California - Irvine Books

This book was great from the very beginning. It is a story about a young photographer , Edith Ivrine, and her assistant, Daisy Valentine, traveling the world to take pitures an show Ediths prints of yosemite at a convention. Their first stop is in San Fransisco where they were planning to leave straight away to sail to Australia. But isntead they found themselves enduring the overwhemliing tragedy of the San Fransisco earthquake and fire. Edith uses this disaster to record the events happening, with her camera against the will of the police officers. This novel has you feel like you are walking the streets covered in crumbled buildings alongs side these two girls.

This book was exellent. Earthquake at dawn, while maintaining the readers interest through highly interesting events, is quite informative, giving information about the earthquake and a firsthand view of what it was like through the eyes of Daisy Valentine, Edith Irvine(a famous photographer)'s assistant. Daisy and Edith arrive in San Francisco hoping to catch a boat to Australia and travel around the world. Unfortunately, disaster strikes right before they dock, and the women find themselves in the middle of one of the biggest earthquakes in history. With the help of the McGregor and Somers families and their friend, Mary Exa, the women are forced to survive in the city by any means possible. Edith does her best to capture the ruins by photograph, but the mayor threatens to shoot anybody who dares to take pictures. An exciting, informative story, Earthquake at Dawn is the perfect book for anyone who wants to learn about the earthquake, or somebody who just wants something to read.

Earthquake at Dawn is a great book. It is about Edith Irvine, a dedicated photographer, and her 15-year-old assistant Daisy. On their way to Europe, the earthquake hits and they have to stop in San Francisco, which is mostly destroyed and collapsing. After the quake, a great fire erupts and several of the city's houses and buildings they had not already fallen burn to the ground. The two are separated from Edith's father, who was traveling with them, and they become friends with a few other survivors. Meanwhile, the mayor is creating even more trouble. Men and women are threatened to being shot for using toilets or electricity, and dynamite, in an attempt to stop the fire, is being set off. But, Edith documents the trip with her photographs, even though that could mean death if she was caught by the mayor, who doesn't want the rest of the country to know the real disaster that is happening in San Francisco. In this incredibly realistic novel, Kristiana Gregory tells the exciting story, based on a letter written by survivor Mary Exa Atkin Campbell and the real photographs taken by Edith Irvine. I would highly recommend this book.

I really enjoyed the book Earthquake at Dawn. It's about the 1906 San Fransisco earthquake/fire that happened at dawn (hence the name Earthquake at Dawn). Even though it is historical fiction, it had a lot of true things that made it incredibly believable. Kristina Gregory definitely made the story good by adding some subplots that kept your interest. The subplots were real things too, like Edith and Daisy getting separated from their father, and Molly dying of lack of healthcare. This was a really good, captivating book which I think many people will cherish for years to come.

Kristiana Gregory really brings out Edith Irvine as a devoted photographer. Even in the midst of all the turmoil, she snaps 60 photos, possibly more! In this true-to-life novel, the famous San Francisco earthquake takes place, however, the quake is not the worst that happens! The fire that the quake created was. It lasted three days and killed an estimated five to ten thousand people. The mayor exploded dynamite to try to get rid of the fire, but the dynamite only created more. This novel also illustrates the annoying floor length dresses that the ladies of 1906 had to wear and the automobiles of Daisy's time. In some books earthquakes are made up just for entertainment. Not this one! This earthquake was real. The first shock was on April 18, 1906 and was recorded at 5:12:05 a.m. and it lasted for 45 seconds. There were 27 earthquakes that were actually recorded that day. Mary Exa Atkins Campbell told the earthquake's story.

The Great California Story paints a vivid picture of just what it is that makes California such an amazing place. I've read a lot of books about the Golden State, but this is the best one yet. If you really want to understand what California is all about, this is the book you've got to read.

Enhanced with 35 photographs, endnotes, and an index, The Great California Story: Real-Life Roots Of An American Legend by Carl Palm aptly combines history and trivia to paint a marvelous picture of what sets the Golden State apart. An engaging look at legends, customs, laws, and how history shaped the residents of California from colonial times down to the present makes The Great California Story an engrossing and enjoyable venture. Especially recommended for school and community library California History collections, The Great California Story is also available in a hardcover edition.

