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 ......
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 ......
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 ......
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 ......
The Lake Tahoe Basin is both a natural treasure and a complex case study in environmental management. Environmental Change in the Lake Tahoe Basin offers a comprehensive assessment of the region's environmental history, current conditions, and future challenges, providing lessons in how science-based policies can drive effective stewardship in ......
In her new collection, Far Country,Kyce Bello documents an unmapped territory in which loss becomes a medium for deepening connection and love. In poems firmly rooted in the Southwestern bioregion, landscape and language are layered into vivid sequences where the personal, collective, and ecological merge and illuminate one another. Ultimately, ......
Finalist for the 2021 Willa Literary Award in Scholarly Non-Fiction Finalist for the 2021 Will Rogers Medallion Award in Western Non-Fiction Carolyn Grattan Eichin's From San Francisco Eastward explores the dynamics and influence of theater in the West during the Victorian era. San Francisco, Eichin argues, served as the nucleus of the ......
While living in the Presidio National Park, Leslie Carol Roberts became enchanted with the park's 125-year old forest, native plant and habitat restoration, serpentine rock formations, and wild beaches just outside the Golden Gate. Roberts unearths stories of scientists, spiritualists, and artists around the globe engaged with specific and ......