Snips & Snails

From roach burritos to diaper gravy, Barf-O-Rama delivers

By Warren St. John

FIRST THERE WAS Mad magazine and later came Pee Wee’s Playhouse and The Simpsons. Now, naughtiest of all, there is Barf-O-Rama–a series of books that will surely delight kids and make their parents shudder. With its emphasis on scatology for scatology’s sake, this series won’t be winning any Caldecott awards.

So far, 10 Barf-O-Rama books have appeared in print, with titles like The Great Puke-Off, Pig Breath, Dog Doo Afternoon, and The Legend of Bigfart. Seven more are due out in coming months. The books deal with “a helmet full of hurl,” “fettuccine al farto,” and “buttwurst.” If these books have any redeeming value, it is that they will keep little Timmy turning the pages of an actual book, rather than zoning out in front of the VCR.

The series is the brainchild of Ann Brashares, a very mild 29-year-old editor at the Daniel Weiss Associates literary agency. When Brashares talks about Barf-O-Rama, what she is really talking about is boogers, “scab pie,” and even “balloons filled with diaper gravy.” This may not be the high-minded stuff that nudged this soft-spoken Barnard College graduate toward a career in publishing. But still, for Brashares, Barf-O-Rama represents the fulfillment of a dream.

“For a long time,” she says, “I’d been thinking about doing something gross.”

There are no whoopie cushions or plastic puddles of fake vomit lying around Brashares’ office; on the walls are photographs of her husband and baby. So how did someone so professional conceive of something as unapologetically disgusting as Barf-O-Rama? “I grew up with three brothers,” she explains. “They find gross things funnier than anything else.”

But as a businesswoman, Brashares has gotten into the gross-out game with a real purpose. Barf-O-Rama, she says, is all about marketing–trying to target that elusive group of boys on the verge of adolescence. The books, with their lurid covers–of a baby whose diaper is about to explode, a kid gagging on a roach-filled burrito–look like things that no parent would approve of, and therein lies the allure.

“It’s a famous problem that you can’t sell books to boys,” Brashares observes.

The Scholastic company’s insanely popular Goosebumps series of light horror has certainly won over this readership in recent years; Brashares thought she’d go Goosebumps one better. “I thought, ‘What if I do something about food? Or gross food?'” She developed a proposal for a book about a group of kids who get into a “gross-out war,” which she called The Great Puke-Off. She ran her idea by executives at Bantam Doubleday Dell. (Her company, Daniel Weiss, comes up with book ideas, packages them with writers, and then sells them to publishers, much as Hollywood producers sell to studios.)

Bantam Doubleday Dell was “reluctantly interested,” she says. Then Brashares called on an old friend, Katherine Applegate. Applegate is the Thomas Pynchon of juvenile fiction; her publisher claims to have never laid eyes on her, and she shuns interviews. She writes out of Minnesota under the pseudonym of Pat Pollari, a gender and ethnic neutral name conceived, ironically enough, so as not to offend. She gets paid a few thousand dollars per manuscript. Applegate, who is “somewhere in her 30s,” according to Brashares, agreed to give The Great Puke-Off a try. Bantam was skeptical, but Applegate turned in something so disgusting that the publishers had to take note.

Here’s an excerpt: “‘Aaargh! There are roaches in the food!’ Zoner shouted. “Allie was the first to blow. Her eyes changed from blue to green behind her glasses. Her throat started doing the gack dance. Then she emitted. She extruded.”

And in case you don’t know what a “gack dance” is, Barf-O-Rama books come with glossaries: “The spasms observable in the throat of a person preparing to gack, blow, heave, hurl, or emit.”

Bantam Doubleday Dell was disgusted enough to order 16 more books just like it, and the Barf-o-Rama series was born.

Getting in on the disgusting trend is Addison Wesley, with its Grossology series. And then there are the gross toys: The Archie McPhee Co. in Seattle is selling lots of brain-shaped gelatin molds these days, and a company called Brainstorms is moving tons of “Gurglin’ Guts Eye Balls,” which produce “oozing and sloshing noises” when shaken. These are all noble efforts, but in both scope and degree of grossness, Barf-O-Rama takes the cake, and gacks it up right back in your lap.

