Anthoy Lucero brings passion to his film East Side Sushi about a single Chicana mother with aspirations as a sushi chef in East Oakland.

Frank Bette was a longtime Alameda resident, a furniture maker and restorer, and an artist, although one who worked in isolation and rarely showed or talked about his work. Indeed, many of his friends were only dimly aware of his artistic production.

How does an artist know when he has made it? When he is invited to participate in RAW, the swanky and exclusive artistic showcase popping up in cities worldwide? When his work is featured in an art magazine? Or when it has been stolen twice? By all these criteria, Michael J. Marx has arrived. He has been creating wearable sculptures from precious metal clay, or PMC, for 14 years, and don’t even think about calling them necklaces.

Three new book of interest to Bay Area readers.

"I’m glad I’m alive!" Doris Louise Bailey, a teen in the Prohibition era, writes this over and over in her diaries after a life-threatening bout of scarlet fever. But it’s also an apt summation of how she lived in the years following her brush with death. Reaching for the Moon: More Diaries of a Roaring Twenties Teen (1927-1929) contains Doris’s true-life adventures, breaking rules and hearts along the way.

Hot-ticket events you don't want to miss in January and February.

Oakland-bred Alameda attorney Rod Gilmore doesn’t get to talk football with his fellow Islanders much. That’s because his wife, Marie, is the mayor, and locals would rather yak it up with her about stuff like the latest graffiti abatement strategy. Sheesh. If they only knew about Gilmore’s other gig as a high-octane ESPN college football analyst. In the spirit of conversational fairness, I called out the former early ’80s Stanford defensive back recently so he could vent—about college football that is.

What to do and when to do it.

Oh, the places you’ll go!” Dr. Seuss famously said, and his admiring exclamation certainly applies to the East Bay Children’s Book Project, started in 2005 by a few retired teachers who wanted to give books to kids with little or no access to the written word. Little did the tiny band of literacy warriors know that less than a decade later, the books distributed would number almost a million—and counting.

New books of interest to Bay Area readers.