Dusty Baker is only a year away from almost certainly becoming a first-ballot Hall of Famer in a sport that wasn’t even his favorite growing up. And that is an irony that just about perfectly suits Baker’s sprawling, at times messy, and thoroughly enlightening life journey. “I love baseball because baseball is everything,” the 77-year-old Baker writes in his new memoir, Crossroads. “It brings out everything in us, at one time or another, and it can teach us just about anything, if we pay attention long enough.” A four-sport star at Del Campo High who now calls Granite Bay home, Baker opens up about playing and living through an openly racist era, what his mentor Hank Aaron taught him, and why Sacramento, at its heart, is a baseball town.
Talk about coming in hot. Devyn Defoe may have just published her debut novel, but already she’s attracting the attention of everyone from Publishers Weekly to Pulitzer Prize nominees. The Sacramento-born author of Burnside talks about finding inspiration in local literary greats Joan Didion and William T. Vollmann, returning to her hometown after her Lady Bird moment, and how keeping her day job at Beers Books helps stoke her creative fire.
The team behind East Sacramento’s Allora brings the heat with the launch of their new downtown live-fire restaurant. With its open flames and cross-cultural cuisine, Aiona serves up everything from souvlaki skewers to grilled branzino to smoky gnocchi.
