toucan Moon" ($15.95 in paperback from Star Publish LLC), a young adult novel set in the year 850, in the Yucatan Peninsula, with a decidedly contemporary sensibility. Petty, writing under the name ZooDoc (www.zoodoc-stories.com), tells of a peasant girl named Honeybee chosen, with her widowed mother, as the new family of the great emperor Kamenkamen. Honeybee is renamed Toucan Moon after the moon goddess provides another sacrifice in place of the child. The young princess, approaching her teenage years, is about to change Mayan civilization.

The author will be signing books this Saturday at 2:00 p.m. at the Chico Barnes and Noble store; the public is invited.

"War Star Rising!" (the reference is to the ascendency of Venus and an impending attack from a nearby Mayan kingdom) is billed as a "historical fantasy adventure." In ZooDoc's imagined world the great beasts, the jaguar and the condor, watch over the affairs of humans. It is a world in which Toucan Moon, who has gained the love of her adoptive father, can convince him that the will of the gods is for a "new law."

"I think human sacrificing is barbaric!" she tells her nursemaid. "That is why we constantly have wars, do you not know? To enrich the plundering victors and to gather slaves for hard word and sacrifices. . . . I remember how awful it was to find out that the father of my best friend was killed in some stupid war, or the mother of someone was sacrificed to appease the sun god, and everyone said it was . . . so stinking honorable."

Honeybee herself is subject to terrible seizures, and must journey to the Cave of the Wise One to find the meaning of her remaining days. The legend ever after tells of a brave princess who found "lasting peace for the chosen ones who show love."

Chico author's medieval journey to Compostela Cathedral in Spain

It's called "furta sacra," holy theft, and when a warrior knight steals two thorns, relics of Jesus' Crown of Thorns, from a monastery in the Pyrenees, a young man undertakes the task of recovery. He is eighteen-year-old Xavier Elgorriaga of Pamplona, "tall, slender, and handsome with the tawny skin of a Basque," a reverent and good-hearted soul eager to test his manhood on the Way as he journeys to the fateful meeting with the knight, fighter of Moors.

The "Way" is the Way of Saint James or Camino de Santiago, "the 500-mile medieval pilgrimage route from the Pyrenees across northern Spain to the Compostela Cathedral" where pilgrims venerated the bones of Sanctus Jacobus, hoping to find "remission of sin and induce the saint to intercede with Christ or Mary on their behalf." The trek was fraught with danger from bandits, disease and inhospitable weather.

Chico writer Neal Wiegman, an expert on Spanish literature, traveled the Way with his wife, Nancy (the host of Nancy's Bookshelf on Northstate Public Radio, KCHO, who recently interviewed your humble columnist for an upcoming program). "Walking the Way: A Medieval Quest" ($17.95 in paperback from WingSpan Press) by Neal A. Wiegman uses the fictional Xavier to paint a detailed picture of life along the Way in 1160. It is travelogue filled with exalted churches and spiritual epiphanies, stork lore, true love, jousting, a disquisition on dung and, later, a pirate attack.

Wiegman will be presenting a slide show and book signing tonight at 7:00 p.m. at Lyon Books in Chico.

The author imagines Xavier as a jongleur, "a teller of tales," gifted with a facility for languages and a prodigious memory, allowing him to recite sections of Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and tales of El Cid, the Spanish hero, and portions are included in the narrative.

Xavier also carries with him the Liber Sancti Jacobi, The Book of St. James, which includes a guidebook for the Way, enabling Wiegman to blend period sources with his own observations. The resulting account, each chapter of the novel devoted to one of the dozens of stops along the Way, offers a nuanced and captivating tour filled with sights, sounds and smells.

It's a tasty stew, good with wine.

Three Chico-area poets

Lyon Books in Chico is hosting a poetry reading and book signing tonight at 7:00 p.m. featuring Chico artist Bob Garner, Magalia poet Lara Gularte, and Chicoan Sanford Dorbin.

