Small Business Saturday has been gaining momentum each year to the point where it has now become the day for customers to discover the independent merchants in their community. (Forget Black Friday and Cyber Monday, they are so over!).  Join our San Francisco Ferry Building Store for a day of special events!

..........................................................................................................................

Sharing a meal is one of life’s greatest pleasures and a powerful and intimate way to create community. Feed Your People offers big-batch recipes from big-hearted chefs and cooks for the foods we gather around.

Starting with an introduction to big-batch cooking, this book features dishes by Alice Waters, Bryant Terry, Gonzalo Guzman, Joyce Goldstein, Tanya Holland, Dennis Lee, Preeti Mistry, and other generous cooks who know how to feed a crowd. You will find ideas and practical information for creating dumpling dinners, vegetarian suppers, meatball fund-raisers, soup swaps, chili cook-offs, seafood boils, backyard barbecues, ice cream socials, and so much more. Most recipes are scaled to feed groups of approximately 10 or 20 people with make-ahead strategies, equipment information, and serving suggestions for rounding out the meal.

From simple comfort foods to show-stopping recipes, you’ll discover centerpiece dishes that feature global flavors, like tamales, rustic minestrone soup, Gujarati-inspired chili, big-pan paella, homemade gnocchi, Korean bo ssäm, fork-tender carnitas, seafood boils, Provençal-style grand aioli with roasted salmon, a chocolatey Texas sheet cake, slab pies, trifles, and other foods that will help you celebrate life’s many special occasions.

Gorgeously illustrated with vivid color photography and filled with tips and cooking wisdom, we hope this book will inspire you to gather your friends, family, and community around the table.

Leslie Jonath is a book packager specializing in cookbooks. Before launching Connected Dots media, she was a creative director at Chronicle Books where she produced many successful titles leveraging partnerships with high-profile causes and foundations, including The Pleasures of Slow Food by Corby Kummer; From Our House to Yours: Comfort Food to Share with Meals on Wheels of San Francisco; and The Edible Schoolyard with renowned chef and restaurateur Alice Waters. Her most recent titles include the Miette Bakery Cookbook (over 150,000 sold to date), The Flower Workshop, Give Yourself a Gold Star, The Model Bakery Cookbook, The Amazing (mostly) Edible Science Cookbook, and The Little Pleasures of Paris. She lives in San Francisco.

Networking has garnered a reputation as a sort of necessary evil in the modern business world. Some do relish the opportunity to boldly work the room, introduce themselves to strangers, and find common career ground—but for many others, the experience is often awkward, or even terrifying.

The common networking advice for introverts are variations on the theme of overcoming or “fixing” their quiet tendencies. But Karen Wickre is a self-described introvert who has worked in Silicon Valley for 30 years. She shows you to embrace your true nature to create sustainable connections that can be called upon for you to get—and give—career assistance, advice, introductions, and lasting connections.

Karen’s “embrace your quiet side” approach is for anyone who finds themselves shying away from traditional networking activities, or for those who would rather be curled up with a good book on a Friday night than out at a party. For example, if you’re anxious about that big professional mixer full of people you don’t know, she advises you to consider skipping it (many of these are not productive), and instead set up an intimate, one-on-one coffee date. She shows how to truly make the most out of social media to sustain what she calls “the loose touch habit” to build your own brain trust to last a lifetime.

With compelling arguments and creative strategies, Taking the Work Out of Networking, is perfect not only for introverts, but for anyone who wants for a less conventional approach to get ahead in today’s job market.

Silicon Valley veteran Karen Wickre is the former Editorial Director at Twitter, where she landed after a decade-long career at Google. An advisor to startups and a lifelong information seeker, she is a member of the Board of Visitors for the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University, and serves on the boards of the International Center for Journalists, the News Literacy Project, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has been a featured columnist for Wired.com and is a cofounder of Newsgeist, an annual gathering conference fostering new approaches to news and information. She is the author of Taking the Work Out of Networking and lives in San Francisco.

Families today are squeezed on every side—from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible.

Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects—from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses—have been wrung out by a system that doesn’t support them, and enriches only a tiny elite.

Interlacing her own experience with close-up reporting on families that are just getting by, Quart reveals parenthood itself to be financially overwhelming, except for the wealthiest. She offers real solutions to these problems, including outlining necessary policy shifts, as well as detailing the DIY tactics some families are already putting into motion, and argues for the cultural reevaluation of parenthood and caregiving.

Written in the spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich and Jennifer Senior, Squeezed is an eye-opening page-turner. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful, it casts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options. It will make readers think differently about their lives and those of their neighbors.

