Berkeley author wrote a book about an old painting he found on the streets of Paris

A UC Berkeley professor explores how Native arts have contributed to the land reclamation efforts of the past 50 years. An organizer and life coach offers tips on tidying up your life. And a comic book author shares little-known facts about plants with a young audience.  

These are a sampling of the new books written by local authors that are set here or otherwise connected to Berkeley in some way. 

Nonfiction

Portrait in Red: A Paris Obsession by L. John Harris

Berkeley author L. John Harris describes his sixth book as a whodunnit with three whos: the artist, the subject and “the idiot who threw out the painting.”

“The painting” is an unfinished portrait of a girl wearing a bright red head covering that Harris found on the streets of Paris in 2015. “The Girl in Red,” as he calls it, is unsigned and bears only a date: Jan. 12, 1935. 

Harris, a food writer and illustrator, began posting about his search for the portrait’s provenance on Facebook, expanding his posts into a book-length manuscript in 2017. His search lasted two years and spanned two continents, with stops in London, Paris, Stinson Beach, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Berkeley.

The book’s publication comes 50 years after Harris’ first book, The Book of Garlic, in 1974. 

To solve the whodunnit, Harris puts up posters on the streets of Paris seeking any information on the portrait, contacts art advisors and experts and a stolen or missing art register. He heads to the Louvre, where he compares the portrait to the Mona Lisa, a task, he admits, better suited to professional critics and art historians, but which he approaches as an art history student or travel magazine stringer. 

He contemplates finishing the portrait himself and winds up having a companion portrait of himself in the style of “The Girl in Red” painted by the Berkeley artist Max Thill at the suggestion of Marcia Masse of Masse’s Pastries in North Berkeley. That encounter provides an opportunity for Harris to gush about her husband’s buttery almond croissants, his favorite “this side of Paris.” 

Such diversions are one of many Harris intersperses throughout, along with musings on fine art, found objects and the aesthetics of a perfect croque monsieur — what had led him to Paris in the first place. 

The publisher especially recommends this book for readers who loved Edmund de Wall’s The Hare with Amber Eyes or Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief. 

Heyday, 320 pages, $35

Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism by Nicholas Baer

The aftereffects of a war and global pandemic. Hyperinflation and economic crisis. The rise of an authoritarian leader and the so-called “crisis of historicism,” in which intellectuals felt disillusioned with the course of history and skeptical whether the historical process held any meaning or coherence at all. 

These are some of the crises faced by Germany’s Weimar Republic between the wars that have prompted analogies to the U.S. in the age of Trump, said Nicholas Baer, an assistant professor of German at UC Berkeley who also lives in Berkeley.

“Commentators have been drawing parallels between interwar Germany and the contemporary U.S.,” Baer said. “There’s definitely a resonance between then and now. We are similarly in a moment of historical pessimism.”

Baer’s first book, Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism, examines that crisis of historicism during the Weimar era by putting its films in conversation with the philosophical critiques of historicism from that time. He then draws links with the U.S. “as we face our own political, economic, and environmental crises,” Baer said. 

Baer analyzes five legendary works of German silent cinema: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain and Metropolis. In the epilogue, Baer draws links between Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Sorry to Bother You by the Oakland filmmaker Boots Riley. Like Metropolis, Sorry to Bother You is also an allegory of capitalism, Baer said. Both contemporary films also try to visualize class stratification.

 “I try to extend the legacies of Weimar cinema by thinking about contemporary global cinema as well,” Baer said.

University of California Press, 258 pages, $29.95

Life Styled: Your Guide to a More Organized & Intentional Life by Shira Gill

Shira Gill’s latest book is different from her first two, Minimalista from 2021 and Organized Living from 2023. Those books illustrate how to live stylishly and simply, with Gill often using her own 1,200-square-foot Craftsman bungalow in Berkeley, which she shares with her husband, two daughters and an Australian shepherd as an example. 

