Product Description: Public spaces have become platforms for the invention and display of self-identity, especially in the affluent West where the restaurant, from local café to Michelin-starred establishment, deftly stages these performances. In this follow-up to her classic Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners, Joanne Finkelstein takes a fragment of social life―restaurant dining―and uses it to examine the dramatic effect our public behavior and social habits have on our private desires and sense of identity...read more

Covering more than five hundred unique accommodations in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands, and the Republic of Ireland, a guide book includes a detailed index, six maps, and customer reviews. Original.

Examines the fiction of California authors and discusses the development of a California literary tradition

Product Description: Examines the processes that maintained and intensified Basque nationalist political consciousness during the Franco years and the subsequent democratization of Spain. This work is based in part on a range of interviews and polls with informants in the Basque Country and abroad."

Product Description: John Muir, Mary Austin, and Gary Snyder are perhaps best known for their connection to specific California ecological regions--Muir's Sierra Nevada Range of Light, Austin's southern Land of Little Rain, and Snyder's Kitkitdizze region of the north...read more

Novelist and muckraker Sinclair, best known for his exposé The Jungle; however, he deserves equal accolades for his entertaining critiques of Southern California's oil industry, movie studios, and urban sprawl--most of which still apply today. This book spans fifty years of his funny and fiery writings, showing how his personal life inspired his political activism. When neighbors in Long Beach struck oil, he wrote about the oil industry. His father's addiction inspired an analysis of alcohol distributors. In 1934, he responded to the Great Depression by running for governor under the EPIC slogan: 'End Poverty in California.' The hard-fought campaign has parallels to our current political world of attack ads and allegations of voter fraud. Here also was apolitical figure who understood popular culture, using movies and the power of Hollywood to give voice to his ideas.--From publisher description.

Between the frequently recounted events of the Gold Rush and the Great Depression stretches a period of California history that is equally crucial but less often acknowledged. In his fresh, synthetic consideration of these in-between years, George L. Henderson points specifically to the take-off of California's rural juggernaut between the 1880s and middle 1920s--the upward spiral of city bids for country dollars and rural bids for urban investments. These decades were salve for mining's risky finances yet groundwork for the chaotic 1930s. Moreover, Henderson argues that much like the two important periods which framed it, this era produced a cultural and literary apparatus that attempted to grapple with capital's machinations, if only to legitimate them in the end.Central to California and the Fictions of Capital is a theory of how the circulation of capital wove itself into agriculture. The book asks why it mattered to capital that agriculture was based in Nature, and then explores the procedures through which images of Nature became central to capitalism's story of itself. What unique possibilities did Nature offer to circuits of capital and what was their role in suturing the urban and rural together? How did boom and bust intervene and set the pace for regional change? How was capital linked to the racializing of working bodies? And why was the capitalist imperative expressed in landscape alterations like irrigation? Such are the key questions informing this bold, far-reaching volume.Beyond political economy, the book also looks to the rural juggernaut's cultural and literary work, which was stamped by celebratory, if fretful, ruminations. In all sorts of texts--but especially in novels by Frank Norris, Mary Austin, Harold Bell Wright, and many other writers--difficult questions surfaced. Capital was seen in terms of its spillage into rural frontiers, just as rural frontiers were seen in terms of movements of capital. Capital was the new geography of money. But for whom did it work? Which identities did it favor? In mapping the real and imaginary realms that capital occupied, Henderson locates the banker-, land developer-, and engineer-heroes of California fiction as well as the fictionalized "new woman" of the capitalist, agrarian West. He unravels the colliding representations of race, gender, and class, while linking their treatment to the naturalizing rhetoric of capital's agrarian turn.In part a tour of California as a virtual laboratory for refining the circulation of capital, and in part an investigation of how the state's literati, with rare exception, reconceived economy in the name of class, gender, and racial privilege, this study will appeal to all students and scholars of California's--and the American West's--economic, environmental, and cultural past.

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Discusses the massive heart attack Cousins suffered in 1980, the events leading up to the attack, the importance of coping with panic, the treatment process, his intensive rehabilitation program, and his recovery

Covering more than five hundred unique accommodations in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands, and the Republic of Ireland, a guide book includes a detailed index, six maps, and customer reviews. Original.

Paintings and texts from a variety of sources explore the grandeur and history of California's landscapes

Thirty-two writers, including Maxine Hong Kinston, William Saroyan, and M.F.K. Fisher, describe their experiences growing up in California

A writer and a photographer celebrate California's diverse and dramatic landscapes

Traces the life and career of the Ohio-born journalist and author who wrote columns for San Francisco newspapers and short stories about the Civil War and the supernatural

Product Description: Book by Powell, Lawrence Clark