The Wonder Years: Portraits of Athletes Who Never Slow Down

My newest project, The Wonder Years: Portraits of Athletes Who Never Slow Down, is now out in bookstores.

The book, which I co-authored with photographer Rick Rickman, is a collection of portraits and stories from an extraordinary cast of senior athletes and former Olympians. You can meet some of them in this cool photo gallery posted at USA Today.

“Perhaps no one knows the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat better than athletes in their later years who are still at their game,” writes Carol Kaufmann at AARP Bulletin. “The aches and pains may be greater but so is the victory at the finish line. In their new book, The Wonder Years, photographer Rick Rickman and writer Donna Wares capture the spirit of the athletes, who are living proof that getting older doesn’t mean slowing down.”

Published this summer by Chronicle Books, The Wonder Years includes 100 amazing color portraits by Rick, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, and a foreword by figure skating legend Peggy Fleming.

For the past two decades, Rick has traveled the country photographing aging adventurers and amateur athletes who defy the conventional wisdom about what it means to grow old in our society. They are part of a growing senior underground of 350,000 men and women competing at the local and state level to get into the National Senior Games. The games arrived on the West Coast for the first time Aug. 1 to 15, on the Stanford University campus. It’s world’s largest gathering of athletes over 50.

The photo accompanying this post comes from Kepler’s, a terrific independent bookstore in nearby Menlo Park. As you can see, Kepler’s has a special August display of books geared toward the 10,000 athletes now participating the Senior Games.

My partner Rick, of course, is in the middle of the action at Stanford. He shooting the games again this year with a group of his talented photography students from Brook Institute in Ventura. You can check out some of their work here.

On Thursday Aug. 6, Rick will be discussing and signing The Wonder Years from noon to 1 p.m. on the Euflexxa Entertainment Stage on the Stanford campus. The event is in the NSG village.

On August 27, I’ll be joining Rick for a special Wonder Years evening in Orange County. We’ll be discussing and signing The Wonder Years at opening night of the Aquadettes’ annual Aqua Follies in Laguna Woods. The amazing Aquadettes are featured the book and will be joining us to autograph copies of The Wonder Years after the show. [Many thanks to Borders in Mission Viejo for supplying books for this special event.]

On Sept. 24, Rick and I will be discussing The Wonder Years at 7 p.m. at the Barnes and Noble Marina Pacifica in Long Beach.

Popular culture sometimes suggests there is little to look forward to in our later years, but popular culture is wrong. The men and women featured in this book — and the thousands of athletes participating in this summer’s National Games — have a different message, one of grace and style, a path to the wonder years.

They are showing the rest of us the way.

P.S. Keep up with the latest news about The Wonder Years at twitter.com/wonderyearsbook.

Latest trek: Savoring a lakefront yurt near Santa Barbara

While working on a new book about California’s Central Coast, I recently visited Cachuma Lake in Santa Barbara’s Santa Ynez Valley and stayed in a lakefront yurt. It’s an idyllic spot tucked along Highway 154, one of the prettiest drives in California.

Here’s a link to the story I wrote for Sunday’s LA Times Travel Section, which also ran this photo gallery and handy info guide, too.

This summer I’ll be spending more time in Central California and also am looking forward to the release of my newest book, The Wonder Years: Portraits of Athletes Who Never Slow Down, which is being published by Chronicle Books.

The book is a collection of stories and stunning photographs by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Rick Rickman (my co-author), who has been the official photographer for the National Senior Games for many years. The Senior Games arrive on the West Coast for this first time Aug. 1-15 and will be held on the Stanford University campus. You can read an excerpt from The Wonder Years here.

Spring break treks, cool bookstores, great libraries, LA stories

SealBeachDaily.com is giving away a copy of Great Escapes: Southern California this week, just in time for your spring staycation.

Just picked up Great Destinations: Palm Springs and Desert Resorts by Christopher P. Baker. Nicely written. Baker clearly knows his turf.

Chronicle Books twitters about this lovely photo gallery: The most interesting bookstores of the world. From San Francisco to Paris to Calcutta, these bookstores are ideal destinations for book lovers.

Library Journal showcases the nation’s “star” libraries, including sixteen here in California.

The Los Angeles Music Center invites Angelenos to share their life stories and oral histories this month. The theme: “Journeys Toward Justice.”

The beauty of fresh and local: Gotta love Kate Cohen’s delightful slide show from one of SoCal’s newest farmers markets.

Two authors, the next president and a burger shack

Santa Barbara travel writer Pico Iyer shares an essay in Time magazine about his chance encounter with Barak Obama in Hawaii.

“It was three days before the New Year in late 2006, and I was eating a burger with the traveler and writer Paul Theroux on Oahu’s North Shore. Beside us in the rickety little shack was a quintessentially Hawaiian group of Chinese Americans, African Americans, semi–Southeast Asians and kids who could have been any or all of the above, waiting for the dad in the group to bring over their avocado burgers from the counter. It took Paul and me a few seconds to realize that the dad in question — who looked like a skinny teenager — was, in fact, the freshman Senator from Illinois, who was expected to enter the presidential race in the next week or two…”

At Sunset Magazine’s travel blog, editor Amy Wolf wonders: What burger shack was it that happened to be serving Pico Iyer, Paul Theroux, and Barack Obama at the very same time? And how good were the burgers?

