Our very own Margaret Regan, author of Detained and Deported, will be a keynote speaker at this weekend's Sahuarita Border Issues Fair at the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ, 17750 S. La Canada.

The fun starts tomorrow night and continues on Saturday: 

The Border Issues Fair Concert, 7 p.m., Friday, Jan. 15, will feature Lance Canales & The Flood—a roots-blues influenced Americana trio from California’s breadbasket, where Canales lived the life that so many songs have been written about since the birth of roots music – hard labor, one room shacks and taunting ghosts whispering of a better life. Canales’ guttural vocals combine a hard-edged storytelling approach beneath a stripped down, foot-stomping, acoustic instrumentation. Opening act will be the Ambos Nogales, border singer-songwriter, Pablo Peregrina. Tickets $20.

The Border Issues Fair will begin with registration at 8 a.m. Saturday, January 16.. Donation $10 at the door. There will be three keynote addresses. The first, by Margaret Regan, journalist and author of “Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire” and longtime contributor to the Tucson Weekly, begins at 9 a.m. “Detained and Deported” was recently named a Top Pick in the 2015 Southwest Books of the Year competition.

Jennifer Johnson, Washington D.C, border policy advisor for the Southern Border Community Coalition, gives the second talk. Dr. Abby Wheatley, border activist and researcher, gives the third lecture, “Reframing Life and Death on the Arizona-Sonora Border."

Donations: Please bring belts and warm hat, gloves and jackets for those in the desert.

The recently late, long great David Bowie was, apparently, an avid reader. As part of a 2013 exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, he included a list of his 100 favorite books. I won't print the complete list here. You can go to the LA Times article to see it.

It's a wide-ranging book list indicating eclectic tastes, not surprising for a man like Bowie who spent his life in constant reinvention. Here are a few, in no particular order, where his tastes and mine intersect:

"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess
"Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert
"The Iliad" by Homer
"As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner
The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov
"Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov
"Black Boy" by Richard Wright
"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The Waste Land" by T.S. Elliot
McTeague" by Frank Norris
"A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole
"1984" by George Orwell
"White Noise" by Don DeLillo
"A People’s History of the United States" by Howard Zinn
"Lady Chatterly’s Lover" by D.H. Lawrence
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac
The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard
"The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin

And I would be remiss if I left out some of his favorites not on my reading list, like:

Longtime Tucson Weekly contributor Margaret Regan's newest book, Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire, has made the list of the Southwest Books of the Year, compiled by Pima County Public Library. 

Regan's book, which was excerpted in the Tucson Weekly earlier this year, has won acclaim for examining the lives of undocumented immigrants who get caught up in the legal system. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said that Regan captures "intimate and heartbreaking" stories in "an authentic look at people caught between borders"; Kirkus Reviews said that "Regan's books bring into focus the fates of undocumented people fighting against the odds to make it into America and then, if they get here, struggling, and often failing, to build a life"; and Booklist noted that "with other horrifying case studies, Regan provides discomfiting statistics to document the rise of the detention-industrial complex."

If you're looking around for a gift for the book lover on your holiday list, Detained and Deported is a worthy candidate.

Here's the complete list of Southwest Books of the Year.

Local badass Jes Baker (you'll know her from her blog, those Abercrombie & Fitch photos, or as the founder of the Body Love Conference) is getting some national love for her new book Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls. 

We'll be printing an excerpt soon to help you decide if you want to buy her book (you do), but until then we'll let the Today Show fill you in.

Baker, who appeared on the Today Show for the first time a few years ago, will be back in Tucson next Friday (Nov. 6 at 7 p.m.) doing a reading from her book at Antigone. 

Author and longtime TW arts correspondent Margaret Regan will be reading from her latest book, Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire, at noon on Tuesday, Oct. 20, at the UNICEF store in Monterrey Village, 6242 E. Speedway Blvd.

Detained and Deported tells the stories of how undocumented immigrants have seen their families torn apart here in the United States and examines the miserable conditions at the private prisons where many of them are housed.

Publishers Weekly called the book "an authentic look at people caught between borders." Library Journal found it to be "heartbreaking, thorough, and insightful." Kirkus Reviews said it was a "timely look at the inhumane effects of immigration policies in the United States… Regan's books bring into focus the fates of undocumented people fighting against the odds to make it into America and then, if they get here, struggling, and often failing, to build a life.” And me? I thought it was great. Go hear Regan read, pick up a book, and get it autographed.

