Coming this Fall: Dublin Reads Epitaph for a Peach

Calling all you gardeners, lovers of fresh food,  people who are interested in organic farming, and eating locally: we have made a selection for our next Dublin Reads and it is David Mas Masumoto’s Epitaph for a Peach.  From Mr. Masumoto’s website:

Epitaph for a Peach

“As pleasurable as a perfect peach, Epitaph for a Peach tells the passionate story of one farmer’s attempt to rescue one of the last truly sweet and juicy fruits from becoming obsolete in a world that increasingly values commerciality over quality. The story of Mas Masumoto’s Sun Crest peaches begins on the day he turns the bulldozers away from his orchards and vows to give himself four seasons to find a home for the fruits of his labor.

 

 

At once a deeply personal story, a sharp commentary about the state of American agriculture, a lighthearted rhapsody of nature, and an intimate glimpse into the Asian American experience, Epitaph for a Peach is about saving a peach, saving a farm, saving a family, saving a way of life–it is a story about finding “home.”"

Last year the Dublin Heritage Center co-sponsored Dublin Reads when we read Snow Mountain Passage.  We were not necessarily thinking  the Heritage Center would want to co-sponsor with us this year, since our selection is not historical.  However, this week I was having a conversation with Elizabeth Isles, the Director of the Center and I mentioned that we were doing Epitaph for a Peach.  Well, it turns out the Heritage Museum is going to have a new exhibit coming this Fall on farm life! 

Farm Life: a Century of Change for Farm Families and Their Neighbors is a traveling exhibit from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mid-America Arts Alliance.  As we talked, Elizabeth and I realized this exhibit connects beautifully with Epitaph for a Peach!

For the library’s part we will offer again free drop-in book discussions, a showing of the film The Real Dirt on Farmer John , and we are currently searching for a speaker who can come and talk to us about our food….where it comes from, eating locally grown foods, what is community supported agriculture and related topics.  We hope also to offer a visit with the author.

The Dublin Friends of the Library will underwrite this special event by providing multiple copies of the book, sponsoring our programs and contributing to book discussion groups. 

Elizabeth is planning a fabulous array of programs at the Heritage Center to coincide with the exhibit.  More details on events will be forthcoming!

Dublin Reads will kick off at Day on the Glen, September 20 & 21st and continue until October 31st.

 

Meet Author James D. Houston

DUBLIN READS Hosts Author
You’ve read the book, now meet the author!  DUBLIN READS concludes with a visit from James D. Houston, author of the highly respected novel, Snow Mountain Passage, and seven other novels including his newest book, Bird of Another Heaven.  Date: Sunday, April 13th Time: 2:00 p.m.                         Location: Dublin Library Community Room, 200 Civic Plaza, Dublin, CA His appearance is graciously sponsored by the Dublin Historical Preservation Association. For more information, contact  Peggy Tollefson at (925) 803-7269.

 

Experience the California Gold Rush!

On Sunday we have another special Dublin Reads Chautauqua event: storyteller Charlie Chin will be here doing a solo performance as the famous Chinese herbal doctor Yee Fung Cheung. 

Like so many others, Yee Fung Cheung was lured to California by the discovery of gold. However, after arriving in the gold camps, he found out that his services as an herbal doctor were needed by the Chinese miners.  His original herb shop, Chew Kee Store still exists as a museum in Fiddletown.

Charlie Chin brings Yee Fung Cheung and the Chinese experience during the gold rush to life. Charlie is a musician, historian, author and storyteller who has been in the forefront of Asian American artistic expression since the 70’s.  In 1989, he was named a Community Folklore Scholar by the Smithsonian Insitution. 

Please join us for this fascinating recreation of California history on Sunday, March 2 at 2:00 p.m.  This program is funded by the Dublin Friends of the Library.

 

music in the library

Adam Miller, folksinger and storyteller, will be here today starting at 2 p.m.  Adam has a repertoire of over 2,000 traditional and contemporary folk songs. Inspired as a child by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, among others, Adam accompanies himself with acoustic guitar and autoharp.  He is, in fact, known as one of the premier autoharpists in the world.

Adam has recorded three CDs of American folksongs, The Orphan Train and Other Reminiscences, Wild Birds and Along Came a Giant – Traditional American Folk Songs for Young Folks. Dublin has a copy of Along Came a Giant so be sure and check it out.

Adam is focusing today on songs of the California Gold Rush and the westward movement. This program is part of a series of Chautauqua events to coincide with Dublin Reads Snow Mountain Passage. Come for a relaxing and fun hour of music and entertainment!  Funds for this program have been provided by the Dublin Friends of the Library.