Harold Bloom is arguably the greatest reader of literature literary criticism has known in the present generation. In this work he asserts ' reading' to be a life- action, an agon a process by which we assert our power.
"Bloom's first chapter on critical and poetic language sums up his systematic procedures and attacks both traditionalist 'humanistic' criticism and recent Continental modes, including Deconstruction. His second chapter centers on the Book of Genesis and on Freud's theory of the origins of sexuality in order to establish three models for poetic originality. The third chapter, commenting on a range of poets from Milton through Stevens, gives a definitive account of the poetric process Bloom has called ' transumption' a technique by which poets come to terms with their forerunners." (From the back cover)
This work precedes Bloom's blockbuster works on ' The Western Canon' and 'Genius' and seems more academically jargoned. Apparently the ' strong poet Bloom ' read this work contended with it and overcame it wish his richer and more poetically flowing later masterworks.

For those who teach American politics and government, there are distressingly few good textbook choices available for national or state courses. A rare exception to the dismayingly dreary or tiresomely trendy tomes that abound is "Democracy in California: Politics and Government in the Golden State." Authors Brian P. Janiskee and Ken Masugi have combined the standard features (formal and informal institutions, demographics, historical vignettes, recent developments, political terminology, etc.) with a thoughtful historical and philosophical approach that places California within the broad scope of American experience and Western political thought.
As its title suggests, this distinctive text draws both high inspiration and practical wisdom specifically from Alexis de Tocqueville's classic study, "Democracy in America" (1835). But the book is more than high-minded or useful: it is dead-on timely too. Tocqueville observed America during the Age of Jackson, early in the pre-Civil War crisis (1830-60) which both preceded and shaped California government. Thus, California was founded at a time (1849-50) when, as Tocqueville knew, republican government was under severe attack from Southern slavemasters and European autocrats. To the extent that the influence of the American founding was not attenuated by these attacks, the new State of California was both representative and free. But having weathered those challenges, California (and the nation) have had to endure the various phases and consequences of the Prussian administrative state which was the questionable contribution of the Progressive movement in the decades since the State's admission to the Union by the Compromise of 1850.
California has been shaped for good or for ill by these competing forces and is necessarily presented in this work as a sort of hodge podge in which multiple offices, frequent elections and political cronyism (the Jacksonian contribution) overlap with direct democracy, anti-partyism and professional expertise (the Progressive contribution). The battle over slavery shaped the State's original identity as a free state in the midst of a bitter sectional dispute but also long tainted its politics with racism. California defied the odds against republican government but the rise of the administrative state and its seemingly boundless taxing and spending--and bureaucratic meddling--puts the future of that regime in serious question. Not everything could be included in this relatively short (160 pages) work but no salient fact is overlooked as it bears upon the future of democracy in the Golden State.
The authors are discerning students of political philsophy, best exemplified today by Harry V. Jaffa, who single-handedly rescued Abraham Lincoln and principled anti-slavery politics from the near-oblivion of the professional historians. Janiskee and Masugi in turn seek to rescue California politics (but not many of its leading politicians)from the academic dead end to which years of pseudo-scientific approaches have relegated it. "Democracy in California" makes the study of California government and politics a much more serious and rewarding enterprise than it has been for many years and will be, if this book is widely adopted, for many more. Extensive footnotes and excellent bibliography. Highest recommendation.

Most flamenco books are simply a collection of sheet music -- they don't teach. Koster's book is actually a bit of a text book -- it explains flamenco and demonstrates through progressively more challenging pieces how to start with a simple rythm and build upon it. There is no substitute to having an instructor, but this book is used by many instructors.

The fifty-one black and white photos in this nicely designed book will not be to everybody's taste. The photos could not be more stark and minimalist, mostly eye level, straight on, images of almost plain walls of commercial premises in Irvine, Los Angeles. The only concession is (photo twenty-two) a close-up of an open two-switch electrical box, I bet Baltz only took this because the box cover was off and the inside looked interesting.

