In the summer of 1942, Eve Halverson assumes her dead sister's identity and leaves behind her small-town life in Washington for the promise of something new in San Pedro, California. Determined to support the war effort, she takes a job at a boot factory, stepping into an unfamiliar world of sweat, steel, and camaraderie. Among the women on the ......
In the summer of 1942, Eve Halverson assumes her dead sister's identity and leaves behind her small-town life in Washington for the promise of something new in San Pedro, California. Determined to support the war effort, she takes a job at a boot factory, stepping into an unfamiliar world of sweat, steel, and camaraderie. Among the women on the ......
Look. Smell. Taste. Judge. Crush is the 200-year story of the heady dream that wines as good as the greatest of France could be made in California. A dream dashed four times in merciless succession until it was ultimately realized in a stunning blind tasting in Paris. In that tasting, in the year of America's bicentennial, California wines took ......
What do coyotes have to do with culture? This unique collection of essays offers a gripping exploration of the precarious beauty and peril of California's iconic coastline. Through essays blending personal narrative, cultural analysis, and history, author Claire McEachern takes us behind the scenes of surf and celebrities to paint a vivid ......
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore
On a San Francisco street corner in 1953, aspiring painter and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti shook hands with sociology instructor and magazine editor Peter Martin. Their handshake sealed Ferlinghetti's five-hundred-dollar investment in a small retail space above a North Beach flower shop that would become City Lights Bookstore and Press. Since the ......
Throughout history, humans have sought creation stories to define our identity and affirm our connections with the universe, diverse life forms, and one another. Over the last two centuries, science has delivered a bold new creation story full of immense time and space, extraordinary objects, and powerful natural forces. Science ideas can seem ......
In the late 1970s the golden valley between Utah's Wasatch Mountains was home to some of the best dairies in the country. That was also where Linda Rhodes, a newly minted large animal veterinarian, had to prove that a woman could do what the Mormon dairymen were sure was a man's job. She was often scared that they were right. Throughout her ......
Few estates born from the discovery of the Comstock Lode still survive. Among the grandest, Bowers Mansion, dates to the height of the Civil War. The property has a tragic history shrouded in legend, laid bare within these pages: from the mansion's construction; to Eilley Bowers's fight to maintain the property after her husband's death, running ......
An Incomplete History of the American West is a striking collection of twelve interconnected short stories that span 150 years across the stark, haunting landscape of the Great Basin. Moving chronologically through time, each story acts like a literary historical marker-pausing along the timeline to reveal a moment, a voice, a reckoning. ......