Alissa Quart  is the executive editor of the journalism non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She co-founded its current incarnation with Barbara Ehrenreich. She is also the author of four previous acclaimed books, Branded, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids’and the poetry book Monetized. She writes the Outclassed column for The Guardian and has published features and reported commentary in many magazines and newspapers, most recently for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Nation and The New York Review of Books. She has won the Columbia Journalism School’s 2018 Alumni Award and the LA Press Club Award for Commentary, was a 2010 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, and has been nominated for an Emmy and a National Magazine Award.

Join the Novato Youth String Ensemble and the Sinaloa Middle School Jazz Choir for a lovely evening of beautiful string music and soaring harmonies. These 2 award-winning groups will present holiday music and a bit more.

Join Marin Ballet at Book Passage on November 30th at 4:30pm to hear the magical tale of The Nutcracker.  This unique telling of the holiday classic will feature a costumed visit by some of the characters from the ballet’s cast.  The dancers will be available to take photos and sign autographs after the reading.  This is the perfect opportunity to introduce the Nutcracker tradition to little ones! 

Follow it up by seeing Clara’s whimsical adventure come to life at the Marin Center on December 8th and 9th.

Presented with CUESA

In 85 innovative recipes, Lindsay-Jean Hard—who writes the “Cooking with Scraps” column for Food52—shows just how delicious and surprising the all-too-often-discarded parts of food can be, transforming what might be considered trash into culinary treasure.

Cooking with Scraps shows how to put those seeds, stems, tops, rinds to good use for more delicious (and more frugal) cooking: Carrot greens—bright, fresh, and packed with flavor—make a zesty pesto. Water from canned beans behaves just like egg whites, perfect for vegan mayonnaise that even non-vegans will love. And serve broccoli stems olive-oil poached on lemony ricotta toast. It’s pure food genius, all the while critically reducing waste one dish at a time.

Lindsay-Jean Hard received her Master's in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan. Her education and passion for sustainability went on to inform and inspire her work in the garden, home, and community. The seeds of this book were planted in her Food52 column of the same name. Today she works to share her passion for great food and great communities as a marketer at Zingerman's Bakehouse. She lives, writes, loves, and creates in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

We are living longer and healthier lives than ever before. Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are heading into retirement in droves (about 10,000 a day, in fact). Joan Tabb is on a mission to bring the best of them to this new stage of life -- one she terms as "Revitalment." Her new book, Building Blocks for the New Retirement reinvigorates the retirement paradigm for Baby Boomers age 55+ and shows us how to channel our energy into opportunities for meaning, purpose and fun.

Joan is a professional writer, coach and speaker. Bringing 20+ year of Silicon Valley corporate leadership at Apple, Intel and 3Com, in marketing, training and consulting, Joan coaches individuals one-on-one on advancement, problem solving and empowerment.

Join us for a reception with artist Tom Killion to celebrate his latest work displayed in the Book Passage gallery on December 2 from 5:00 - 7:00pm.

Book Passage is thrilled to welcome back Tom Killion to our Gallery for a year-long exhibition of his original prints and hand-crafted books. Killion was born and raised in Marin County, where the rugged scenery inspired him from an early age to create spectacular landscape prints. His work has been inspired by the landscape prints of early 19th century Japan as well as early 20th century European/American wood-engraving and book illustration techniques.

In Conversation with Dave Eggers

It’s the fall of 1979 in New York City when twenty-three-year-old Anton Winter, back from the Peace Corps and on the mend from a nasty bout of malaria, returns to his childhood home in the Dakota. Anton’s father, the famous late-night host Buddy Winter, is there to greet him, himself recovering from a breakdown. Before long, Anton is swept up in an effort to reignite Buddy’s stalled career, a mission that takes him from the gritty streets of New York, to the slopes of the Lake Placid Olympics, to the Hollywood Hills, to the blue waters of the Bermuda Triangle, and brings him into close quarters with the likes of Johnny Carson, Ted and Joan Kennedy, and a seagoing John Lennon.

But the more Anton finds himself enmeshed in his father’s professional and spiritual reinvention, the more he questions his own path, and fissures in the Winter family begin to threaten their close bond. By turns hilarious and poignant, The Dakota Winters is a family saga, a page-turning social novel, and a tale of a critical moment in the history of New York City and the country at large.