“It delivers,” Brashares says.

But won’t this stuff damage a child’s mind? Dr. Norma Doft, a child psychologist at New York University Medical Center, says, “Everything has to be taken within the framework of who the kid is. For some kids, it’s too stimulating; for others, it meets their needs.”

Even Brashares herself says, “Parents aren’t going to want their kids to have 48 Barf-O-Rama books on their shelves.” Dan Trace, manager of Copperfield’s Books’ Sebastopol store, doesn’t see this as a problem. “It’s a moderate seller,” he says. “We’ve only moved three to five of each number so far, and it came out in July of ’96. And,” he adds with a laugh, “my son will be 13 in April, and he picked one up and just said, ‘Yuck.'”

Dear old mom is probably the biggest hurdle standing between Barf-O-Rama and Goosebumps-style success. A survey last year in Publisher’s Weekly determined that mothers buy nearly half of all children’s books, with teachers buying the next 20 percent; kids themselves buy between 5 and 15 percent of the books they read, and fathers, even fewer than that.

Brashares argues that the books are an alternative to violent or scary stories. “Nobody gets hurt or killed,” she says. “It’s just that they’re pretty gross.” And how. To quote from that potential classic of underground prepubescent literature, The Great Puke-Off: “The two vomit streams hit Mr. Chapman like a fire hose.

“I stood on the seat as the tidal wave of heave rolled by.”

From the February 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Tree for Two

Into the Woods: Jean Hegland sees the forest for the trees in her new novel.

Photo by UPI/Bettman

Author Jean Hegland goes wild

By Zack Stentz

ONE OF THE YEAR’S most fascinating science fiction novels has nary a starship or extraterrestrial in any of its 193 pages. Instead, novelist Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest (Calyx, 1996) takes as its subjects Nell and Eva, two intelligent teenage girls trying to survive in an isolated house in the heart of a redwood forest, while outside society gradually falls apart and reverts to chaos. Nell and Eva’s priorities aren’t to seek out new life forms and new civilizations; they’re to figure out how to grow their own food, keep healthy, and defend themselves in a world suddenly gone low-tech and savage.

Interestingly, the actual details of society’s collapse are left vague, and form an indistinct backdrop to the realities of the girls’ day-to-day existence. “I think that I was much more interested in how a disaster would/will affect individuals than how it will come about,” says Hegland, sitting at a table on the 55 acres of second-growth forest property she shares with her husband and three children near Healdsburg. “Individuals won’t know what’s happening in the wider world. You don’t know what’s going on and you’re left to your own devices.”

DRIVING OUT to meet Hegland at her remote home, it isn’t difficult to guess what inspired her to tell the tale of two teenage girls living far from the nearest town. To reach her house, one must navigate several miles of axle-shattering dirt road and cross a one-lane bridge rickety enough to make Indiana Jones wish he’d majored in mathematics instead of archaeology. “We’re not quite as isolated as Nell and Eva,” she says.

Still, Hegland is familiar enough with the often unglamorous realities of rural life to have not succumbed to Rousseau-like fantasies and romanticized the glories of living close to nature. “I don’t have any illusions about what Nell and Eva are up against,” she says. “They’re going to have hard lives, to lose teeth and break bones, and their baby could choke on something or die of any number of things.

“And yet, we place this enormous value on living a long time and avoiding discomfort, and I wonder sometimes if that value is misplaced.”

Hegland’s two minds on the subject of civilization and its discontents are manifested in the novel’s big-wow finish. Without giving away too much, suffice it to say the two girls make an irrevocable break with society. “Some people find the ending really heartbreaking, while others say ‘Yeah!’ and are really excited by the girls’ decision.”

Mixed reaction to the finale aside, Into the Forest has garnered plenty of praise since its debut in July, with Hegland garnering positive reviews and touring independent bookstores up and down the West Coast in support of the novel. “Since it was published by a feminist company, a lot of the interest has been coming from those quarters,” she says, of the book which has just been picked up by Bantam. “But I’ve also had people tell me things like ‘My 19-year-old son saw my copy and then read the book and loved it.'”

