California Books

I read this after reading a book about a silver mine fire in Idaho. This is more of a historical type book, but it held my interest. The book author did his homework and brought this sad story to life. I recommend it.

As an avid reader of non-fiction books based on historical events, I picked up 47 Down in hopes of learning a bit about my home state and in return I got so much more. Not only does O. Henry Mace give a gripping account of a disaster that affected the lives of many but a concise representation of the background and history of mines in California and across the country. What I appreciated most about the book is the detail the author took into researching the lives of not only the 47 miners and their families, but also the reporters, rescue workers, and the town as a whole. By the time I closed the book I had a clear picture in my mind of what life was like in Jackson, California 1922. I can hardly wait for the next book O. Henry Mace writes!

"47 Down" refers to the number of miners trapped in one of the deepest and most prosperous gold mines in the California foothills, in the year 1922. I bought the book because of a distant relationship to one of the individuals managing the mine, thinking this would be a good way to learn some family history. I was prepared to wade through what I thought would be dry melodrama, but I was gripped from the first pages.

In addition to learning a great deal of interesting information about mining and mines, I was completely captivated by the human story of the trapped miners and the bravery and ingenuity of the rescuers. There is a story line involving the contemporary media which was also interesting in that it points out how little some things have changed. The technology of the media may have evolved, but the competition and frenzy for a good story and headlines has not changed much. This was a terrific book that will interest people who have no idea what mining is all about as well as those who do.

The San Francisco Bay area has some of the best hiking in the state. Indeed, when I found myself with time off from work this April I left southern California and flew my father in from Idaho to enjoy a week in the region. Between Point Reyes National Seashore, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the many state and local parks in the Santa Cruz mountains, Bay area hikers pretty much have it all. I'm actually envious of all the area has to offer and periodically threaten to move there until I remember that home prices are positively prohibitive. Still, spring is a wonderful time to visit and this new edition of Huber's 60 Hikes within 60 miles, San Francisco, is a good place to start.

This book has all the nice features found in the "60 Hikes, 60 miles" series, including a nice locator map, decent trail sketch maps, and a list of author hiking recomendations broken down by hiking distance, best places to take kids, and areas where you can actually walk a dog in the canine unfriendly Bay area. Each hike also includes a "key information at a glance" section where readers can learn the mileage, elevation gain, a rough estimate of hiking time, and the GPS coordinates for each trailhead. In all, the book provides solid information for each trail.

But what makes this book so special is the care Huber has taken in selecting the trails. As the webmaster for bahiker.com, she is very familiar with all the Bay area has to offer, but this guide does an excellent job of selecting some of the best. Included are several hikes on Mt. Tamalpais, Point Reyes, and numerous walks among redwoods. The latter are my favorites and I have hiked the routes she describes in Henry Cowell Redwoods (often overlooked) and Big Basin State Park on multiple occasions. Berry Creek Falls in Big Basin has to be one of the top hikes in the state. Huber has also gone to great effort to select a variety of different trails for readers. Hikes range from 3/4 of a mile to over 11 with the vast majority falling in between 4 and 7 miles. Literally anyone can find a hike suited to their abilities within this book. Finally, Huber is something of a self trained naturalist and she shares her extensive knowledge of plants and animals found along the trails in her detailed route descriptions.

I try to get to the Bay area a couple of times a year to hike. For the most part, my explorations have been confined to Marin county and the Santa Cruz mountains, both of which can feel quite remote despite their close proximity to the city. I've hiked several of the routes Huber describes here, and am interested in doing many more on my next trip. I am also keen to explore the many regional parks in the East Bay area now that I have read this book. In all, this is a great guide to Bay area hiking. If you are a resident or frequent visitor, it will be a nice addition to your outdoor library.

I've really been searching for a great introductory book to get me started hiking at all the great state parks in the North Bay section of the Bay Area and this book came up. [...].

Each park has an introductory section detailing distance, trailhead location, directions to the trailhead and much, much more. I usually use the introductory information to start my hike and then when I'm finished I go back and read the details. If I find I've gotten lost or found an unmarked trail, I can usually discover which is the correct direction.

So far, I've only made it to five parks here in Sonoma and Napa County, but with the help of Huber's book, I'm looking forward to exploring farhter and discovering a new favorite hike.

