Book Store Appearances

One of the great pleasures of publishing a book is speaking with readers about what you have written. I am scheduled for the first for My Father’s ALS: A Son’s Healing Journey. It will be on September 4, 2024 in San Francisco at Bird and Beckett Books and Records.

Speaking about my new book.

It will be an author’s presentation. Folding seats usually have been placed in a spot at the back of the store, with the author at the front behind a podium facing the chairs. Usually there is a generous introduction of the author. The author then speaks for around 20 minutes. I also like to read a favorite passage or two. Questions follow.

Next is my favorite: speaking with readers one to one. The author is seated on a chair alongside his new book piled on an adjacent table. Readers line up to speak with the author for a minute or two, and to purchase a copy of the new book, that the author signs. If the buyer is someone I know, or someone who says something identifying in our brief conversation, I try to write a personal inscription along with my autograph. Transaction completed. The customer goes to the front to buy the book. I go on to speak with the next interested customer. For me, it is a delight.

One of my favorite book appearances was the first for my second book, Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, when I was at Copperfield’s Books in downtown Petaluma, the community that was the subject of the book. That appearance was over a decade after I had conducted the interviews of Petaluma Jewish community members whose stories were in the book. The audience was filled with community members I had not seen in years.

I was thrilled to see those people again, talk with them about this long-awaited book on their community, and inscribe copies for them. I was in that bookstore for hours, until I had spoken with everyone willing to wait.

That first appearance was fun, partially because it was only two weeks after publication, too soon for most people to have read the book and formulate complaints about how I portrayed them and their community. I decided that I owed it to community members to give them a better shot at me, so, a year after publication I arranged to speak at the Petaluma Jewish Community Center one Sunday morning.

The community’s old timers, the immigrant founders, had mostly died by then and I never would learn their reactions to my book. But that morning of my appearance the old social hall was filled with children and grandchildren and newcomers (non-chicken ranchers) I had interviewed over a decade ago, and many others I had never met. I spoke about my long journey to write the book, some nineteen years, and I read passages of the book. But my purpose was to give community members an opportunity to air any grievances with me. And they did.

One debate immediately flared over whether my book was biased in favor of the linke, the community’s left wing. Barry Nitzberg, grandson of the Communist chicken rancher who had been tarred and feathered in 1935, defended me from rechte, right wing, offspring. Other criticisms bubbled up: factual errors, colorful people I had missed, important events I had omitted, and my accounts of everything from raising chicken to raising children. Here was my fractious chicken ranching community working over my book.

Everyone, linke and rechte, children and grandchildren and newcomers, agreed on one complaint I never had expected: the book’s fictitious names. I had used thin aliases to provide some anonymity for my informants with the book’s public airing of messy and controversial community history. But most wanted their names connected to the book’s characters, and within weeks of publication community members had compiled a comprehensive list that correlated fictitious and real names. I took this grievance as praise that my account was accurate and sympathetic. (No aliases in the current book.)

They were grateful, too, that I had preserved their remarkable community story in a book. They thanked me, as if this two-decades historical quest had been my faithful community service.

I only hope that the coming appearances for My Father’s ALS, about my father and me and our family, are as interesting, surprising, and engaging. That would mark a successful book.