Stranger still to Hegland has been the desire of some readers to draw one-to-one correspondences between events in the book and the author’s own life and personality. “I’ve been surprised at how much people who know me want to read my life into the book,” she says. “I suppose that has to do with people’s interest in that mysterious thing that happens when stories get written. But none of my characters corresponds exactly to me or anyone else. There’s some of me in all of them, but their lives are not my own.

“And,” she adds, laughing, “they had a much nicer house than we do.”

HAVING LIVED and studied for a time in eastern Washington state, Hegland got to see a societal breakdown up close when Mount St. Helens blew its top in 1980. “That was the funny thing about the disaster,” she recalls. “The people closest to it knew the least about what was going on.”

But even a cursory read of Into the Forest reveals that Hegland’s primary source of inspiration was not her life but her imagination. And like many fiction writers, she felt the disorienting twinge of having her own characters become more real to her than the actual people in her life. “It was very strange,” she says. “I’d be writing, and then I’d get up and actually be surprised to see my own face looking back at me in the mirror, and not Nell’s. I even had Nell’s dreams sometimes.”

Though already at work on her next novel, Hegland makes it clear that she hasn’t entirely left Nell and Eva behind. “I’m definitely finished with this book,” she says, “and I’ll never write a sequel, but I do find myself thinking about the characters, and what became of them, and how they’re doing now.”

From the February 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Warning Signs

Nature’s Way: Naturalist Bernie Krause has released a collection of journal notes and field recordings.

Photo by Eric Luse/San Francisco Chronicle

New book captures Bernie Krause’s life in the wild

By Greg Cahill

THE BITTER TASTE of mortality hung in his throat. Bernie Krause huddled in the cabin of a New Zealand coast guard cutter, sailing to Antarctica through stormy South Pacific seas. The small cabin, perched at the stern near the engine room, lurched violently as huge waves buffeted the ship. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sleep. And using the toilet was like peeing into a coffee can while riding a roller coaster. The acrid smell of vomit and diesel exhaust wafted through the cabin, contributing to the roiling in the pit of his stomach.

Nature wasn’t giving up its secrets easily as Krause ventured back to the southern continent to record the sounds of whales, seals, and penguins.

In search of relief, Krause staggered from the cabin, only to be greeted by daunting 40-foot walls of dark gray water that came one after another, crashing on deck and threatening to break apart the ship. “It was the most terrifying experience of my life,” recalls Krause, who now lives in the green hills above Sonoma. “It took me two weeks to stop shaking.”

But Krause’s tribulations had just started. Shortly after recovering from the sea voyage, he learned firsthand about Antarctica’s legendary cold during a brief jaunt outside the research station where he was staying. Five seconds after he stepped out of the station’s airlock, against the advice of the resident scientists, the subfreezing air–174 degrees below zero–crystallized the viscous fluid of his eyes, lacerating the corneas and sending Krause to sick bay for several more weeks.

“You learn real quick,” says the soft-spoken naturalist and sound recordist of life in the wild. “Real quick.”

SOME OF THOSE LESSONS are included in Notes from the Wild: The Nature Recording Expeditions of Bernie Krause (Ellipsis Arts, 1996), a fascinating collection of words and sounds. The new 95-page book offers lively, insightful accounts of his exploits through entries from field journals and–thanks to a companion compact disc–excerpts from field recordings he has made of wild animals and their habitats.

“I wanted to give the reader a sense of what it’s like to record and to experience the world from an aural texture rather than from a visual texture,” he says of the decision to release a book/CD project. “We are very much a graphic culture, but in ancient cultures, the aural cues are much more balanced with the graphic. Because my eyesight isn’t particularly great, I hear the world, I don’t really see the world as other people do.

“That’s created an experience in my life that is absolutely powerful to the extent that I almost don’t want to do anything else except listen to that voice of natural environments, it gives me so much pleasure.”

