Alan Deutschman's latest book, "Change or Die" is available for pre-orders on the web. Publication date is January 1, 2007 from Regan Books, an imprint of Harper Collins.

Author Alan Deutschman has consistently received positive reviews on his books on Steve Jobs and the California Wine Industry, as well as his numerous business articles.

"Enjoyably wry... ardent and amusing"
    --Janet Maslin, New York Times

"Insightful... robust and full-bodied"
   --People Magazine

"Intoxicating... He serves up the drama glass by glass... Rarely has such an exclusive world and its inhabitants been made so accessible."
   --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Click for reviews about "Change or Die."
Available January 1, 2007 from Regan Books!

Click for reviews about "A Tale of Two Valleys."

Click for reviews about "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs."

Tech Tales

With his new book "A Tale of Two Valleys," writer Alan Deutschman chronicles the efforts of local bohemians and iconoclasts in Northern California's wine country to combat unwelcome change wrought by the influx of nouveaux-riches from Silicon Valley's tech industry. Now Mr. Deutschman appears to be getting a taste of that combativeness first-hand. A Reading of the book was scheduled for May 2 at Readers' Books in Sonoma, an idyllic town that figures prominently in the story, but Readers' recently canceled the event.

Mr. Deutschman says his contacts in the town told him local Sonomans, who were ticked off by their portrayal in the books, threatened to boycott the bookstore if the reading went forward. Lilla Weinberger, a co-owner of Readers,' won't tell why the book reading was canceled, saying, "I'm just gonna get myself into hot water if I comment."

Mr. Deutschman admits that he pokes fun at the locals in his book, as they fight for causes like allowing wild chickens to roam freely in the town square. But he says he is more sympathetic to them than he is to the Silicon Valley newcomers in the book, including an executive from Cisco Systems Inc. who paid $500,000 for an oversized bottle of Screaming Eagle cabernet at a wine auction in 2000. Sonomans "are headstrong, iconoclastic people," says Mr. Deutschman, who stayed at the homes of several Silicon Valley entrepreneurs during the reporting of the book. "I'm not sure they would be happy about anything I wrote unless they'd written it themselves."
(The Wall Street Journal, April 17)

FINE WHINES: Napa and Sonoma are neck and neck in the thin-skin competition.

Alan Deutschman's new book, "A Tale of Two Valleys: Wine, Wealth and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma," which was reviewed by John King in Sunday's Chronicle, has the town of Sonoma a-buzz. That's not because it makes fun of Sonoma's cheese-eating nouveaux riches, say TIC spies, but because by quoting people who were surprised to find themselves quoted, the author has set neighbor against neighbor. In several cases, Deutschman's retelling of stories freely shared during the information-gathering process turned out to be embarrassing in the light of print. Readers Books, which had scheduled a Deutschman appearance on May 2, has canceled, and won't say why.

Wine Country residents with a hankering to meet the author will have to go to Copperfield's in Santa Rosa on Tuesday.

Six months ago, the publication of James Conaway's "The Far Side of Eden," about money and the Napa Valley in the '90s, caused such a stir there that he could hardly find a place to speak. After Copia and the St. Helena Cameo Cinema turned him down, Conaway wound up making an author's appearance at the St. Helena Elementary School.
(Leah Garchik, "The In Crowd" Column, San Francisco Chronicle, April 14)

Sour grapes
What an outsider criticizes in Napa,
he loves in Sonoma

With only a slight leap of imagination, and perhaps a glass of good Viognier, one imagines a bookstore where the ever-proliferating number of books about Napa and Sonoma rival the number of wineries in each county. There'd be display tables groaning with luscious pictorials. A wall of cookbooks would ponder new ways to pair figs and prosciutto. And a good-size shelf would feature books taking the approach of "A Tale of Two Valleys" by Alan Deutschman -- a would-be expose playing up the excesses of new wealth and its impact on what was there before.

Yet even if publishing's fascination with wine continues, there may still never be a book quite like Deutschman's. The writing is crisp, the reporting captures the high-boom tension of an era that now seems distant -- but what makes the result unique is Deutschman's oddly entertaining cluelessness.

The premise is simple enough: A San Francisco business journalist heads off to the Wine Country to live the good life. He stays in fancy houses provided by super-wealthy friends. He falls in with "class-diving bohemians" fighting change around the city of Sonoma. He takes notes like a chino-clad Margaret Mead: "It would be hard to overstate how happy everyone seemed. The men wore baseball hats with logos from Goodyear or other agricultural-industrial firms, " Deutschman writes of a cafe on Sonoma's central plaza. "The customers ordered huge pastries. . . . Sometimes, amazingly, a Sonoman would consume two of the oversized creations."

His enthusiasm for what one chapter title calls "a place unlike the rest of America" leads Deutschman in two directions. The first is political activity: He joins the band of transplantees and "humbler natives" who successfully quash a hillside resort above town and then try to take control of the Town Council. He also visits the Napa Valley in his effort "to understand what was at stake in Sonoma," and records such
signs of the times as a charity wine auction where a giant bottle of Screaming Eagle Cabernet goes for $500,000.

Napa is where Deutschman shines: He's good at drawing stories out of people, such as Screaming Eagle owner Jean Phillips' painstaking metamorphosis from dressmaker to real estate broker and cult winemaker, "the ultimate insider in one of the most insidery of places." He also distills the odd essence of late '90s America,
when well-off people simmered with desire because others had more.

"Napa had the best wines but you couldn't buy them, and it had the nation's best restaurant but you couldn't get a reservation there, and many of its loveliest chateaux and vineyards weren't open to the six million tourists who drove through each year," he writes. "There was an invisible velvet rope in the Napa Valley, and Jean Phillips could move it."

