Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, February 1, 2020, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

There There by Tommy Orange

Synopsis

What at first appears to be collection of short stories about urban Indians living in Oakland, California, coalesces into a novel built around a powwow taking place at the Coliseum and about the histories, dreams, and aspirations of the people planning to attend.



Tommy Orange Biography

Tommy Orange was born January 19, 1982, in Oakland, California. He grew up in Oakland's Diamond District. His father was an engineer at Lawrence Berkeley Lab and grew up as an enrolled member of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribe of Oklahoma. His mother was white. Orange majored in analog sound engineering at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico right before sound engineering went digital. He found himself working as a social worker at the Indian Center in Oakland when he came up with the idea for the book. He lives in the Gold Country now with his wife and young son and is working on several new projects.

Cast of Characters from There There

Since there are about a dozen major characters and any number of minor characters in There There, I found myself forgetting who was who almost as soon as I had finished the book. To help refresh my memory for the discussion, I found the following guide from the publisher useful, and you might too.

Tommy Orange Talks about Himself and There There

Jean found a pretty good interview with Tommy Orange on Austin PBS. At 27 minutes it is shorter than most of the interviews I found on YouTube, but I couldn't figure out how to embed it in the blog post, so you will have to click on this link to see that video. If you don't mind sitting through a video that is twice as long, here is one from YouTube that I found pretty interesting.



The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly

In There There, Tommy Orange (Thomas Frank Orange) created a character named Thomas Frank, who he states is the closest thing to a stand-in for himself in the book. Thomas Frank has a hero, an outsider artist named James Hampton, who spent 14 years creating an altar from found materials. Below is a picture of that altar, which is now in the Smithsonian. Here's a link where you can read about it.

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, January 4, 2020, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

Glossary of Terms

Toward the end of Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain defined some of the restaurant lingo he had been throwing around for most of the book. But just in case he left anything out, I am including a link to a page with definitions of commonly used restaurant terms. Just for good measure, I am throwing in a link to a page of French cooking terms and  one of Italian cooking terms. I hope this helps.

Biography

Since Kitchen Confidential was autobiographical, Anthony Bourdain touched on his childhood only in respect to the awakening of his palate while on family vacation in France as a child. He then picks up the narrative when he got his first restaurant job while on summer vacation from college. The narrative then continues until the publication of the book, a time at which Bourdain was working as Executive Chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York City

Before Kitchen Confidential

Bourdain was born on June 25, 1956 in New York City and was the older of two sons. His father was a salesman at a camera shop, then floor manager at a record store, and finally an executive for Columbia Records. His mother was a staff editor for The New York Times. He spent most of his childhood in Leonia, New Jersey, and attended a private college prep school in Englewood, New Jersey. He attended Vassar University for two years and then dropped out to pursue a culinary career, as described in the book.

After Kitchen Confidential

After the success of Kitchen Confidential in 2000, Bourdain maintained a loose affiliation with Les Halles for several year, but gradually became less and less involved in being a chef and more and more a writer and television personality. In addition to Kitchen Confidential, he wrote two more bestselling nonfiction books about cooking and the restaurant world, Cooks Tour (2001) and Nasty Bits (2006). He was the author or coauthor of many other books, articles, and even a graphic novel. He eventually published a line of cookbooks.

His career as media celebrity included “A Cook's Tour” on the Food Network (2002-2003); “No Reservations” on the Travel Channel (2005-2012); “The Layover” on the Travel Channel (2011-2013); and “Parts Unknown” on CNN (2013-2018). He was also a guest on numerous other cooking shows and appeared as a cartoon version of himself in one episode of “The Simpsons” and appeared as himself in the movie “The Big Short” in 2015.

In June of 2018, while working on an episode of “Parts Unknown” in Strasbourg, France, Bourdain was found dead by hanging in his hotel room.

Anthony Bourdain Videos on the Internet

You will find an embarrassment of riches when it comes to Anthony Bourdain videos on the internet. Most of them are just a couple of minutes long as he is plugging one of his books on some talk show or another, but most of them were an hour or longer. Interestingly, none of them are from any of his travel series, probably due to copyright considerations.

I found this short clip from a "CBS This Morning" appearance interesting because it is on the occasion of the publication of a 10th anniversary edition of Kitchen Confidential, in the notes to which, Bourdain apparently repudiates much of what he said in the original edition. (Note also a pre- "me too" Charlie Rose.)



Of the longer clips I had time to watch, I kind of enjoyed this one at a 2011 Sydney, Australia, writers festival. He is there to plug his memoir, Medium Raw. In it, he admits to trying to emulate Hunter S. Thompson, and you can see him kind of slipping in and out of character as he talks.



For the heck of it, here is Anthony Bourdain demonstrating knife skills.