USF Bloggers Planet

The next book we will be discussing is Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon.

Please join us on July 12th at noon in room 209 in the Gleeson library. The library copy is checked out so you are welcome to request it through Link+ or at the SF Public Library. The SF Public library also has sound recordings and digital editions available for check out.

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there–longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart–half tavern, half temple–stands Brokeland. When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffes life. (back cover)