This book is a terrific resource for people who like to walk and find themselves in the Bay Area. I found the book because it is mentioned on Jane Huber's wonderful website (www.bahiker.com). I bought the book out of gratitude, but I should have bought it out of pure self-interest. Having an actual book to page through, WITHOUT being hooked up to a computer, is a joy, and I rediscovered the simple truth that cross-referenced lists on paper (and a good table of contents and index) can be superior to links on the screen. With the book, it is a snap to compare hikes by location and difficulty at an information-packed glance. Huber organizes the book so that every question I can think of is answered, easily, clearly, helpfully. Hats off!

For a realistic, hearfelt look at what it was like to dance at an infamous strip club, have a long love affair with porn king Artie Mitchell, and hang out with Hunter Thompson, this is the book to read! Full of uncanny detail, Corday's story is affectionate, funny, sexy, and a real page-turner. With a searing account of Artie's slaying by his brother Jim and the motives behind it, the murder trial which cost him $1.3 million, and the political connections that helped him get off with serving just 3 years at San Quentin.

An absolutely unmissable read for anyone interested in this bizarre story of two brothers who had the world on a string and then stuck a pin in it.

Simone Corday not only provides intimate details about working at the O'Farrell Theater, she kept track of conversations between she and her long-time lover Artie Mitchell, and her compadre Hunter S. Thompson in journals.

In her memoir, you are like a fly on the wall, drinking in so many delicious details about her life with these over-the-top counterculture icons.

It's a sensual, emotional page turner. You won't want to put it down, and then you will be crying out for more, lingering on that final page, and searching for old Mitchell Brothers' films to get more glimpses on her extraordinary life.

great aerial photos - can't wait to someday visit some of these sites on Crete.

This is a stunningly handsome volume; The effort combines scholarly research and an extremely valuable photographic record of many imoportant sites in Crete. The aerial photos are one-of a-kind.

Invaluable for both scholar and Minoan enthusiast. Contains large color photos and drawn plans of major excavations on Crete. Comprhensive tabular commentary by original or current excavator. Low altitude balloon platform provides highly detailed representations.

Anyone who loves San Francisco needs this book. Its obvious that a lot of work went into making this book. Its not a slap-dash book put together by some promo conmpany. It was lovingly created to allow us a before and now look at the City.

I received this book along with another one called: "Denial of Disaster: The Untold Story and Photographs of the San Francisco",by Gladys Hansen.

Both books are wonderful to read together because the book by Hansen describes what happened during and after the 1906 Fire (and/or 1906 Earthquake), and this book by Fradkin shows more photos from the tragic event. Thus, I recommend both books highly.

AFTER THE RUINS: 1906 AND 2006 - REPHOTOGRAPHING THE SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE has been a century in the making, and deserves a spot on any collection purported to be even halfway authoritative about San Francisco or California history. Its purpose seemed simple: to capture the meaning and impact of the 1906 quake through juxtaposing 'before' and 'after' photos, right down to the very angle of original landscapes. The idea was to also document how the city's landscape changed because of and since the quake: black and white and duotone photos by photographer Karin Breuer compliment essays by Philip L. Fradkin and Rebecca Solnit, longtime writers on California history, compliment an outstanding survey. College-level holdings on urban planning and design also should make this a special pick: it's an important documentation of how urban disasters change urban landscapes.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Interesting reading considering how Zinoviev's views changed after the fall of the Soviet Union. He fought to keep Lenin's body on display, and had huge critisim of the new russian system/economy. He also said he was never an anti-communist.

There is no book better than this to examine the social system under which hundreds of millions of people lived, largely wasted, and ended their lives. In contrast to, say, "Cursed Days" by Bunin, the author lived out his life in the mire of Absurdistan, and can explain the WHOLE period even better than Solzhenitzyn. An era, the most tragic in human history, when one could choose to either be beaten to death or bored to death. A must for any intellectual contemplating the future.

This is the famous lampooning of how life was in the Soviet Union, with veiled and caricatured personae of Stalin, Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak and many more from the time period. One of the Soviet Union's leading philosophers, Alexander Zinoviev was, upon Brezhnev's personal orders, stripped of all degrees and honors, dismissed from his appointments, expelled from the Communist Party and deprived of citizenship for writing this book. This novel has been described as the one of the bitterest satirical attacks on the Soviet system to appear in Russian (and most probably in English as well). The book can be read on a number of different levels. Comparable to Swift, Kafka, Rabelais and Orwell. And quite readable, despite its length. Go for it.

Corsi's book made me change the way I teach the history of evolutionary theory. I had accepted the Darwin-centric account, which says that modern theory begins with Charles Lyell and Darwin. Yes, Lamarck originated `transmutation' of species thinking and Cuvier was an outstanding paleontologist. But Lamarckian inheritance doesn't work and Cuvier was a bitter opponent of evolution.

