Featured Events in Oakland in October, 2024 (July Updated)

Join us to learn about Bay Wheels bike share, its reduced-rate program, and essential safety tips and need-to-knows for getting around the city by bike! We’ll meet in the library for the first half of the program and then roll out for a group ride on BayWheels bikes! Free helmets and a monthly membership to Bay Wheels provided to all registered participants! Information Source: Bike East Bay Education Program | eventbrite

Event: Wolfpack Day 2024 Date: 28th October 2024 Location: Oaklands College, East Drive, AL40JA Celebrate the spirit of sport at Oaklands College at Wolfpack Day 2024! The day is dedicated to showcasing our athletic talent as well as giving you the opportunity to trial for one of our elite level sport academies. Karate Trials: Think you’ve got what it takes to join the Karate Wolfpack? These public trials give you the chance to showcase your skills on the mat. Whether you’re an experienced karateka or eager to give it a go, coaches will be evaluating new talent for the 2025 Wolfpack. It’s also a perfect opportunity to ask questions, experience the academy environment, and see if it’s the right fit for you. For any enquires contact - Jordan.Thomas@oaklands.ac.uk Information Source: Oaklands College | eventbrite

Born on the West Coast, the son of Bronx-born parents, Steve Wasserman is a generalist and public intellectual but is perhaps less well known as a cultural essayist and social critic of the first rank. In thirty splendid essays, originally published in such diverse publications as The New Republic and The Nation, The American Conservative and The Progressive, The Village Voice and The Economist, Wasserman delivers a riveting account of the awakening of an empathetic sensibility and a lively mind. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of his enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, and the tumults of a world in upheaval. These essays include the remarkable tale of a bookstore owner who wouldn’t let him buy the books he wanted, to his brave against-the-grain take on the Black Panthers, to his shrewd assessment of the fast-changing world of publishing. Here is, as Joyce Carol Oates notes, “arguably the very best concise history of Cuba and the legendary Fidel Castro; beautifully composed eulogies for two close friends, Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens; sharply perceptive commentary on Daniel Ellsberg; a thrillingly candid interview with W. G. Sebald.” Steve Wasserman is publisher of Heyday. A 1974 graduate of UC Berkeley, he holds a degree in criminology. His past positions include being deputy editor of the op-ed page and opinion section of the Los Angeles Times; editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review; editorial director of New Republic Books; publisher and editorial director of Hill and Wang at Farrar, Straus & Giroux and of the Noonday Press; editorial director of Times Books at Random House; and editor at large for Yale University Press. A former partner of the literacy agency Kneerim & Williams, he represented many authors, including Christopher Hitchens, Linda Ronstadt, Robert Scheer, and David Thomson. He lives in Berkeley, California. Dorothy Lazard began her library career at UC Berkeley, where she received her Master of Library and Information Studies degree in 1983. After working several years on the Berkeley campus, she joined the staff of the Oakland Main Library In 2000. There she was responsible for the history, biography, architecture, and map collections. From 2009 until her retirement in 2021, she managed the Library’s Oakland History Center, where she hosted and delivered history lectures, mounted exhibits, and wrote articles about Oakland history. She is widely celebrated for encouraging people of all ages, cultures, and educational levels to explore local history, with several authors citing in their acknowledgements their appreciation for her assistance. For her work, she has received the Partners in Preservation Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oakland Heritage Alliance (2022) and the Oscar Lewis Award for outstanding contributions to Western History (2023) from the Book Club of California. Dorothy is also a writer who holds a MFA degree in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. Her memoir, titled What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World, about growing up in the Bay Area during the heady 1960s and ‘70s, was published in 2023 by Heyday Books. “’Orson Welles Meets a Deadline’ is surely the most hilarious piece in Wasserman’s collection and seals his skill as a storyteller on the page. Meetings with Barbra Streisand, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Gore Vidal are similarly thrilling I could’ve read another book’s worth of his takes on the demise of American print media, the decline of independent booksellers and their subsequent rebirth, and his hatred of Amazon.” —Denise Sullivan, San Francisco Chronicle “If ever a man was in love with The Movement—that is, the peace and liberationist movements of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s—that man is Steve Wasserman. This collection of essays, in all its intelligent exuberance, pays full respect to that honorable devotion.” —Vivan Gornick, author of Taking a Long Look “Steve Wasserman’s wit and passions are on full display in this collection of fine essays, crammed full of insights and anecdotes from several (apparently very fun) decades in the literary world. Editor, publisher, agent, and bon vivant, Wasserman enjoys books, ideas, friends, and progressive politics, and his love for them all is infectious. A troublemaker of the good kind since his youth, Wasserman continues to inspire with his vigorous dedication to the life of the mind, exhibited with clarity and grace in this book.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of A Man of Two Faces “With its deeply human portraits and incisive criticism, Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie is a record of a personal and intellectual journey like few others. Berkeley in the ‘60s! Susan Sontag! Barbra Streisand! Orson Welles! Jackie Kennedy! Steve Wasserman is a treasure of American letters and his book is a testament, above all, to a literary life lived to the fullest.” —Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant Souls “Steve Wasserman is so open to experience—so open and articulate about history, and the new—that to not follow his quicksilver intelligence and bountiful heart in these wonderful pages would be criminal. Read, reflect, and rejoice in the bounty. What a gift.” — Hilton Als, author of My Pinup Information Source: Clio's Books | eventbrite