Gill’s latest effort falls into the personal development category, in which she also has expertise. In addition to being a professional organizer, Gill happens to be a certified life coach and applies her less-is-more approach to one’s health, wellness and career and relationships, as well as one’s home and environment. Like her previous books, this one includes images from her own white-washed, minimalist residence and four others in the Bay Area. 

The book’s biggest message, she said, is the “power of less” and setting boundaries so you’ll have time to focus on the things that matter most to you, which Gill helps you determine.

“We’ve reached this tipping point where we keep adding more, but without subtracting we’re doomed to being completely overwhelmed,” she said. 

Ten Speed Press, 248 pages, $29.99

Old Films, Young Eyes: A Teenage Take on Hollywood’s Golden Age by Simone O. Elias

Simone O. Elias said that she did not write her first book, Old Films, Young Eyes: A Teenage Take on Hollywood’s Golden Age with college applications in mind. Now 15, a freshman at Eldorado High School in Placerville began pursuing her passion for classic films two years earlier when she created with a friend the podcast “Teenage Golden Age.” 

“I was thinking about my own personal creative fulfillment,” said Elias, who is also “a writer of everything you can possibly think of,” as she puts it in the preface, from songs to movies, TV pilots and essays. 

Elias is the daughter of Jessica Carew Kraft, a forager and author of Why We Need to Be Wild: One Woman’s Quest for Ancient Human Answers to 21st Century Problems, who was interviewed by Berkeleyside last year. Like her mother, Elias divides her time between the Berkeley Hills and Placerville. 

Elias will be discussing her book at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 14, at the Berkeley Historical Society and at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 7, at Mrs. Dalloway’s. 

The book is a Gen Zer’s take on the golden age of films, which she defines as the beginning of the 1930s to the end of the 1960s. She argues that members of her generation would learn a lot about American history and popular culture by watching old movies and demonstrates how they foreshadowed, influenced and continue to shape pop culture. Watching a full-length film, she writes, also provides an antidote to her generation’s limited attention span. 

Though her first exposure to film began with the 1957 musical Funny Face, Elias began working her way back and found herself falling in love with films of the 1930s. In particular, she finds the wise-cracking, fast-talking women played by the likes of Clara Bow, Ginger Rogers and Barbara Stanwyck to be, well, dope.

“They played strong female characters who were ahead of their time. I found so much joy watching them. I don’t see women acting this way even today,” she said. “Back then they were very strong.” 

McFarland, 192 pages, $29.95

Native Lands: Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims by Shari M. Huhndorf

In the spring of 2021, the Native artist Nicholas Galanin created an installation in the desert near Palm Springs with the words “Native Land” in 45-foot high white letters, recalling the iconic Hollywood sign overlooking Los Angeles. 

The Hollywood sign had served as a real-estate advertisement for the new, whites-only communities in Los Angeles, writes Shari M. Huhndorf, a professor of Native American studies at UC Berkeley. Such land was “a commodity for purchase while promoting racial segregation” and “an act of erasure, obscuring the long histories of the Gabrielino Tongva people.”

Huhndorf begins her latest book with the story of the “Native Lands” sign because it best represents its subject matter: the ties between Indigenous arts and Native land reclamation movements that have taken place over the past 50 years.

“Native artists, filmmakers and writers have used their work to represent Indigenous histories and meanings of land in ways that support Indigenous territorial claims,” she writes. Such “radical political imagery” challenges the authority of the U.S. and Canada, “refutes extractive colonialism on Native lands and envisions a future that draws together territorial reclamation with social justice, including gender justice, for Native people.”

Huhndorf’s previous books on Native culture include Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination and Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture. 

University of California Press, 204 pages, $29.95

Kids

Golden Gate: Building the Mighty Bridge by Elizabeth Partridge

Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s on a hill near Claremont’s Star Grocery, the children’s book author Elizabeth Partridge saw the Golden Gate Bridge on a daily basis. Nevertheless, the bridge still represented a magical place to her because it also formed the basis of a family myth. 

The myth was that her godmother, Dorothea Lange, the Depression-era photographer, had selected the color of the bridge, a half-truth spread by Lange’s first husband, the artist Maynard Dixon. 