 

Juana Briones

I have to confess that my understanding of California history is very limited.   It’s not something I ever got in school in a consistent way; nor was it a subject that I was ever drawn to explore on my own.  Ironically, though I did not care much for the subject of California history, I did care about local history. The names of places, the origins of things, the beginnings.  If I am standing on Donlon Road looking at Old St. Raymond’s Church, there is a part of me that wants to know…where did this come from, who built it what was their experience of this land before freeways, strip malls, tract housing and office complexes?  I stand here now, but who stood before and what did they experience?

On Sunday we will be exploring the life of a woman who came much before our time….Juana Briones de Miranda.  She was born in 1802 of a mixed race couple that included Spanish, Mexican, African and Indian ancestry.  Her life, so unusual for a woman, but also for a woman of mixed race, included owning her own land, obtaining a legal separation from her husband at a time when there was no divorce,  successfully raising 8 children and supporting them with her own vegetable farm and cattle ranch. 

According to the Presidio of San Francisco website, without any formal training she was a nurse and midwife, a curandera, healer who was a legend in her own time. She treated smallpox and scurvy, set broken bones, used herbal remedies for her healing. As the political fortunes of California moved from Spanish, to Mexican to U.S. governance, and many other Mexicans were losing their rancheros, she took her claim of land ownership all the way to the Supreme Court and won. “One of the few Mexican women of early California who owned a rancho in her own name (not as inherited property of a deceased spouse), Juana’s life story is a model of personal integrity, economic self-sufficiency, compassion for others and success as a landowner against great odds,” writes Stanford History Professor Albert Camarillo in a Palo Alto Weekly column.

So you would think with all this achievement that there would be a book about her.  But there really isn’t.  What we do have though, is a wonderful storyteller, Olga Loya, who has fashioned a unique one woman performance piece on her life. In a dramatic monologue and dialogue with the audience, in English and in Spanish, Olga tells us the story of Juana Briones by becoming Juana Briones.  She will perform at the Dublin Library on Sunday starting at 2:00 p.m.

This event is part of the series of Chautauqua learning experiences coinciding with Dublin Reads Snow Mountain Passage.  It’s appropriate for families with children in elementary through high school. More information can be found about Juana Briones at these websites:

Juana Briones Heritage Foundation, www.brioneshouse.org

Stanford University Research at the Presidio of San Francisco, Tennessee Hollow Watershed Archealogical Project, www.stanford.edu/group/presidio/juana.html

There is one book about Juana Briones, The Stories of Juana Briones:Alta California Pioneer, which most unfortunately we do not own in Alameda County, but it can be borrowed through Link+. 

 

Dublin Reads @ the Heritage Center

“Think of America, I told myself this morning. The whole thing.  The cities, all the houses, all the people, the coming and going, the coming of children, the going of them, the coming and going of men and death, and life, the movement, the talk, the sound of machinery, the oratory, think of the pain in America and the fear and the deep inward longing of all things alive in America.”

With this great quote from William Saroyan in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, James Houston sets the tone for his novel Snow Mountain Passage as a drama of “inward longings” that prompted thousands to pack their lives up into a covered wagon and strike out for a better life. Early in the book Jim Reed exclaims to his wife Margaret, who suffers from chronic, severe headaches, “Suppose we could travel to a place where you would never have another headache?  Isn’t that worth considering?” And he eagerly reads to her from Lansford Hastings’ Emigrant’s Guide describing California, “a place free of pestilence, surrounded with pasturelands and sunny valleys where everything can grow and with unlimited water, no mosquitoes, no malaria.” As the wagons gather in Independence Missouri in 1846, ready to set out on the long journey west, these travelers felt “history gathering like a wind, like a river current that could not be resisted.” Jim Reed imagines that his wagon train will be among the earliest to arrive in California.  His wife lays out a tablecloth wherever she can find a patch of grass.  “We’re going to stay civilized,” she says, “no matter how far into the wilderness we may wander.”

If you are reading this wonderful novel and ready to talk about it with others, our next book discussion is this coming Saturday at 10:00 a.m.  We will meet at the Heritage Museum on Donlon Way, where Museum Director, Elizabeth Isles, and her volunteers will have for us a light pioneer breakfast of biscuits and bacon to set the mood.  After discussing the book, volunteer docents will be ready to give you a tour of the Museum an/or the Pioneer Cemetary.  It is so fitting to have a discussion of this book at the Museum where the permanent exhibit so carefully renders  the westward journey of Dublin pioneers.  Please join us Saturday morning!