Back in Sonoma, Deutschman is more like a wide-eyed naif. The problem is this: Deutschman wants desperately to belong. He wants to be cozy with the wealthy people who let him stay in their weekend homes, and he wants to be accepted by the willful eccentrics who settle there year-round. When one growth foe invites him to a meeting, Deutschman is thrilled. "I had never belonged to a group of agitators and activists," he gushes, "but then again, never before had I found one whose members shared my fervor for fine cheeses." It'd be nice if this were wry self-awareness. It probably isn't.

The only folks that Deutschman wants no part of are "homegrown Babbitts," natives who don't appreciate the wisdom of outsiders like his friends. Singled out for scorn are natives of the city of Napa. Their sin is their "defiantly backwards culture" and their resistance to change -- the very resistance that dazzles the author in Sonoma, 10 miles and a ridgeline to the west. Explaining this contradiction, Deutschman is painfully earnest. Napa residents "were plagued with a mindlessly ingrained conservatism, since their shabby city actually needed a lot of help." His Sonoma friends "justly wanted to preserve the character of their lovely town."

In other words, it's OK to sneer at resort developers and the builders of trophy homes. But taking aim at outsiders who want cosmopolitan culture in a country setting? That's going too far! It's interesting to compare this book with James Conaway's "The Far Side of Eden: New Money, Old Land, and the Battle for Napa Valley," published last year. Conaway is almost too earnest, exploring with great detail the various mind-sets at work in the struggle over Napa Valley's future. Deutschman is more fun to read, with an easy command of narrative, but he comes off as a gently mocking dilettante. His last visit to Sonoma in the book is to celebrate the wedding of one of the "bohemians," a former ad exec in his 50s who traded New York for Sonoma after a motorcycle accident. At the reception, he tells one organic farmer there how the night before, at Chez Panisse, Deutschman's romaine salad was identified as coming from the Sonoman's farm. The farmer haughtily corrects
Chez Panisse, saying it was actually butter lettuce. Deutschman is delighted: "That reassured me that Sonoma was still even more Berkeley than Berkeley." And that's a good thing?
(John King, San Francisco Chronicle, April 13)

Deutschman (The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) has written a highly readable account of life and strife in two of California's eminent wine valleys--Napa and Sonoma. In his view, Napa has fallen victim to the excesses of skyrocketing real estate prices, luxury estates, and pursuit of the perfect wine. Sonoma is poised to follow the same path unless an assorted group of organic farmers, retirees, and aging hippies can prevent it. Deutschman gives us his impressions of their successes and setbacks as they win city council seats, argue among themselves, fight off a luxury resort, and create a nature preserve. His book's strength, however, is its many striking (and not always flattering) profiles or people who shaped Napa's and Sonoma's past and are shaping the valleys' futures.

Starred Review

In this brief, intoxicating book, Vanity Fair contributor Deutschman(The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) chronicles the year or so he spent as a freeloading guest at some of the finest homes in the Sonoma and Napa valleys in the heart of California's near-mythic wine country. He eavesdrops on conversations at the cafe and bookstore, talks to locals at the Tuesday
farmer's market and indulges in bottle after bottle of fine wine (one even costing half a million dollars) at the best tables. While he is not shy about writing about his personal pleasure with life in the valley, he is no mere hedonist. He's also a fine reporter, who documents the force new tech money pouring in from Silicon Valley is exerting on the shabby gentility of the wine region.

After revisiting some of the same territory covered earlier by James Conaway in Napa and The Far Side of Eden, Deutschman picks up the story in present-day Sonoma with the community's efforts to defeat the very same kind of luxury resorts that first made Napa the darling of glossy travel magazines. He serves up the drama glass by glass, starting with a rather mellow debate over loose chickens in the town square, building to the battle between the town folk and a luxury hotel developer, and culminating in an election fight between the new professional class and the bohemians for control of the Sonoma City Council.

What remains longest in the memory are his portraits of the wine makers themselves-some known stars, such as Jean Phillips, proprietor of cult winery Screaming Eagle, and others less so. Rarely has such an exclusive world and its inhabitants been made so accessible.

The wine country's magnetic attraction for visitors seems just as strong as for writers. This season's expose, A Tale of Two Valleys: Wine, Wealth, and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma, comes from Alan Deutschman, a magazine journalist who covered Silicon Valley for Fortune and now lives in San Francisco. His formula is hardly new: Spend a few months living in wine country, inveigle yourself into the homes and wineries of a few big names whose egos outweigh their caution, and weave in an environmental or social theme to give the appearance of substance.

Deutschman, though, has just the right style for the game: wry, fast-paced and continually bemused. When he describes Napa as "like Hollywood: an efficient machine for finding whoever in the world had too much money at the time and taking it from them," you laugh at both his audacity and his accuracy.

The book is divided into three parts, with the outer sections devoted to political and environmental wrangles and the center section devoted to the ostentatious doings of the extremely rich in Napa. The structure hardly hangs together, but it also hardly matters. Like good magazine articles, Deutschman's chapters keep things moving, introduce you to new characters every few pages and let you hear them say things like "Even though I agree with them, these people make me embarrassed to be an environmentalist." Bada-bing!

When Alan Deutschman got himself a gig reporting on the goings-on in California wine country, he was mostly looking forward to living and eating very, very well. Who knew he would end up in the center of a heated political struggle between long-time locals and new-money invaders? His dishy book is nearly a genre buster--the comic noir--with big-egoed characters, read-aloud lively scenes, and a dark undertone of greed and loss.