"Paper Dolls" (from fakepublishing@csuchico.edu) features a dozen Bob Garner poems, several of which first appeared in Watershed and the California Quarterly. The poet takes the reader to places of the mind, "deep / into the country of night" ("The Dream"), to the "kaleidoscope / of broken bottles / just below the pier" ("Memory Loss"), "when death bangs on the door / with both hands and feet, / reasonably tired and irritable / from another day of pointless conversation. . . ." ("Learning"). No pointless words here.

Lara Gularte's "Days Between Dancing" ($10 from The Poet's Corner Press) is about hard things, tragedies, people "grateful for the night, / the black hole / that swallows up the glare of the day. . . ." ("Night"). In "The Haunting," the poet writes of her mother: "Her ghost still hovers, / reminding me that I slept / and drank from her body. / I fear she will come back, / hook me with her nails, / try to pull me back inside her." There is "Aunt Louisa Amaral": "She was like skim milk, / pale and thin. . . ."

Sanford Dorbin is a "septuagenarian, mobile division" and a retired academic librarian. Dorbin's acerbic perspective is on full display in "Saying Goodbye to Babylon" ($5.00 from The Singlefooter). Here's "Nomenclature": "'You must be,' he said / mouth foaming with disgust, / 'one of those--relativists // and I reply with a smile / dazzling as ice, / 'Absolutely.'"

But there's celebration as well. The poet, hapless dad, helps deliver "Bozo Supreme," who, later, "so verbally dexterous at two-and-a half-- / this little linguist laughs, and running the changes / like the bebop king he is, laughs again and allows / 'Bozo Sucreme' to appear. And he's right, / he is the cream--the top. He'll turn sour / when it suits him. . . ."

In "Weekend Out of State" two lovers "dress and descend / to the lobby, and breakfast, fitting like silk / into the echo of other people's chatter." A fitting way to end a book, and this review.

Rock novel from Paradise writer hits all the right chords

According to an author's note, Chad Peery played "bass guitarist for John Kay & Steppenwolf, and Fleetwood Mac's Bob Welch." His rock reminiscences appear on his Web site, www.chadwrite.com, and it's clear that Peery has had an exceedingly full life. Now he can add "novelist."

With a rock sensibility and unbounded imagination, Peery takes his characters into uncharted territory, and back. In "Smoking Jimi" ($14.95 in paper from CreateSpace, available locally at Lyon Books and Made In Chico) former "Jammies" 70's guitarist Brad Wilson (now a photographer) is sucked back into playing by a most bizarre offer.

It's 1999. Ex-band-manager Mitch Damian shows up with a million dollar offer to get the band back together and play for an eccentric millionaire in South America. Wilson is skeptical, since thirty years ago Damian had absconded with the money from the band's record deal. Part of the fun in the first half of the novel is how ne'er-do-well Damian, with Brad's reluctant assistance, actually gets the group together--or what's left of it. One had committed suicide (no help there); another had become a monk and a third, whacked out on drugs, had joined a survivalist compound in Colorado.

Wilson picks up a guitar: "I pressed the whammy bar to dip the pitch of the strings, and it snapped back into perfect tune, unlike my old Stratocaster. . . . What a thrill to play again, and to have a reason for playing again." Later, when the band actually makes it to Pablo Lupa's estate, the music flows (Lupa has spiked the punch), and Wilson looks for words: "How I had forgotten the magic, when your body, mind and soul become the music, flowing in a beautiful ribbon. . . . Finally, I hit one last, sustained note, and then allowed it to descend slowly like a waterfall over a bridge of rainbows."

Pablo Lupa takes "smoking Jimi" literally and all seems over for the band when Lupa's real intentions are revealed, the compound is engulfed in military conflict, and Wilson mourns a lost lover. But the story is not yet over, and Peery has produced a hilarious, improbable stew of oddball personalities enmeshed in music, madness and mystery, and love that rocks the world.

Paradise photographer contributes to Dashiell Hammett book

"Samuel Dashiell Hammett arrived in San Francisco summer 1921 and left in the fall of 1929. He began writing in this city, finishing . . . what stands today as his single most famous work, The Maltese Falcon." So writes Don Herron, the author of an engaging new book, "The Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook" ($19.95 in hardcover from Vince Emery Productions).