 

“Dublin Reads” Chautauqua Program features William Harlan, Sunday October 14

This photograph is Jacob Harlan who, along with other family members, traveled with the Donner Party in 1846.  Coming up this Sunday, one of his descendents, William Harlan, will be speaking at the Dublin Library, talking about the Harlan wagon train and the forces that contributed to their successful arrival at Sutter’s Fort, 10 precious days before the Donners. Those 10 days made all the difference; the Harlans arrived during the same rainstorm that became the blizzard that trapped the Donners in the mountains.Their story is described in Bernard AugustinDeVoto’s book The Year of Decision (owned at Castro Valley Library and Fremont Main), and in a new, recently published book Eyewitness to the Settlement of the West, by Bruce E. Mowday. The photograph of Jacob Harlan is taken from Mr. Mowday’s website.

 The Harlan Family eventually settled in Yerba Buena (San Francisco), opened the first general store in the gold diggings in 1848, and landed in southern Contra Costa County in 1852; in fact the county line with Alameda County ran right through their ranch house! 

Mr. Harlan gives a fascinating talk about the Donner/Harlan wagon trains and subsequent fortunes of the Harlan family.  This is the first in a series of Chautauqua programs celebrating Dublin Reads.  Please join us, Sunday, October 14 at 2:00 p.m. in the Library’s Community Room!

 

Books Loose in Dublin!

Lions and tigers and books, oh my! 

Have you seen “wild” copies of Snow Mountain Passage and Patty Reed’s Doll in your neighborhood?   The library has released over 30 copies of the books that are hopefully moving from house to house throughout the Dublin.  These wild books have a label on the inside front page that says: 

I’m not lost…I’m a Dublin Reads book! 

Books were released at the library and the Dublin Heritage Center.  We’d like to track the movement of these books so if you have one or have passed one along, please comment on this entry and let us know where the book has traveled so far! After you’ve read and released the book be sure to participate in a discussion group.  The next one meets Thursday October 18 at 12:30 in the group study room at the library.

 

Donner Party film

Tonight we showed the PBS documentary film, The Donner Party: an American Experience.  I want to thank the audience for their patience as we worked through some technical difficulties.  I found the movie compelling and grim.  Very grim.  It’s hard to listen to some of it.  But it should be.  I liked very much how Ric Burns, the filmmaker, set these events in the context of a massive tide of  immigration west, and it was interesting to me that after word of what happened to the Donners got out, people weren’t so eager to come to California for awhile.  And what changed that  was the gold rush. 

Also interesting that 2/3rds of the women in the party survived while 2/3rds of the men died. 

Someone asked me after the movie, the names of the Dublin pioneers who were part of  rescue parties, and I could only remember the Fallons but I’m pretty sure there were others from Dublin. 

Ah the terrible hardships that people have suffered in order to seek a better life!

 

Dublin Reads

What would it be like if everyone in Dublin read and discussed the same book? Well, Dublin Library is launching a major reading event called “Dublin Reads.”  Half the fun of reading a good book is talking about  it — this program gets the whole community talking about the same book.

The chosen book is Snow Mountain Passage by James D. Houston.  In the 1840s, thousands of pioneers sought a better life by heading West.  Among the many who attempted this difficult journey was a party lead by George Donner and James Frazier Reed. Inspired in part by the glowing descriptions of California as a “new Eden,” the Donner party started west out of Springfield, Illinois, in 1846.  In vivid, cadenced prose, Snow Mountain Passage tells the story of these ill-fated emigrants who found themselves stranded in the Sierras during the Winter of 1846-47.

Copies of the book are ready for you to pick up at the Library and will also be seeded around the community.  The Dublin Friends of the Library have purchased multiple copies that people can “read and release” into the community — to a neighbor, at Starbucks, and other locations. By filling in the log inside the book, we’ll know where in the community the book has been.

During the course of the series, the Library is offering drop-in book discussion groups, film showings of the PBS documentary The Donner Party: an American Experience, and a series of Sunday afternoon Chautauqua programs that bring to life the historical context of the time period covered by the novel. You can get a full listing of programs on the library’s website. Our grand finale is a visit with author James D. Houston on April 13, 2008, so there is plenty of time to get involved!

Dublin Reads is offering a unique component differentiating it from similar “one city, one book” programs: the inclusion of a children’s book, Patty Reed’s Doll by Rachel Laurgaard. It was important to Library staff, if we were going to take on such an ambitious program, that it be all-inclusive and intergenerational. By including Patty Reed’s Doll as an option for children, people will have the chance to make this a family activity.

Join the journey! Attend a program, create your own reading group, pass the book along to a friend, discuss both books around the dinner table.