Palo Alto Weekly 09.21.2012 - section 1 by Palo Alto Weekly

Book Talk

A DANGEROUS TIME ... Palo Alto author Keith Raffel’s “A Fine and Dangerous Season” is set just a few days before the Cuban Missile Crisis when “JFK needs an old friend from his time in Palo Alto to come help him stop two countries hell-bent on nuclear war,” according to Raffel. Raffel says he had “a great time researching” JFK’s stay during fall quarter of 1940 at the Stanford Business School when he paid $60 per month rent for his place on campus. The book is available through Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com. AT STANFORD ... Upcoming author talks at the Stanford Bookstore, 519 Lasuen Mall, include: Jory John, “K is for Knifeball” (Sept. 24, noon-1 p.m.); Nancy Singleton Hachisu, “Japanese Farm Food” (Oct. 3, 5:30 p.m.); Martha Collins, “White Papers” (Oct. 6, 10:30 a.m.); and Nancy Huddleston Packer, “Old Ladies-Stories” (Oct. 10, 6 p.m.). Information: stanfordbookstore.com or 650-329-1217. GIVING AWAY $$$ ... Palo Alto resident Colburn Wilbur, a trustee of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation where he was CEO for 23 years, has co-written with Fred Setterberg “Giving With Confidence: A Guide to Savvy Philanthropy,” which will be published by Heyday in October. The book deals with seven core principles aimed at helping people maximize the impact of their contributions. Wilbur currently sits on a variety of boards, including Planned Parenthood Mar Monte and the Stanford Theatre. He is the coauthor of “The Complete Guide to Grantmaking Basics.” The book is available at Amazon.com and from the publisher at https://heydaybooks.com/book/ giving-with-confidence/. MEET THE AUTHORS ... Upcoming author events at Kepler’s Books at 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, include Salman Rushdie in conversation with Tobias Wolff, “Joseph Anton: A Memoir” (Sept. 25, 12:30 p.m., cosponsored by India Community Center); T.C. Boyle, “San Miguel” (Sept. 26, 12:30 p.m.); and Carissa Phelps, “Runaway Girl: Escaping Life on the Streets, One Helping Hand at a Time” (Sept. 28, 7 p.m.). Tickets at $35 admit one person and include a copy of the book; $10 admits one person (without the book). Also, authors at Books Inc., #74 Town & Country Village, Palo Alto, include: Stephanie Lucianovic, “Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate” (Sept. 27, 7 p.m.); Lynn Povich, “The Good Girls Revolt” (Oct. 1, 7 p.m., cosponsored by the Palo Alto Library); Scott Hutchins, “A Working Theory of Love” (Oct. 4, 7 p.m.); Joshua Welle with Rachel Torres, “In the Shadow of Greatness” (Oct. 8, 7 p.m.); Jon Klassen, “This Is Not My Hat” (Oct. 11, 7 p.m.). Information: www.keplers.com and www.booksinc.net.

Items for Book Talk may be sent to Associate Editor Carol Blitzer, Palo Alto Weekly, P.O. Box 1610, Palo Alto, CA 93202 or emailed to cblitzer@paweekly.com by the last Friday of the month.

Title Pages A monthly section on local books and authors

“Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution,” by Michael Doyle, Syracuse University Press, 416 pp., $29.95

oy Kepler’s life was a tale of two revolutions: one that gave rise to war protests, draft resisters and the bohemian, anti-establishment sensibilities of the late 1960s, and another one that brought paperback books to the masses and, in the process, redefined the bookstore as we know it. But Kepler didn’t look like a typical revolutionary, or, for that matter, a typical bohemian. He did not sport a Che beret, hurl Molotov cocktails, shroud himself in beatnik black, or wear flowers in his hair. While his associates favored group hugs, painted buses and spiraled-down, mind-bending acid trips, Kepler saved his trips for places like Livermore, where he was arrested in 1960 for protesting the recently built nuclear lab; and Oakland, where he was arrested in 1968 after leading a peaceful demonstration in front of the Oakland Induction Center, a transfer point for soldiers about to go to war. As Michael Doyle illustrates in his engaging new biography, “Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution,” Kepler was a sharp, unsentimental businessman, known less for his own personality than for those of wild, world-changing bohemians who populated his popular Menlo Park bookstore, a landmark institution that plans to reopen its own next chapter later this month. But while he often wasn’t the loudest man in the room, Kepler was, above all, a leader — a man who parlayed his own pacifism into a broad anti-war movement and, in the process, created a beloved institution that continues to inspire bookworms to this day. Doyle, a journalist with the McClatchy newspaper chain and former Palo Alto Weekly reporter, follows Kepler from his humble upbringing in Denver, Colo.; to his war-resistance efforts during World War II and the Vietnam War; to his radical experiences with new institutions such as the Free University and the Institute for Nonviolent Studies; to his wild success in transforming his stuffy but eclectic bookshop into the Bay Area’s leading melting pot for revolutionary thinkers. Kepler was born in Denver and first became a “radical pacifist” at the onset of World War II — a period when being a conscientious objector didn’t endear one to the general population, particularly when the stance had no religious basis. His brother, Earl, also a pacifist, received a 30-month sentence for

