San Francisco Book Review

We're launching our annual holiday gift guide. We'll keep adding books to it until we get close to Christmas, so check back daily for more. Here's a peek. https://bit.ly/36o0Qin First Second Books ... Thames & Hudson Steidl @mit.press.bookstore See more

San Francisco Book Review’s Grace Utomo talks with Dr. John Kruse about ADHD and his book, Recognizing Adult ADHD: What Donald Trump Can Teach Us About Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. https://bit.ly/2AWlA4Z

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If you're a poetry reader, "Urban Love Poem," the episode of Poetry in America that centers on a love poem for San Francisco, is now streaming free on PoetryinAmerica.org and will air on KQED Plus on Sunday, May 24th at 5:30 pm. https://www.poetryinamerica.org/episode/urban-love-poem/ Poetry in America is hosted by Harvard professor Elisa New and airs on PBS stations all around the country. Here is a description of the episode:... Urban Love Poem (by Marilyn Chin) The episode explores San Francisco's history from the Gold Rush and early Chinese immigration to the rise of Silicon Valley through Chin's poem about her San Francisco youth. New brings together acclaimed memoirist Maxine Hong Kingston, tech investor Randy Komisar, and four Bay Area residents on a rooftop in Chinatown to discuss the love of a great city.

If you've ever attended the Bay Area Book Festival, you know how awesome it is. Well, this year (starting May 1), it's going virtual. Here are details on how you can "go to" the festival without leaving your home. Here's a peek into what will be featured. https://sanfranciscobookreview.com/the-bay-area-book-festi/

Although the beloved Bay Area Book Festival only announced its cancellation due to COVID-19 safety concerns on March 11th, festival director Cherilyn Parsons and her indomitable team have already developed an online alternative: Bay Area Book Festival #Unbound. The restructured event will feature several lecture tracks: voting rights (the original headliner for this year’s festival), health and wellness, and the power of literature during times of crisis. Beginning on May 1s...t, virtual attendees can browse the Festival’s website to access #Unbound’s stimulating programming. Director Cherilyn Parsons recently paused from her flurry of planning to chat with the San Francisco Book Review about what to expect from #Unbound, as well as what emotional support readers and writers can offer each other during the COVID-19 crisis. https://sanfranciscobookreview.com/bay-area-book-festival-/

Stellar book marketing by @entangledteen !! . @tracywolffbooks . #yanovels

McKenna Barney, fourteen, realizes her vision is failing. Her younger sister has already lost almost all her vision to a genetic disorder called Stargardt disease. McKenna faces the same fate, but she still has enough vision to compete in one more dogsled race, one that would carry important letters to try to raise awareness for Stargardt. And she cannot let her parents know what is happening or they will stop her. Even in the best of weather, a dogsled race is difficult, and... there will be storms to face along the way. McKenna’s dogs know her well and know how to race, and she finds unexpected help from two of her competitors. Maybe she can do this. Terry Lynn Johnson has quite a franchise with middle-grade survival stories set in Alaska. This is a terrific survival story that will keep young readers totally engaged and turning pages. The writing is terrific, the dialogue is spot-on, and the characters are well-rounded and completely believable. The story is very compelling. The family relationships not only in McKenna’s life but those of her two competitors add a lot of complexity and credence to this great book. Dog Driven By Terry Lynn Johnson HMH Books for Young Readers $16.99, hardcopy, 240 pages #tweensreads Reviewed by Rosi Hollinbeck 5/5

Olive Kitteridge makes no apology for who she is, and her blunt, unbending worldview will be immediately familiar to anyone who loved Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. This time, however, Olive is older, and she isn’t quite so quick to make moral judgments and swift dismissals. Olive has never been as hard as others sometimes believe her to be, but in this collection, she reveals a new vulnerability, recognizable from the original stories but heightened now, more searing. Her nurtur...ing side is more pronounced as she navigates the indignities, fears, and disappointments of old age. There are complicated new layers of love, resentment, and forgiveness with her son, Christopher, and his prickly second wife, Ann. New, too, are second chances, including Olive’s second chance at love now that her husband, Henry, is gone. . The people who share Olive’s hometown of Crosby, Maine, are as lonely and conflicted as ever, and some of the most wrenching stories in this collection aren’t directly Olive’s at all. Kayley Callaghan, an eighth-grade house cleaner, finds a queasy connection with an elderly man in Cleaning. A grown woman discovers devastating new truths about her parents in Helped. And in Light, a woman dying from cancer finds more comfort in Olive than in her own doting husband. In all of these stories, Olive is a crucial force either in person or in spirit, and readers will want to seize every second of her waning life. Olive, Again is an essential partner to Olive Kitteridge, and the emotional impact of these new stories won’t easily fade. . Written by Elizabeth Strout $27.00, Hardcover, 304 pages Published by Random House (10/15/19) Reviewed by Margo Orlando Littel 5/5 . @randomhouse @margolittell . . . #bookreview #popfiction #popularfiction #amreading #bookrecommendation See more

SFBR's Sara Podwell interviews Dr. Lili Naghdi about ON LOVING, her first novel., inspired by both the ordinary people she has the honor to support and by the great literature of Persia and the world.

December is traditionally a time for looking back, hopefully with fondness, on what the previous year has brought. We think of what we’ve accomplished, the state of the world, the good and the bad, and analyze. And December is also a time for looking forward, with hope for a promising future. We think of what we’d like next year to bring, the dreams we’d like to see realized, the beautiful twists and turns life may take. A good book can help us with both of these goals, letting us both think on history and dream for the future. Read on for some of December’s best biographical offerings.

If you have a gamer on your gift list, check out these books we've curated for you: http://bit.ly/2rN18yB

We have some great book gift suggestions for the green thumb on your list. http://bit.ly/2DpoA92