Oakland Tribune Outtakes

So it’s election season and the 14 men and women vying for the mayor’s seat and five open seats on the City Council are in full campaign mode, doing their best  to impress voters with their knowledge and commitment to the People’s Republic of Berkeley.

Dave Weinstein isn’t a candidate. Quite the contrary _ he’s spent the last 20 years as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers, including doing freelance writing for that one across the pond that the Oakland Tribune competes with. We don’t hold that against him.

In fact, Weinstein gets some cyber ink today because in his new book “It Came From Berkeley: How Berkeley Changed the World,” he tells folks about topics that have nothing to do with traffic circles, downtown density bonuses or affordable housing.

And that’s a good thing.  

Did you know that public radio, California cuisine, the lie detector, the atomic bomb and the hot tub were all invented in Berkeley?

In his new book, Weinstein shows  readers (with words and pictures) why J. Stitt Wilson, Berkeley’s first Socialist mayor, may have had a good point when he said “Any kind of day in Berkeley seems sweeter than the best day anywhere else.”

We asked Weinstein what possessed him to write more than 200 pages about the quirky city?

“The book began as a suggestion from my publisher, Gibbs Smith, who’d been talking to Andy Ross, (former)owner of Cody’s, about how a good, lively history of Berkeley with lots of pictures would do well,” Weinstein tells us.

“That Berkeley is far from being a place apart from the rest of America, a strange People’s Republic that the rest of America can safely ignore. Berkeley is not only an archetypal American city that grew up with many of the travails common to American cities — it is a model American city, representing much that is best in America: religion as a force for social justice, participatory democracy, the rights of the individual over the power of the bureaucracy, a love for nature and efforts to live in harmony with nature.’’