Bay City Books: New Books from Bay Area Authors – August 2024

The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House

Nancy Pelosi (San Francisco)
Simon & Schuster, August 6, 2024

Nancy Pelosi was first elected to Congress in 1987 when she was 46 and a mother of five. Over the next four decades, she became a master legislator, a partner to presidents, a leader of the Trump resistance, and the Speaker of the House – the most powerful position in the House of Representatives. She just helped maneuver President Biden not to run for re-election. How did she do this? In The Art of Power, Pelosi tells the story of her transformation, her successes and setbacks, and the devastation her family experienced after an intruder broke into her house and attacked her husband, Paul.

The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory

Thomas Fuller (Moraga)
Doubleday, August 6, 2023

As San Francisco bureau chief for the New York Times, Thomas Fuller reported on some of the most exciting stories of the day, including wildfires, mass shootings, and the pandemic. But an obscure email from the California Department of Education transformed his life. The November 2021 message told how the football team at the California School for the Deaf in Riverside, coached by a deaf former athlete, was undefeated. Fuller was so inspired by the story that he jumped in his car and drove south for seven hours to watch the team in the playoffs. The Boys of Riverside looks back at the team’s inspiring 2021 and 2022 seasons and follows the journeys of the deaf coach, a player who slept in a car in a Target parking lot, a player who refused to let a broken leg stop him, and a team that would not quit. 

The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food

Julie Guthman (Santa Cruz)
UC Press, August 6, 2024

Part of the myth of Silicon Valley is that its products do good and change the world. But its apps and software and tech adventures have not solved our food crises, Julie Guthman argues in her new book. Guthman, a geographer and professor of community studies at UC Santa Cruz, believes that a capitalistic approach and moonshot ideas have failed and society must turn from technology to respond to the root causes of hunger and food insecurity. 

This Ravenous Fate

Hayley Dennings (Oakland)
Sourcebooks Fire, August 6, 2024

Haley Dennings’s debut fantasy novel is set in 1926 in Jazz Age Harlem where reapers (a mutated form of vampire) are on the rise. Elise Saint, 18, recently returned from Paris, is the reluctant heir to her family’s reaper hunting business. She knows that they want her dead, none more than Layla Quinn, who believes Elise’s betrayal turned her from human to reaper five years earlier. But when a series of brutal killings sweep the city, threatening both humans and reapers, the two former friends are forced to work togther to solve the crimes. As they explore New York City’s underworld, they also confront their feelings for one another.

The Palace of Eros

Caro de Robertis (Oakland)
Atria/Primero Sueno Press,  August 13, 2024

In The Palace of Eros, prolific Oakland author Caro de Robertis retells the Greek myth of Psyche and Eros, but with a subversive, feminist spin that explores the power of queer joy and freedom. Psyche is so beautiful that every man lusts for her yet no one wants to marry her.  The goddess Aphrodite grows jealous of Psyche’s beauty and tells Eros, her nonbinary daughter and the deity of desire, to make Psyche fall in love with a monster. Instead, Eros falls in love with Psyche. The young lovers flee. By night they live a life of passion, but when the sun rises, Eros must leave to not break a spell that keeps them safe. Can the lovers stay together when outside forces and the wrath of the gods want to pry them apart? 

A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson

Camille Perri (San Francisco)
Viking, August 13, 2024

Robert Louis Stevenson is best known for writing classics such as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But with Camille Peri’s new book, A Wilder Shore, he may also be remembered for the rich and fruitful marriage he had with Fanny Van de Grift. They met in France in 1876, he, a Scottish writer, and she, an Indiana native once married to a philandering Nevada silver miner. Their union was tempestuous but supportive. They traveled around Europe to the U.S. to Samoa, where they joined the native islanders’ fight against imperialist powers. Fanny wrote about their travels, helped Robert pen his masterpieces, and cared for him as he died. 

Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies

Abigail Hing Wen, (San Francisco)
Feiwel & Friends, August 13, 2024

Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies, the fourth book of Abigail Hing Wen, a New York Times bestselling YA writer, delves into a complicated love triangle. Tan Lee and Winter Woo are best friends who had a magical kiss at prom, and those feelings intensify when their parents venture to Hawaii leaving them behind. Tan’s ex-girlfriend from Shanghai suddenly returns with a handful of Tang Dynasty coins stolen from her billionaire father and thugs chasing her. The three team up to outsmart international hackers and chase them to the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the Barnes and Noble in Union Square, and the UC Berkeley campus. Fans can also see Love in Taipei, the adaptation of one of Hing Wen’s earlier novels, on Netflix.

No Democracy Lasts Forever

Edwin Chemerinksy (Oakland)
Liveright, August 20, 2024

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law, confronts the limitations of the U.S. Constitution in No Democracy Lives Forever. The document is fossilized, he argues, with just 15 of the 11,848 amendments proposed since 1789 passing. Our 250-year-old Constitution has “bad bones” because of its amber-like status. That has led to extreme polarization. Political armageddon can be avoided if the country holds a new constitutional convention to replace the one adopted in 1787. If that doesn’t happen, the country should consider reforming into an alliance structured like the European Union so regions with different values can act more autonomously.