Local authors get on the page Local authors get on the page (February 13, 2004)

New writers give talk at Books Inc.

By Dan Stapleton

Local authors enjoyed a moment in the spotlight thanks to an event hosted by Books Inc. in downtown Mountain View last week.

Five authors from Mountain View and Palo Alto came to talk about their books and themselves at Books Inc.'s first local author's event on Feb. 4. Books Inc. currently carries all of the books featured.

Store manager Helen Sumser said that the "local authors" theme drew a larger number of spectators than many previous book review nights, which Books Inc. holds monthly. In light of the public interest, Sumser plans to hold more events centered on local figures. "Books Inc. is a community-based book store, so we want to host local authors to give them community attention and bring the community together," she said.

Letters To America 2004, by Rosiland Bivings

Mountain View resident Rosiland Bivings' interest in politics led her to run for a City Council seat first in 1992 and then in 2002. Now, it's led to her first political book. Letters To America 2004 is a collection of 37 letters, 1,000 words or less each, responding to the question, "If you were to write a letter to America at this time, what would it say?"

Bivings describes the letters, which came from as far away as North Carolina and Maryland, as patriotic but critical and frustrated. She joked that some of the names had been changed to protect the letter writers from the Department of Homeland Security.

Bivings is working on a second volume of Letters To America which she expects to complete this summer and is accepting submissions at letterstoamerica2004@yahoo.com.

Bivings will be back at Books Inc. to talk about her book on March 3.

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

Author Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. In 1980, Hosseini's diplomat father received asylum for his family in the United States and fled their war-torn homeland. Today, Hosseini is a doctor living in Mountain View.

"The Kite Runner," the first Afghan novel written in English, is about a friendship between two boys from different social classes growing up in Afghanistan who are divided by the conflict that tore apart the country. Hosseini was halfway through writing the book on 9/11, when the direction of the novel changed and gave him a whole new goal.

"The book became about introducing people to a country and a people they had only seen on CNN," he said.

How to Do Everything With Google, by Nancy Blachman

"Most people use Google but are only aware of a fraction of its capabilities," says Mountain View resident Nancy Blachman. To help them search smarter, she and two Google engineers co-authored "How To Do Everything With Google," a guide to the many uses for the Internet's most popular search tool.

Blachman, who has co-authored several other books offering technical tutorials, says that this book started with her Web site, www.GoogleGuide.com. "I wanted to give tutorials and get feedback from users," she said. After several rewrites and reorganizations, Blachman accumulated many ways to help people get more and better results from their Google searches.

Blachman then teamed up with Google engineers Fritz Schneider and Eric Fredricksen to write "How to Do Everything With Google," an in-depth guide to the ins and outs of Google's many uses with more examples, more detail and history of Google's development than are available on the Web site.

Blachman will be back at Books Inc. to talk about her book on March 11.

Taming Hal, by Asaf Degani

Palo Alto resident Asaf Degani is a NASA/Ames researcher at who specializes in the interaction between humans and machines through interfaces. "Sometimes it is not your fault that you get frustrated trying to program your VCR. Sometimes it's the designer's fault," said Degani.

His book, "Taming Hal," is not about killer computers on spaceships, as the title's reference to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" suggests, but rather how we can work more closely and effectively with the machines that surround us. The book is made up of 18 chapters, each of which is a story about Degani or others interacting with technology.

Degani will be back at Books Inc. to talk about his book on March 9.

Women Taking Charge, by Paula Leslie

Palo Alto resident Paula Leslie is an organizational consultant and practicing psychotherapist specializing in workplace conflict for companies like Hewlett Packard and Cisco Systems. Her book, "Women Taking Charge," draws on her experiences and lays out five steps for women to become more assertive in a work environment and gain self-esteem.

Leslie will be back at Books Inc. to talk about her book on Feb. 25.

E-mail Dan Stapleton at dstapleton@mv-voice.com

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