Thanks to Corsi's painstaking research we know that English evolutionary thought was time-lagged about a half century behind the French. The uniformitarianism vs catastrophism interpretation of earth history, which I had thought was due primarily to Lyell, was intensively debated by French geologists by 1800. The geologist Philippe Bertrand, proposed, in 1797, the marine origin of life and gradual evolution of all organic forms. Terrestrial plants and animals are descended from original marine species. Julien-Joseph Virey proposed (1816) that the term `evolution' be used to denote the transmutation of species. `It is thus plausible that, thanks to such evolution, nature has risen from the most tenuous mold to the majestic cedar, to the gigantic pine, just as it has advanced from microscopic animals up to man, king and dominator of all beings.' In his Histoire naturelle du genre humain (1800) he stated the principle of sexual selection, which assured the optimum adaptive state through elimination of the weaker: "Nature resembles the law of Sparta, which let weak and sickly babies die, but took extreme care of strong, muscular individuals. Thus it is that women submit more easily to the most ardent males, seek the strongest ones, prefer the most untamable." We seem to hear Darwin speaking when Virey writes: "Nature initially produced only one very simple plant and one very simple animal, which it then varied to infinity, with gradual increases in complexity, to produce the most consummate species." The geologist Louis-Constant Prévost proposed that the evolutionary descent of each organism might one day be traced from the fossil record, from "the creation of the simplest beings to that of man himself."

Corsi summarizes his findings: "In the late-eighteenth-century Parisian scientific community, there was extensive discussion on the origin of life, on the possibility of explaining vital-function characteristics in physical terms, and on interpreting the success of life forms on earth in evolutionary terms. Far from being an isolated thinker, Lamarck took part in a far-reaching, momentous debate that aroused the curiosity and concern of many of his contemporaries."

This book is a must-read for all those teaching history of science.

Despite his fame and authorial fortune, the place of Darwin in the history of evolutionary thought is an anomalous one, and the standard histories tend to reinforce this imbalance. The real birth of the idea of evolution was at the end of the eighteenth century, with Lamarck in many ways the first great theorist on the subject, with a definite plus in the camp of Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather. Lamarck is too often taken in terms of his more well known, but less successful idea of adaptation, but this is a secondary question. In the depiction of Soren Lovtrup in _Darwinism: Refutation of a Myth_ Lamarck really produced several theories of evolution, among them that of the fact of evolution, as opposed to theories of the mechanism. Darwin ended up taking credit for what was really Lamarck's breakthrough, in part because the times were ripe, and because of the changes in social thought by the mid-nineteenth century. The idea of evolution was born and then passed under the spectre of Jacobinism, and the period of Restoration created a long delay in the idea's acceptance. We can still see that nervous reluctance to even broach the topic in Darwin himself.
Many of the first to assess Darwin's theory saw immediately that Darwin was really proposing Lamarck's first theory and grafting natural selection onto that, and they could see a problem there at once, undoubtedly one of the factors in the onset of debate and the confusion over evolution as fact and theory that became associated with Darwin's formulation. If the record could ever be set straight, this book might help.

Corsi's book made me change the way I teach the history of evolutionary theory. I had accepted the Darwin-centric account, which says that modern theory begins with Charles Lyell and Darwin. Yes, Lamarck originated 'transmutation' of species thinking and Cuvier was an outstanding paleontologist. But Lamarckian inheritance doesn't work and Cuvier was a bitter opponent of evolution.

Thanks to Corsi's painstaking research we know that English evolutionary thought was time-lagged about a half century behind the French. The unifromitarianism vs catastrophism interpretation of earth history, which I had thought was due primarily to Lyell, was intensively debated by French geologists by 1800. The geologist Philippe Bertrand, proposed, in 1797, the marine origin of life and gradual evolution of all organic forms. Terrestrial plants and animals are descended from original marine species. Julien-Joseph Virey proposed (1816) that the term 'evolution' be used to denote the transmutation of species. 'It is thus plausible that, thanks to such evolution, nature has risen from the most tenuous mold to the majestic cedar, to the gigantic pine, just as it has advanced from microscopic animals up to man, king and dominator of all beings.' In his Histoire naturelle du genre humain (1800) he stated the principle of sexual selection, which assured the optimum adaptive state through elimination of the weaker: "Nature resembles the law of Sparta, which let weak and sickly babies die, but took extreme care of strong, muscular individuals. Thus it is that women submit more easily to the most ardent males, seek the strongest ones, prefer the most untamable." We seem to hear Darwin speaking when Virey writes: "Nature initially produced only one very simple plant and one very simple animal, which it then varied to infinity, with gradual increases in complexity, to produce the most consummate species." The geologist Louis-Constant Prévost proposed that the evolutionary descent of each organism might one day be traced from the fossil record, from "the creation of the simplest beings to that of man himself."

