Booksmith BOOKSWAP: Great American Family Edition!

Bookswap is back, fresh for 2012!
We are very excited to have Peter Orner join us for January's installation of Bookswap! His literary mosaic Love and Shame and Love paints a beautiful and intimate portrait of a Chicago family across four generations. With Love and Shame and Love on our minds, and the holidays fresh on our heels, let's dedicate this Bookswap the Great American Family.
Tolstoy said it best in Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Bring a book to swap that best depicts the American Family inside your heart. Fiction or nonfiction; anything goes!
Tickets $25, in the store, or online at Brown Paper Tickets.
- Street:
- 1644 Haight St.
- City:
- San Francisco ,
- Province:
- California
- Postal Code:
- 94117-2816
- Country:
- United States
VICTORIA COSTELLO / A Lethal Inheritance: A Mother Uncovers the Science Behind Three Generations of Mental Illness
Author Victoria Costello in conversation with Dr. Demian Rose, UCSF Psychiatrist, Medical Director of PREP SF. Co-presented by the Mental Health Association of San Francisco
Part memoir, part scientific detective story, A LETHAL INHERITANCE is
Emmy Award-winning
science writer Victoria Costello’s harrowing account of her son’s descent into
schizophrenia, which, at its worst had him wandering the streets of Los Angeles
shoeless, muttering incoherently; and her exploration into her family’s history
of depression, drug addiction, and secrets that stretches backat least three generations.
She shares the story of her younger sister, who by sixteen had a full-blown heroin habit, recalls her loving, but alcoholic father, and re-examines the tragic “accident” that left her grandfather dead on a New York City railroad track in 1913. She also shares how she had to address her own history of depression and cope when a second son developed an anxiety disorder.
Artfully weaving the scientific into the personal, Costello takes a journey to the far reaches of neuroscience and reports back on the startling findings it is yielding about the complex interplay between genes and environment that drives mentalillness and what it now tells us about how parents can trump a lethal inheritance.
“This honest, lucid book examines the urgent problems of family history and early diagnosis in mental illness from a personal and scientific standpoint. It will be invaluable to families trying to understand their own history, and to those who have been blind to such history.” – Andrew Solomon, National Book Award- winning author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Victoria Costello is a science writer, journalist, and TV producer. Originally from suburban New York, Costello launched her investigative journalism career by weighing in on the Vietnam War and the rights of farm workers in her high school’s “underground newspaper.” She studied journalism at American University in Washington, DC and became an independent video journalist covering such hot button issues as abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, nuclear power, the environment, and social justice for PBS. She was the first Director of the TV/Video Program at The American Film Institute; a TV producer of documentaries; a web content writer and editor; and the author of four books on mental health topics. Currently, she helps train social workers in strength-based recovery at Family Services Agency in San Francisco.
- Street:
- 1644 Haight St.
- City:
- San Francisco ,
- Province:
- California
- Postal Code:
- 94117-2816
- Country:
- United States
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How to Reserve a Seat for an Event in the Store
We offer limited reserved seating for anyone purchasing a copy
of an event’s featured book in advance from The Booksmith.
In the store: let us know you’d like a reserved seat
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add “reserved seat for talk on [date]” to the comments field.
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