Revised and expanded from the original edition, the book features maps by Paradise resident Mike Humbert as well as ten of his black-and-white photographs of present-day San Francisco, including the building at 891 Post Street where Hammett lived in apartment 401.

The book also includes a new preface from Hammett's daughter, Jo (who calls her father "Da-SHEEL" rather than "DASH-ull"); "On the Trail of Sam Spade" by detective novelist Charles Willeford, and an entertaining biography of Hammett by Herron himself. Most of the book is taken up with a leisurely look at more than thirty Hammett sites, including Burritt Street. Humbert provides a close-up of a bronze plaque at the same location that says "On Approximately This Spot, Miles Archer, Partner of Sam Spade, Was Done In By Brigid O'Shaughnessy."

Hammett, born in 1894, lived sixty-six years, long enough to consume vast quantities of alcohol, to be consumed by tuberculosis, to marry and beget two daughters, to carry on a three-decades affair with playwright Lillian Hellman, to write pulp stories about a detective known only as "Continental Op," to invent hard-boiled detective Sam Spade and the booze-guzzling team of Nick and Nora Charles, to be labeled a Communist, incarcerated and blacklisted, and to become one of the most famous writers of his time with novels such as The Thin Man and Red Harvest.

Herron writes that "the San Francisco of Spade and the Op is literally built of truths, rumors, and lies: places like John's Grill that are as real as a dime; . . . places such as the Alexandria Hotel or Eddis Street which have never appeared on any map of The City. Hammett's detectives move across this imagined grid of reality, rumor, and falsehood--a mysterious and dangerous San Francisco created in the pulp magazines of the 1920s that has not lost its fascination or its hold on our imagination."

Chico couple views westward migration through the eyes of contemporary diarists

The Englishman William Woodhams, more recently from Michigan, crossed the Missouri River on April 28, 1854, arriving in Sacramento in August. On August 6 he wrote in his diary: "We of course (ragged in the extreme, unshaven and unshorn, knives and pistols at our belts) were rather wild looking even for California."

Those who journeyed west in the mid-nineteenth century were a motley crew, but many of them kept diaries. In fact, write Chicoans Andrew and Joanne Hammond, "it has been estimated that one out of every 200 emigrants kept a diary or journal of some sort."

The Hammonds have skillfully excerpted the diaries of "eleven women and twenty-six men who recorded their experiences while en route to Oregon, California and Utah" to form a roughly chronological account of the way west. The result is "The Look of the Elephant: The Westering Experience In the Words of Those Who Lived It 1841-1861" ($18.95 in paperback from the Oregon-California Trails Association, www.octa-trails.org, or from the authors at awham25@aol.com).

The authors write that "to have 'seen the elephant' meant that one had not only endured the rigors of the trail, but had survived as well. The expression still symbolizes the indomitable spirit of the emigrants and their ability to view extreme hardship with a sense of humor."

There were dangers along the way, not always external. "Less than a month after setting out, John Bidwell reported that 'a young man by the name of Shotwell while in the act of taking a gun out of the wagon, drew it, with the muzzle toward him in such a manner that it went off and shot him near the heart.'" The diarists include not only Bidwell but "querulous J. Goldsborough Bruff, considered by many to be the greatest diarist of all; the captious Joshua Variel; the upbeat but frequently ill Alonzo Delano; . . . the unfortunate Mary Rockwood Powers, whose physician husband appears to have been insane. . . ."

The Hammonds provide maps of each stage of the journey, black and white illustrations, and biographies of each diarist, along with insightful commentary. This is a treasure of a book, one that touches the heart of those long ago days before ever there were blogs.

Redding-area authors tell first-hand story of "Li'l Smokey"

The sky was studded with lightning. It was June 20, 2008. "Dry leaves and grass smoldered, then burst into flames. Fire crawled along the ground and into the brush and trees. . . . By sunrise the next morning over 2,000 fires blazed across Northern California. In the following weeks, wildfires would destroy more than one million acres, leaving at least 300 families homeless. Thousands of wild forest animals fled their homes. Many would not survive."

