Book Talk Book Talk (September 07, 2005)

SAY IT AIN'T SO . . . There aren't many things that can bring a newsroom to a complete halt, but the closing of Kepler's Books in Menlo Park last Wednesday was one of those moments. Well, we are all readers. Kepler's had just celebrated its 50th anniversary in May, with hundreds of people at an invitation-only party, including Clark Kepler, his mother and his sister, along with many past employees. Losing a bookstore is like losing a part of the community. Clark Kepler followed a tradition set by his late father, Roy Kepler, when he opened a modest bookstore on El Camino Real in Menlo Park in 1955. Kepler's, along with City Lights in San Francisco and Cody's in Berkeley, were part of a strong tradition of independent Bay Area bookstores. Now, there's an empty seat at the table, so to speak.

OF LOCAL NOTE . . . Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Stanford University professor, went to Iraq in 2003 at the invitation of his former Stanford and Hoover colleague, Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security advisor, to be an advisor to the occupation government. Diamond wrote about that experience in his recently-published book, "Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq." Diamond, in an interview last week on National Public Radio, said that the biggest mistake the American government made in Iraq was to establish an occupation government after the fall of Baghdad instead of moving immediately to an interim Iraqi government. "If we did not succeed in stabilizing Iraq, I felt it would become what it was not before the war -- that is, a haven for international terrorists, a really imminent problem for regional security and stability and a threat to the security of the United States," Diamond told NPR. "In addition to which, it was clear that many Iraqis, in the wake of toppling Sadam, were coming forward and struggling to build a democratic system of government and I thought those people deserved our help." Diamond knows Rice from her days as a political science professor and then-provost at Stanford, but told NPR that he has not heard from her since his book was published in mid-June.

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