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.