Download or read book Our California written by Pam Mu¤oz Ryan and published by Charlesbridge. This book was released on 2008-02-01 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Takes the reader on an imaginary trip through California while offering information about the history and geography of the major cities and towns.
Download or read book California Crackup written by Joe Mathews and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "California Crackup is brilliant. It cuts through the familiar tangle of diagnoses and quick-fix solutions to provide a comprehensive and persuasive analysis of California's dysfunctional governmental system. Paul and Mathews have coolly laid out a complicated story, made it readable, sometimes even comedic. It is the best discussion of the issue I've seen in over three decades."--Peter Schrag, author of California: America's High-Stakes Experiment "I know of no other work that combines so succinctly and enjoyably a historical summary of California's existing problems with such a sweeping and provocative program of reform."--Ethan Rarick, University of California, Berkeley "Mark Paul and Joe Mathews have produced an indispensable guide to California's crisis of governance--and they have done so with humor, scholarship, fairness and storytelling verve. Every Californian should read this book."--Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars "Mark Paul... has a talent for presenting California Big Think stuff in an easily accessible and always readable way...[offering] clear and creative insights on the subject of California's collapse."--CalBuzz "Joe Mathews has done an artful, fascinating, and convincing job of connecting the California of today's Schwarzenegger era to the long history that made his rise possible.--James Fallows,The Atlantic Monthly on Mathews' book, The People's Machine
Download or read book California Vistas written by James A. Banks and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Golden Shore written by David Helvarg and published by New World Library. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the first human settlements to the latest marine explorations, The Golden Shore tells the tale of the history, culture, and changing nature of California’s coasts and ocean. David Helvarg takes the reader on both a geographic and literary journey along the state’s 1,100-mile Pacific coastline, from the Oregon border to the San Diego–Tijuana international border fence and out into its whale-, seal-, and shark-rich offshore seamounts, rock isles, and kelp forests. Part history, part travelogue, part love letter, The Golden Shore captures the spirit of the California coast and its mythic place in American culture.
Download or read book Very California written by Diana Hollingsworth Gessler and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2013-07-12 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fisherman on the Santa Monica Pier. The vineyards of Napa Valley. Surfers in Malibu. An Indian village in Yosemite and the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. Artist Diana Gessler captures the color and character of our third largest and most populous state. In lively watercolors, sketches, and stories, Gessler shares her adventures on the road, driving from north to south--Sonoma to San Diego and beyond. She and her husband, Paul (designated driver and food lover), stop when curiosity or hunger seizes them. With pen and brush, Gessler works on the spot, bringing to life the cities, towns, and countrysides as well as the details that make them special. A great horned owl. A local farm stand. A woman making tortillas on a sidewalk cart. A bunkhouse in the redwoods. Crab traps along the bay. Her intimate journal is filled with colorful people, beaches, flowers, architecture, animals, trails, memorable meals, and movie stars (at least the gates in front of their houses). Very California is organized by region, and each chapter opens with a map and driving route of the area. Peppered throughout are amusing tidbits about all the things that make California so very California. Diana Gessler has created a memento for tourists and an enchanting book for those who appreciate the pleasures of the West Coast.
Download or read book Golden Poppies of California written by George D. Lepp and published by Lepp & Associates. This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the visual record of Lepp's love affair with California's state flower and his annual spring migrations to poppy centers where the blooms paint the land with color so brilliant it seems to have spilled from the sun itself. As a rich tribute to California's heritage and its disappearing wild lands, the books also serves as a reminder to consider carefully what's being lost
Download or read book Golden Days written by Carolyn See and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1996-10-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available again in paperback, Golden Days is a major novel from one of the most provocative voices on the American literary scene. Linking the recent past with an imagined future, this "adventurous blend of feminist fiction and nuclear apocalypse fantasy" (Time) marvelously captures life in Los Angeles in the '70s and '80s.