Krause, 57, is probably best known as the studio wizard who in 1985 lured Humphrey the wayward humpback whale out of the brackish Delta water and back to the open sea. He did it by serenading the languid leviathan with a tape recording of humpback whale sounds. The episode brought him worldwide recognition.

But Krause–a slightly built, reserved man who harbors a real passion for the natural sciences–spends most of his time far from the limelight, recording the grunts, growls, hoots, and howls of wildlife in their natural surroundings. He captures the ambiance of rain forest and desert, meadow and marshland, by taping animal sounds uncorrupted by human ones–or trying to. In the past decade, he has released a series of nature recordings for the Nature Company and on his own Wild Sanctuary label. His fanciful 1989 recording Gorillas in the Mix (Rykodisc) used digitally sampled animal noises to create a jungle of jazzy beats. Krause is now creating complex soundscapes for a new Disney theme park in Florida and a Native American museum in Massachusetts.

But capturing the sound of the wild is a challenge these days: the pounding beat of oil drills travels 70 miles in Alaska’s thin Arctic air; the shrill buzz of chain saws ravaging the Brazilian jungles drifts 20 miles; and the auditory wake of airplanes and helicopters is everywhere. In 1987, Krause spent two months in Africa recording the sounds of Dian Fossey’s endangered mountain gorillas. “I got 15 minutes of usable tape out of 500 hours in the field,” he says, explaining that within earshot of gorillas feeding in the small Rwandan nature preserve are ghetto blasters pumping out rap, the shouts of nearby villagers, and the sounds of domestic animals.

Krause has been likened to a botanist collecting the auditory seeds of species destined for extinction. That’s an accurate description; he notes that of the 3,300 hours of natural sound he has recorded since 1968, 20 percent of his tape library comes from now-extinct habitats. In his new book, Krause poignantly illustrates that point by pairing two journal entries: the first, from June 1989, describes the serene beauty of Lincoln Meadow in the Yuba Pass in the High Sierras; the second, from April 1996, chronicles his return to find the nearby woods clear cut, the stream muddied, and the songs of the birds and frogs all but silenced.

“It’s like missing an old friend,” Krause says of the personal toll exacted by such grim discoveries. “You find something that gives you some sense of a spiritual place–some sense of solace in the world–but then you almost feel violated when you return to find that as human beings–as a tribe, as a race–we’ve become so desensitized to the extraordinary beauty in these places, which really speaks to us in a spiritual and a psychic way. As a result, we find ourselves with a void in our lives because we’ve allowed this to be taken away from us.

“We’re all part of that process.”

For Krause, that loss is powerful motivation to get the word out. “I’m hopeful that we may stop being so destructive in our living and our lifestyles–I mean, America is 5 percent of the world’s population and uses 60 percent of the resources–but until we’re prepared to stop that, I don’t think much is going to change,” he says. “I think that it’s going to get a lot sadder and a lot more stressful to live because there won’t be any place left to go for a respite.

“So while I am hopeful, I am not optimistic.”

Bernie Krause will give a reading and play excerpts from his field recordings at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 25, at Copperfield’s Books, 650 Fourth St., Santa Rosa. Admission is free. To learn more about his work, visit his website.

From the February 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Free Radical

Arrested Development: Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman usually got what he wanted from the police–which was attention from the media.

Photo by UPI/Bettman

Jonah Raskin recalls activist Abbie Hoffman and the theater of the soul

By Sara Peyton

IN THE MONTHS before Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman surfaced in September 1980, after six and a half years of running from the law on a drug charge, he sometimes hung out at the rustic Union Hotel in remote Occidental. Hoffman–a counterculture Pied Piper whose no-holds-barred theatrics helped to entice stoned-out Vietnam-era flower children into antiwar activism–passed the hours drinking red wine in the hotel’s saloon with his longtime comrade and future biographer, Jonah Raskin.

During the visits, Raskin–who chronicles those times in his acclaimed biography For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (University of California Press, 1996)–put his life on hold. Hoffman–who suffered from clinical manic depression–talked non-stop, racked up huge phone bills while staying at Raskin’s home, paced, drank up his host’s booze, and put the finishing touches on his 1980 autobiography, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture. “Abbie was busy organizing his surrender,” Raskin recalls. Those plans culminated successfully in a brilliant pre-surrender public relations coup–a friendly interview with ABC-TV correspondent Barbara Walters.

