Summer is here, readers. Whether you’re stretched out on Memorial Glade or dreaming of swaying hammocks, cold drinks and a good book, relax because our editors and contributors have done the hard work for you: We’ve selected ten Berkeley-connected reads to indulge this summer. (OK, there’s one exception, but if you love to hate on that school down in Palo Alto, you’ll want to read this one.)
Let us know what you think of the list! Write to us at californiamag@alumni.berkeley.edu.
1. Brand New Beat
Peter Richardson, Ph.D. ’91
Richardson, whose previous book-length subjects include The Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and journalist Hunter S. Thomspon, continues to give careful consideration to 60s countercultural icons in this study of Rolling Stone, the rock ‘n’ roll magazine that was so much more. Cofounded by Cal dropout Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s genius was to blend sex, drugs, and music criticism with serious political commentary and investigative reporting. The model proved sustainable as music labels, wanting to appeal to RS’s young audience, took out beaucoup ads in its pages. Richardson’s compelling history, published by UC Press, only covers the first decade of RS’s run (1967-1977), but what an insane decade that was, with the Manson murders, the My Lai massacre, and the Patty Hearst kidnapping all in the news. Leaven that darkness with Dylan and the Stones, Joplin and Slick, and you had a brand new brand of magazine–one that survives to this day. While Richardson’s treatment is scholarly, the writing, mercifully, is not academic.
—Pat Joseph
2.Groundbreaking: My Unmapped Path as an Academic, Mother, and Gardener
By Clare Cooper Marcus, MCP ’65
When longtime Berkeley Professor Clare Cooper Marcus passed earlier this year, a theme emerged in all her obituaries, including in this magazine: She was a pioneer. In an age when aesthetics, and men, ruled in design, Marcus taught architects and landscape architects at the College of Environmental Design the importance of putting the user first in their work. Wary of award-winning design, she instead elevated the humble moments: a patch of usable green space in an affordable housing complex, planter boxes in a nursing facility, a bench in a hospital garden. She humanized design. In Groundbreaking, Marcus tells her story from the beginning, musing on how a little girl who survived World War II in England ended up a single mother and path-blazing professor in Berkeley. In a world that feels like it is increasingly being built for optimization and profit, this lovely memoir will inspire you to look for, and appreciate, the human moments around us.
—Esther Oh
3. House of Liars
by Jenny Williams ’04
Anna Olin is a failed novelist. So when she is invited to an island residency to compete for a million-dollar publishing contract, she seizes the opportunity. All she has to do is finish her novel and best four other writers—and one AI bot.
There is something about Lore Island that sparks dark desires within Anna, including a lustful fantasy involving a former friend. And when Anna receives a chatbot modeled after her own writing, she is drawn to explore its abilities.
Informed by Williams’ insider perspective on AI ethics garnered in her more than eight years spent working at Microsoft and Google, this story is for anyone navigating the complex relationship between humanity and AI. “The Hunger Games of writing retreats,” Williams writes. Releasing July 15.
—H.J. Valerio
4. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
By Michael Pollan
In Michael Pollan’s latest, the bestselling writer, Knight Berkeley journalism professor, and cofounder of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics picks up right where he left off. Having reintroduced LSD, psilocybin, and the like to everyday conversation (and usage) with his popular books and Netflix series, Pollan takes the natural next step in A World Appears; from consciousness-altering substances to consciousness itself. But the more Pollan learns from speaking with cutting-edge neuroscientists, psychologists, and biologists who are devoting their own considerable gray matter to the mysteries of the mind, the less he seems to understand about the what and how of consciousness, let alone the why. There are no neat and tidy answers at the end of this particular journey, but that’s precisely its payoff.
—E.O.
5. Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball
By David Henkin, M.A. ’92, Ph.D. ’95
If soccer is “the beautiful game” and football is “the gridiron game” what is baseball? Yes, “America’s past time.” But Professor of history David Henkin, author of Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball, would say it’s also a window to cultural change. Henkin’s book counters several assumptions about baseball, including that it’s an American sport and that it has fundamentally changed since its origin. Jumping between its 19th century roots and its current global presence, Out of the Ballpark investigates the structures of baseball competition, the “sacred scripture” of the rulebook, its traditions and superstitions, association with manhood, obsession with statistics, and its reflections of racial and ethnic change. This is not your typical baseball book.