Tom Barbash grew up in New York and is the author of three books as well as numerous reviews, stories essays, and articles for publications including McSweeney’s, Tin House, the Believer, Narrative Magazine, One Story, StoryQuarterly, Zyzzyva, the Missouri Review, Story Magazine, Men’s Journal, ESPN the Magazine, BookForum, and the New York Times. His short story collection, Stay Up With Me, was nominated for the Folio Prize, and was picked as a Best Book of the Year by the Independent of London, NPR, Amazon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and was a San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. British GQ, British Vogue, and British Harper’s Bazaar selected it for their summer book clubs. His novel, The Last Good Chance, was awarded The California Book Award, was a Publishers Weekly and Anniston Star Best Book of the Year, and was short listed for the Great Lakes Book Prize and the Saroyan International Prize. He has held fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The James Michener Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Mistral is a portrait of Provence seen through its legendary wind. Photographer Rachel Cobb illustrates the effects of this relentless wind that funnels down the Rhone Valley, periodically gusting to 120 km per hour -- hurricane strength on the Beaufort wind force scale. The region has, accordingly, adjusted to accommodate the mistral's impact. Some houses are built the traditional way, with few or no windows on the windward side and the main entrance on the sheltered side. Heavy stones hold down terra-cotta roof tiles. Rows of trees lining fields create windbreaks to shield crops.

Cobb spent years chasing this capricious wind, challenging herself to photograph the invisible. As she became sensitive to its rhythms and effects, Cobb realized the mistral was not just a weather phenomenon; it was an integral part of the fabric of Provencal life. It was everywhere, yet always unseen.

Mistral captures this invisible force of nature through its effects: a leaf caught in flight, a bride tangled in her veil, spider webs oriented to withstand the wind and grapes lashed by powerful gusts ("You can taste the wine better when the mistral blows," a Chateauneuf-du-Pape winemaker says). Writers have also tried their hand at conjuring this ungraspable phenomenon. Excerpts from writings by Paul Auster, Lawrence Durrell, Jean Giono and Frederic Mistral are included in this volume, a luminous evocation of nature's unseen power.

New York City-based photographer Rachel Cobb has photographed current affairs, social issues, and features in the U.S. and abroad for the past 25 years.  She has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Time, Rolling Stone, Natural History, Stern, and Paris Match among others on assignments ranging from U.S.-led sanctions in Iraq, a Kosovo Liberation Army soldier’s journey from a U.S. college to his war-torn homeland, the Evangelical movement in Guatemala, and a papal visit to Cuba.  Cobb's work has earned her recognition with Picture of the Year awards for her work during the 9/11 attacks in New York City and in war-torn Sarajevo, a nomination for the ICP Infinity Award for young photographer, and a Marty Forscher Grant for Humanistic Photography for documenting New York City's homeless.  She has exhibited her work in solo and group shows at the Miami Museum of Art, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Parrish Art Museum (Southampton, New York), Visa Pour L’Image (Perpignan, France), and in galleries across the U.S.

Bering Sea Strong is a tale of adventure and self-discovery. The story portrays a young woman on a solo journey, pushed to the edge of the earth and further from the weight of family -- marked by divorce, death, disability, and depression -- and a life she desires on land.

Locked at sea for ninety days as the lone female trying to tuck in tight alongside twenty-five rough-and-tumble commercial fishermen in Alaska, Laura Hartema offers a rare glimpse into the intertwining worlds of a fisheries observer and the crew she works beside. She graphically illustrates the challenges of daily life and relationships in a way few have seen before. Her story provides an unprecedented portrait of the bizarre and entertaining human dynamics aboard an at-sea catcher-processor vessel, where men battle dangerous working conditions, loneliness, and boredom while rivaling for the attention of the only woman.

Between trough and crest, Laura Hartema ponders the trauma and tragedies of her Midwest childhood as her capabilities and resilience are regularly tested. She is often left deciding when to "blow it off" and when to "blow a gasket." In the end, the tumultuous Bering Sea is where she finds the strength to overcome the wounds of her past, embrace life's uncertainty, and steam ahead into the unchartered waters of her future. Bering Sea Strong demonstrates one woman's determination to overcome obstacles in pursuit of a satisfying career and a better life.

Laura Hartema was born and raised in Chicagoland and earned a Bachelor of Science in biology from College of the Ozarks in Branson, Missouri. The challenging work and adventures depicted in Bering Sea Strong led to Hartema's present career as an ecologist focusing on stream and wetland restoration. Her passion for her work and love for nature spills into her community, where she leads volunteers in stream enhancement efforts. She encourages others to seek inspiration, beauty, and humor in her blog, Love This Day. Hartema resides in the Seattle area and spends much of her time outdoors embracing Puget Sound and the Cascade and Olympic mountains.

