Heyday

Brian Bibby brings together the present and the past—both ancient and recent—in a fascinating compilation of anecdote, myth, recollection, and reflection. Five years in the making and the result of almost thirty years of dedicated work among California’s native communities, Deeper Than Gold is a tribute to the people who know Gold Country best. Witness a visual history with family photographs from private albums and stunning original work by renowned photographer Dugan Aguilar (of Paiute/Pit River/Maidu heritage). This gorgeously designed book offers an intimate view of the remarkable and persistent people of Gold Country whose culture continues to evolve and thrive in the area around Highway 49.

Winner of the 2016 California Historical Society Book Award! The latest title from the author of A History of Wine in America recounts the beginnings of California's world renowned wine trade—a story set not in Napa but in the isolated pueblo now called Los Angeles. With incisive analysis and a touch of dry humor, The City of Vines chronicles winemaking in Los Angeles from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century through its decline in the 1950s. Thomas Pinney returns the megalopolis to the prickly pear-studded lands upon which Mission grapes grew for the production of claret, port, sherry, angelica, and hock. From these rural beginnings Pinney reconstructs the entire course of winemaking in a sweeping narrative, punctuated by accounts of particular enterprises including Anaheim's foundation as a German winemaking settlement and the undertakings of vintners scrambling for market dominance. Yet Pinney also shows Los Angeles's wine industry to be beholden to the forces that shaped all California under the flags of Spain, Mexico, and the United States: colonial expansion dependent on labor of indigenous peoples; the Gold Rush population boom; transcontinental railroads; rapid urbanization; and Prohibition. This previously untold story uncovers an era when California wine meant Los Angeles wine, and reveals the lasting ways in which the wine industry shaped the nascent metropolis.

Buildings in cities are remarkable things: they provide not only shelter but touchstones of reference and recall, a language that shapes our sense of place as well as the skyline. In sparkling prose and with full-color photography, Cityscapes looks at fifty buildings that convey a distinct slice of San Francisco. These are the buildings that are defined by bold visual moves and the ones that offer tactile delight. These are the structures you notice every time you pass by, and the ones that escape notice until the light hits them a certain way. Included are some of San Francisco’s most familiar buildings and works by some of architecture's biggest names—but also plenty of buildings that are often ignored yet add a unique texture to this fabled place. An outgrowth of “Cityscape,” a weekly column that debuted in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009, Cityscapes is part history, part guidebook, and part architectural primer. And the points it makes about specific buildings convey something true to all great cities—that every building shines in its own way as a distinctive piece in a much larger puzzle, one still being assembled before our eyes.

From the gold rush to the Internet boom, the US District Court for the Northern District of California has played a major role in how business is done and life is lived on the Pacific Coast. When California was first admitted to the Union, pioneers were busy prospecting for new fortunes, building towns and cities—and suing each other. San Francisco became the epicenter of a litigious new world being cobbled together from gold dust and sand dunes. Its federal court set precedents, from deciding the fate of Mexican land grants and shanghaied sailors to civil rights for Chinese immigrants. Through the era of Prohibition and the labor movement to World War II and the tumultuous sixties and seventies, the court's historic rulings have defined the Bay Area's geography, culture, and commerce.

Sponsored by the Northern District Court's Historical Society and told by veteran journalists, The Court That Tamed the West presents the region's history through a new lens, offering insight along with great storytelling.

Part pocket guide, part history, and part architectural primer, the companion piece to urban design critic John King's Cityscapes: San Francisco and Its Buildings contains all of the wit and wonder of the first installment. In epigrammatic prose and with detailed full-color photographs, King highlights fifty structures that tell the story of San Francisco through architecture. Included are emblematic buildings such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, and the Palace of Fine Arts; but King pays just as close attention to less celebrated structures that embody the politics, architectural fads, and cultural values of the eras in which they were conceived. A fresh take on the familiar, Cityscapes 2 shows us how to read the structures around us as signposts and translations for the story of a multilayered and ever-changing city.

