The Book Club of California is offering in-person and online programs and activities. Hybrid events with in-person attendance and a streaming element are also held.
In-person programs without a virtual component may be recorded for online viewing on our YouTube Channel after the event.
Unless otherwise noted, all events are free and open to the public and take place at the Book Club of California located at 47 Kearny Street, Suite 400 in San Francisco.
Please refer to the description under each event.
Email programs@bccbooks.org for any questions, or call (415) 781-7532 ext. 2. Many of our staff will be working remotely so please contact them by email or phone. Staff contact information can be found on our website.
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5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
Pasadena Heritage | 160 N Oakland Avenue | Pasadena, California 91101
An essential piece in California Studies, Redemptive Dreams: Engaging Kevin Starr’s California offers the first critical engagement with the vision of California’s most ambitious interpreter. While Starr’s multifaceted and polymathic vision of California offered a unique gaze—synthesizing central features, big themes, and incredible problems with the propitious golden dream—his eight-volume California Dream series, along with several other books and thousands of published articles and essays, often puzzled historians and other scholars. Historians in the contemporary school of critical historiography often found Starr’s narrative approach—seeking to tell the internal drama of the California story—to be less attuned to the most important work happening in the field. Such a perspective fails to acknowledge key developments in historical subfields like Black and African American Studies, Chicana/o/x Studies, Asian Studies, Native Studies, and others that draw from the narrative in their critical work and how this relates to Starr’s contribution. Along with being a major figure in California institutional life, with literary output spanning genres, it is through the lens of his lived experience as a devout Catholic that this critical sociological perspective sheds new light on his project. With contributions from sociology, history, and theology, akin to investigations appearing in Theology and California: Theological Refractions on California’s Culture (Routledge), Redemptive Dreams offers interdisciplinary perspectives that highlight key features inherent in interdisciplinary theological reflection on place and illuminates these diverse disciplinary discourses as they appear in Starr’s articulation of the California Dream.
An in-person presentation by Jason S. Sexton, author and professor of sociology at University of California, Los Angeles
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at Pasadena Heritage
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City, presents a seldom-attempted blend of human and geologic history, explaining the stories told by the physical landscape and detailing how the city has interacted with it. Wealth generated in the region from its geological resources―water, stone, soil and minerals―has influenced societies from the pre-contact Ohlones to the Americans of yesterday and today. So have the hazards of earthquake, fire, drought and changing sea level. Today, climate change has shown us that nature and civilization are not separate realms; the idea they are is an illusion that grows ever more costly.
The topic of a city’s rocks and landmarks is a natural entree to a more global, “deep time” centered standpoint that can enrich readers in new ways as they guide their communities toward more sustainable policies. The pleasures of learning to see one’s familiar surroundings in new depth, as geoheritage, translate to deeper engagement in determining a city’s collective future. Recent advances in geology, from plate tectonics to digital visualizations, have given geologists unprecedented ways to tell the histories of the cities they live in; Deep Oakland proves the power of a geologist’s approach to equip the public for policy engagement based on nature’s long-term trends and demands.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Andrew Alden, geologist and geoscience writer
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at The Book Club of California
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
The fields of book history and bibliography are having a cultural reckoning. The Women in Book History Bibliography (womensbookhistory.org) has acted as an impetus for championing the “lost” histories of women in the book trades and as a tool for arguing for further recovery work. Still in progress, the bibliography currently consists of over 2000 citations of scholarly work that has otherwise been made inaccessible due to problematic indexing practices. This lecture will combine an overview of historical figures and a discussion of the ways that bibliographical practices can make – or erase – history.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Cait Coker, associate professor and curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
** Co-presented and co-hosted by the Northern California Chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America **
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at The Book Club of California
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
At the time of Herman Melville’s death, in 1891, his novels had fallen into obscurity. Moby-Dick, his masterwork published in 1851, was out of print and unread. But in the 1920s, critical reassessments led to a “Melville revival.”
This lecture surveys some of the famous and less well-known illustrated editions, artists’ books, and other visual interpretations, examining their role in establishing the unassailable reputation of Moby-Dick as the great American novel.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Declan Kiely, author, lecturer, and Executive Director of the Grolier Club
** The Windle-Loker Lecture Series on the History of the Illustrated Book **
** Co-presented and co-hosted by the American Trust for the British Library **
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at The Book Club of California
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47 Kearny Street, Suite 400 • San Francisco, California 94108 • t. 415 781 7532 • 