“It turned out that when bridge officials met with local artists, they chose the color of the bridge,” Partridge said. “So, yes, my godmother helped choose the color of the bridge, but didn’t choose it all by herself.” 

With illustrations by Ellen Heck, Golden Gate (for ages 5 to 8) is dubbed “a love story to the bridge and its creation.” It chronicles the planning and construction of the bridge from the point of view of the nearby lighthouse keeper’s children. The children watch as trucks and crews arrive and the steel towers are primed in the color called International Orange and rise above the tempestuous water of the Golden Gate, where the ocean meets the bay. When the bridge opened on May 27, 1937, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. 

Partridge now lives in North Berkeley, where she no longer has bridge views, but glimpses them each night when she walks her two dogs in the hills. 

“Every day I say, ‘Hello bridge, how are you doing?’” she said. “I love watching the fog roll in and out of the bay.” 

Chronicle Books, 60 pages, $19.95

Andy Warner’s Oddball Histories: Spices and Spuds, How Plants Made Our World by Andy Warner

Andy Warner pays attention — close attention. An observer of the overlooked, the nonfiction comic book author turned his curiosity to everyday objects and the result was his 2016 book, Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, a New York Times bestseller. 

Because the book was a hit with kids and librarians, when Little Brown approached him to do a series for ages 6 and up, he jumped at the chance. The result: Andy Warner’s Oddball Histories series. The first book in the series, Pests and Pets (2021), is about the animals — domesticated or not — that are successful because of humans. 

The second book in the series, Spices and Spuds, came out Nov. 5. It explores the ways people use the plants around us and follows domesticated plants, trends and technologies to find the connective stories between places and cultures. 

“Did you know that a pepper blockade led to the Age of Exploration? How about that huge

wheat barges once kept Rome running with free bread? Or that whole wars were fought over

Tea?” These are a few of the many questions Warner answers in a way that “makes learning fun,” according to the publisher. 

Though he continues to create work for an adult audience, Warner has personal experience with the younger audience. His 7-year-old twins go to Malcolm X Elementary School, where he recently did a presentation for their class about being a cartoonist. 

“Making work they’re interested in is definitely a fun part of the job,” he said.

Little, Brown Ink, 248 pages, $12.99-$24.99 (hardcover)

The Long Way Around by Anne Nesbet

Anne Nesbet is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures and film and media at UC Berkeley whose side hustle is writing children’s books. Lots of them. Her eighth, The Long Way Around, is a wilderness adventure for readers ages 8 to 12. 

The plot involves three cousins who get cut off from their parents after getting permission to camp for one night at a lake all on their own. A major earthquake makes it impossible to return the way they came, so they must chart a different path. Along the way, they encounter a wide range of obstacles, from wild animals to raging rivers and treacherous mountain passes. 

Their hardest challenges, however, are the psychological ones they carry along with their backpacks. Vivian’s afraid of starting middle school and of “changes she can’t control,” while Own still suffers from the emotional scars of a car accident and Amy wishes to live another life rather than her own boring one. 

Candlewick, 256 pages, $18.99

Calling All Future Voters! by Laura Atkins, Edward A. Hailes Jr. and Jennifer Lai-Peterson

Calling All Future Voters! seeks to explain to 7 to 11 year olds the importance of voting and the ongoing fight for voting rights. Berkeley children’s book author Laura Atkins shares the byline with two veteran civil rights activists: Edward A. Hailes, a former civil rights attorney and Baptist minister, and Jennifer Lai-Peterson, a civil rights attorney and former union organizer. Srimalie Bassani illustrated the book. 

“We’ve written a book to help kids understand why it’s important to vote, how people have fought for this right and the tools to know their rights,” says Atkins. 

Passionate about social justice, Atkins co-wrote Fred Korematsu Speaks Up with Stan Yogi and Biddy Mason Speaks Up with Arisa White, both part of the Fighting for Justice Series. She is also the author of the picture book Sled Dog Dachshund, an editor and coach. 

Gloo Books, 32 pages, $19.95

“*” indicates required fields

This post was originally published on here