To mask Hoffman’s identity, Raskin introduced his fast-talking friend as Barry Freed, Hoffman’s underground alias. As Freed, the then-fugitive worked to protect New York’s St. Lawrence River from dredging and even met with Sen. Daniel Moynihan. “When he was here, Abbie talked to several people about how to keep the Russian River clean,” says Raskin. No one recognized the heavily bearded man.

The two men had become pals at the height of Hoffman’s fame in 1970 after the Yippie leader’s conspiracy trial for inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and before he was nabbed five years later for selling cocaine. During that period, Raskin, an academic-socialist­turned­counterculture activist, unwittingly delivered an envelope to Hoffman from someone named “Molly,” who turned out to be radical Weather Underground leader Bernadine Dohrn, wanted on rioting charges.

On such radical wings, the friendship flew.

Before long, Raskin was the minister of education for the Yippies, an anarchistic band of publicity-seeking political activists who used the media to stage their rebel acts. Whether he turned up on the Merv Griffin TV show toting a marijuana joint or delivered a speech dressed like a Keystone Cop and shooting his cap gun into a crowd, Hoffman’s in-your-face theatrics got him the media attention he thrived on.

Cultural revolution is what Abbie did best, says Raskin. “But it wasn’t all show. The show was for a serious purpose and something that was really heartfelt,” he says. “The Yippies were genuine radicals.”

They were also more fun. “I can remember spending a day with Abbie and encountering a folksinger. We started singing and dancing in the street. We’d go to the Law Commune and meet with radical lawyers. We’d meet with Black Panthers, hang out on the street corner, or play basketball. We’d go back to Abbie’s place on East 13th Street and go up on the roof and climb into his hammock.

“It was just great to be on the roof of his apartment building and look out on the New York skyline.”

AS WE TALK at his Occidental home, the 55-year-old Raskin–a Sonoma State University communications instructor since 1981–pours tea. For him, it has been a difficult year of extreme highs and lows. Last summer, he faced brain surgery for a benign tumor. Though the surgery was successful, it left one eye weeping (recently corrected by plastic surgery). Two weeks later his mother, Mildred Raskin, died.

Last fall, For the Hell of It was published. It was praised as both a vivid chronicle of the liberation movements of the ’60s and a biography of their self-appointed publicist. Feminist Vivian Gornick opined in The Nation: “In the ’60s, the revolution pressed on Abbie’s heart as it did on the hearts of a few million others, and he put his manic-depression where it belonged: on the line for the glory of a liberated life.”

Others have condemned the era as silly and misguided. Calling Hoffman–who committed suicide in 1989 at the age of 52–“a “Groucho Marxist,” Jonathan Rieder wrote in the New York Times Book Review: “The violent anxieties [Hoffman] and the others were churning up in Middle America–to what end?–helped fuel the backlash and Agnew and Nixon.”

For Raskin, the book project reaffirmed his commitment to his old friend. When first starting the research, “I was angry at Abbie because he committed suicide,” observes Raskin. “But I’d forgotten the more positive things about him and his role as a protester-comic-genius,” he adds. “One of the things I’ve seen in the reviews is how much ’60s bashing is going on. But people came forward then. There was a generation of people who wanted to end segregation in this country. They were in rebellion politically, culturally, and spiritually. Relationships between men and women changed. We have much more freedom in the ’90s then we did in the ’60s.

“I don’t want to idealize Abbie. He was an egomaniac, he wanted to be famous, and he was excessive. He had plenty of flaws. But he joined with people who were trying to change the world and remake themselves. So they stumbled and fell and took wrong turns–so what?”

During the book project, Raskin drew on his own recollections, interviews with some 250 people–including LSD guru Timothy Leary, activist-turned legislator Tom Hayden, and black radical Angela Davis–FBI files, court records, TV and radio broadcasts, press clippings, and Hoffman’s own books and articles. It wasn’t easy to find the truth about the Yippie leader, Raskin says, since Hoffman deliberately changed his personal history and left a trail of false stories and documents, creating a nightmare for biographers.

