December 5: Eva Rutland

Time Tested Books is happy to welcome back Eva and Ginger Rutland for the presentation of Eva’s book, No Crystal Stair.

Born and raised in Georgia, the granddaughter of a slave, after World War II, Eva Rutland and her husband moved to Sacramento, where they raised four children. During this time Eva took on a quiet Civil Rights struggle, integration at the family level. She was the first African American mother to join the PTA, as well as the a member of the first black family to live in their neighborhood. By seeking common ground with white mothers during this challenging time, Eva Rutland was able to break down stereotypes and help create part of the foundation that transformed American race relations. It is from this life experience and more that Eva draws from for her novel No Crystal Stair.

A departure from her prior novels, No Crystal Stair was originally published in 2000 by Mira Books. December sees a new edition of the book thanks to IWP Book Publishers. Eva is also the author of the much acclaimed autobiography, When We Were Colored.

Eva’s daughter Ginger Rutland will also be talking about the book. Ginger Rutland is an editor at the Sacramento Bee and a regular commentator on Capitol Public Radio.

The event is on Saturday, December 5, 2009, 7 pm.

December 6: Peter J. Hayes

On December 6, we welcome author Peter J. Hayes for the release of his new book An American River Journal. A collection of short essays on the flora and fauna of the American River, An American River Journal is a great tribute to one of Sacramento’s best features! The book has terrific illustrations by Jo Glasson Smith.

Peter Hayes is author of An American River Almanac and edited The Outdoor World of the Sacramento Region (with Jo Smith) and The Lower American River, the best history of this historic waterway. He started his writing career as a reporter for UPI, before moving to Sacramento and becoming an editor for the Sacramento Union. In 2008 he was recognized as the Outstanding Volunteer of the Year by the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors for his service to the county’s regional parks.

The event is on Sunday, December 6, 2009. 3:00 pm

Nov. 15: poetry w/ Mary Mackey & Francisco X. Alarcon

We are now into November with Time Tested Books’ 2009 poetry series. This time around we have two excellent poets in Mary Mackey & Francisco X. Alarcon.

Mary Mackey is related through her father's family to Mark Twain. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. During her twenties, she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica. In the‘90s she served as Chair of PEN American Center, West. She is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has recently served on the Governing Board of PEN Oakland. Mackey is a Professor of English and Writer in Residence at California State University where she teaches creative writing and film. She is the author of many volumes of poetry and novels, including her most recent book, “The Widow’s War.”

Francisco X. Alarcón is an acclaimed poet and educator, author of ten volumes of poetry. Alarcón is the recipient of 1993 American Book Award, the 1993 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and the 1984 Chicano Literary Prize. In April 2002 he received the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association (BABRA). He was one of the three finalists nominated for the state poet laureate of California. Alarcón's books include Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes / Sonetos a la locura y otras penas (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company 2001) and From the Other Side of Night / Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press 2002). He currently teaches at the University of California, Davis.


Time Tested Books is located at 1114 21st Street in Midtown Sacramento.

The event is on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 7 pm. The event is free, however a donation - which goes to the poets - is requested.

November 11: David Kulczyk author of "Death in California"

Sacramento author David Kulczyk visits us on Wednesday November 11 at 7 pm for an odd look at a darker side of California, one involving death!

In his new book, “Death in California: The Bizarre, Freakish, and Just Curious Ways People Die in the Golden State” (Quill Driver Books), Kulczyk turns a sardonic, but always humane, eye to strange and gruesome events from the earliest California pioneers to the present day. A grimly humorous history of hangings, murders, accidents, overdoses, suicides, and fatal stupidity, “Death in California” offers a bizarre, lighthearted and cheerfully perverse glimpse into California’s deadly past. From the tragic tale of 14 tourists swept to their deaths over Vernal Fall in pastoral Yosemite National Park, and the gritty details of Bob “Bear” Hite overdosing on heroin in a seedy Hollywood nightclub, to the shocking chronicle of a 10-ton jet crashing into a Bay Area kitchen, this zany collection is delightfully weird and enthrallingly human.

David Kulczyk (pronounced Coal-check) is a Sacramento-based historian, freelance writer and award-winning author of short fiction. His work has appeared in the SF Guardian, the East Bay Express, Strange Magazine and the Sacramento News and Review. He is also the author of “California Justice: Shootouts, Lynchings and Assassinations in the Golden State.”

Monte Schulz - author of This Side of Jordan - book talk 10/28/09

Time Tested Books is pleased to welcome novelist Monte Schulz for a book talk and reading.