Looking through the photos at the shapes and rigid right angles of the walls, doors, guttering and windows suggest abstract paintings and I can well understand that the appearance of the book encouraged the significant 1975 photo exhibition, 'New Topographics'. Some of the ten photographers (including Baltz) in that show have gone on to exhibit and publish books about the man-altered landscape. I think this particular photographic genre is now well established, thanks to Baltz.


The book is as minimalist as the photos, apart from the simple captions there is no essay about Baltz (at least not in my German produced copy which does not have a photo on the cover) no page numbers, nothing on the inside flaps or back of the cover. I would have preferred this 2001 edition to have some reference to the influence these photos had over the last twenty-five years. An equally minimalist designed book I have enjoyed is 'Meadowland' by Ray Mortenson (ISBN 0912810408) here the photos are of an industrial area in New Jersey. The photos are not as rigid as those by Baltz and frequently show how the natural landscape has been changed by heavy industry.

Both books present a vibrant photographic style and I like them because they show how visually fascinating the man-made environment can be.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

A good map of LA. Plus it gives a good overview for people wanting to carpool and ridesearch.

Nice little book of wonderful gems of early California painters. A joy to look at again and again. Good colors, good selection of works.

Pandas are very rare and very beautiful creatures (but they aren't really bears, and if anyone is a bear expert, it is me!). This book tells the adventures of Basi and Yuan Yuan during their visit to the San Diego Zoo. The best part of the book are the many pages of color photos. I was especially attracted to this book because we don't have pandas in France. And I am French. This is a great picture book to admire!

I have to share this: Recently while weeding out my various collections and selling some, my Mother listed this book for me. I did not tell her it was fiction and after looking over and reading some of the book she decided to go online and get more information about the Kesh. She was convienced they had actually existed. Now, my Mom is an intellgent and informed woman -- The amazing job Ursula did in making the Kesh so REAL is astounding! This Book and Tape are definitly worth the time and money for ANYONE who appreciates Great writing.....Genre be darned!

Ms. Le Guin is one of the foremost authors in America working across a broad spectrum of genres. This is one of her best works detailing a life in a culture that works with the land & the spirit. The rich details of this culture appear in the music, poetry, stories and art of the Kesh. These are a vibrant people who appeal on every level.

Ursula LeGuin's Kafka Award winner and 1985 National Book Award runner-up is the deepest deep-ecology fiction I know of and my favorite novel. It's the only scifi book to earn such honors [her 1972 National Book Award for "The Farthest Shore" was in Childrens Books]. "Always Coming Home" is less a book about landscape than a book that inhabits a landscape. I've just finished my third reading in twenty years.

True to her anthropological scifi themes, LeGuin creates the feeling of living in a very different culture better than any other writer I've read. In negative reviews I've seen, [not just here] aside from problems reading it's "experimental" format, I've been struck by reviewers simply not getting it at a fundamental level.

Many years ago, the credo of my graduate fiction-writing workshops was "Show, don't tell" and "Be concrete", both accomplished through use of details. Thus defined, ACH is a fiction-writing tour de force in which she not only invents an Amerindian-like culture [with advanced technology, sort of], but has us participate in its calendar of rituals, oral wisdom and parables, eco-knowledge, recipes, poems, songs and family fights. The original boxed editions included a cassette tape of fables, poems, songs, and sacred chanting in a language she invented for these people, the Kesh. And the Kesh are embedded within the natural landscape of California's Napa Valley sometime in the nebulous future.

The story takes place millenia after a worldwide industrial apocalypse. Fossil fuels are exhausted, wide swaths of territory are poisoned by chemicals and radiation and sterilized by plastic sands. Large geological events have put the San Francisco Bay basin, California's central valley and the Great Basin under the ocean.

The book's antagonist, the Condor culture, Leguin's version of the warrior-dominated Indo-Europeans migrating from the steppes into agrarian Europe circa 3500 B.C. is an almost cartoonish sketch. A foil for Kesh society, Condor society is a social and material culture as unsustainable as our current rapacious, consumption-at-all-costs society [which may be changing]. But it's a mistake to read ACH as a simple industrialization versus environmentalism vision. It's not primarily about that, nor is it about the future, nor a metaphor for today, nor utopian fare, although it's partly all those.

