Events

This month we're discussing the story collection Brownsville by Oscar Casares, who made an appearance at Brazos in August. If you missed his signing, don't fret -- he'll be here again in May for Inprint's Brown Reading Series, this time with Houston fictionist extraordinaire Gwendolyn Zepeda.

The book club is always free and open to the public.

If you missed him here at Brazos, now you can have the pleasure of seeing Oscar Casares in the comfort of Sylvia's Enchilada Kitchen, his sister's famous restaurant. Join the Casares family at the new location, 6401 Woodway (one block east of Voss).

Oscar Casares will read from his new novel, Amigoland, a story of two brothers approaching old age and the road trip they take to settle a long-time feud.

In Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us), a brilliant, lively, and eye-opening investigation, Tom Vanderbilt examines the perceptual limits and cognitive underpinnings that make us worse drivers than we think we are. He demonstrates why
plans to protect pedestrians from cars often lead to more accidents. He
uncovers who is more likely to honk at whom, and why. He explains why
traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our quest
for safety, and even identifies the most common mistake drivers make in
parking lots. Traffic, a New York Times Notable Book and one of the Best Books of the Year according to The Washington Post, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and Rocky Mountain News,
is about more than driving: it's about human nature. It will change the
way we see ourselves and the world around us, and it may even make us
better drivers.

Tom Vanderbilt writes about design, technology, science and culture for Wired, Slate, The New York Times and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn and drives a 2001 Volvo V40. Check out his "companion blog" to the book: How We Drive.

The Rothko Chapel presents Rubén Martinez for a program called "Truth and Consequences on the Mexico-United States Border: An Overview -- A Series Examining Issues Critical to Human Rights and Environment." Martinez is the Emmy Award-winning journalist and author of Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail, among others. For more info, visit rothkochapel.org.

Please join us to celebrate the release of a new anthology of war poetry, Against Agamemnon, edited by James Adams. The book contains the work of Fady Joudah (The Earth in the Attic), Hayan Charara (The Sadness of Others), Andrew Kozma (City of Regret), and Sasha West, among others. We are thrilled to host these four poets for a joint reading and signing. Pick up your copy of Against Agamemnon at Brazos today.

"The French Resistance poet Robert Desnos once wrote 'for
the earth is a camp lit by thousands of spiritual fires,' and
he saw that in times such as his and our own 'one bivouacs all
over the world.' These poems are written by the light of those
fires. We owe a debt of gratitude to James Adams for retrieving
them from our present darkness." -- Carolyn Forché

"In this dynamic collection, veterans, peace activists, relatives of
service members, U.S. citizens and people from around the world all
share space as they write the war from multiple perspectives and poetic
approaches, lyrical, angry, hopeful, and
heartbreaking." -- Kazim Ali

Join Brazos Bookstore for a reading and signing by William Linden of his new book, The Historical Jesus for Beginners.

The last few decades have seen a resurgence of the scholarly quest for
the historical Jesus -- for the words and deeds that probably can be
attributed to the human Jesus who walked the hills of Galilee some two
thousand years ago. You might not be aware of the recent scholarship,
and the reason is simple. For the most part, many scholars write for
and talk to other scholars, using their own technical language. This
leaves huge numbers of Christians unaware of their discoveries. So even
though you may have studied the Bible for years, you still may be a
historical Jesus beginner.

After the life of Jesus, his followers began to develop their memory of
his sayings and actions. Then, year after year, and century after
century, the tradition grew until it became Christianity as it is known
in the twenty-first century. What if we could go back in time and delve
beneath all the layers to find what Christianity would be if it were
based upon the historical Jesus? If you are a person who would like to
begin to be informed, this book is for you.

