Two books that explore Jewish family history — one a work of historical fiction and the other a “second-generation Holocaust memoir” — and Aimee Phan’s first book for a YA audience are among the seven new books by Berkeley authors.
A column on books in Berkeley
FictionThe Lost Queen by Aimee Phan
G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 368 pages, $20
Aimee Phan did not intend to time the publication of her first Young Adult book to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, which she describes as “the inciting event that created the Vietnamese diaspora.”
For the Berkeley author, a second generation Vietnamese American, her interest in the diaspora is a thematic constant that runs through her three books.
Her latest, The Lost Queen, is her first YA book in a duology geared to ages 13 and up.
Phan grew up steeped in the myths and stories of her ancestral home. Her 2004 story collection, We Should Never Meet, is based on the evacuation of thousands of Vietnamese orphans weeks before the fall of Saigon. Her 2012 novel, The Reeducation of Cherry Truong follows two feuding families that escape Vietnam, ending up in Orange County’s “Little Saigon.” (Phan lived close to that neighborhood, but did not live there.)
Aimee Phan. Credit: Nicholas Lea Bruno
Phan’s previous books were deeply rooted in realism, so she was keen on trying her hand at a YA fantasy, a genre she had always been interested in. Like her other books, she began with a young protagonist, only this time she was “writing about dragons, writing about magic, writing about time travel.” The experience turned out to be good for her writing.
“These genre departures from realistic fiction are really fun and allow my characters and their situation to go in unpredictable ways,” she said. “You can explore very true emotional feelings but in a more spectacular, captivating way.”
The Lost Queen follows the adventures of Jolie Lam, a San Jose high school sophomore, who, with her sister, discovers that they have been reborn as the Trung sisters, the real-life founding queens of Vietnam who rebelled against the Chinese Han Empire and established the Kingdom of Vietnam in 40 A.D. Though their rule was brief, the sisters remain two of Vietnam’s greatest national heroes. The book culminates in an epic battle that forces Jolie to determine right from wrong in a fight for everything she loves — and the fate of the world.
The magic and myths may be Vietnamese, but Phan finds the belief in superstitions to be universal. One purpose of myth, she said, is to give people hope.
“So many cultures have dragons. So many cultures have these mystical, mythical fantasies,” she said. “It empowers people to imagine solutions even if they seem unrealistic.”
The Rabbi’s Suitcase by Robert Kehlmann
Koehler Books, 364 pages, $22
For Robert Kehlmann, one of the most difficult — and cringeworthy — aspects of writing The Rabbi’s Suitcase, a work of historical fiction, was reading the real-life love letters between his mother, the former Zipora Siev, and Reuven Borstein, one of the founding fathers of the State of Israel who would later change his surname to the Hebrew Barkat, meaning “lightening.”
“Reuven’s letters were sexually explicit,” Kehlmann said. “It was hard for me to imagine my mother in that way. It’s probably an oedipal thing. But the letters are what inspired the book.”
Kehlmann discovered the letters shortly after his mother’s death in 2009. Kehlmann, an internationally renowned glass artist, author and known in Berkeley for creating the historic plaque project in 1996 while chair of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, began working on the book 12 years ago. The deeper he dug into the subject matter, the more he realized that his mother’s story had broader implications.
Kehlmann devotes a third of the book to his family’s migration odyssey from Lithuania to Brooklyn, by way of Cypress and Mandatory Palestine, setting the scene for his mother’s coming-of-age story. The narrative begins in 1880 and ends in New York in 1933.
Though the book is steeped in history, Kehlmann never considered writing a strictly historical account.
“Maybe this is a work of fiction,” he said, “but that allowed me to give people personalities, to be able to see what it was like when they interacted with each other and that filled out an entire narrative.”
While early sections are devoted to the family epic, it’s the love story between Zipora and Reuven that becomes the focus, thanks to those love letters.
Zipora, the eldest of eight, meets Reuven when she is 17. Their long-distance relationship exists mostly in passionate letters while he studies first in Strasbourg and Paris and she works in Brooklyn, sending some of her earnings to him. Their six-year love affair broke taboos in their rabbinic Orthodox families and does not end well.
In the endnote, Kehlmann writes that he felt protective of his mother and resentful toward Reuven, but said later that the story of these star-crossed lovers was not so black-and-white.