So begins the extraordinary story of "Saving Li'l Smokey" ($11.99 in paperback, www.lilsmokey.net) by Adam and Celeste Deem, with full-color illustrations by Ryan M. Lamb, a freshman at Redding's Foothill High School. Adam works for Cal Fire; on July 17, 2008 he was driving "deep into the forest" past Whiskeytown Lake "up the mountains to Shoemaker Bally." Suddenly he saw a bear cub whose paws "looked melted." It was no easy task getting the frightened and injured cub into his truck, but as the story unfolded in the media Li'l Smokey melted the hearts of people around the country and across the globe. The terrible fire season had a face.

Adam and Celeste will be reading their book this Saturday at 2:00 p.m., during the All Ages Storytime, at Chico's Barnes and Noble store. Afterward they'll sign copies and talk about what happened to Li'l Smokey after his rehabilitation with Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care (which will receive a portion of the book proceeds).

According to an authors' note, Celeste, raised in Alaska, first met Adam "while hiking in Northern California. Her motto was 'Love me, love my dog," and upon meeting Adam, he immediately began tossing a stick for Kody. They were married ten months later."

Back at headquarters, Li'l Smokey sat on Adam's lap "while the medical team examined the cub. Melisa gave the cub a cherry lollipop, much to his delight. He tried to eat the whole thing in one bite!" It was a sign of hope: "Maybe the cub would survive." Eventually, at Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care, the bear, paws wrapped in bandages, "feasted on special milk, peach nectar, and all the food he wanted, from blueberries and what grass to pieces of fresh salmon."

In the midst of destruction, these are the paws that refresh.

Shy Chico writer masters world travel on the cheap

The last decade has been an eventful one for Chicoan Brian Ward. It began with his enrollment in the study abroad program at Chico State University (which took him to Queretaro, Mexico), and ends with the publication of "Single Abroad: Tales of the Boyish Man" ($18 in paperback from lulu.com). Well, not ends, really; he writes that "my dream is to open a hostel in Latin America or work as a travel writer." He's in no hurry to settle down.

Ward's account of living on the cheap in Europe and Latin America is self-deprecatingly funny. He is shy around girls and can hardly find the courage to pucker up when one of them leans forward "within kissing range." Yet he craves traveling to new places and meeting people (he stays at the Flying Pig Hostel in Amsterdam's Red Light District to meet his cousin, Simon, from the Canary Islands). He just has a difficult time with women people.

Ward is home for a time and will be signing books at Cafe Flo, 365 E. 6th St. in Chico on Tuesday, August 25 from 6:30 - 9:00 p.m. Those with wanderlust and a hankering for new-climes-on-a-dime are especially welcome.

For a while Ward worked at Club Med Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo in Southern Mexico. A quarter century ago Club Med was synonymous with the swinging lifestyle, but now it caters more to families. His Club Med interview is quintessentially Wardian. Each potential employee had to demonstrate a talent since Club Med staff are encouraged to mingle with the guests as "gracious organizers."

"My name was called," he writes, "and I walked up to the front of the conference room. I didn't know what to say so I stated that I had gone to Chico State; everyone started cheering and pounding on the desks. . . . The recruiter (Amy) was smiling at me the whole time and asked me what classes I had taken at Chico State. I admitted that during my last semester I had taken Tae Kwon Do, Softball, and Jujitsu. The whole room started laughing." So he did some martial arts rolls and explained he used them "whenever I was thrown off my bicycle in order to avoid breaking my back."

He got the job.

Mia King's new novel debuts with book signings in Chico

"Mia King" is Darien Hsu Gee, married to Chico native Darrin Gee and mother of three. The couple lives in Hawaii where Darrin operates the Spirit of Golf Academy and Darien is working on her fourth book. The family is in Chico visiting relatives and celebrating the publication of Darien's new novel, "Table Manners" ($14 in paperback from Berkley Trade), a sequel to "Good Things."

Both Darien and Darrin (who has published several golf guides) will be signing their works at Lyon Books in Chico on Wednesday, August 19 at 7:00 p.m. and at Chico's Barnes and Noble on Saturday, August 22 at 2:00 p.m.

