Above, an invitation to Burlingame's library fundraiser ... Image from wincountrygetaways.com

... While in Salinas in 2004, readers protest "death of the libraries." Photo from indymedia.org

On Saturday, May 3, the Burlingame Public Library Foundation hosted a lunch that was as much about building community as it was about raising funds. As one of the organizers put it, the afternoon was an exercise in “friend-raising.”

Michael Krasny, the host of the San Francisco Bay Area public radio station KQED’s Forum program, talked about his new book, Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life, published this year by Stanford University Press.

Michael shared his often hilarious experiences interviewing everyone from Bill Clinton to the Merry Pranksters’ Ken Kesey, detailing the journey that took him from host of a show called “Beyond the Hot Tub” in swinging 1970’s Marin (the county north of San Francisco best known for hot tubs, peacock feathers, and the self-actualization movement EST) to “Bay Area cultural institution,” as author Michael Chabon describes him.

Henry H. Neff, a teacher at the private San Francisco boys’ high school Stuart Hall, spoke about his experience writing The Tapestry, a series of young adult novels that our 10-year-old son, who’s anxiously awaiting the next installment, describes as “like Harry Potter, but even better.” Charming, funny, and articulate, Henry’s next book comes out this fall – news that our son was delighted to hear.

Christina Meldrum

I read the galleys of my friend Christina Meldrum’s stunning debut novel, Madapple, over a single, rainy afternoon a few months ago. I refused to get up off the couch, despite the requests of my husband and sons, until I’d finished the last page. What a book! I truly couldn’t put it down. Christina has written a gripping page-turner that explores the dichotomy between religion and science. Reading it, I felt as if I’d entered into a dream state where nothing was quite what it seemed.

Christina began her book nearly a decade ago, while she was still working as a high-powered litigator at a big law firm’s San Francisco office. She would rise at five a.m. daily and write in the darkness of dawn for about an hour, her computer providing the only light, before heading to her San Francisco office. She had majored in religion as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and then went on to Harvard’s storied Graduate School of Law. Although she had the drive and intelligence to be recruited as an associate by one of the top law firms in the world, Christina didn’t find what she was looking for in the practice of that profession.

Tony Horwitz: His blog details the "voyage long and strange" that is a book tour. Photo from voyagelongandstrange.com

I hit a low point on my first tour for The House of Mondavi on one of those days that come so seldom to Chicago. It was last June and the weather felt balmy, with the last burst of spring blooms still on display. Who would want to sit indoors on an afternoon like that?

Few did. At a bookstore known for its well-attended author events, only three people showed up (excluding my very patient Aunt Gene and Uncle Jack, who had sat through my book talk several times already.) I’d brought two bottles of wine – one from the Robert Mondavi winery and the other, a Charles Krug, from the Peter Mondavi side.

That was my mistake: the warm weather, combined with the alcohol, literally lulled a third of my non-family audience to sleep. The book lover who come to my talk that day had her head thrown back, producing a soft, ladylike snore.

President John F. Kennedy plays with children John. Jr., and Caroline in the Oval Office in October 1962, above, while below, his motorcade approaches Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Top photo from historyplace.com; bottom photo Walt Sisco, photographer/Courtesy The Dallas Morning News

I can’t remember the last time I choked up with emotion while visiting a museum. But the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas – which offers far more than just the preservation of historical artifacts behind glass cases – is an example of powerful storytelling about a tragedy that changed history.

What unfolds there is a recounting of the November 22, 1963, assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald, an event that occurred when I was a toddler. Illustrating the ways in which multimedia storytelling is often so much more moving than print or broadcast alone, I used the audio tour to guide me through the exhibition. The audio tour’s spare, muscular prose was narrated by Pierce Allman, who was the first journalist to broadcast from the Texas Book Repository, where the assassin took aim at the motorcade below.

On that day more than four decades ago, 200,000 people had gathered in the streets of Dallas to welcome the presidential party. One of them was dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the convertible limousine that the President was riding in that day through the downtown streets with his 8 mm Bell & Howell movie camera. As the car passed directly beneath the Texas School Book Depository, shots rang out. The stills of these moments captured on Mr. Zapruder’s film are profound.

Robert Mondavi as Bacchus, with wife Margrit. Photo: Avis Mandel for Pate International

During the three years it took to research and write The House of Mondavi, I interviewed hundreds of people, pored through legal and corporate documents, and studied old photographs from high school yearbooks and other fragments of the past, searching for clues about Robert Mondavi’s character. Along the way, I gained an enormous respect for his passion, his perseverance, and his joie de vivre.

I was lucky enough to have the last formal interview Robert Mondavi ever granted to a writer. Our meeting took place in a second floor conference room of the Robert Mondavi Winery in Oakville on March 29, 2005, nearly four months after the forced sale of the Robert Mondavi Corporation. Although the sale proceeds helped Mr. Mondavi fulfill his many philanthropic pledges, it also put him out of the wine business for the first time since the 1930s. It was a sad spring for Mr. Mondavi, then 91, and his wife Margrit and I left that interview feeling as if Robert Mondavi was already beginning to slip away.