Download or read book The Golden State written by Lydia Kiesling and published by MCD. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35 PICK. FINALIST FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD. LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE. Named one of the Best Books of 2018 by NPR, Bookforum and Bustle. One of Entertainment Weekly's 10 Best Debut Novels of 2018. An Amazon Best Book of the Month and named a fall read by Buzzfeed, Nylon, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Refinery29 and Mind Body Green A gorgeous, raw debut novel about a young woman braving the ups and downs of motherhood in a fractured America In Lydia Kiesling’s razor-sharp debut novel, The Golden State, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her toddler, Honey. Bucking under the weight of being a single parent—her Turkish husband is unable to return to the United States because of a “processing error”—Daphne takes refuge in a mobile home left to her by her grandparents in hopes that the quiet will bring clarity. But clarity proves elusive. Over the next ten days Daphne is anxious, she behaves a little erratically, she drinks too much. She wanders the town looking for anyone and anything to punctuate the long hours alone with the baby. Among others, she meets Cindy, a neighbor who is active in a secessionist movement, and befriends the elderly Alice, who has traveled to Altavista as she approaches the end of her life. When her relationships with these women culminate in a dangerous standoff, Daphne must reconcile her inner narrative with the reality of a deeply divided world. Keenly observed, bristling with humor, and set against the beauty of a little-known part of California, The Golden State is about class and cultural breakdowns, and desperate attempts to bridge old and new worlds. But more than anything, it is about motherhood: its voracious worry, frequent tedium, and enthralling, wondrous love.
Download or read book Golden Dreams written by Kevin Starr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-09 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose, Kevin Starr's acclaimed multi-volume Americans and the California Dream is an unparalleled work of cultural history. In this volume, Starr covers the crucial postwar period--1950 to 1963--when the California we know today first burst into prominence. Starr brilliantly illuminates the dominant economic, social, and cultural forces in California in these pivotal years. In a powerful blend of telling events, colorful personalities, and insightful analyses, Starr examines such issues as the overnight creation of the postwar California suburb, the rise of Los Angeles as Super City, the reluctant emergence of San Diego as one of the largest cities in the nation, and the decline of political centrism. He explores the Silent Generation and the emergent Boomer youth cult, the Beats and the Hollywood "Rat Pack," the pervasive influence of Zen Buddhism and other Asian traditions in art and design, the rise of the University of California and the emergence of California itself as a utopia of higher education, the cooling of West Coast jazz, freeway and water projects of heroic magnitude, outdoor life and the beginnings of the environmental movement. More broadly, he shows how California not only became the most populous state in the Union, but in fact evolved into a mega-state en route to becoming the global commonwealth it is today. Golden Dreams continues an epic series that has been widely recognized for its signal contribution to the history of American culture in California. It is a book that transcends its stated subject to offer a wealth of insight into the growth of the Sun Belt and the West and indeed the dramatic transformation of America itself in these pivotal years following the Second World War.
Download or read book Alta California written by Nick Neely and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This national bestseller chronicles one man’s 650–mile trek on foot from San Diego to San Francisco—sure to appeal to readers of naturalist works like Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Paul Thoreau’s On the Plain of Snakes, and Mark Kenyon’s That Wild Country. In 1769, an expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá sketched a route that would become, in part, the famous El Camino Real. It laid the foundation for the Golden State we know today, a place that remains as mythical and captivating as any in the world. Despite having grown up in California, Nick Neely realized how little he knew about its history. So he set off to learn it bodily, with just a backpack and a tent, trekking through stretches of California both lonely and urban. For twelve weeks, following the journal of expedition missionary Father Juan Crespí, Neely kept pace with the ghosts of the Portolá expedition—nearly 250 years later. Weaving natural and human history, Alta California relives Neely’s adventure, while telling a story of Native cultures and the Spanish missions that soon devastated them, and exploring the evolution of California and its landscape. The result is a collage of historical and contemporary California, of lyricism and pedestrian serendipity, and of the biggest issues facing California today—water, agriculture, oil and gas, immigration, and development—all of it one step at a time. “Rich in little–known history . . . Up the Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo county coasts, then inland into the Salinas Valley to Monterey Bay. Somewhere along here, the owl moons and woodpeckers do something you might not have thought possible in 2019: they make you fall, or refall, in love with California, ungrudgingly, wildfires and insane housing prices and all . . . What a journey, you think. What a state." —San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book Golden State Golden Youth written by Kirse Granat May and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seen as a land of sunshine and opportunity, the Golden State was a mecca for the post-World War II generation, and dreams of the California good life came to dominate the imagination of many Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Nowhere was this more evident than in the explosion of California youth images in popular culture. Disneyland, television shows such as The Mickey Mouse Club, Gidget and other beach movies, the music of the Beach Boys--all these broadcast nationwide a lifestyle of carefree, wholesome fun supposedly enjoyed by white, middle-class, suburban young people in California. Tracing the rise of the California teen as a national icon, Kirse May shows how idealized images of a suburban youth culture soothed the nation's postwar nerves while denying racial and urban realities. Unsettling challenges to this mass-mediated picture began to arise in the mid-1960s, however, with the Free Speech Movement's campus revolt in Berkeley and race riots in Watts. In his 1966 campaign for the governorship of California, Ronald Reagan transformed the backlash against the "dangerous" youths who fueled these actions into political triumph. As May notes, Reagan's victory presaged a rising conservatism across the nation.