In "Good Things" forty-year-old Deidre McIntosh meets the man of her dreams, Kevin Johnson, the son of a very wealthy Seattle couple. At the end of the story she has received a commission from Jamison Cookies and Confections to produce a signature line of baked goods. Kevin takes her in his arms and calls her "sweet Deidre." And so a brand is born.

"Table Manners" (picked up by Rhapsody, the Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club) finds the harried Deidre facing cookie meltdown. Focus groups say her creations are less than splendid, and the company is demanding new recipes--in a matter of days. Her personal life is complicated by Marla Banks,"Seattle's prominent fiftysomething socialite and star of At Home with Marla Banks," and, oh yes, Kevin's sister. Marla schemes at every turn to undermine the growing romance. The reader is transported into a world of haute couture, gourmet foods, and sophisticated cattiness, especially when Kevin's ex-fiancée, "Tabby," makes an entrance.

Did I mention food? The reader will encounter "tarte tatin--puff pastry with crystallized caramel apples and cream. . . ." and les macarons Ladurée, featuring "delicate domes of almond meringue. . . ." There's a large recipe section at the end of the book highlighting "summer beef bourguignonne skewers" and "summer tomato-olive-caper salad."

As usual in a Mia King novel there are twists and turns, especially involving Deidre's friend, Lindsey, owner of a small but popular restaurant in Jacob's Point, a rural getaway beloved by both Deidre and Kevin.

In the end it's a story about finding your passion, especially when you're about to lose your cookies.

Local novelist delivers riveting crime novel

Imagine Newton, a "college community of approximately 150,000 people, although the number drastically reduces in the summer months due to the mass exodus of the student population. . . . But for all the splendor and beauty of this Northern California city, scratch just beneath the delicate surface of superficial tranquility to discover a dark murderous evil prowling the city." It is 2004 and there is a serial killer on the loose whose gruesome calling card can hardly be described in a family newspaper.

Area author Sherry Long, a hair stylist, mother and grandmother, probes the psychological depths of the "malevolent evil" stalking Newton in a fast-paced, violent and shocking tale, "What If You Hadn't?" ($29.95 in paperback from PublishAmerica). She will be signing copies of her novel this Saturday from 1:00 - 3:00 p.m. at Barnes & Noble in Chico. The public is invited.

When reformed hooker Bianca Fugate becomes one of the victims, Homicide Lt. Brad Belser finds himself falling head over heels for her friend, Teagan Chandler, right at the start of the interview. She is deeply attractive to the twice-divorced Belser, and Teagan is equally taken with him, a Russell Crowe look-alike "with seductive Johnny Depp eyes." She, too, knows the loss of love. Her college-days romance with her current employer, Alan, ended suddenly when she discovered him to be a faithless cad. Now he wants to renew the relationship, but she has eyes only for Brad.

Love, as it so often does, complicates the proceedings until Brad and Teagan are ensnared in a web of horrendous secrets.

There are lighter moments. Early on, Long has Belser "reading a book he couldn't put down. . . . 'The Truth About Jacob' was written by a first time published author. He'd read her bio on the back cover because he'd wondered to himself, what kind of woman could think of those twists and turns in the plot?" Sherry Long is that kind of woman, and she doesn't disappoint in her new novel, either. The language is raw and it comes mixed with sex and grisly death. The reader is drawn into the story, in spite of or maybe because of its ghastly scenes, and the emotions will not rest until the killer is found.

SHORT NOTICES

Who are the Signmakers? Los Angeles English teacher Kathleen Kaufman creates a near-future world in which Las Vegas and other cities become ecologically self-sustaining, but only because the mysterious Signmakers "permanently remove" anyone who does not go green. "The Tree Museum" ($14.95 in paperback from The Way Things Are Publications) traces the collapsing marriage of Nate and Rosemary. The delusional Nate, convinced he is directing a "dystopic love story," trails his wife across across transformed territory from Southern California to Colorado. The tale, stocked with paranoid wanderings and f-bombs galore, asks what price we might pay for a tyrannical harmony.

Chico State University philosophy professor Troy Jollimore won a National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. "At Lake Scugog" appears in the July 27 issue of The New Yorker. At the southern Ontario lake the poet observes that "up on the bank, who I am / maintains an uneasy truce / with who I fear I am. . . . // Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were / gingerly trades spots / with the person you are // and what I believe I believe / sits uncomfortably next to / what I believe. . . ."

