Sunday, Oct 10, 7 pm: Berkeley Says NO to Torture Week event at Revolution Books

JUSTINE SHARROCK is an investigative journalist and National Magazine Award nominee. Her work has been published in Mother Jones, Utne Reader, Salon, Alternet, San Francisco magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She will be discussing her new book Tortured: When Good Soldiers Do Bad Things. 

ANDY WORTHINGTON is a journalist and historian, based in London. He is the author of The Guantánamo Files, the first book to tell the stories of all the detainees in America’s illegal prison, and the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo." 

Revolution Books is wheelchair accessible

Suggested donation $5-10 – sliding scale

For more about Berkeley Says NO to Torture Week go to:
http://www.firejohnyoo.org/2010/07/berkeley-says-no-to-torture-week.html

Tuesday, Oct 12, 7 pm: Uzma Alsam Khan - The Geometry of God

Save the date! Rare appearance by novelist Uzma Aslam Khan.

Uzma Aslam Khan comes to Revolution Books on Tuesday, October 12, 2010 at 7 pm. She will discuss her recent novel The Geometry of God. Khan also has a story in the upcoming issue of  Granta Magazine issue devoted to Pakistan, and will be appearing to talk about this at LitQuake while she is in the area. Check out her blog here.



About the Geometry of God:

Amal: the practical sister who digs up the “diamond key” that unlocks the mystery of Pakicetus, a whale-dog creature who once swam the ancient seas that are now Pakistan.
Mehwish: the blind younger sister, who moves with the sun and music inside her and thinks in “cup lits not fully legal.”
Zahoor: their heretical grandfather, a scientist who loves variation and “vim zee” and his two granddaughters most of all.
Noman: the young man who steps into a lecture hall, decides “their triangle needs a fourth point,” and changes all their lives.

These are the four shifting chambers who make the heart of The Geometry of God, the new novel from lauded Pakistani writer Uzma Aslam Khan. Through these vivid, contradictory, and original characters, Khan celebrates the complexities of familial and erotic love, the tug of curiosity and duty, the intersections of faith and longing. Her exuberant language draws from Urdu and Punjabi and invents one of its own for Mehwish, whose fractured English divides and slows and reveals.

The Geometry of God is a novel one can read greedily, following these characters as their lives unfold against the backdrop of General Zia’s Pakistan, where religious fundamentalism gains ground and the mujaheddin is funded by gem sales and the Americans. Or one can savor, as the sisters show us: digging as Amal does toward the novel’s deepest questions about love and knowledge and faith, moving as Mehwish does to the rhythms of an abundant and original language.

____________________________________________________________________________

Ms. Khan teaches at the University of Hawai'i, at Manoa. Says Khan, "My work has been shaped by the various countries and cultures I have lived and taught in, which include Pakistan, the United States, and Morocco." Her novels are The Story of Noble Rot (Penguin India 2001; reissued by Rupa & Co. in 2009), Trespassing(Metropolitan/Henry Holt 2004), and The Geometry of God (Clockroot Books/Interlink Publishing 2009). Trespassing was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2003 and has been translated into fourteen languages in eighteen countries.The Geometry of God will appear in several languages in 2010. Her fiction has also appeared in the anthologies And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women (Feminist Press 2008) and The New Anthem: The Subcontinent In Its Own Words (Tranquebar Press 2009). 

POSTPONED Thursday, Oct 14, 7pm POSTPONED -Discussion of Special Issue of Revolution Newspaper on Israel with correspondent Larry Everest

This event has been postponed to not conflict with the Berkeley Says NO to Torture Week events. For a listing for all events for this week go to:

 http://www.wesaynototorture.net/

The discussion will be rescheduled soon, in the meantime, check out this special issue:

Wednesday, Oct 6, 7 pm-- film: October--Ten Days That Shook The World

Oktyabr -- Ten Days That Shook the World

Join us for this film about the October revolution! This 1927 film by Sergei Eisenstein vividly portrays the insurrection that had occurred in Russia only 10 years earlier.  Eisenstein broke with the then standard conventions and techniques and created "dialectical montage" to portray these earth shaking events. His innovations in cinema were forged to tell the story of how a revolutionary people and its leadership, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, made history and brought the first socialist state into being.

Tuesday, Oct 5, 7 pm: "Revolution Newspaper...and Making Revolution For Real"

Special Presentation and Discussion.


Bring your friends for this important meeting.

Tuesday, Sept 28, 7 pm: Pakistan Floods--Disaster on Top of Disaster

Presentation & Discussion with Larry Everest

"When the water came, we moved our women and children to high ground. Three of my daughters stayed behind to help the men pack up whatever belongings we could carry with us… within minutes, the current got too strong and the waters rose head high." This is how a villager from Sardaryab, a village in northwest Pakistan, lost two of his daughters ages 16 and 17. He was only able to save his youngest daughter. "Their bodies were found three days later, dumped on the bank by receding waters about 6 kilometers down the river."

Drowning Pakistan: What It Means for the People and Who Is Responsible
August 30, 2010. A World to Win News Service, republished in Revolution newspaper.

What do global warming, deforestation have to do with the disastrous flooding that has affected millions in Pakistant? Why have the huge resources of the Pakistan and US with large militaries not been allocated to help these millions of suffering people?

