California Memoir

A touching literary discovery, 402 Avalon follows a boy's journey during the 1950s through one of San Francisco's most mysterious houses that was built during the 1880s. This curious true story about a neglected boy, his uncommon family, the gushing growth of San Francisco and the infamous house is part intrigue, part innocence and part discovery. 402 Avalon is a stunning portrait of a child wanting guidance, living in the haunted three-story wooden structure that was dangerous.

This suspenseful true story of a drug cartel hitman who got away with murder after murder in California's Central Valley over three decades reveals how the criminal justice system fails our most vulnerable immigrant communities. On the surface, 58-year-old Jose Martinez didn't seem evil or even that remarkable - just a regular neighbor, good with cars and devoted to his family. But in between taking his children to Disneyland and visiting his mom, Martinez was also one of the most skilled professional killers police had ever seen.

In CinderGirl, Christina tells her piercing and poignant story of leaving behind homelessness to become Ms. California and the founder of a nonprofit organization that provides advocacy for foster-care children.

James R. Smith, Ph.D., a retired educator and psychotherapist, grew up in California (and now lives in Bandon, Oregon) and has been fishing for eighty years (since he was four years old). This memoir is emotionally honest, very detailed about fishing, and informative about so many kinds of fish. Fishermen will relate, and people who don't actually fish but enjoy human-interest stories and nature will enjoy this book. What makes this book come alive is that it includes over one hundred photos, most of which are in color. There are photos of fish, of family and friends, of scenery, and most ...

No one explodes one of the longest-held misconceptions of music history better than Steve Lukather and his band Toto. The dominant pop-culture sound of the late 1970s and '80s was not in fact the smash and sneer of punk, but a slick, polished amalgam of rock and R&B that was first staked out on Boz Scaggs' Silk Degrees. That album was shaped in large part by the founding members of Toto, who were emerging as the most in-demand elite session muso-crew in LA, and further developed on the band's self-titled three-million-selling debut smash of 1978.

American Oz is a rollicking, gritty, adventurous story of life in the secretive subculture of traveling carnivals. You'll never see your state fair or street festival the same way again. Comerford writes a bold, inspiring true story of a year working behind the scenes with the colorful characters and legends of carnivals. He shares stories of freaks, a carnival pimp, a tramp gold miner, and the last king of the sideshows.

The long pilgrimage of LeRoy Chatfield weaves its way through multiple collective projects designed to better the condition of the marginalized and forgotten. From the cloisters of the Christian Brothers and the halls of secondary education to the fields of Central California and the streets of Sacramento, Chatfield's story reveals a fierce commitment to those who were denied the promises of the American dream. Chatfield recounts his childhood, explains the social issues that have played a significant role in his life and work, and uncovers the lack of justice he saw too frequently.

United States of True Crime is an anthology series with books devoted to the most disturbing cases in each of the 50 states. This audiobook focuses on 20 of the most chilling crimes in California history. True crime junkies may recognize some of the highly publicized cases but I’ve made sure to include lesser-known, equally unsettling crimes.

Claus Spreckels (1828-1908) emigrated from his homeland of Germany to the United States with only seventy-five cents in his pocket, built a sugar empire, and became one of the richest Americans in history. Migrating to San Francisco after the gold rush, Spreckels built the largest sugar beet factory of its kind in the United States. When Spreckels gave America its first sugar cube, he became the “Sugar King.” The indomitable Spreckels was a colorful and complicated character on both sides of the Pacific.

She was leaning against the door. Her smile was a sickly twisted grimace; the sort a prisoner gives a judge when he's asked if he has anything to say before he's sentenced. Russell Haxby is a ruthless used-car salesman obsessed with manipulating and cavorting with married women. In this classic of hard-boiled fiction, Charles Willeford crafts a wry, sardonic tale of hypocrisy, intrigue, and lust set in San Francisco in the early '50s.

James Capen Adams roamed the Sierra Nevada when California was wild. He slept on the ground, ate what he could kill, mended his own wounds, and made friends with the Native Americans he encountered. Adams captured animals in elaborate traps he built by hand and delivered his prey to zoos, museums, and certain famous exhibitions. Many of his stories became the inspiration for a popular TV show in the 1980s, featuring a mountain man and his pet bear. This is the true story behind the legend, as told by Adams to respected California historian Theodore Hittell.

Alexandra Morton has been called "the Jane Goodall of Canada" because of her passionate thirty-year fight to save British Columbia's wild salmon. Her account of that fight is both inspiring in its own right and a roadmap of resistance.

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area during the golden age after World War II, the bold, often reckless Joe Fessio would suddenly enter the Society of Jesus at age twenty and, by divine providence, find himself studying under three of the greatest theological minds of the twentieth century—Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI).

The Super Bowl champion wide receiver for the New England Patriots shares his inspiring story of an underdog kid who was always doubted to becoming one of the most reliable and inspiring players in the NFL. Relentless is the story of Julian Edelman's rise, and the continuing dominance of the Patriot dynasty, filled with memories of growing up with a father who was as demanding as any NFL coach, his near-constant fight to keep his intensity and competitiveness in check in high school and college, and his celebrated nine seasons with the Patriots.

Delve into the hidden underbelly of crime as we unveil the secrets of the Los Angeles Mafia Crime Family. From its elusive origins to its far-reaching influence, prepare to uncover the tangled web of power, intrigue, and betrayal that defined this criminal empire.

In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey quotes the iconic French philosopher as speaking “nostalgically...of 'an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, [and] nice people'". This came to pass in 1975, when Foucault spent Memorial Day weekend in Southern California at the invitation of Simeon Wade - ostensibly to guest-lecture at the Claremont Graduate School where Wade was an assistant professor, but in truth to explore what he called the Valley of Death.

At fifty-four, Alenka was running out of time to follow through on a dream she’d written down in her pocket-size Rumi book just after her first marriage crumbled. Years later, as she slowly rebuilt her life with her second husband, things started spiraling out of control. The only way she knew how to heal and connect all painful parts of her life was by riding her bike, and she didn’t want to have regrets. But was she brave enough to embark on an unknown path and risk losing everything . . . perhaps even her own life?

In May 1972, Liese Greensfelder arrived in the small Norwegian town of Øystese to startling news: Johannes, the farmer who hired her for the summer, had just been hospitalized after a stroke. Could she please watch over his place for a month or so, until he got back on his feet? Twenty years old and with no farming experience, Liese was dropped off the next day at a centuries-old mountain farm at the end of a dirt road high above the magnificent Hardanger Fjord—with 115 sheep, two cows, one calf, a draft horse, and a Norwegian herding dog to care for.

One day during his ninth-grade speech class, Kelly Daniels's outlaw, soul-surfer father appears at school unannounced and pulls the boy from class. Speeding down the freeway, Daniels's father admits that he has been involved in a crime, but he does not remember how it happened. He'd been up for days on cocaine and booze, he explains, and the next thing he knew he woke up in jail with a bad feeling.

Had Upton Sinclair not written a single book after The Jungle, he would still be famous. But Sinclair was a mere 25 years old when he wrote The Jungle, and over the next 65 years, he wrote nearly 80 more books and won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He was also a filmmaker, labor activist, women’s rights advocate, and health pioneer on a grand scale. This new biography of Sinclair underscores his place in the American story as a social, political, and cultural force, a man who more than any other disrupted and documented his era in the name of social justice.