Cover by Gahan Wilson. Copyright The New Yorker.

Cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham teaches psychology at the University of Virginia. He writes that "People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking." That suggests an answer to his book's title, "Why Don't Students Like School?" ($24.95 in hardcover from Jossey-Bass). Teachers assume students can learn principles in the abstract and then apply them to specific situations, and that "learning styles" are important considerations. The author disputes both of those claims. His conclusion? "Children do differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work."

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver's family tackles "living locally"

A few years ago Barbara Kingsolver, her husband, Steven Hopp, and their two daughters, Camille and Lily, moved from their home in Tucson, Arizona, to a farm in southern Appalachia. One of the reasons for the relocation was, as Kingsolver puts it, a desire "to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the ground."

For a year the family endeavored to grow what food they could, shop at local farmers' markets, and in general eat only what had been raised no more than, say, an hour or so away. There were exceptions: Steven had to have coffee and Barbara needed tumeric, cinnamon, and cloves, so they used fair trade channels. The result is chronicled in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" ($14.95 in paperback from Harper Perennial) by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. (Lily, Barbara notes, was too young to sign a book contract.)

Enloe Medical Center is sponsoring a brown bag lunch and discussion of the book on Monday, August 10th, from noon until 1:00 p.m. at the Enloe Health Learning Center, 1465 Esplanade at 5th Avenue in Chico. The public is invited.

Barbara writes that "we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew. We tried to wring most of the petroleum out of our food chain, even if that meant giving up some things. Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be us, as we learned to produce more of what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals and enough sense to refrain from naming them."

Barbara writes the main narrative, while Steven provides sidebars dealing with social and political considerations, such as issues surrounding factory farms (which he calls "concentrated animal feeding operations") or becoming a "locavore." Camille adds a teenager's take on eating spuds or free-range animals (and Barbara makes a case against the vegan movement). There are many recipes, with more resources at http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com.

All in all, for the family, and readers, a growing experience.

A pictorial history of the Chinese experience in California

Historian Hannah Clayborn, based in Walnut Creek, writes that "Word of the 1848 gold discovery in California first spread on ships, and the people of Guangdong Province, burdened at home with political corruption, war, and floods, were some of the first to hear of it." By 1852 some 25,000 Chinese were listed on the California census. "Their countrymen called them Gam Saan Haak (guests of Gold Mountain). . . . The typical Chinese argonaut was young, single, and uneducated. He intended to return to China with his fortune made."

Clayborn tells the story of a century of immigrant experience in "Historic Photos of The Chinese in California" ($39.95 in hardcover from Turner Publishing). It features nearly 200 images drawn from such collections as the Oroville Chinese Temple and Museum, UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, and the Library of Congress.

"Despite violence and discrimination," the author writes, "the Chinese clung tenaciously to Gold Mountain, taking jobs on road crews, reclaiming marshlands in the Sacramento Delta and Central Valley, digging reservoirs and wells in new towns, and piling stones for property line fences." And they worked on the railroad, "doing the most hazardous tasks involved in laying track over the Sierra Nevada."

One photograph shows a procession of some sort down Montgomery Street in Oroville ("City of Gold") around 1890. Clayborn notes the town "was once the center for a population of Chinese miners, railroad workers, and agricultural laborers reportedly numbering above 10,000."

Another image, from 1895, shows Chun Kong You, "the most prosperous Chinese businessman in Oroville." He owned the "Fong Lee (Big Profit) store, which sold herbs and was a licensed gold purchasing agency. His descendants . . . helped preserve the Oroville Chinese Temple."

With the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, the city's "old Chinatown, home to an estimated 14,000 people" became "a muddy mash of crusted pottery, ash, twisted metal, and an untold number of charred bodies." But in a twist of historical fate, the destruction of the birth records meant that "Chinese men could now claim citizenship and therefore the right to bring their families from China." A new Chinatown was built, families began to arrive--and so did the tourists. The story doesn't end there, and Clayborn's book repays repeated visits.