Ultimately, with science-hunger moved off-stage, ACH is about how it has felt and what it has meant to be human over our million or so years on the planet. This hasn't changed, nor will it, despite today's technological veener. LeGuin's vision sums up this entire experience of being human and particularizes it to one specific biophysical environment just as all cultures have been so particularized, except in some instances over the last few millenia.

The Kesh do have industry. For example, much of their Na valley floor is covered with vineyards and a railroad delivers barrels of wine to the coast where a farflung maritime trading system begins. But it's appropriate technology use; their culture is rooted in being human, not in production. The Kesh are not poor, nor subsistence-level livers, nor backward in any way, but their material lives service their non-material lives -- their humaness -- and not vice versa. They still have teenagers, testosterone-driven conflicts between groups, curious and lazy people, firebrands, hermits, dissidents, warriors, mystics, cliques, social outcasts and the joys and tribulations of sexuality.

Anyone familiar with the structure and daily lives of primal cultures will recognize the verisimilitude under the scifi novel conventions here. And if you know a bit about the vanished, semi-sedentary cultures of the California Indians you'll find LeGuin's fictitious one as real as rain. [The cultures that inspired her are revived in "The Ohlone Way", a gem of a book by Malcolm Margolin.]

The book's major weakness is it's stiff, shallow, and simplistic antogonist [culture], a characteristic problem in LeGuin's work; she doesn't write good villians. Another is the actual narrative, the story of Stone Telling, only 112 extracted pages and our primary view of Condor culture, so I wish she'd developed it more. Her P.O.V. -- that of a socially immature, pre-adolescent in a restrictive harem -- may be the problem in both instances. I want some plot device to get her out of the house. Still, Stone Telling's story resolves perfectly for this symphony of life in the Na Valley.

The book's non-linear format will turn many people off, and it's flawed, but for me ACH is in a class by itself, even beyond the novels of my favorite novelist, William Faulkner. Faulkner is the better writer, perhaps, but the realization of the Na Valley exceeds that of Yoknapatawpha County.

LeGuin's anthropological slant is developed to it's structural extreme: a collection of field notes and texts including visual and impeccably accurate oral material -- a file cabinet -- as novel. This hints at the epistolary origin of the English novel. Giving the book the time and attitude it requires means buying or borrowing the CD/tape. You not only hear the Kesh speak and sing, a suprisingly evocative tool, but even the Na Valley landscape itself. This audio portion of a novel is not only unique but integral to LeGuin's mosaic. She's constructed a complete culture, a formidable creative accomplishment.

LeGuin spent formative years in the Na valley and the village of Sinshan itself. I live in the Bay Area and know it's ecosystems and pre-contact Native American culture. She's nailed them. Sit on a shaded, worn redwood deck bordering a bay laurel or redwood grove, gaze out at the dry, yellow, August hills of the California coast range, and it's easy to see, feel, and smell the ancient stone and redwood Kesh family great houses. Easy.

The Kesh live in a numinous environment that is mostly lost now but is still here for us to rediscover. Give this book a chance and you will breathe with the Kesh.

Ursula Le Guin is my favorite living author, and this is my favorite of her novels. If you don't want a review that comes from that position, which has developed over thirty years and uncountable books and is not (quite) as facile as it sounds, stop now.

This book, though, received a lot of criticism, some of it, perhaps, just. It was criticized for appropriating Native American culture, and although Le Guin is explicit in denying that as her intent, it's an issue worth discussing. Because Le Guin is the daughter of anthropologists specializing in deep study of native cultures, it might be truer to say that those visions of the world have appropriated and influenced her. Nonetheless, this is something to discuss if you teach the book, or recommend it to a friend.

Le Guin's also been variously accused of predicting the future with that least forgivable sin, earnestness, and of creating a prescriptive utopia in which no reasonable reader can believe. These charges, though, I find less worthy of discussion. Those who say it's unbelievable cite

a) the Kesh's success in dealing with the military-industrial Condor through nonviolent resistance (nonviolent resistance actually work? Ridiculous! Oh, wait a minute...),
b) the improbability of the Condor getting so caught up in their exploding toys that they don't make good use of them (also ridiculous! no one would build more and more bombers while failing to provide body armor for their troops, and the Afghanis never drove out the techno-heavy USSR with flintlock rifles), and
c) the belief that the culture of the Kesh "really" wouldn't be anything like this.