"This comprehensive and compelling book is a masterful primer of the
historical Jesus for beginners. But is also a valuable resource for
those who have been on the journey for some years." -- G. Richard
Wheatcroft

William M. Linden holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Theology from
Oxford University in England and is the Chair of the Board of Directors
of the Foundation for Contemporary Theology in Houston. Mr. Linden has
concentrated his efforts in theology in the scholarly quest for the
historical Jesus -- the human being who walked about Galilee in the
first century, a person who showed us what God is like and what a human
life full of God is like. For the past three years, Mr. Linden has been
teaching a course on the historical Jesus in the Rice University School
of Continuing Studies and in various Christian churches in the Houston
area. He is an Associate Member of the Westar Institute in California,
which sponsors the Jesus Seminar, the leaders in academic historical
Jesus research. Prior to concentrating his work on the historical
Jesus, Mr. Linden was a Houston lawyer. He is a retired partner of
Vinson & Elkins law firm, where he specialized in federal income
tax law.

The world is now at a hinge moment in its history, according to veteran
international correspondent Paul Starobin in his new book, After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age. A once-dominant America has
reached the end of its global ascendancy, and the question of what will
come next, and how quickly, is not completely clear. Already the global
economic crisis, in exposing the tarnished American model of unfettered
free-market capitalism, is hastening the transition to the next After America phase of global history.

According to Starobin, the After America
world is being driven less by virulent anti-Americanism than by
America’s middling status as a social, economic, and political
innovator; by long-wave trends like resurgent nationalism in China,
India, and Russia; and by the growth of transnational cultural,
political, and economic institutions. While what is going to come next
has not been resolved, we can discern certain narratives that are
already advancing. In this sense, the After America age is already a
work in progress—pregnant with multiple possibilities.

In this
book, which masterfully mixes fresh reportage with rigorous historical
analysis, Starobin presents his farsighted and fascinating predictions
for the After America world. These possibilities include a global chaos
that could be dark or happy, a multipolar order of nationstates, a
global Chinese imperium, or—even more radically—an age of global
city-states or a universal civilization leading to world government.
Starobin feels that the question of which narrative will triumph may be
determined by the fundamental question of identity: how people
determine their allegiances, whether to the tribe, nation-state,
city-state, or global community.

There will be surprises, Starobin thinks. In the After America
world, both the nation-state and the traditional empire may lose ground
to cosmopolitan forces like the city- state and the universal
civilization. California—the eighth largest economy in the world and
the most future- oriented place in America—is becoming an After America
landscape, as illustrated by postnational, multicultural Hollywood.
Prestigious educational institutions like Harvard are migrating from an
American to a global identity and thus becoming part of an After
America universal civilization. While these changes may feel
unsettling, our best hope for adapting to an After America world is by
becoming better borrowers of the best ideas and practices developed all
around the planet.

Thought provoking and well argued, After America
offers a way to think about a dramatically changing world in which the
United States is no longer number one. Starobin’s tone is sober but in
the end hopeful—the age after America need not be a disaster for
America, and might even be liberating.

Paul Starobin is a staff correspondent for the National Journal and a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly. He was Moscow bureau chief for BusinessWeek from 1999 to 2003 and has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and National Geographic.

They were the children of France’s most celebrated men of
nineteenth-century letters and science, the celebrity heirs and
heiresses of their day. Their lives were the subject of scandal,
gossip, and fascination. Léon Daudet was the son of the popular writer
Alphonse Daudet. Jean-Baptiste Charcot was the son of the famed
neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, mentor to a young Sigmund Freud. And
Jeanne Hugo was the adored granddaughter of the immortal Victor Hugo.
As France readied herself for the dawn of a new century, these
childhood friends seemed poised for greatness.

In Gilded Youth: Three Lives in France's Belle Epoque,
Kate Cambor paints a portrait of a generation lost in upheaval. While
France weathered social unrest, violent crime, the birth of modern
psychology, and the dawn of World War I, these three young adults
experienced the disorientation of a generation forced to discover that
the faith in science and progress that had sustained their fathers had
failed them.

With masterful storytelling, Cambor captures the hopes and
disillusionments of those who were destined to see the golden world of
their childhood disappear -- and the universal challenges that emerge
as the dreams of youth collide with the realities of experience.

Kate Cambor received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University. She has written for The American ScholarThe American Prospect, among other periodicals. Cambor lives in New York City. This is her first book.