“They wanted to break free from old world ways,” he said. “Reuven was potentially her saviour for the life she was trapped in. He takes her to plays, introduces her to a world of culture she had never seen. That was her ticket to the 20th century and the possibility of a broader life.”
Shot: A Dictionary of the Lost by Jude Berman
She Writes Press, 243 pages, $18
“We should be ashamed,” writes Jude Berman, after citing gun statistics in her latest work of fiction. “And we should do more.”
Shot: A Dictionary of the Lost, a short story collection about gun violence, is the Berkeley author’s attempt to take action.
“What I do have is the ability to write fiction,” Berman said. “People are telling the real stories, but haven’t used fiction and storytelling as a tool for gun violence prevention. I felt like this was something that I could offer that hasn’t been done. The appeal is a little more indirect psychologically. That’s why we watch movies. It’s easier sometimes to take something in when it’s in storytelling or fiction form.”
Each of the collection’s 26 stories are named for a character whose first name corresponds with a letter of the alphabet. Berman greatly varied the characters in terms of age, race, class, religion, gender orientation, geographic location and their views regarding guns. Not all of the characters end up dying from gun violence.
Berman spent a career in academic research before segueing into freelance writing and editing in the late ’80s. She has also run two small indie presses, including Pathways Press in Palo Alto in the ’90s. She is the author of 10 books, including textbooks and novels she has ghost written for others.
“After working on other people’s novels for a long time, I decided to finally write my own,” she said.
She published The Die, a work of speculative fiction, in April 2024 and The Vow, historical fiction, seven months later. Both The Vow and Shot were produced by the Berkeley-based She Writes Press.
NonfictionThe Glory of Giving Everything: The Taylor Swift Business Model, by Crystal Haryanto
John Wiley & Sons, 240 pages, $25
With her fringed, Versace bodysuit, thigh-high boots and football player beau, pop superstar Taylor Swift is an unlikely marketing genius whose approach to her own brand development is the subject of a popular course at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business taught by Crystal Haryanto, who has brought together her findings in a debut monograph, The Glory of Giving Everything: The Taylor Swift Business Model.
An economic consultant at Cornerstone Research in San Francisco, Haryanto graduated from UC Berkeley in 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, cognitive science, and public policy. Her class, “Artistry, Policy, & Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,” has attracted global media coverage.
Designed for entrepreneurs, marketers, and fans alike, The Glory of Giving Everything addresses how Swift has not only revolutionized the music industry but created a sustainable brand that resonates deeply with fans.
The book’s title comes from a Swift song called “Clara Bow,” which traces the lineage of women working in entertainment, commanding them to “take the glory, give everything.” Haryanto interprets that as Taylor “accepting the fame and prestige while also subjecting every part of herself to public consumption and dedicating her all to her craft,” she said.
“‘Giving everything’ isn’t something you ‘give up’ in order to get success,” Haryanto said, “fulfillment is found in the giving itself.”
That’s something Swift channels when she pours her experiences into art, making her fans feel as if she knows them and commits to long performances.
Since the beginning, Swift has been intimately involved in every stage of her own marketing and brand development, Haryanto noted. In 2005, when she met with record labels, she had already been communicating directly with supporters on the platform Myspace, developing a devoted fan base. Taylor’s continued commitment to her fans, through her ability to create songs that resonate with them and connect deeply with them is key to her marketing savvy.
“My take on Taylor’s marketing is that art and business function in tandem,” Haryanto said. “Taylor pushes herself to exceed industry standards because doing so gives her the means to continue creating art.”
As for all that Swiftie merchandise, which raked in more than $200 million during the 2023 Eras Tour? Haryanto disagreed with critics who blasted the singer for manipulating fans into buying her products.
“Fans are the ones choosing to continuously demand it,” she said, “prompting Taylor to continuously supply it.”
Stumbling Blocks by Jennifer Krebs
Legacy Book Press, 265 pages, $16
Growing up on a farm in 1960s upstate New York, Jennifer Krebs remembers her German Jewish family switching to German when they felt the subject matter was not meant for their American children’s ears.
“My grandfather or my father and his sisters would interject in German and no one would translate for me,” said Krebs, who has lived in Berkeley for three decades. “You knew there was more going on than what you were being told.”
She later learned that such conversations were about their former lives during the Nazi occupation “in the middle of nowhere Germany,” Krebs said, aka the rural village of Berleburg. Krebs explores her family’s wartime journey and her own in Stumbling Blocks: A Second Generation Holocaust Memoir.