Download or read book Golden Numbers written by David Domeniconi and published by Count Your Way Across the U.S.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "California's symbols, facts, landscapes, and history are introduced using numbers. Each subject is introduced with a poem, followed by more detailed information. Topics include volcanoes, presidios, the desert tortoise, frogs, and monarch butterflies"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Golden Gulag written by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-01-08 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.
Download or read book Hellacious California written by Gary Noy and published by Heyday Books. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1855 an ex-miner lamented that nineteenth-century California "can and does furnish the best bad things," including "purer liquors...finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtezans [sic]" than anywhere else in America. Lured by boons of gold and other exploitable resources, California's settler population mushroomed under Mexican and early American control, and this period of rapid transformation gave rise to a freewheeling culture best epitomized by its entertainments. Hellacious California tours the rambunctious and occasionally appalling amusements of the Golden State: gambling, gun duels, knife fights, gracious dining and gluttony, prostitution, fandangos, cigars, con artistry, and the demon drink. Historian Gary Noy unearths myriad primary sources, many of which have never before been published, to spin his true tall tales that are by turns humorous and horrifying. Whether detailing the exploits of an inebriated stallion, gambling parlors as a reinforcement and subversion of racial norms, armed skirmishes over eggs, or the ins and outs of the "Spirit Lover" scam, Noy expertly situates these stories in the context of a live-for-the-moment society characterized by audacity, bigotry, and risk. Published in collaboration with Sierra College Press.
Download or read book California s Golden Years written by William T. Bagley and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics is personal, Bill Bagley likes to say, and here is a personal journey through the politics of America's most extraordinary state. California's Golden Years offers tales of cash-filled envelopes, all-night poker games, and all the free liquor a legislator could drink. But the stories and the anecdotes offer more than mere fun -- they illuminate a larger lesson learned during Bagley's 14 years in the California Legislature. The personal relationships forged during a continuum of hosted bipartisan lunches and dinners are, in Bagley's view, the glue that ensures working relationships and pragmatic compromises. Those who play together, he writes, stay together. The Legislature of Bagley's era accomplished much for its state. With the population booming, California enjoyed the best schools, roads, and water systems in the nation. Today, as the Golden State faces unprecedented challenges, California's Golden Years offers both a look back toward a fondly remembered era, and an insider's explanation for why politics seemed to work better then than now.
Download or read book Right Out of California written by Kathryn S. Olmsted and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a major reassessment of modern conservatism, noted historian Kathryn S. Olmsted reexamines the explosive labor disputes in the agricultural fields of Depression-era California, the cauldron that inspired a generation of artists and writers and that triggered the intervention of FDR's New Deal. Right Out of California tells how this brief moment of upheaval terrified business leaders into rethinking their relationship to American politics--a narrative that pits a ruthless generation of growers against a passionate cast of reformers, writers, and revolutionaries. Olmsted reveals how California's businessmen learned the language of populism with the help of allies in the media and entertainment industries, and in the process created a new style of politics: corporate funding of grassroots groups, military-style intelligence gathering against political enemies, professional campaign consultants, and alliances between religious and economic conservatives. The business leaders who battled for the hearts and minds of Depression-era California, moreover, would go on to create the organizations that launched the careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. A riveting history in its own right, Right Out of California is also a vital chapter in our nation's political transformation whose echoes are still felt today.
Download or read book California Childhood written by Gary Soto and published by Creative Arts Book Company. This book was released on 1988 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A number of writers have contributed fiction and essays on growing up in California.
