UC Santa Cruz Professor nominated for 2010 National Book Award
Thanks to Scott McKenzie’s soulful crooning and dreamlike lyrics, generations of people throughout the world have imagined San Francisco to be an idyllic escape from reality where carefree hippies frolic about with flowers in their hair. Natives to the city, particularly minority groups, know it differently.

In her latest novel, “I Hotel,” UC Santa Cruz professor Karen Tei Yamashita gives voice to those groups by examining the 1960s and ’70s in Northern California through the eyes of a Chinese-American poet, a Filipino-American farm worker organizer and a Japanese-Russian-American disability activist, among others.

One of five finalists nominated for a 2010 National Book Award in the Fiction category, the novel catapults the reader into a series of 10 novellas beginning with the line: “So I’m Walter Cronkite, dig? And it’s February 27,1968, and I’m saying, the U.S. is mired in a stalemate in Vietnam, and you are there.”

Editor’s note: In this week’s Poetry Corner, we feature the work of Monica Youn. Her second poetry collection, “Ignatz” (Four Way Books) is a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. She lives in New York City, where she is an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. She is a past recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress.

Bookshop Santa Cruz recommends:
1. “Wolf Hall”
2. “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk”
3. “Grace of Silence”
4. “The Food Matters Cookbook”
5. “Howl
Capitola Book Café recommends:
1. “Drood”
2. “What Is Left the Daughter”
3. “Kook:
4. “Getting Green Done"

Bay Area author Bo Caldwell illuminates the harrowing lives of missionaries in pre-Communist Revolution China
Having personal experience with missionaries—my sister is currently a missionary in Taiwan—I have an understanding of both the risks and rewards that a life devoted to serving others entails. Spiritual rejection, sleepless nights and lack of funds are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to challenges that must be daily faced. However, to see the smiling faces of those who would have otherwise remained hungry or sick without receiving assistance is a reward, I’m told, that far outweighs even the most difficult hurdle. So when I saw that Bo Caldwell’s newly released novel, “City of Tranquil Light,” is a tale of missionaries serving in China, I was immediately drawn in. Luminous, heart wrenching and intricately detailed, the novel—told through the eyes of both Will and Katherine Keihn—is based loosely on the author’s real life grandparents as well as on other early missionaries to China.