From the author of the New York Times bestselling and award-winning Not on Our Watch, John Prendergast co-writes a compelling book with Fidel Bafilemba -- with stunning photographs by Ryan Gosling--revealing the way in which the people and resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo have been used throughout the last five centuries to build, develop, advance, and safeguard the United States and Europe. Congo Stories highlights the devastating price Congo has paid for that support. However, the way the world deals with Congo is finally changing, and the book tells the remarkable stories of those in Congo and the United States leading that transformation.

The people of Congo are fighting back against a tidal wave of international exploitation and governmental oppression to make things better for their nation, their neighborhoods, and their families. They are risking their lives to resist and alter the deadly status quo. And now, finally, there are human rights movements led by young people in the United States and Europe building solidarity with Congolese change-makers in support of dignity, justice, and equality for the Congolese people. As a result, the way the world deal with Congo is finally changing.

Fidel Bafilemba, Ryan Gosling, and John Prendergast traveled to Congo to document some of the stories not only of the Congolese upstanders who are building a better future for their country but also of young Congolese people overcoming enormous odds just to go to school and help take care of their families. Through Gosling's photographs of Congolese daily life, Bafilemba's profiles of heroic Congolese activists, and Prendergast's narratives of the extraordinary history and evolving social movements that directly link Congo with the United States and Europe, This important work provides windows into the history, the people, the challenges, the possibilities, and the movements that could change the course of Congo's destiny. Featuring an afterword by bestselling author Dave Eggers,.

John Prendergast is a human rights activist and New York Times bestselling author who has focused on peace in Africa for over thirty years. He is the founding director of the Enough Project, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity. He is also the co-founder of The Sentry with George Clooney, a new investigative initiative focused on dismantling the networks financing conflict and atrocities. John has worked for the Clinton White House, the State Department, two members of Congress, the National Intelligence Council, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Fidel Bafilemba is a Congolese field researcher who coordinates a civil society network called GATT-RN.

Dave Eggers is the author of ten books, including the national bestsellers The Circle and A Hologram for the King, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco. Eggers is the cofounder of 826 National, a network of eight tutoring centers around the country, and ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization designed to connect students with resources, schools, and donors to make college possible. He lives in Northern California with his family.

Chou Chou Namegabe is a Congolese journalist.

Our biology is no longer destiny. Our genes respond to everything we do, according to the revolutionary new science of epigenetics. In other words, our inherited DNA doesn't rigidly determine our health and disease prospects as the previous generation of geneticists believed. Especially in the last ten years, scientists have confirmed that the vast majority of our genes are actually fluid and dynamic. An endless supply of new studies prove that our health is an expression of how we live our lives -- that what we eat and think and how we handle daily stress, plus the toxicity of our immediate environment -- creates an internal biochemistry that can actually turn genes on or off. Managing these biochemical effects on our genome is the new key to radiant wellness and healthy longevity.

Now gaining broad credibility among scientists, the study of epigenetics is at the forefront of modern medicine. According Change Your Genes, Change Your Life, the real upshot of the epigenetic revolution is that it opens the door to what futurists call personalized medicine. For the first time in a trade book, Dr. Kenneth Pelletier explains in layperson's language the genetic biomarkers that will become the standard reference for measuring which specific lifestyle changes are required to optimize a given individual's health. In the very near future, each person's state-of-the-art genetic and epigenetic profile--matched with other precise indicators such as assays of the gut microbiome -- will guide their daily health practices.

This short but profound book by a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine introduces readers to this exciting new field, and reveals the steps that each of us can take today to change our genetic expression and thereby optimize our health for a lifetime.

Kenneth R. Pelletier, PhD, MD is a clinical professor of medicine and psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco. He is a medical consultant to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the World Health Organization, the Federation of State Medical Boards, and major corporations. Kenneth also serves as chairman of the American Health Association and is a founding board member of the American Board of Integrative Medicine. His research, clinical practice, and publications have been the subject of numerous national television programs including appearances on the ABC World News, the Today Show, Good Morning America, the CBS Evening News, the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, CNN, numerous PBS specials on his books, and the award-winning BBC series The Long Search. Kenneth is the author of ten books including the international bestseller Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer and has published over 300 medical and professional journal articles.

During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty.

With Lost Time, Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.

Eric Karpeles, painter, writer and translator, is the author of Almost Nothing: The 20th Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski. His comprehensive guide, Paintings in Proust, considers the intersection of literary and visual aesthetics in the work of the great French novelist. He has written about the paintings of poet Elizabeth Bishop and about the end of life as seen through the works of Emily Dickinson, Gustav Mahler and Mark Rothko. Painter of the Sanctuary and the Mary and Laurance Rockefeller Chapel, he has also translated Lorenza Foschini's Proust's Overcoat. He lives in Northern California.