On the road: a new collection to take along

Verlyn Klinkenborg, author and New York Times editorial writer, digs into the American Earth anthology at Book Forum. From Henry David Thoreau, writing from Concord in 1837, to book editor Bill McKibben, writing from the Yosemite backcountry last year, American Earth is a collection of essays, speeches, and poems about nature and the environment. More than a hundred writers contributed. Klinkenborg enthuses:

This is an anthology, then, of the writing that gets produced when reasonable men and women fight off the extremes of protest and despair to which they’ve been driven by the devastation of this planet. That makes this a practical-minded collection, commendably light on the vaporous spirituality, the blank stare, found in so much nature writing. This is literature for a cause, a cookbook for getting something done, a partial archive of the documents that shaped ecological awareness as we know it.

Keep reading here.

[via Jacket Copy]

Finding your way around literary California

Good news: CaliforniaAuthors.com has teamed up with BookTour.com to make it easy to find literary events – and your favorite writers — around the corner and around the state. As Kevin Smokler notes at the BookTour blog:

Yes, We love being in California, which its great weather, better food and governor who used to pose in a speedo. So we’re thrilled to announce today that our event data will now be syndicated at CaliforniaAuthors.com, the thoughtful chronicler of all things literary and left coast. Just click “event search” in their main navigation and get sent here. Then search by zip code, mileage and time. Take your pick.

CA’s Kate Cohen made the whole thing way too dang easy for her users. And for us. California Authors also features a directory of authors based in the Golden State, libraries of west coast bookstores and publishers and a nice little collection of excerpts from books by California authors.

Read more here.

Summer Staycation

The LA Times business section looks at this summer’s travel trend — the staycation. Faced with sky-high gas prices, many Southern California travelers are planning getaways close to home. Hotel reservations here are up from last summer (by 9 percent, says the Times) and families are loading up the car and driving to area theme parks and attractions that don’t involve costly air travel.

Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., said Southern California might have a unique advantage over other major regions of the nation in weathering the downturn in travel.

“You have 21 million people in Southern California, so there is a big market right in your own backyard,” Kyser said. At the same time, “there are a lot of things to partake in without going far such as Catalina Island. Our backyard is a pretty exotic and fun place.”

Booksellers are seeing a renewed interest in close-to-home travel books. At the Barnes and Noble Marina Pacifica in Long Beach, for example, community events director Cindy Patterson has created a special SoCal travel table and shoppers are snapping up her selections. I’m delighted that Cindy’s picks include Great Escapes: Southern California.

*Photo: a slice of Malibu’s spectacular coast, courtesy of Veronique de Turenne. Malibu is one of the cool getaways featured in Great Escapes: Southern California.

Summer getaways and a good works trek, too

This Thursday, June 5, I’ll be at the Marina Pacitica Barnes and Noble in Long Beach talking about Great Escapes: Southern California. Check out the details here.

This weekend, I went to the amazing BookExpo America in LA. Check out my photo gallery here. [Travel finds included Explorer's handy mini map series (photo above) and the Greenopia guides for Los Angeles and San Francisco.]

Yesterday, I helped pal Lori Sakamoto create a blog for her good works trek to Africa this summer. Check out the Crocs for Kenya Project.

Your California lit guide

A shiny new CaliforniaAuthors.com debuted this week with a fresh design and an easy-to-navigate new site.

Kate Cohen and I first launched CaliforniaAuthors in 2002 and we’ve built some nice resources for exploring the Golden State. You’ll find a growing and varied library of book excerpts and essays by California writers; a directory of California novelists, nonfiction writers and poets; and listings pointing to independent bookstores, West Coast Publishers, literary events, book festivals, and more. CaliforniaAuthors also teamed up with Angel City Press to create the remarkable My California anthology, which benefits the California Arts Council and writing programs for children throughout the state. Browse here.

Goodbye Travel Rut — My New Book is Here

When my husband and I plotted a monthlong trip to Europe, I spent weeks researching every detail. I amassed a bedside mountain of travel books. I quizzed friends about their adventures in the French countryside, scoured travel websites, and rented movies set in our intended destinations (I watched American Dreamer so many times I felt like a regular at Paris’ swanky Hôtel de Crillon). By the time we left, we had an adventurous, offbeat itinerary filled with cool new restaurants to try and treks to out-of-the-way corners I’d missed on previous trips abroad.

But for getaways close to home, I’ve always tended to go for the easy and familiar. Over and over. It’s just so effortless to say, let’s go to Palm Springs, which invariably means checking into the same desert resort my family always visits, with its comfortable, airy rooms and twisting water slide that keeps the kids entertained. Enjoyable, yes. But after the umpteenth trip, hardly exciting.

Then last year I was asked to write a travel book of great weekend getaways in Southern California.

Goodbye travel rut.

Suddenly I began looking at Southern California through fresh eyes. A travel writer’s eyes. Nearly every week I went someplace different: Date nights. Day trips. Weekend treks to my favorite spots and to places I’d always meant to visit, like Cold Springs Tavern near Santa Barbara.

My husband and two children often came along and they had a blast kayaking, horseback riding, swimming, snorkeling, hand-feeding emus, and roaming luscious nature spots from San Diego to the Central Coast. Other times I set out on the road (or train) alone with California writers such as Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Kem Nunn, Gidget, and the Steinbecks (John and son Thomas) as my guides.

I sampled my way through two wine countries, played blackjack in the afternoon, cooked alongside a great chef, savored amazing farmers’ markets and ethnic groceries all over, swam with schools of bright, teeming fish, and strapped on water-skis for the first time in years.

I recently wrote about five of my favorite SoCal road trips for the Los Angeles Times and I wanted to share these quick getaways as summer approaches. The story, and this handy Google map, offer a taste of the adventures in my new book, Great Escapes: Southern California, which is being released on Monday.