Lea Aschkenas, author of Es Cuba: Life and Love on a Illegal Island
Sunday, July 23, 7:00 pm
Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA
Love is the operative word in journalist Aschkenas’s intimate, detailed memoir of 10 months spent exploring life in Cuba—love for a young Cuban man whose devotion largely defines her journey. As a tourist, she is housed in an exclusive hotel in a wealthy Havana neighborhood, removed from the dirt-poor, hand-to-mouth struggling Cubans, whose average monthly salary is $12. She soon meets Alfredo, a black-skinned stage technician who teaches her to eschew “la vida plastica” in order to learn about the “real Cuba”.
Leonard Pitt, author of Walks through Lost Paris: A Journey into the Heart of Historic Paris
Monday, July 24, 7:00 pm
Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA
When he discovered that the city he lived in for many years was actually entirely rebuilt during the mid-1800s, Leonard Pitt plunged into Paris’s history and began photographing what he learned had changed. Walks Through Lost Paris chronicles Paris’s great periods of urban reconstruction through four walking tours.