An environmental planner who worked for a short time for the City of Berkeley as a hazardous waste inspector in the 1990s, Krebs has published essays and stories over the years. This is her first book.
The title comes from the German word stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, brass plaques that were placed in the pavement in front of her family’s former home in Berleburg, part of a public art project to commemorate the victims of Nazism. The book is based on years of research and numerous visits to Europe and Israel over her lifetime. She began writing in 2019.
The book begins after Kristallnacht, when Jennifer’s father and two sisters are sent to live with relatives in Belgium for two years. In 1941 they unite with their parents and flee Germany for the U.S. The Belgian family, meanwhile, is sent to Auschwitz and does not survive.
Krebs has wrestled with the survivors’ guilt she was exposed to, along with the stumbling blocks she herself encountered when coming out as a gay woman in a small town.
“I did not want to be overtaken by all this baggage,” she said, “the survivors’ guilt and anxiety about things I couldn’t do anything about as a child of people who have gone through trauma.”
She pointed out the cover image of her driving a tractor as a pre-teen as an example of the can-do ethic her family required of her.
“They didn’t expect me to wait around and be given stuff,” she said. “They expected me to land on my feet and start running.”
Life-Changing Homes: Eco-Friendly Designs That Promote Well-Being by Kirsten Dirksen and Nicolás Boullosa
Abrams, 240 pages, $40
A home made from a dilapidated stone stable in the Italian Alps. A Huck Finn-inspired boat made of scraps found in a Santa Cruz backyard that sailed down the Mississippi. A Scandinavian house encased within a geodesic dome to protect against extreme weather and aid plant growth.
These are a few of the 80 or so unconventional dwellings featured in Kirsten Dirksen and Nicolás Boullosa’s first book, drawing on homes from around the world they have featured on their 15-year-old YouTube Channel, @kirstendirksen/*faircompanies, which attracts some two million subscribers. Many of the homes both on the website and in the book were created with sustainability in mind, a desire to escape modern living and/or pursue a quirky dream.
“Sometimes a home doesn’t just provide shelter — it becomes deeply aligned with the person or people living in it,” Dirksen said. “There’s a kind of quiet inevitability to it, a resonance or rightness on a deeper level.”
The couple’s path to YouTube began in 2004, when Dirksen, a videographer/filmmaker, met her journalist/photographer husband in Spain. They found common ground in their mutual interest in sustainability and minimalism. They married in 2006 and spent 18 years in Europe — often working with their kids in tow — before landing in Berkeley two years ago.
But their work in Berkeley goes way back. Berkeley-based videos the couple has taken over the years include the backyard ADU of a UC Berkeley professor, developer Patrick Kennedy’s micro units and architect Karl Wanaselja’s car-parts home.
The couple and their three children reside in a life-changing home of their own: a 1908 South Berkeley fixer that they haven’t entirely fixed, but have tweaked to suit their needs, turning a laundry room into a bedroom, squeezing laundry appliances into the kitchen and carving out a sleeping nook for themselves in the attic.
“It feels grounded and intimate, and in many ways, suits us better than some of the sprawling homes we’ve stayed in while filming,” Dirksen said.
KidsBringing the Beach Home by Laura Atkins
The Collective Book Studio, 40 pages, $19
As a lifelong beachcomber, Laura Atkins has collected sea glass and created sculptures and mobiles from shells, pebbles and driftwood, much of which she has found at Bay Area beaches near her Berkeley home. In her latest work, Bringing the Beach Home, Atkins combines her love of beachcombing with her day job as a children’s book author.
The picture book, illustrated by Evgenia Penman, is intended for readers in pre-school to third grade.
Bringing the Beach Home is a story about resilience, creativity and the healing power of nature.
The book’s protagonist, Rowan, the son of divorced parents, is tired of going back-and-forth between Mom’s and Dad’s houses until a trip to the beach with Dad sparks something magical.
At first Rowan becomes overwhelmed by the loud waves and bright sun, but soon finds peace by connecting to nature. Inspired, father and son craft a wind chime from seashells, a stick and pebbles, and bring the magic of the beach home with them.
“I wanted to explore how children can find comfort and a sense of belonging even in moments of uncertainty,” Atkins said. “This story encourages young readers to embrace creativity as a way to change.”
To help readers discover some beach magic for themselves, the book includes instructions for creating a wind chime from found beach materials.
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