Kepler’s war on war Radical pacifism and the making of an institution by Gennady Sheyner

Michael Doyle resisting the war and avoiding the draft. Though he was paroled after 10 months, Earl would never see happy days. He joined the Civilian Public Service and was assigned to work in a forest north of Glendora, the same camp where Roy was based. Within a month, a fire that was accidentally started by his cabin-mate destroyed his cabin and left 95 percent of Earl’s body covered in second- and third-degree burns. He died in the hospital. Roy Kepler would spend his early 20s shuttling through various work camps, including Germfask, a CPS camp in northern Michigan known as “Alcatraz of CPS.” With morale plummeting because of tedious labor, scarce supplies and aggression from residents of nearby towns, Germfask men fought back with pranks — shattering a 3-gallon mustard jar in the kitchen, clogging latrines, covering the floor in a layer of white flour topped with obscenities written in coffee grounds, calling in sick in alphabetical order. As the war ended, the camps were dismantled and by the spring of 1946, Kepler was a free man. After a few post-war years as an activist in various peace groups, including a stint as an executive secretary of the War Resisters league,

the newly married Kepler took a job for Eastern News Service, a distributor of books and magazines. In the spring of 1955, he began contemplating his own venture — a bookstore that would specialize in paperbacks, a new book type that was largely viewed as vulgar by Stanford Bookstore and other established booksellers. In May of that year, Kepler’s Books & Magazines opened shop at its first location, 939 El Camino Real. From its inception, Kepler’s sought to create something greater than a place that sells books — a community where browsing is encouraged and where connections form. And it is this quality that helped sustain the store through an era of chain bookstores and Amazon — forces that put many independent booksellers out of business. In 2005, with its finances in shambles, the store was preparing to shut down and was saved only by community outcry and an injection of funds from a team of investors. Earlier this year, Roy’s son and longtime store proprietor Clark Kepler retired from the family business, and Kepler’s welcomed a new transition team led by former Kepler’s enthusiast Praveen Madan. The new store is scheduled to reopen in late September.

Doyle’s book, like Kepler’s bookstore, is loaded with colorful cameos, from the civil-rights pioneer Bayard Rustin and troubled beatnik Allen Ginsberg to the shaggy-haired rocker Jerry Garcia and the charismatic Paly graduate Joan Baez, a prominent figure in Kepler’s life. It was at Kepler’s that Garcia, a store regular, met his future Grateful Dead collaborators, the lyricist Robert Hunter and bassist Phil Lesh. Ken Kesey stopped by the store in 1964 in search of a driver for his bus, which would become immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s classic “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” It was here that a teenaged nerd named Steve Wozniak pored through computer books and absorbed the knowledge he would later use to help launch another revolution. And it was also here that Ira Sandperl, a loquacious pacifist and Baez’s intellectual guru, worked his bard-like magic as a bookstore clerk. Throughout the era of protests, experiments and change, Kepler remained a “steady, solid, nonviolent rock,” as Baez described him to the Palo Alto Weekly in 1994, according to the book. His wife, Patricia, likened him to a statue, calling him “a steadfastly unemotional man more easily admired than embraced,” Doyle writes. Even when vandals hurled cherry bombs at his stores and colleagues urged mayhem to resist the status quo, Kepler remained unflappable, methodical and committed to his principles up until his death on New Year’s Day in 1994 at the age of 73. Doyle doesn’t try to veil his own admiration for his subject. His portrayal of Kepler and his inner circle is intimate and deeply sympathetic. He consistently refers to Kepler, Sandperl and Baez by their first names and he doesn’t dig too deeply into the philosophical underpinnings of Kepler’s and Sandperl’s pacifist convictions. Nor does he raise any questions or present any challenges to Kepler’s and Sandperl’s fixed commitment to nonviolence — there are no discussions of “just wars” in this book. But Doyle does a masterly job in weaving Kepler’s life into the colorful, rapidly shifting context of the Bay Area in the second half of the 20th century and in explaining how this principled visionary both shaped and was shaped by the zeitgeist around him. N Staff Writer Gennady Sheyner can be emailed at gsheyner@ paweekly.com.