"The problem is not a lack of resources, but that the interests of those who control them and the whole imperialist system are in antagonistic contradiction to the interests of the masses of people everywhere.

"The U.S.—and its junior partner in crime, the Pakistani military—might as well just come out and admit that their arms and technology exist to oppress the people and that they don't give a damn what happens to millions of poor and common people in Pakistan—except insofar as "instability" threatens their interests." --- AWTW News Service

Tuesday, Sept 21, 7 pm: Film & Discussion on the Mexican Revolution

Join us for a film & discussion on the Mexican Revolution - 1810 and 1910

snapshot!
Between 1776 and 1836, several colonial independence movements shook the Americas. One of the leaders of the Mexican revolution was Father Miguel Hidalgo, who led a revolt that sparked the outbreak of Mexico's war of independence. On September 16, 1810, Hidalgo shouted the famous "Grito de Dolores"--"Long live our Lady of Guadalupe, down with bad government, down with the Spaniards!" For the next eleven years there were many more uprisings and in 1821 Mexico declared its independence from Spain.

snapshot!
In the early 1800s two economic systems were competing in the U.S.: slavery and capitalism. The southern slave system, with its constant need for new land, was the driving force behind the seizure of the territory of northwest Mexico (what is now the U.S. Southwest). But the capitalists in the North also eyed the territory as a source of land, gold and other mineral resources, and as an opening of trade to the West. In 1836, slave owners, who had moved into the eastern part of Texas, stole the land from Mexico and declared it the Independent Republic of Texas. Despite warnings from the Mexican government, the U.S. annexed this so-called republic in 1845, and this led to the U.S.-Mexican War. At the end of the U.S.-Mexican War the U.S. ripped off approximately 50% of Mexico's territory...and the theft of this land crippled Mexico's future economic development.

snapshot!
Revolution broke out in Mexico in 1910 as peasants rose up demanding "Tierra y Libertad--Land and Liberty." Ninety-five percent of the Mexican people were landless peasants and tenant farmers and they fought for the land to be redistributed. Peasant leaders like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata led the Mexican people in resistance. Organizations in the U.S. like the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), led by Ricardo Flores Magon, actively built support for the revolution among Chicano and Mexicano workers. Magon was later imprisoned by the U.S. government and murdered in prison. This period saw the first large-scale migration of Mexican workers into the U.S. The political and economic upheaval that accompanied the Mexican Revolution led to hundreds of thousands coming to the U.S.--nearly 10% of Mexico's population. (excerpts from The Chicano Struggle and Proletarian Revolution in the U.S. Part 2: Mexican Independence from Spain, and the U.S.-Mexican War.)

Wednesday, Sept 22, 7- 8 pm: Revolution newspaper discussion

Join us to read and discuss the latest articles from Revolution newspaper such as…

• LAPD Murders Again: Justice for Manuel Jamines 

Tuesday, September 14: The Assault on Embryonic Stem Cell Research (presentation & discussion)

7 pm

The Chief Judge from the U.S. District Court for Washington D.C. has issued a ruling stopping all federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Embryonic stem cells have the ability to develop into any other cell in the human body and are invaluable for research and potential cures. The District Court ruling has resulted in immediate cuts to tens of millions of dollars of cutting edge research into fundamental questions of cell biology and rapid elimination of federal funding to many lines of current research which offer great promise of medical breakthroughs on conditions including diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and many others. The ruling orders greater restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research than what prevailed under George Bush.

The ruling shines a spotlight on the powerful political forces aggressively pushing the fundamentalist Christian dogma that treats a fertilized egg as a full human being, and treats women’s bodies as nothing more than incubators. It sheds light on how the assault on scientific discovery and scientific thinking did not end with the Bush presidency. And it points to the great harm done by the Obama administration in leading people to seek common ground with fascist forces.

What we need: a determined fight to resist this attack as a crucial part of the battle for revolution and a radically different world.

Tuesday, September 7 Presentation & Discussion -- Glenn Beck, the "Founding Fathers" ...and A REAL Radical Alternative

7 - 9  pm

Over the past few years, Glenn Beck has called the overwhelmingly poor and Black survivors of Hurricane Katrina locked down in the Superdome—in his words—"scumbags." He has ranted that progressives are a "cancer" that have to be "eradicated" from America. On an episode of his TV show, Beck envisioned—with barely concealed glee—an armed uprising of "bubbas" (white racists). He claims Barack Obama's White House is highly influenced if not run by communists, and that Obama "has a deep seated hatred for white people and white culture." A wide-ranging array of right-wing militia members, Tea Party mobs, and heavily armed desperate people get much of their picture of the world, along with organizational direction, from him.

But Glenn Beck argues that all he is really saying is that the U.S. needs to return to the government envisioned and prescribed by the "Founding Fathers" in the U.S. Constitution. To return to the days before "big government" got so out of hand, with the collusion of both parties, before a tax-obsessed political class enslaved the middle class to fund programs that feed the corrupt and lazy—from Wall Street to those on welfare.

Is Glenn Beck ideologizing and organizing a draconian, racist, and ominous reactionary movement? Is he a harbinger of, and organizer for, fascism? Or, as he claims, is he simply basing himself on the values and vision of the "Founding Fathers"?

The answer, as we shall see, is… both. And that poses a profound challenge to all who are outraged by what Beck spews out and represents.