Crowds of book group aficionados flocked to San Jose for the third annual Book Group Expo, above; below, author Frances Dinkelspiel debuted her book, Towers of Gold, at the convention.

There are conventions for everyone: dog lovers, tattoo artists, people who trade sports memorabilia, barristas, and hairdressers. They all have their annual gatherings to swap tales, make friends, and do business.

So why shouldn’t book groups have theirs? For the third year, an estimated 1,700 people gathered over a weekend in October for Book Group Expo at the San Jose Convention Center in California’s Silicon Valley to meet authors, eat chocolate, and engage in high (and low) book talk.

Some 75 authors also made the trip, including Andre Dubus III (House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days), Gail Tsukiyama (Women of the Silk, The Street of A Thousand Blossoms), Julia Glass (Three Junes, I See you Everywhere) and Will Durst (The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing).

Since some book groups have started reading The House of Mondavi alongside King Lear, I was invited to participate in a panel called “Where There’s A Will….Shakespeare In The 21st Century.” And let me tell you: I felt pretty sheepish when I misstated the century in which Shakespeare wrote his plays. Okay, so I was off by a hundred years!

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The elegant Mondavi arts center, above, is a dramatic addition to the rural landscape of Davis -- and it will soon be joined by the Robert Mondavi Institute, depicted in an artists' rendering below.

Anyone driving east from San Francisco on Highway 80, the 10-lane transcontinental highway to Nevada and points east, can’t miss the name Mondavi. In California’s Central Valley, where the Mondavi family first made its name in the grape wholesaling business in the 1920s and then became America’s foremost wine dynasty, Robert and Margrit Mondavi have passed into legend – so much so that their names are heralded for all to see from the freeway.

This past week, I gave talks on my book, The House of Mondavi, in Sacramento and the nearby town of Davis, where the University of California’s renowned viticulture program is based. Davis is home to both the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts and the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science. You can see the sign for the Mondavi Center on one side of the I-80 and the construction site for the new RMI on the other.

When I told a good friend from Alabama about these author events, she teased, “Oh, Julie, it’s just Mo’ Bob Mon …” -- meaning that talking about the late Bob Mondavi had become a long-standing routine. In fact, it’s been Mo’ Bob Mon for more than 15 months now, and that’s why I was was not much looking forward to what had threatened to be a long and taxing day in the Central Valley.

But to my surprise, the two events were some of the liveliest and most though-provoking I’ve yet attended. The first took place at a breakfast for about 50 members and guests of the Capital Region Family Business Center, a non-profit group made up of second-, third-, and even a few fourth- and fifth-generation members of local family businesses.

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Sparse crowds at Copia have contributed to its financial challenges.

(Photo from Sacbee.com - Owen Brewer / Sacramento Bee file, 2002)

Despite my intention to take a summer sabbatical, an investigative story that appeared on the front page of last Sunday’s Sacramento Bee brought me back to my keyboard. The story raises some new questions about Robert Mondavi’s philanthropic legacy, a subject I explored in The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty.

An enterprising reporter for The Bee named Andrew McIntosh broke the news that Copia, the nonprofit brainchild of Robert Mondavi devoted to wine, food and the arts in downtown Napa, was bailed out by a state-owned bank that might now be liable if the center fails to recoup its losses. In the mid-1990s, Robert Mondavi had donated $20 million to found Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts. Ever since the 80,000-square-foot building opened in 2001, the center has struggled with low attendance, financial troubles, and a confused mission.

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A summer day in Berkeley includes seeing buildings rise and fall at the Lawrence Hall of Science (above) and smelling the "Corpse Flower" (below), whose name and odor both recall Audrey II, the killer plant from another planet (bottom).

This spring, I mailed off applications for our boys to attend an academically challenging summer school run by the University of California at Berkeley. When the letters arrived in the mail telling us whether they’d been admitted, I opened them with mixed emotions – perhaps even a certain amount of dread.

Both boys were admitted, which made me proud. But that also meant we’d be setting our alarm clocks for 6:30 every morning to make it to their classes in Berkeley, which would begin at 8:30 a.m. sharp.