Monte Schulz is the son of Charles M. Schulz, creator of Peanuts, and in This Side of Jordan one of his ambitions was to recreate the time of his mother’s and father’s Jazz Age childhood, when America was making the irresistible transition from rural to urban life.

“When I was in my early twenties, and Dad saw that I was developing an interest in writing, he showed me some of the beautiful passages of Thomas Wolfe and John Steinbeck, and lent me his copies of Complete Poems by Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. He told me the writer’s gift is to be able to express for people certain ideas and emotions they cannot express for themselves,” says Schulz.

This Side of Jordan is a tapestry of American life in the summer before the economic crash of 1929, and a quintessential novel of the rural Midwest offered unexpectedly as a crime thriller. Full of American landscapes and totems, images and notions, foibles and fables, beasts and the blessed, it follows the experiences of 19-year-old tubercular farm boy Alvin Pendergast.

This Side of Jordan is Schulz’s second novel. His first, Down by the River, was published by

Viking in 1991. Library Journal raved that it compared to Stand by Me and Twin Peaks, and seemed "ready-made for Hollywood." He spent ten years writing Crossing Eden, from which This Side Of Jordan is drawn as the first of three interconnected novels; the second and third, Fields of Eden and The Big Town, will be published in 2010 and 2011.

"Schulz, son of the beloved Peanuts cartoonist, proves himself to be a handy wordsmith in this literarily ambitious novel of pre-Depression America. Hand this straight-faced and multifaceted almost-satire to fans of the southern gothic tradition, all the way from Flannery O’Connor to John Kennedy Toole." — BOOKLIST

“Monte Schulz's novel This Side of Jordan shows that Like Father Like Son —both superb!” — RAY BRADBURY

Time Tested Books is located at 1114 21st Street in Midtown Sacramento.

The event is Wednesday, October 28, 2009. 7 pm.

October 18 poetry with Julia Connor and Joshua McKinney

Time Tested Book’s poetry series continues with an October 18 reading by Julia Connor and Joshua McKinney.


Julia Connor began study at the Poetics Program of New College of California in San Francisco at the age of forty., where she studied with poets Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, and David Meltzer. Since 1988, she has taught poetry in a wide variety of situations from Graduate MFA Programs such as Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics to State Prisons. Her teaching has taken her every place from Martha's Vineyard to Sussex, England. A life-long protégée of renowned potter, poet, and educator, M.C. Richards, author of Centering in Poetry, Pottery and Person, she now serves as Ms Richards literary executor. She was named Poet Laureate of Sacramento in April of 2005.


Joshua McKinney is a professor of English at California State University - Sacramento, where he won the 2008 President’s Award for Research and Creativity, for “his accomplishments in the field of poetry. His book Saunter won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Competition for 2001. He has published in American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.


We are very happy to host this dynamic pair of poets. The event is on Sunday, October 18, 2009, 7 pm

Harvey Schwartz on the ILWU 10/14/09

Time Tested Books is thrilled to host historian Harvey Schwartz for a talk on his new book, “Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU”. Schwartz, an oral historian at the Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University, and curator of the Oral History Collection, ILWU Library, has written extensively on the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the San Francisco Bay Area labor movement (“The March Inland”, “Union Carpenters, Navy Town”, “Harry Bridges”, etc.). “Solidarity Stories” is his most recent contribution to this history.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union, born out of the 1934 West Coast maritime and San Francisco general strikes under the charismatic leadership of Harry Bridges, has been known from the start for its strong commitment to democracy, solidarity, and social justice. In this collection of firsthand narratives, union leaders and rank-and-file workers - from the docks of Pacific Coast ports to the fields of Hawaii to bookstores in Portland, Oregon - talk about their lives at work, on the picket line, and in the union.

Published by University of Washington Press, “Solidarity Stories” is a unique contribution to the literature on unions. There is a power and immediacy in the voices of workers that is brilliantly expressed here. Taken together, these voices provide a portrait of a militant, corruption-free, democratic union that can be a model and an inspiration for what a resurgent American labor movement might look like. The book will appeal to students and scholars of labor history, social and economic history, and social change, as well as trade unionists and anyone interested in labor politics and history.

"Harvey Schwartz is the dockworkers' Studs Terkel. Solidarity Stories is right up there with the best of Terkel's books, an inspiring account in their own words of how the men and women working the Pacific Coast docks and beyond built a great union and won dignity and fair pay on the job. Schwartz's oral history is so well organized and fully annotated that it rises to the level of a genuine history of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union." --David Brody, professor emeritus, University of California, Davis

The event is on Wednesday, October 14, 2009. 7 pm.