There is a way to tell if a book is a well written polemic by a conservative author. I call it “The C Clue.” If you look up a book on Amazon, you will see a horizontal bar graph. This graph depicts the relative numbers of the different star ratings. A conservative polemic will have a large number of one star ratings with somewhat fewer two star ratings. They represent the work of those from the other side of the political spectrum who wish to suppress the book. The book will have few three star ratings, but many four star, and still more five star ratings from conservatives who love a well written polemic. So, when the graph looks like a “C,” you may assume it to be arguing from a conservative political perspective.

Such a book is The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, by Michael Walsh (as of this writing, this book is more of a capital E, but you get the idea).

To get a good perspective on this book, one should take a look at the author. Walsh graduated from the Eastman School of Music in 1971. He worked as a reporter for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, then became its classical music critic. He later became a music critic for the San Francisco Examiner, then for Time Magazine. Around the turn of the century he was a Professor of Journalism and Professor of Film & Television at Boston University. He wrote for National Review, and had a weekly column at the New York Post. He helped Andrew Breitbart launch Big Journalism.com, and became a featured journalist at PJ Media. He has authored over a dozen books both fiction and nonfiction. In short, he is a bit of a Renaissance Man.

My friend Ron was halfway through a Kurt Vonnegut novel when he decided to reach out via Facebook for assurance that his particular book would get better. I replied, "It doesn't." A while later he replied saying that I was right. The subject of Vonnegut reminded me of one of his recurring characters, Kilgore Trout. Trout was himself a science fiction writer who could only achieve publication as filler for pornographic books and magazines (no internet in the 70's). Kilgore Trout, in turn, reminded me of a hilarious, wildly imaginative, and sometimes disturbing 1975 novel Venus on the Half-shell, by Phillip Jose' Farmer, originally published under the pen name "Kilgore Trout".

If you have yet to read it, Venus on the Half-shell makes for an absorbing, fast paced, escape from our crazy times. I told Ron as much.

Most authors will start a novel by painting a picture of the setting, then begin the introduction of the characters. Farmer starts Venus with the protagonist, Simon Wagstaff, having sex atop the Great Pyramid of Giza. Next came the great flood, literally. An alien race called the Hoonhor traveled from planet to planet checking out the state of evolution. If the state was not well, they cleansed it. Earth was one of these. The Hoonhor caused all the water vapor in the atmosphere to precipitate at once, washing the planet, and giving evolution another shot. 

Our hero, Simon Wagstaff, managed to float around long enough to float by an abandoned Chinese spacecraft which he boarded shortly before running aground on, where else, Mount Ararat. After learning how to fly the craft, Simon left Earth and traveled the galaxy far and wide to find the answers to unanswerable questions, like, "Why are we created only to suffer and die?"

The novel starts out with a bang, but that is only the first in a number of sexual adventures. There was, for example, the planet Dokal where all the people were identical to humans with the exception of possessing a five to six foot long prehensile tail, naked, save for a tuft of fur at the end. The Dokals insisted on fixing his lack of tail problem, and after the installation, he found it to be quite useful. Useful, he found, in ways he had not imagined, like when the King's young daughter named Tunc (an anagram) seduced him and... well, I'll leave it there.

Occasionally the humor could be a bit disturbing. As it turned out, faster-than-light travel was made possible by sucking energy from a parallel universe to feed the engine. Unfortunately, the globs of energy were actually living beings. They died in the process. The engine, in fact, transmitted the sound of their wailing death cries - the faster he went, the louder they became. Simon found it terribly unnerving.

Farmer was a great admirer of Vonnegut, and through the persona of Kilgore Trout he was able to take the Vonnegut style to far higher level of humor and creativity. Writing Venus was a joy for Farmer, and it shows in the writing. He speaks of laughing out loud while typing it, and concluded, "What a blast it was!"

Venus is a great escape novel for the science fiction buff, and the joy of the author in its creation touches you. Finish your summer reading with this!

Oh yeah, Ron's book that did not get better was Slaughterhouse Five.

I rarely read a book that I find to be transformative, that not only adds to my knowledge and understanding of an issue but significantly alters my way of thinking about it. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of those works. It's a new book and currently sits at number two on the New York Times' nonfiction best seller list. 

Coates' book is presented as a letter to his teenage son. It's his attempt to describe what it's like growing up black in present-day America from the inside out, using his own life as his touchstone. He presents his world from a personal, subjective point of view. This isn't a sociological or political text. In the book Coates renders his confusion, his questions, his grief, his anger and his joys with literary clarity, and with a depth that can't be captured in a dry, "objective" discussion of the issues.

It would be incorrect for me to say I "understand" the book. You can only understand the world he's trying to capture if you've lived it, if you've felt it in your psyche and your nerve endings. Intellectual understanding, even combined with valiant attempts at empathy, can't substitute for being there on a day by day, minute by minute basis. I'm an older, white, privileged male who does his best to comprehend the nature of racism in this country, but I know I'm looking at that world from the outside. Coates grants me the ability to get as close to what the life of a black man is like as any recent work I can think of.

