VIRTUAL: ZYZZYVA & The Booksmith Present: Lockdown Lit @ Lunch with Bonnie Tsui & Jennifer Steinhauer

Booksmith and The Bindery, in partnership with Zyzzyva, present Lockdown Lit @ Lunch, a weekly salon, Tuesdays at 11am PST. Lockdown Literature is a group of authors with books published during the coronavirus pandemic who have banded together to support one another. This event features Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim) & Jennifer Steinhauer (The Firsts).

You can find a full list of Lockown Lit authors here. Please save the date and join us!

This event will be streaming live on our Facebook page.

Friends, neighbors: We are pleased to be able to bring you some of our events virtually while our doors are otherwise closed in the interest of public health. If you’d like to support the store, you can still do that in the usual ways:

> Buy Why We Swim and/or The Firsts and we’ll deliver them directly to your door.
> Buy one of our gift certificates, which we keep on file and never expire.
> Make a donation.

Thank you very much for your support – we’re proud to be a legacy business and a mainstay of the Haight-Ashbury since 1976!

Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui

We swim in freezing Arctic waters and piranha-infested rivers to test our limits. We swim for pleasure, for exercise, for healing. But humans, unlike other animals that are drawn to water, are not natural-born swimmers. We must be taught. Our evolutionary ancestors learned for survival; now, in the twenty-first century, swimming is one of the most popular activities in the world.

Why We Swim is propelled by stories of Olympic champions, a Baghdad swim club that meets in Saddam Hussein’s palace pool, modern-day Japanese samurai swimmers, and even an Icelandic fisherman who improbably survives a wintry six-hour swim after a shipwreck. New York Times contributor Bonnie Tsui, a swimmer herself, dives into the deep, from the San Francisco Bay to the South China Sea, investigating what about water—despite its dangers—seduces us and why we come back to it again and again.

Bonnie Tsui is the author of the new book Why We Swim. A journalist and longtime contributor to The New York Times, she is also the author of American Chinatown, the winner of the Asia/Pacific American Award for Literature and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. She lives, swims, and surfs in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Firsts: The Inside Story of The Women Reshaping Congress by Jennifer Steinhauer

In the November 2018 midterms, the greatest number of women in history were elected to Congress. It was a group diverse in background, age, professional experience, and ideology. And from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the Squad” to a group with national security backgrounds calling themselves “the Badasses,” from the first two Native American women to the first two Muslim women, all were swept into office on an enormous wave of grassroots support.

Here, New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer chronicles these women’s first year in Congress, following their shift from trailblazing campaigns to the daily work of governance. In committee rooms, offices, visits back home with their constituents, and conversations in the halls of the Capitol, she probes the question: Will Washington, with its hidebound traditions and overpriced housing and petty power struggles, change the changemakers? Or will this Congress, which looks a little more like today’s America, truly be the start of something new?

Vivid and smart, The Firsts delivers fresh details, inside access, historical perspective, and expert analysis as these women—inspiring, controversial, talented, and rebellious—do something surprising: make Congress essential again.

Jennifer Steinhauer has covered numerous high-profile beats in her twenty-five-year reporting career at the New York Times, from City Hall bureau chief and Los Angeles bureau chief to Capitol Hill. She won the Newswoman’s Club of New York Front Page Deadline Reporting Award in 2006 for her reporting on Hurricane Katrina. She has written a novel about the television business, and two cookbooks.

This event is free and all ages.

RSVP appreciated by not required.