Join authors Andrew Alden (Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City) and Jenny Odell (Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock) in a conversation with moderator ​Dorothy Lazard (What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World) about rocks, clocks, and so much more.

Part of the Oakland Public Library’s Fall History Series.

Both authors’ recent books take readers on a tour through unexpected and unseen parts of the Bay Area, and reveal the structures beneath both our built environment and our lived experience.

Andrew Alden is a geologist and geoscience writer who has worked for the US Geological Survey and reported for KQED and Bay Nature. Long fascinated with rocks and landscapes, Alden found inspiration for his debut book, Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City, in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which, as he writes, “ripped the city open and revealed to us its heart and character.” Through his writing Alden raises awareness for what he calls the deep present: the appreciation of the ancient underpinnings that shape the modern-day surroundings of daily life.You can find more of his writing on his Oakland Geology blog, which has been the home of his writing since 2007. 

Jenny Odell is a multi-disciplinary artist and author. Her first book was the New York Times Bestseller, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Sierra Magazine, and more. Her most recent book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, explains how we got to the point where time became money, and offers us new models to live by–inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time–that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible. Odell takes readers on a journey through other temporal habitats, while remaining firmly grounded in the Bay Area.

Dorothy Lazard is an author (What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World), historian, and former Oakland History Center Librarian.