For decades, this store was an anchor for the Bay Area's Asian American community. Now, Harvey and his wife Beatrice, the store's co-owner, have decided to close the shop. They're both in their 70s and have aging parents to care for – and last weekend, they shut the doors for the final time.
While they're used to seeing this place packed with literature, Eastwind was never just about the books.
I have never been to Hiroshima, but for a long time I have felt a strong desire to connect physically with this part of my family’s history. I have been searching for things that survived — an heirloom, a letter, a bracelet.
Unexpectedly, the objects that have offered me the most meaningful connection to Hiroshima are not objects at all but living, breathing things: trees.
But, once you get used to the style and surrender to it, “Honeybees” is a lovely book to get lost in because it forces you to be in the moment with the story. Something clicks — you hit a stride and suddenly realize pages have passed since you said “I’ll stop at the end of this paragraph.”
David Edmonds’s new book, “Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality,” is about both the intelligence and the strangeness of its subject. It works through his life, spent largely at Oxford, and his ideas, which all relate to people (or “persons”) and ethics, the study of what people ought to do. In Edmonds’s estimation, at least, Parfit saw himself as among the first philosophers to really and seriously undertake this study without religious assumptions. Concerned above all with suffering, Parfit himself had abandoned religion in his youth, unable to understand how a just and loving God could be responsible for so much pain. And his ethical philosophy remained focused on suffering, a good fit for British utilitarian consequentialism, an intellectual tradition in which promoting pleasure and reducing pain are seen as the primary mandates of ethics.