If we're talking of earnestness and prescriptive prediction, though, I think such critics undermine their own position. It doesn't get much more earnest, or much more prescriptive, than saying that someone else's imaginary culture "would" "really" have done thus-and-such. One of Le Guin's points is that the world doesn't *have* to go the way that some military-industrial-consumer Americans are prone to believe it must; there are other choices, though perhaps only after some very regrettable ecological catastrophes. She's also mildly famous for pointing out that SF authors don't predict the future; they observe the present. By that standard, ACH doesn't say that people will live in Kesh-like valleys, or that they should live in Kesh-like valleys, but that some people, right now, do in some sort live this way. And that, in my experience, is the literal truth. Those people are silenced and ignored and sneered at and mocked, but they exist, and not just in straw-bale solar houses.

In terms of Utopia, Le Guin explicitly rejects it(in the passage "Pandora Converses with the Archivist.") Now maybe she needs more than a single rejection to prove that this doesn't function as an improbable utopia; but it doesn't hurt to actually read the thing before dismissing it, and see what she does say.

I tend to think that it avoids utopianism by what IS included: for instance, people in the Valley routinely and slowly die of mercury poisoning (or something very like it, "sevai".) Not so Utopian, really. Again, rather than having machines which make all manual labor obsolete, we see two women digging a garden in soil that's "like wet concrete when it's wet, and like dry concrete when it's dry." They do this by digging a shovelful and then handing it to the other woman to clean off the concrete-like mud while digging a second shovelful with a second spade, and so on. If that's your idea of utopia, I can only say it's not mine: people suffer, people die, people work, sometimes, very hard. The fact that they aren't doing it in Wal-Mart, or in a cubicle, doesn't mean that hard work isn't, well, hard work. Thirdly, living "in harmony" in this valley (or anywhere else) isn't just a matter of the warm fuzzies: it requires some knowledge of ecology, and some brutal adjustments to it. These people can have two children per person, no exceptions. If you marry someone who's got two, you won't have any children of your body. If you want six, you're out of luck, that's all, and it's not such an easy proposition. "Living in balance" is a term easy to scoff at; but balance, as those know who've tried it, requires work and thought, both routinely thought to be unnecessary in a well-maintained utopia. And, finally, this "utopia" spans one valley in one mountain range: the Kesh's "goodness" hasn't convinced the rest of the world to change its ways, not even the Pig People next door. If picturing a world in which one insular society is allowed to live sustainably and peacefully is Utopian, then, yes, it's Utopian; but viewing this as so improbable as to be not worth contemplating says more about the reader than about the author.

Still with me? needless to say, I recommend it very highly indeed. Maybe it's not fair in its use of indigenous elements; I don't feel qualified to say. Maybe it is a Utopia, if people can die and suffer and sweat and fart in Utopia. But whether or no, it's a beautiful and entertaining and thought-provoking book.

On the one hand, I agree with all the good things other reviewers have mentioned. On the other hand, I also agree with all the bad things.

The cultures in the book struck me not so much as "simple" but as "simplistic." I think I was also really bothered by the lack of enough story to illuminate the practices of the society. The story parts were great. The poetry parts frequently drove me up the wall (true also of my reading of Tolkein). It was choppy, which made it difficult to read without the concentration one reserves for *actual* archaeological study.

I think in the end that might have been my biggest problem with it. I wanted to read about a world that never was, a world that might be, a world of people different from me. Instead, I was stuck reading fake archaeology. I was uncomfortable with the in-between-ness of it - I either wanted real archaeology, or real fiction, not a mishmash of the two. The book is incredibly self-indulgent of the author; what saves it is that LeGuin is so phenominally gifted that even her self-indulgence is interesting and well-written.

It was compelling (in places) and maddeningly dull (in places). I think I'm glad I read it - but I'm not sure - and I don't think I'll read it again - but I'm not sure.

I'm sorry this isn't a more coherent review. It's hard for me to know if the problem was mine, or the book's. A very strange, in-between book that left me in a strange, in-between place.

In sum: Very well written, very unique book, that left me very ambivalent about whether it was "worth it" as a reader.