Living the California Dream

Living the California Dream

Author: Alison Rose Jefferson

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 1496229061

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2020 Miriam Matthews Ethnic History Award from the Los Angeles City Historical Society Alison Rose Jefferson examines how African Americans pioneered America’s “frontier of leisure” by creating communities and business projects in conjunction with their growing population in Southern California during the nation’s Jim Crow era.


Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915

Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915

Author: Kevin Starr

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1986-12-04

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 0199923256

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Examining California's formative years, this innovative study seeks to discover the origins of the California dream and the social, psychological, and symbolic impact it has had not only on Californians but also on the rest of the country.


California Dreamers

California Dreamers

Author: Belinda Jones

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 9780340998632

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Ever wished you could make-over your life? Make-up artist Stella is an expert at helping other people change their images, but when it comes to transforming herself, she doesn't even know where to start. So when her new friend, glamorous Hollywood actress Marina Ray, summons her a movie set in California, Stella can't resist the chance to start afresh - it is the land of sunshine and opportunity after all! But are they really friends or does Marina have an ulterior motive? What is the secret that both women are hiding about the nautical (but nice) men in their lives? And what will it take to really make both of their California dreams come true?


Material Dreams

Material Dreams

Author: Kevin Starr

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 019507260X

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In Material Dreams, Starr turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920s, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles. Although he treats readers to intriguing side trips to Santa Barbara and Pasadena, Starr focuses here mainly on Los Angeles, revealing how this major city arose almost defiantly on a site lacking many of the advantages required for urban development, creating itself out of sheer will, the Great Gatsby of American cities. He describes how William Ellsworth Smyth, the Peter the Hermit of the Irrigation Crusade, propounded the importance of water in Southern California's future, and how such figures as the self-educated, Irish engineer William Mulholland (who built the main aquaducts to Los Angeles) and George Chaffey (who diverted the Colorado River, transforming desert into the lush Imperial Valley) brought life-supporting water to the arid South. He examines the discovery of oil ("Yes it's oil, oil, oil / that makes LA boil," went the official drinking song of the Uplifters Club), the boosters and land developers, the evangelists (such as Bob Shuler, the Methodist Savanarola of Los Angeles, and Aimee Semple McPherson), and countless other colorful figures of the period. There are also fascinating sections on the city's architecture (such as the remarkably innovative Bradbury Building and its eccentric, neophyte designer, George Wyman), the impact of the automobile on city planning, the great antiquarian book collections, the Hollywood film community, and much more. By the end of the decade, Los Angeles had tripled in population and become the fifth largest city in the nation. In Material Dreams, Kevin Starr captures this explosive growth in a narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose.


California Dreamers

California Dreamers

Author: Mark Abramson

Publisher: Lethe Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1590211448

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The sixth book in Abramson's popular Beach Reading mystery series set in San Francisco. Tim Snow is recruited along with other HIV patients for an experiment with Neutriva, an AIDS drug with the peculiar side effects of enhancing dreams and expanding latent psychic abilities. But is something sinister going on with these trials?


California Dreamin'

California Dreamin'

Author: Pénélope Bagieu

Publisher: First Second

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1250156149

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California Dreamin' from Pénélope Bagieu depicts Mama Cass as you've never known her, in this poignant graphic novel about the remarkable vocalist who rocketed The Mamas & the Papas to stardom. Before she was the legendary Mama Cass of the folk group The Mamas and the Papas, Ellen Cohen was a teen girl from Baltimore with an incredible voice, incredible confidence, and incredible dreams. She dreamed of being not just a singer but a star. Not just a star—a superstar. So, at the age of nineteen, at the dawn of the sixties, Ellen left her hometown and became Cass Elliot. At her size, Cass was never going to be the kind of girl that record producers wanted on album covers. But she found an unlikely group of co-conspirators, and in their short time together this bizarre and dysfunctional band recorded some of the most memorable songs of their era. Through the whirlwind of drugs, war, love, and music, Cass struggled to keep sight of her dreams, of who she loved, and—most importantly—who she was.