“Looking back at Abbie Hoffman from the vantage point of the ’90s, it seems to me that he was the first American cultural revolutionary in the age of television,” says Raskin. Objective reality didn’t exist for Hoffman, who advised followers “to turn your life into an art form, a theater of the soul.”

Yet, for Hoffman–who affected what Raskin calls a “Jewish drugstore cowboy persona” as a teen, gambling, drinking, and hot-wiring cars before being drawn to radical causes in college–close, lasting relationships remained out of reach. “It was hard for Hoffman to look inside,” Raskin continues. Hoffman married three times and had numerous lovers; he neglected his children, sometimes bullied his friends. The Yippie male elite was sexist, and fellow female founders, including writer Robin Morgan, eventually denounced the male members and moved on to the women’s movement.

“The part of Abbie’s life I like the best was between 1967 to 1973,” says Raskin, about the years of massive antiwar protests, student strikes, free love, and LSD. “You can almost see Oliver Stone doing a movie on this time period.”

Indeed, Hoffman had a knack for the outrageous. On Aug. 24, 1967, Hoffman and fellow protesters dropped dollar bills at the New York Stock Exchange as “startled capitalists,” according to the Daily News, scrambled for the cash. A few months later, he announced plans to make the Pentagon “rise in the air.” He received a permit to raise the seat of military power, but no more than 10 feet. In a letter written to the East Village Other, Hoffman declared: “We will dye the Potomac red . . . and try to kidnap LBJ while wrestling him to the ground and pulling his pants off.” At the protest, the irreverent Hoffman and his second wife, Anita (who today lives in Petaluma), dropped LSD.

As the tumultuous years of antiwar protest stilled, the once-youthful hustler, who loved to get high, turned to dealing drugs. Arrested in 1973 for selling three pounds of cocaine to undercover narcotics agents in Manhattan and facing 15 years to life on felony charges, Hoffman turned to Raskin for help.

“One day at the Bronx Zoo he asked me to contact a lawyer in midtown Manhattan and pick up an envelope containing $10,000 cash,” Raskin writes. “I remember when I handed it over, I said goodbye, thinking I’d never see him again.” For most, that’s how the story of Abbie Hoffman ends, with the one-time radical leader slipping underground and out of the spotlight. Though he surfaced in 1980, Hoffman never successfully inserted himself again into public life. Unable to cope with the demons of his mental illness, he sabotaged efforts at recovery.

But his biographer remembers those underground years fondly. “When Abbie was underground, lots of people helped him, even though it could have gotten them in trouble for harboring a fugitive. There was the romance of helping the outlaw,” says Raskin.

“I had some of that romance too.”

From the February 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Printed Matters

UPI/Bettman

Land of Dreamy Dreams: Sebastopol author Megan McDonald’s ‘My House Has Stars,’ illustrated by Peter Catalanotto, is among the favorite children’s books collected above.

Girls, God, galaxies, garbage–they’re all grist for our local authors

By Gretchen Giles

WHEN THE SUN peeks a few timid rays down our backs and into our gardens at this time of year, there’s no question: we’re out on our backs and in our gardens. But there has not been a reasonable share of that lately, and the second-best choice is obviously to be on our backs with a view of the garden–surrounded by a few good books. Adhering to our tradition of synopsizing books produced by area writers and illustrators, we find ourselves this winter comfortably awash in a bounty of new children’s books, as well as tomes on wide-ranging topics. Below, we offer just a sampling of the local crop.

Stephen S. and Jeanette K. Berger
A Tooth Fairy Tale
Illustrated by Camille Czech
Dragonbreath Productions, 1996

SANTA ROSA DENTIST Stephen Berger and his wife, Jeanette, have written a sweet ‘n’ silly tale that sugarcoats its message of dental health in the story of Vesta, a wise tooth fairy sent down to Earth to save the world’s children from tooth decay. Yeah, go ahead and laugh, but kids lick this stuff up, and the conceit that children’s teeth are as precious as stars is a good one. Complete with back-of-the-book charts, stickers, a poster, and other incentives, as well as a step-by-step description of the proper way to brush one’s teeth, this is an excellent tool to coax sulky brushers into better habits, produced by a couple so dedicated to the state of children’s mouths that they buy back tons of Halloween candy from kids each year.