Since hiring a chauffeur wasn’t in our budget and reliable public transport system between our home and Berkeley doesn’t exist, their acceptance to the program meant that I’d be spending at about three hours a day in the car ferrying them to their respective campuses.

Even though I am now a best-selling author, with the The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty under my belt, and a newly-signed contract for a non-fiction narrative with Grove/Atlantic, I’m still stuck with the school run.

And like many working mothers across the country, my life becomes infinitely more challenging in the summer, at least in terms of finding the time to squeeze in work. (I’ve found the time to write this, for instance, while I’m waiting for one son outside a summer school classroom: I’ve got exactly 18 minutes left before the dismissal bell rings and my writing day ends.)

Even so, I realize how lucky I am to have the chance to spend this time with our boys, unlike so many other working mothers who punch in and out at work every day. Despite my grumbling, I’m grateful for this privilege.

To explain why I don’t mind driving our young scholars every day, let me tell you about how my younger son and I recently spent the morning in Berkeley – he gets one day off from class each week – while my other son was in school.

We started off at the Lawrence Hall of Science, arriving nearly an hour before it opened. We passed the time playing a fascinating game in the atrium (which opens before the rest of the museum) called “Hex.”

Continue reading "Hex, the Corpse Flower, and Berkeley’s Tree-Sitters: A Summer Sabbatical" »

Mrs. Magoo readies for her closeup; next stop, stardom as a cyber-TV celebrity book critic?

(Photo courtesy Mrs. Magoo)

In the fall of 2007, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) ran a lengthy essay by Steve Wasserman, a former editor of The Los Angeles Times Book Review, titled “Goodbye to All That.”

It offers a fascinating glimpse into the dire state of newspaper book review sections and Steve began by tallying the vanishing coverage at major newspapers. To darken the picture even further, he then went on to correlate that with the exploding number of books published every year.

In the mid-1980s, he reported, about 50,000 books a year were published. Today, the total is three times that number. But the pages devoted each week to reviewing books has steadily shrunk, with entire sections folding in the wake of anemic ad revenues from book-related advertising.

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Meg Waite Clayton and her creation.

For anyone who has ever dreamed of becoming an author, Meg Waite Clayton’s website is a delightful and inspiring place to visit.

Meg is the author of the bestselling novel, The Wednesday Sisters, a book about a group of women friends. They meet at a park in Palo Alto, California, in the late 1960s and form a writers’ circle. Along the way, as the war in Vietnam rages, American astronauts land on the moon and the Women’s Movement challenges much of what they think about themselves. They support each other through changes in their personal lives brought on by infidelity, longing, illness, failure, and success.

I loved Meg’s book in part because I was born in Palo Alto in the 1960s and the book helped me imagine what my own mother’s life might have been like at the time. I also loved The Wednesday Sisters because it celebrates the strong bonds and support that can be provided by a good writers group. And I am lucky to be a member of two such groups that helped me navigate the often treacherous waters leading to publication.

Long before I began the Wall Street Journal article that led to The House of Mondavi, I joined a long-standing group of women nonfiction writers who usually met every two weeks in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. We came to call ourselves “North 24th,” because we’d usually meet north of 24th Street.

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Two kings: Ian Holm as Lear and Robert Mondavi. Photo of Holm from the University of London; photo of Mondavi by Mike Kepka/SFGate.com

What can Shakespeare teach us about a troubled family business?

That’s a question I’ll try to answer at a discussion hosted by a long-lasting and large book group in Burlingame, Calif., this fall. Over the summer, the group has decided to read Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear, alongside my book, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty.

To prepare myself for the evening, I’ve checked out the DVD of the Royal National Theatre’s celebrated production of King Lear with Ian Holm (which I had the great fortune to see performed in London in 1997) from our local public library. I’ve also checked out the Cliff Notes on King Lear, as well as the text of the play itself (the Pelican Shakespeare edition of the 1608 Quarto and 1632 Folio Texts).

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