Golden Days

Golden Days

Author: Jack McCallum

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0399179070

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"During their 1971-72 championship season, the L.A. Lakers won thirty-three games in a row ... a run of uninterrupted dominance that predated by decades the overwhelming firepower of today's Warriors, a revolutionary team whose recent seasons include some record-threatening win streaks of their own. Tying together the two strands [of the] story is Hall of Famer [Jerry] West, the ferociously competitive Laker guard who later became one of the key architects of the Warriors"--Amazon.com.


The Dreamers

The Dreamers

Author: Karen Thompson Walker

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 0812994175

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NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep in this mesmerizing novel from the bestselling author of The Age of Miracles. “Stunning.”—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven • “A startling, beautiful portrait of a community in peril.”—Entertainment Weekly NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Glamour • Real Simple • Good Housekeeping One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster. Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what? Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life—if only we are awakened to them. Praise for The Dreamers “Walker’s roving fictive eye by turns probes characters’ innermost feelings and zooms out to coolly parse topics like reality versus delusion. . . . [It has] the perfect ambiguous frame for a tense and layered plot.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “[Walker’s] gripping, provocative novel should come with a warning: may cause insomnia.”—People (Book of the Week) “Powerful and moving . . . written with symphonic sweep.”—The New York Times Book Review “2019’s first must-read novel . . . Alternately terrifying and moving . . . The Dreamers is overflowing with humanity.”—Jezebel “This is an exquisite work of intimacy. Walker’s sentences are smooth, emotionally arresting—of a true, ethereal beauty. . . . This book achieves [a] dazzling, aching humanity.”—Entertainment Weekly


Golden Dreams

Golden Dreams

Author: Kevin Starr

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-09-09

Total Pages: 601

ISBN-13: 0199924309

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A narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose, Kevin Starr's acclaimed multi-volume Americans and the California Dream is an unparalleled work of cultural history. In this volume, Starr covers the crucial postwar period--1950 to 1963--when the California we know today first burst into prominence. Starr brilliantly illuminates the dominant economic, social, and cultural forces in California in these pivotal years. In a powerful blend of telling events, colorful personalities, and insightful analyses, Starr examines such issues as the overnight creation of the postwar California suburb, the rise of Los Angeles as Super City, the reluctant emergence of San Diego as one of the largest cities in the nation, and the decline of political centrism. He explores the Silent Generation and the emergent Boomer youth cult, the Beats and the Hollywood "Rat Pack," the pervasive influence of Zen Buddhism and other Asian traditions in art and design, the rise of the University of California and the emergence of California itself as a utopia of higher education, the cooling of West Coast jazz, freeway and water projects of heroic magnitude, outdoor life and the beginnings of the environmental movement. More broadly, he shows how California not only became the most populous state in the Union, but in fact evolved into a mega-state en route to becoming the global commonwealth it is today. Golden Dreams continues an epic series that has been widely recognized for its signal contribution to the history of American culture in California. It is a book that transcends its stated subject to offer a wealth of insight into the growth of the Sun Belt and the West and indeed the dramatic transformation of America itself in these pivotal years following the Second World War.


A New California Dream

A New California Dream

Author: Patrick Atwater

Publisher: Stag Hunt Enterprises

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9789780615475

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California doesn t need more lofty rhetoric about what a Dream place this state is. Our government is in crisis. The impartial Legislative Analysts Office projects multi-billion dollar deficits until at least 2015. Cynics say that Californians are too polarized, too diverse, and too burdened with a byzantine bureaucracy to come together to face this mountain. Yet our recurring deficit is only less than one percent of California s nearly two trillion dollar economy. And these cynics don t offer reasons so much as excuses. California today has a proud history, a stunning natural environment, and an unbelievably creative people that connects to every corner of the globe. Reflecting on the fractures that have flowed from the hyperidealistic California Dream of the past, Patrick Atwater shows how together we can harness those strengths to build a New California Dream focused on creating a better life for all Californians. In honor of his parents, twenty percent of the proceeds from the book will be donated to California schools through DonorsChoose.