Kay Drikey
Positive Aging A to Z
Vision Books, 1996

WHEN PETALUMAN Kay Drikey was a young 68 years old, she went back to college. With a full career as a mother and a business person, as well as a stint in the Peace Corps behind her, Drikey’s studies in gerontology led her to write this collection of 26 profiles of outstandingly vital seniors, ending with her musings and tips on the glories of the aging process, underlying her assertion that getting old has nothing to do with feeling old.

Robert Funk
Honest to Jesus
HarperSanFrancisco, 1996

SANTA ROSA’S Dr. Robert Funk is founder of the Westar Institute and the Jesus Seminar think-tank of religious scholars and lay people who meet regularly to hash out the historical and philosophical relevancies of the gospels and of Jesus’ life. A former ordained minister, Funk does not always find himself welcome in religious circles, as he is a Christian who doesn’t believe in God. At least, not the traditional notion of an omniscient, sentient being who presides over the heavens and can be called upon to grant a child’s prayer or stay a murderer’s hand. What he does believe is that Jesus was a living, breathing, fallible man who had the gift of occasionally being able to see through God’s eyes. That is, his spiritual powers were acute enough to be able to peer through small breaks in the firmament of reality to the glorious wonder of the cosmos that enrapture us all. With a constant feel for his readers, Funk cogently leads us through the plausibilities and implausibilities of traditional Christian teachings, taking the fundaments of faith back to the rigors of their historical roots.

Matthew Gollub
Uncle Snake
Illustrated by Leovigildo Martinez
Tambourine Books, 1996

A YOUNG OAXACAN BOY becomes insatiably curious about a forbidding black cave near his home. “Don’t go in there or you may never come out,” warn his parents. What happens next? Well, a baby could tell you. But the transformation that the boy undergoes from his time in the cave and the sentence he must bear thereafter draw on the power of myth and redemption, themes far elevated above the playpen. Sebastopol author Matthew Gollub has successfully teamed again with gifted illustrator Leovigildo Martinez (The Moon Was at a Fiesta, The Twenty-Five Mixtec Cats) to create a compelling piece of folklore. Based on traditional Mexican myths, Uncle Snake posits a distinctly unscientific notion of where lightning comes from, and does so in a poetic and challenging text, with drawings so beautiful that they were recently honored by the Society of Illustrators in New York. Highly recommended.

Andrea Johnston
Girls Speak Out: Finding Your True Self
Introduction by Gloria Steinem
Scholastic Press, 1997

GIRLS TALK. Girls listen. Girls think for themselves. The positive exploration of girlhood through former Independent writer Andrea Johnston’s eyes is designed to both resonate with and empower young girls, ages 9 to 15, who often internalize feelings of being “undervalued” by society. Based on the nationwide Girls Speak Out program (conscious-raising meetings for diverse groups of girls held by program co-founders Johnston and Gloria Steinem), the book uses the stories, poetry, and experiences of the young participants, as well as noted writers’ works to explore sexism, racism, patriarchy, and sexual abuse. Illustrations of female artifacts from “pre-history,” and their interpretations by girls and by the author, show how these ancient goddess symbols, unearthed in various continents, can be today’s role models. The book can be a practical guide on how to organize a “Girls Speak Out” program, or it can simply be a supportive connection with the powerful expressions of young girls who’ve learned that each voice matters–Paula Harris

Cynthia Lamb
Brigid’s Charge
Bay Island Books, 1997

RELYING ON FACT and legend, Cynthia Lamb of Cotati traces back her ancestor, healer Deborah Leeds, and examines the legend that Leeds birthed a devil that haunts us still today. Traveling from England to New Jersey in 1704 to marry a man she had never met, Leeds integrated herself into the burgeoning Quaker community, established herself as a healer of extraordinary powers, and comfortably bore and raised 12 children. But it was babe number 13, an unexpected change-of-life pregnancy, that garners the attention, as shocked midwives reported the transformation of the infant to a winged devil. Meticulously researched, Brigid’s Charge follows the wiccan path along its rocky road.