Corsi summarizes his findings: "In the late-eighteenth-century Parisian scientific community, there was extensive discussion on the origin of life, on the possibility of explaining vital-function characteristics in physical terms, and on interpreting the success of life forms on earth in evolutionary terms. Far from being an isolated thinker, Lamarck took part in a far-reaching, momentous debate that aroused the curiosity and concern of many of his contemporaries."

This book is a must-read for all those teaching history of science.

as a person who has read many books on Alcatraz, i can say that this is an excellent book to read, filled with many pictures. Describes all the escape attempts, and generally keeps you from putting it down to read it in one sitting..... I highly reccommend it!!!Great insites on The Birdman, Creepy, etc...some facts that other books dont reveal...

I have read about ten books on Alcatraz and this one is by far the best. The author is the son of one of the guards that was at Alcatraz. He has certainly done his homework before writing this book. He lists each attempted escape from the first to the last listing the participants and what happened during the attempt and also what eventually happened to each inmate.

This book was great!!! It contained much precise information about the Island, from beginning to end: Conquistadores to the closure of the Federal Pennitenary on March 21, 1963. It personified many individuals who lived on Alcatraz, both families and inmates. It also gave a very descriptive overview of almost every part of the prison and it's operations. The book also has much information about individual prisoners and their escape attempts. Not to mention, the book is loaded with tons of pictures. I believe this book was the greatest book ever writtten about Alcatraz Island Federal Pennitenary. I guess enough to make me want to go into the field of Corrections Administration. The book is very easy to read, along with many vivid pictures on each page that makes the entire book very impressive. Mr. Donald Hurley did an outstanding job!!!

I'll be up-front: I've known Jerry for about a decade now, as a lawyer hiring him to do "research." It was his experience as a vice cop and later as a firefighter in San Francisco that forms the basis of his bottomless pool of material. As a fan of the classics in detective novels, from Sayers to James and Poe to -- well -- Kennealy, I find his Nick Polo stories of contemporary California society as compelling, insightful and readable as Ross McDonald's Harper series. Good, quick reads with versimlitude (like that Jerry?), lots of wit and action. In fact, I'm sure I know Polo's landlady!

Fortunately for us all, Amazon.com can get all the works of Jerry Kennealy for those who are interested. He's a masterful mystery writer in the Robert Parker/Robert Crais vain and his Nick Polo character is every bit as funny as Spenser or Elvis Cole. Kennealy knows his stuff(having worked as a PI in the Bay Area for quite some time)and he knows what it takes to hold a reader. I've been fortunate enough to meet the man on a few occassions and he's been a tremendous help to me in my own attempts at mystery writing. Give this man a chance and he'll make you a believer after just a few pages. He's a real buried treasure, but hopefully he can finally get the success he really deserves.

This was my first Nick Polo book and it was really enjoyable, Polo is a Mike Hammer type character with great charm and wit. Well written, I have ordered the rest of the series thru Amazon.

This is an excellent sequel to Hello, Goodbye, I Love You.

I really love Ms. Bauer-Mueller's tale of what it takes emotionally
to raise a seeing-eye dog and then give it away. It takes strength of
character from both giver and receiver.

Revisiting the characters made me realize how much I loved the first one.

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We really loved the whole book because it was a story of adventure, love, friendship, loyalty, devotion, perseverance, and triumph. What more could you want from a story? In Aloha Crossing, Pamela does a tremendous job of having the reader be "right there" with the characters. We feel Kimberly Louise's frustration, we know what it's like to be lost during a hurricane, and we grow to love each character more and more as the book goes on. This is a terrific read for young and old.

I could not put this book down until I found out if Aloha made it through the hurricane. Living on an island, you know hurricanes are always a possibility so living this one out through the lives of Kimberly Louise & Diego was exciting and scary at the same time. Trying to imagine what life is like without seeing comes alive as Pamela Bauer Mueller let me "see" into Kimberly Louise's life. Having Aloha as her faithful companion almost makes me not feel badly about her blindness. Diego inspired me with his courage and trustworthiness, traits that reminded me how young people can really make a difference in the lives of others. Kids of all ages will be encouraged to follow their dreams, work hard and enjoy the moment. A MUST-read for people of all ages.