 Red Room Writer Profile
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Julia Flynn Siler's Blog
November 5, 2008
- There are conventions for everyone: dog lovers, tattoo artists, people who trade sports memorabilia, barristas, and hairdressers. They all have their annual gatherings to swap tales, make friends, and do business. So why shouldn’t book groups have theirs? For the third year, an estimated 1,700 people gathered over a weekend in October for Book Group Expo at the San Jose Convention Center in ...
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October 20, 2008
- Anyone driving east from San Francisco on Highway 80, the 10-lane transcontinental highway to Nevada and points east, can’t miss the name Mondavi. In California’s Central Valley, where the Mondavi family first made its name in the grape wholesaling business in the 1920s and then became America’s foremost wine dynasty, Robert and Margrit Mondavi have passed into legend – so much so that ...
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July 24, 2008
- Despite my intention to take a summer sabbatical, an investigative story that appeared on the front page of last Sunday’s Sacramento Bee brought me back to my keyboard. The story raises some new questions about Robert Mondavi’s philanthropic legacy, a subject I explored in The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty. Sparse crowds at Copia have contributed to its ...
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July 18, 2008
- This spring, I mailed off applications for our boys to attend an academically challenging summer school run by the University of California at Berkeley. When the letters arrived in the mail telling us whether they’d been admitted, I opened them with mixed emotions – perhaps even a certain amount of dread. Both boys were admitted, which made me proud. But that also meant we’d be setting ...
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July 10, 2008
- In the fall of 2007, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) ran a lengthy essay by Steve Wasserman, a former editor of The Los Angeles Times Book Review, titled “Goodbye to All That.” It offers a fascinating glimpse into the dire state of newspaper book review sections and Steve began by tallying the vanishing coverage at major newspapers. To darken the picture even further, he then went on to ...
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July 9, 2008
- For anyone who has ever dreamed of becoming an author, Meg Waite Clayton’s website is a delightful and inspiring place to visit. Meg is the author of the bestselling novel, The Wednesday Sisters, a book about a group of women friends. They meet at a park in Palo Alto, California, in the late 1960s and form a writers’ circle. Along the way, as the war in Vietnam rages, American astronauts ...
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July 8, 2008
- What can Shakespeare teach us about a troubled family business? That’s a question I’ll try to answer at a discussion hosted by a long-lasting and large book group in Burlingame, Calif., this fall. Over the summer, the group has decided to read Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear, alongside my book, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty. Two kings: Ian Holm ...
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July 8, 2008
- If there is a modern American equivalent to the French salons of the 17th and 18th centuries, it may be found in the thousands of book groups that gather regularly across the nation in living rooms, public libraries, and local coffee houses to discuss literature and ideas – often passionately, and with a great deal of wine and laughter involved. Book lover Liz Epstein guides groups ...
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July 7, 2008
- The Gerald Loeb Awards are the Oscars of the financial and business journalism world. And this year’s award ceremony took place in the suitably glamorous setting of Cipriani 42nd Street – the former Bowery Savings Bank built in 1921, just a few years before the market crash of 1929. Above, the Cipriani 42nd Street was the elegant venue for the Loeb awards; below left, the author and ...
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July 1, 2008
- The last stop on my paperback tour for The House of Mondavi was Portland, Oregon, where I can truthfully, if somewhat reluctantly, report that I found what seems to be a city even more obsessed with good food than my own San Francisco Bay Area. David Schargel, in blue, offers "epicurean excursion" participants a sampling of Portland's culinary prowess; below, a sampling of the ...
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June 13, 2008
- A few months ago, I received a politely-worded invitation to visit the George Town Club in Washington, D.C., to speak about my book, The House of Mondavi. The organizer of the evening, club board member Jane-Scott Cantus, was also hoping I might stay to join members of the club for a dinner featuring wines from the Mondavi family. These lucky few at the George Town club were the first on the ...
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June 11, 2008
- It was hard to escape “Sex and the City” even at the black-tie 2008 James Beard Foundation Awards Ceremony on June 8th at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson of Tartine Bakery share their James Beard award with the sweetest of their creations. Photo from Gothamist.com The evening’s co-host was Kim Cattrall, the actress who played Samantha in the ...
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June 11, 2008
- I’ve met a lot of wonderful people while touring to promote the paperback release of The House of Mondavi, but surely one of the most memorable was Helen Dufficy. Who knew such a dainty garden setting would occasion talk of "the two Ls"? Helen, a lively 91-year-old who lives in a retirement community called The Tamalpais, came to the annual fund-raising talk and ...
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June 4, 2008
- One of the most uplifting stories I’ve come across recently is that of Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind. Known as Peggy by her friends, Mitchell became the first woman to cover hard news in the early 1920s for the Atlanta Journal, one of the predecessor newspapers to today’s Atlanta Journal Constitution. Above, Margaret Mitchell at the typewriter she used to write the ...
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June 3, 2008
- Allegro Romano, a small Italian restaurant on San Francisco’s Russian Hill, is the setting for a key scene in The House of Mondavi. The restaurant was where Timothy Mondavi broke bread with two of the outside directors of the Robert Mondavi Corp. in an effort to convince them to oust the company’s non-family member CEO. His efforts backfired. Instead of convincing them to fire the executive, ...
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