California Gothic: The Dark Side of the Dream

California Gothic: The Dark Side of the Dream

Author: Charles L. Crow

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2024-01-16

Total Pages: 82

ISBN-13: 1839983817

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California Gothic explores the California dream and its dark inversion as a nightmare, as illustrated in fiction, poetry, and film. California began as a literary invention, a magic island, in a Spanish romance before conquistadors first visited the land. From early days to the present, the California dream of happiness in a land of new beginnings has been maintained by suppression of disturbing realities: above all, the destruction of native peoples; and by events and facts such as the tragedy of the Donner Party, the persistence of poverty and crime in the golden land, disturbing crimes such as the Black Dahlia; and pandemics and ecological disaster. This book explores a rich Gothic tradition that exposes the repressed past and imagines the fates awaiting a failed California.


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.


The Dreamt Land

The Dreamt Land

Author: Mark Arax

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2019-05-21

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 1101875216

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A vivid, searching journey into California's capture of water and soil—the epic story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth. The Dreamt Land weaves reportage, history and memoir to confront the "Golden State" myth in riveting fashion. No other chronicler of the West has so deeply delved into the empires of agriculture that drink so much of the water. The nation's biggest farmers—the nut king, grape king and citrus queen—tell their story here for the first time. Arax, the native son, is persistent and tough as he treks from desert to delta, mountain to valley. What he finds is hard earned, awe-inspiring, tragic and revelatory. In the end, his compassion for the land becomes an elegy to the dream that created California and now threatens to undo it.


California Dreams

California Dreams

Author: Kathryn Wright Smith

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2014-01-09

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1493156500

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Melissa Kellogg was your average teenager from sunny California until that fateful day when her dad was transferred to Alabama. Thomas Jefferson High School will never be the same when this junior comes to town. Melissa learns to make new friends while keeping the old ones. She must learn to juggle family, high school crushes, and broken hearts. Can Melissa make a new life in a new place or will she run to her comfortable life back in Cali?


The Newsom Nightmare

The Newsom Nightmare

Author: John H. Cox

Publisher: Post Hill Press

Published: 2023-11-14

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13:

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In a time when American politics is at its lowest ebb, and when political leadership is notably absent across the ideological spectrum, one politician stands apart as a particularly unfortunate exemplar of everything that is wrong with our national leadership. Gavin Newsom. In this detailed and infuriating exposé of how big money has corrupted the political process at every level of society, businessman and philanthropist John Cox uses Newsom’s career to analyze how and why the system operates as it does. Politicians are bought and paid for by moneyed interests; media coverage is determined, first and foremost, by financial concerns; and the average citizen is fully disenfranchised from determining electoral or policy outcomes. And nowhere is this more evident—with tragic results—than in Gavin Newsom’s collapsing California. The cost of living is out of control; a homelessness epidemic is on the rise; there’s a shortage of housing, water, and energy; crime rates are at an all-time high; wildfires cause devastation at alarming rates each year; and high taxes make it nearly impossible to start a small business. We’re beginning to see these trends spread throughout the United States. As the old saying goes, “as goes California, so goes the nation.” Our system must be reformed. This book doesn’t just lay out the problems; it posits a workable and easy to implement solution that will work to get this country—and California—back on track. In The Newsom Nightmare, Cox deftly and succinctly provides an alternative that would, if implemented, put the American body politic back on solid ground.


California

California

Author: Carey McWilliams

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1999-04-02

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780520218932

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This edition is graced by a new foreword by Lewis Lapham.


The Seven States of California

The Seven States of California

Author: Philip L. Fradkin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1997-05-12

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 9780520209428

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"Philip Fradkin's work is full of foresight, good sense, and an understanding of the ties between social and environmental dilemmas. Taking Fradkin's writing seriously is an important step in figuring out the American West today."—Patricia Nelson Limerick


The Age of Great Dreams

The Age of Great Dreams

Author: David Farber

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1994-04

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780809015672

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In this absorbing new book, David Farber gives us the history of our collective and individual memories of the 1960s: the brilliant colors of revolt and rapture, of flames and raised fists, of napalm and tear gas, of people desperate to make history even as others fought fiercely to stop them. More than thirty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, this book grounds our understanding of the terrible events of that era by linking them to our country's grand projects of previous decades: the forging of a national system of social provision in the New Deal; our new agenda as global superpower after World War II; the creation of the national security state; and the maturation of a national consumer-driven mass-mediated marketplace. Farber's account, based on years of research in archives and oral histories as well as in the historical literature, deals in full not only with nation building in Vietnam, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Watts riot, and the War on Poverty, but with the entertainment business, the drug culture, and much more.


American Nightmare

American Nightmare

Author: Randal O'Toole

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781937184889

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The American Dream turned into a nightmare when the housing bubble burst, and people have been trying to figure out who to blame- Greedy bankers? Corrupt politicians? Ignorant homeowners? In American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership, Randal O'Toole explores the forces at play in the housing market and shows how we can rebuild the American dream of homeownership by eliminating federal, state, and local policies that distort the free market for housing.