LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Jeff Greenwald, Author of Snake Lake
Monday, November 1, 2010 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com
If you have not witnessed our next salon speaker in action, you have missed out! If you have been to any presentation by Jeff Greenwald, you know what we mean. We’re delighted to be able to share a night with this amazing traveler and raconteur as he celebrates the long awaited publication of Snake Lake. In this latest work, Jeff (Shopping for Buddhas and The Size of the World) returns to Kathmandu. Snake Lake unfolds during Nepal’s bloody 1990 uprising. Encounters with a Tibetan Lama and a frisky photographer enliven a tale in which he wrestles with three wildly different paths to liberation.
Jeff Greenwald has a gift for electrifying descriptions of the profound intricacy of the world and the mind. His portrait of his erudite, inscrutable, and doomed brother and keenly illuminating memoir of place, spirit, love, and brotherhood are unforgettable.
—Booklist
Jeff Greenwald has traveled extensively through five continents, working as a writer, artist and photographer. In addition he has prepared exhibits, lectures and educational programs for the San Francisco Exploratorium, the University of California, the Body Shop International, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
In the course of his travels, Mr. Greenwald has had the opportunity to participate in a number of unusual projects. In 1979, during his first trip to Asia, he designed urban playgrounds for UNICEF and the Nepal Children’s Organization. Several months later, arriving in Thailand during the Khmer civil war, he served as a volunteer water engineer at Khao-I-Dang–the largest of the Cambodian refugee camps.
In the Spring of 1983, he was awarded a Journalism Fellowship by the Rotary International Foundation, and departed for a second trip to Asia. During this 16-month residence he lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, and made excursions to the Himalaya, India, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Japan, Java and Bali. The resulting articles appeared in GEO and Islands magazines.
His first book, Mr. Raja’s Neighborhood: Letters from Nepal (John Daniel, 1986), is still in print. Shopping for Buddhas, first published by Harper & Row in 1990, was reissued in 1996 by Lonely Planet Publications; the new edition won the Lowell Thomas Gold Award for Best Travel Book of 1996. The Size of the World–a chronicle of his 29,172-mile, around-the-world overland voyage (Globe Pequot, 1995 & Ballantine, 1996)–was a national bestseller, and won the 1995 Lowell Thomas Silver Award. This was followed by Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth, released in June 1998 by Viking Penguin. Mr. Greenwald’s travel writing is widely anthologized. His new book, Snake Lake, was released by Counterpoint in October 2010.
Greenwald divides his time between California and Asia, publishing stories and essays in a variety of publications–including The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Salon.com. Jeff is also Executive Director of Ethical Traveler, a global community dedicated to exploring the ambassadorial potential of world travel.
Note: As this salon takes place at the same time as the World Series, iphones and other devices for keeping track of the Wold Series will be permitted and there will be breaks for checking the score!
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