Cults, cooks and clothing

I hope that by now everyone has had a chance to dig into The Pacific Circuit, our pick of the month for September. One club member told me that although she thought “it started slow” that once things kicked in, it was “fantastic.” I hope that perseverance pays off with every book we read together here: there’s a reason behind me sharing each title.

So, if you have had a chance to read, then it’s reminder time: next week we’re talking to author Alexis Madrigal at 7pm Eastern/4pm Pacific on Tuesday September 23. It’s a live interview and Q&A, conducted on Zoom and open to everyone on this list. Alexis is a great talker and very open and able to hold forth on any number of topics from the book (and many more!) so I hope you’re able to make it to what I think will be a fascinating conversation. 

While we prime ourselves for that chat, I wanted to share three other books that I felt had ties back to this one; some takes on local history and the march of commercialization that you might enjoy.

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If you read The Pacific Circuit and wanted more Bay Area history, I think that Jeffrey Toobin’s American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (2017) does a pretty good job of touring one of the region’s strangest and most symbolic moments. It’s centered on the notorious Hearst and her involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army cult—a story that is very familiar to those who were around when it happened, but has faded into the background since.

It’s a fairly straight-laced retelling, but as someone who grew up overseas, a lot of it was new to me. Along the way it paints an eye-opening picture of the turbulent environment stirred up in San Francisco and Berkeley by countercultural folks in the early 1970s. Toobin has written better books, I think (his OJ Simpson one is extremely good) and later became a figure of some controversy, but American Heiress does a great job of pulling together the many disparate threads that made the same slice of California that Madrigal looks at so wild.

Talking of wild… I cannot underscore how remarkable and charming I found Arbitrary Stupid Goal by Tamara Shopsin, her 2017 memoir-history about growing up around one of New York’s quirkiest establishments. Her father Kenny started a bohemian Greenwich Village diner called “The Store”, which became the hub for all manner of weird and wonderful folk in the neighborhood.

Shopsin has a wonderful eye for detail and character that really brings this world alive, and her madcap attempt to capture all of these different elements in service of local history felt like a connection to Madrigal’s book.

Rachel Slade’s Making it in America has characters, too, although they’re not quite as openly radical as you might find in any of those other books. It’s focused mainly on Ben and Whitney Waxman, a plucky and foolhardy couple who start a clothing company in Maine, and the folks who support them in their journey. (The book’s subtitle is “The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)” so you can probably guess more than a little of what it contains.) 

I found this is a little bit of an up-and-down read—there were moments I wanted to skip the finer details of garment production, or zoom much deeper into the economics—but it goes a long way to outline what it takes to make things in America today, and how industry has been reshaped by offshoring and labor… wrestling with the same changes that the Pacific circuit has created for us all.

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If you’ve ever got book recommendations, please send them over! I’m always looking to widen my reading and find great books to share with you all. Anyone who recommends a book that I  end up choosing will get a month’s credit in appreciation.

While I wait for the flood of messages to come in, I’ll be sending calendar invites and Zoom links for the Q&A around on Monday. I hope to see you next week!

Onwards

Bobbie