Wisdom of the Last Farmer: The Legacy of Generations by former California Humanities board member, David Mas Masumoto. NOTE: Miriam is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and will be part of our Pulitzer Centennial Campfire iniative taking place in Fresno on September 28, where she and Dawn Mabalon will discuss the farmworker movement. He was a brilliant strategist who sometimes stumbled, and a streetwise organizer whose pragmatism was often at odds with his soaring dreams. Chavez emerges here as a visionary whose eyes were fixed on a horizon others often could not even see. The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, by Miriam Pawel, in the first comprehensive biography of Chavez, Miriam Pawel offers a searching yet empathetic portrayal. This book is an outsider’s look into a community that is quintessential Oakland. Bullies centers on the author and his most memorable bully, the founder and president of the motorcycle club, who reconnect off of the playground and as adults. You can feel the East Bay Rats MC presence in almost any dive or punk show in the East Bay.

Neha Balram is reading Bullies: A Friendshipby Alex Abramovich, as an East Bay and an Oakland newbie, Neha naturally picked this one off of the shelf. Bullies is at once a vivid, visceral narrative of an unusual friendship and an incisive portrait of a beautiful, terrible city.We, at California Humanities love books, and we thought we’d share with you what we’re currently reading, or hope to be reading over the summer months. But dangerous, dysfunctional Oakland was also becoming one of America's most rapidly gentrifying cities, and the questions Abramovich had arrived with were thrown into brutal relief: How do we live with the burden of violence? How do we overcome it? Do we overcome it?Īs Trevor, the Rats, and the city they live in careen between crises and moments of renaissance, Abramovich explores issues of friendship, family, history, and destiny - and looks at what happens when those things fail. In 2010, Abramovich moved to California to immerse himself in Latham's world - one of fight clubs, booze-filled nights, and beat-downs on the city's streets.

Decades later, when they met again, Abramovich was a writer and Latham had become President of the East Bay Rats, a motorcycle club in Oakland. Once upon a time, Alex Abramovich and Trevor Latham were mortal enemies: miniature outlaws in a Long Island elementary school, perpetually at each other's throats.

The powerful account of one writer's unlikely friendship with his childhood bully, now the president of a motorcycle club in one of America's most dangerous cities.

Bullies by alex abramovich