People compare Coates' book to James Baldwin's electrifying 1963 work, The Fire Next Time. It's a valid comparison, but for me, the experience of reading Between the World and Me is more like what I felt when I read Ralph Ellison's great 1952 novel, Invisible Man. That's the only other book I can remember that gave me the momentary sense of living the black experience, and helped me understand how distant it is from my experiences and how limited my understanding will always be.

This book deserves to join the literary canon alongside works by Baldwin, Ellison and Toni Morrison. So let me end by quoting what Morrison wrote about Between the World and Me.

“I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading."

The present U.S.-Mexico borderlands bring  documentary filmmaker and author Kathryn Ferguson tremendous melancholy. 

A Tucsonan by birth, Ferguson remembers the days when she and her family would drive down to Nogales for even the simplest craves, such as a cup of coffee. There were no walls or armed men in uniform patrolling the frontier; people didn't die as often while trying to cross the desert into the United  States; and the cultural exchange wasn't as problematic.

"It was a different world, it is a darker world now," she says. "When I was a girl I would never use the word 'raid,'  the word 'deportation.' You would think, raids at 3 a.m., when people are taken out of the homes and put in prison, you would think that was another country you were talking about, not the United States."

But things have also changed in Mexico. For years, she'd travel alone to as far south as Michoacán and Guerrero. And, as a documentary maker, she extensively explored the Sierra Madre in the state of Chihuahua. Michoacán and Guerrero are now two of the most dangerous states in Mexico. "(They are) not very good places. I would think twice about going...and I love Mexico," she says. 

Witnessing all those changes throughout her life was what inspired Ferguson to write The Haunting of the Mexican Border, a collection of anecdotes about her and friends on both sides of the border.  

The book is split in two: the introduction is on Ferguson's travels through the Sierra Madre, while she worked on a documentary, and the second part takes place once Ferguson returns to Tucson, while also traveling to Mexico back-and-forth. She describes her experience collaborating with a group called the Tucson Samaritans, volunteers who bring water to the desert for migrants to drink. "This is a personal book," she says. "Seeing things that happened to friends, to me, the desert...as a result of politics."

"Nobody really knows what goes on in the border, even though it is on all the headlines," she says. "Everybody is crossing all the borders of the world, and we need to take a look at why that is happening."

Ferguson is having a book party Saturday, Aug. 15 from 5 p.m.to 7 p.m. at the Temple of Music and Art lounge, where she will read excerpts of her work. John Fife, local human rights activist, retired Presbyterian minister, as well as co-founder of the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s, will be the guest speaker.

The Chicago Teachers Union is pissed at a Tucson writer—who goes by the pseudonym Gabby Matthews—over a political erotica novel he wrote about a teachers strike that shut down part of Chicago's public school system for about a week back in 2012. 

The union has told the author they do not want to be associated with this "spanking novel," titled The Teacher's Strike, citing alleged trademark violations, according to the author. CTU’s communications director, Stephanie Gadlin, says a fictional Teachers Union logo on a shirt worn by the teacher’s character on the cover should be removed from both print and online copies, because it is way too similar to the union's actual logo. The union also demands that any copies of the book already printed be recalled, a letter from the union's attorney says.

The publisher and author have until Aug. 14 to comply, or the union will "take steps" to ensure they do obey, the letter says.

"I think the union is widely overreacting. It's just a book...I wish they'd recognize it is a political satire and just have a good laugh at it," Matthews says. He'd prefer not to reveal his real name, but he's a local activist and educator, as well. "I expected more open-minded sentiment about sexuality and gender from a union that purports itself to be liberal and progressive" 

The book, which was released in July, tells the story of an "illicit romantic affair" between a male student of legal age and his early-20-something-year-old female teacher. It takes place during the teachers' strike from three years ago. 

The novel is described as work that "takes a sympathetic perspective on the Union’s struggle over educational policy inside Chicago schools. The main and supporting characters take part in the high-profile labor battles against city policies, personified in the book’s unseen antagonist, 'mayor of the 1 percent,' the unflattering title used by activists to describe Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel...At one point in the story, the book title’s double meaning becomes clear when the teacher spanks (or 'strikes') the student’s bare behind (and vice versa) in a romantic act of affection during intercourse."

Matthews says he, as a writing tutor, and the CTU fight for the same things: education equality and labor rights, so why are they so mad?

An attorney with the union says they reserve the right to seek damages and relief from the profit that comes from book sales—in the case the logo is not removed, that is.