Verna Larson
The Bearables of Bernie Bear
Illustrated by René Torres
Vision Books, 1996

BERNIE BEAR lives in the woods with his ma and pa. Drawn away from home one day following the flight of a honeybee, Bernie becomes lost and stung, is found and comforted. That is all that happens in Santa Rosan Verna Larson’s story, and there are read-aloud times, when a child is drowsy and pajama’d, leaning with a head damp from a hot bath next to one, that not much more needs to happen.

Jonathan London
Jackrabbit
Illustrated by Deborah Kogan Ray
Crown Publishers, 1996

PROLIFIC Graton author Jonathan London turned out some nine volumes of children’s literature last year, earning himself both awards for outstanding work and a facetious honorable mention as the most overpublished juvenile author (R. L. Stine of the Goosebumps horror factory tiptoed away with first prize in that line). Deceptively simple yet pleasingly lyrical, London’s stories are usually grounded in a deep love and respect for the natural world. Jackrabbit is no exception. Based on a neighbor’s true rescue of a baby jackrabbit from a plowed-down orchard, Jackrabbit traces the brief stay the bunny has in a human home before she is returned to the wild to mate and have babies of her own. Plumped with smells and tastes, Jackrabbit leaves the animal content in the wild, dreaming sweetly of the exotic scent of bananas.

Megan McDonald
My House Has Stars
Illustrated by Peter Catalanotto
Orchard Books, 1996

MEGAN MCDONALD, the Sebastopol author who introduced thousands of children to the joys of a smaller order with her Insects Are My Life, is surely one of the only children’s authors to begin a read-aloud book with a quote from Dante: “And so we came forth and once again beheld the stars.” But it is exactly this deep-reaching sensibility that makes My House Has Stars so complete. Using the childlike wonder inherent in the notion that the stars we gaze upon at night are in the same sky that shelters people in Nepal, Japan, Brazil, and Alaska (to name a few of the places McDonald puts her characters), this poetic read-aloud book is chock-a-block with everyday facts about things like yurt-building and Japanese mythology, all the while stressing the commonality of the human experience.

Douglas Pittman
Principles for Living on the Edge
Quantum House Publishing, 1997

DOUGLAS PITTMAN of Sebastopol exhorts us to lead a “bold and daring life–expansive and creative,” in this extended essay on the positive. Taking the stand that we are our own worst enemies, Pittman offers affirmations and cues to loosening the restrictions of individual paradigms and of finding a way to stand whole and golden in this world, achieving personal and professional goals heretofore thought impossible by minds that have restrictions created only by themselves.

Vicki Sebastiani
Cucina Viansa
Viansa Winery, 1996

SONOMAN Vicki Sebastiani’s evocation of the good life tempts one to throw over all duties for a glass of rough red (served in a tumbler, peasant-style), a crust of good bread, and anything with olive oil, tomatoes, basil, and olives in it. Based on an ethos of living exemplified by the Viansa Winery Sebastiani owns with her husband, winemaker Sam Sebastiani, this book is elegantly laid out, full of tips and wine pairings, and gorgeously illustrated with photos and doodles. There’s nothing fussy or even expensive about the food here. Rather, this working cook’s manual is based on the garden, the seasons, and the simple restrictions of time.

Ann H. Sutherland
My Grandpa Has No Garbage
Illustrated by Kathryn Graham-Wilson
Vision Books, 1996

CHILDREN ARE NOT particularly the ones who need a good sit-down with My Grandpa Has No Garbage. They’re natural environmentalists. It’s the older crowd, the purchasers, who already have set patterns of discarding that need to be discarded. In a straightforward singsong, Ann H. Sutherland of Petaluma tells the American tale of an older man who grew up giving discards to the rag picker of his city streets, moved to the country, composted, recycled, or burned his trash–and confounded the garbage company.

From the February 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

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