—James Pagett Tollen
6. How to Rule the World
Theo Baker, Stanford ’26
You may ask yourself why this magazine would recommend a book about Stanford by a newly minted Stanford alum. Well, if you want more reasons to hate on your archrival, this book is for you. Baker was the student journalist who, writing as a freshman for the Daily Stanford, singlehandedly took down then-Stanford president Marc Trevor Tessier-Lavigne, whom Baker showed was guilty of improprieties if not outright fraud in his published research. Surprisingly, the author had no intention of becoming a reporter despite his parents both being celebrated journalists. A talented coder, Baker’s real ambition was to break into the tech world and it’s his computing chops that give him entree into what he calls the “Stanford within Stanford.” It’s a world where teenagers are wined, dined, and funded (often even before they have anything to fund) by rapacious venture capitalists looking to get in early on the next big thing. Baker’s title is taken from one of the most exclusive of the elite, secretive clubs on campus for those deemed the best and brightest. It is actually called How to Rule the World, or simply Rule by those in the know. Against all this hang several high-profile Stanford-related scandals, including Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos), and Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX). Add the ex-president himself and the whole culture begins to seem suspect. Baker’s telling is both illuminating and devastating. What Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker did to (or for) Wall Street, How to Rule the World does to (or for) Stanford. Is there a cautionary tale in it for Berkeley? There’s probably one for any major university. But you be the judge.
—P.J.
7. Shakespeare High and Low
By Jeffrey Knapp
More than four centuries have passed since William Shakespeare wrote his plays, and yet here we are, still puzzling over Hamlet’s paralysis and debating Shylock’s grievances. Surely that’s because he was a genius beyond ordinary understanding, isn’t it? Well, not according to Jeffrey Knapp. The Distinguished Berkeley Professor of English says The Bard is still relevant today for quite a different reason: because he wrote as a mass entertainer: “It was precisely his determination to connect with everyone in his audience that made possible the astonishing range and power of his drama,” Knapp writes in Shakespeare High and Low. He develops his case through eleven plays—starting with comedies before wading into dramas like Hamlet and Othello—always grounding readers in Shakespeare’s world, one where theater was deemed immoral and degrading. If you are intimidated by a 300-plus-page study on Shakespeare, rest assured: the footnotes are lean, the chapters all self-contained (perfect for skipping around as you take reading breaks to cool off in the waves), and the jargon kept to a minimum. This is, after all, Shakespeare as Shakespeare intended: for everyone.
—Nathalia de Alcantara
8. We’re Having Much More Fun
by Judith A. Peraino and Tom McEnaney
It’s the 1980s on Cal’s Sproul Plaza. The square has temporarily been named Biko Plaza after the anti-apartheid activist who died at the hands of South African police. The sound of hardcore band Special Forces provides the soundtrack to the student-led protests. Now that’s punk.
We’re Having Much More Fun is written by Cornell Professor Judith A. Peraino and UC Berkeley Associate Professor Tom McEnaney, but it’s hardly academic. Instead, it’s an analog archive of essays and interviews featuring punk rockers.
Cal alumni will recognize familiar locations that housed Bay Area shows but the book also covers punk scenes from NYC to LA.
“Maybe punk can’t do everything, but it feels like it can do anything,” Peraino and McEnaney write. Any reader, punk or not, will find the book’s riotous ensemble of art and writing inspiring.
—H.J.V.
9. Good Things
By Samin Nosrat ’01
Good things are better shared, says award-winning author and chef Samin Nosrat in her newest cookbook.
If you know Nosrat, you know that a recipe book goes against the ethos of her 2017 bestselling debut, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, where she set out to free cooks from recipes entirely. “I could never escape the feeling that each one felt like an attempt to capture, quantify, and define the ineffable,” she writes in Good Things.
But then a global pandemic happened. The lockdown plunged many, including Nosrat herself, into a new and profound loneliness. The experience made her ask, “What is a good life?” and changed her view of recipes, which she now sees as “rituals that promise transformation.”
In addition to recipes, readers of Good Things can expect tips on cookware and ingredients, like the kind of oil to reach for in the grocery store, (always extra virgin, she insists, because your cooking’s only as good as your olive oil).
Nosrat says cooking provides moments for creativity. And when caught up in the daily deluge, finding those moments is precious—an undeniably good thing.
—Lizzy Rager
10. Summer of Love
By Kerri Maher ’98
Kerri Maher’s newest jumps between the stories of three women of the Hartley family—two sisters in the summer of 1967 and a daughter in 2015. The sisters are Winnie, a recent Cal grad and poet who reconnects with an old boyfriend, and Miranda Hartley, the newest inheritor of the family vineyard. Fifty years in the future, Miranda’s daughter Dawn Hartley, a secret alcoholic, begins a life-changing journey to uncover the truth behind the anonymously written (fictional) Vineland novels. What she discovers about herself and her family “just might set her life on the right path at last.” Written with witty but down-to-earth prose, Summer of Love is a book that could only come from someone who loves Berkeley.
—J. P. T.