No need to hop on a plane to the East Coast! California has beautiful fall foliage, especially in the Sierra Nevada, which glows red and golden every year with aspens, cottonwoods, dogwoods, maples, and oaks. This compact, lively guide shows visitors where and how to capture the best images of turning leaves in the eastern Sierra, Tahoe, and Yosemite, as well as destinations off the beaten track. Mitchell's advice is suitable for photographers of all levels, whether tourists who want to share their experience with friends or professionals seeking advice for dealing with the special challenges of fall photography. More than a manual of technical considerations, though, California's Fall Color encourages us to be overwhelmed by beauty—to take home an image containing the color but, just as importantly, the essence of that sublime feeling.

This charming, full-color field guide to 25 birds easily found in Berkeley proves that even the city's avian residents are a little quirky.

Meticulously detailed illustrations capture each bird's distinctive physicality and temperament. A Burrowing Owl faces you in a full-on head shot, perhaps having just raised its raspy, chattering alarm call as you trespass on its last remaining Bay Area foothold at the Marina. The Anna's Hummingbird gives you a coy backward glance to assess if you've properly admired its flashy throat feathers, maybe having just performed its signature J-shaped courtship dive. Even in composition, each bird is strikingly individual, whether depicted in mid-dive or creeping into frame. While descriptions of identification and vocalizations are straightforward, author-illustrator Oliver James takes a delightfully creative approach to his write-ups of each species. He invites you to imagine that a Cooper's Hawk, for example, is Steve McQueen in a '68 Mustang, and you, “a pigeon in a rental car with a poor turning radius,” are fleeing through traffic: “It's all over in a matter of seconds.” A joy to read and pore over, Birds of Berkeley will enchant readers far beyond the city limits with its findings gleaned from painstaking and patient wildlife observation.

Veteran journalist Peter Schrag argues that California's role in the era of Donald Trump is twofold: to act as a leader in the resistance to the current administration, and to be held up as an alternative to the course being pursued in Washington. Given the Democratic Party's stronghold on all statewide elected offices and legislature, it isn't surprising that California has become a beacon of progressivism. But this is hardly an inevitability. California was almost where much of the GOP wants to take the nation today, leading the country in tax revolt, passage of the Three Strikes criminal sentencing law, and virtual prohibition of bilingual education in public schools. Schrag points to the state's shifting demographics and the erosion of the Republican Party in the wake of Proposition 187 as two major reasons behind California's shift to the left. It is particularly pertinent, then, that a state that formerly espoused these values now negotiates with other nations on climate control, asks its agents not to sweep courthouses in search of people to deport, and has approved major tax increases. California Fights Back gives proof that things can be better, and raises the possibility of this becoming the story of other states.

Winner of the Nautilus Book Award

Winner of the 2021 FOCAL Award

Silver Award Winner, 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards

Winner of the Book Award for Young People’s Literature, 2020 Maine Literary Awards

A Great Kid Books Best New Book

Building on the brilliance of Fred Korematsu Speaks Up, the newest installment in the Fighting for Justice series introduces young readers to another real-life champion for civil rights: Bridget “Biddy” Mason, an African American philanthropist, healer, and midwife who was born into slavery.

When Biddy Mason arrived in California, where slavery was technically illegal, she was kept captive by her owners and forced to work without pay. But when Biddy learned that she was going to be taken to a slave state, she launched a plan to win her freedom. She refused to be defined by her enslavement, and coauthors Arisa White and Laura Atkins devote much of their narrative to Biddy Mason's later life as a business and civic leader in the fledgling city of Los Angeles. Biddy Mason Speaks Up is an age-appropriate yet unflinching examination of slavery, racism, and community healing in the United States. Each chapter begins with lyrical verse and full-color illustrations that draw readers into the narrative, and is followed by visually engaging sections filled with keyword definitions, historical context, timelines, and primary sources. Throughout the book, the authors pose questions to the reader, such as “How do you see power at work in your community?”, making Biddy Mason's story all the more relatable to the present day.

We bring the strength and beauty of the natural world into our urban landscapes by planting trees, and California is blessed with a rich horticultural history, visible in an abundance of cultivated trees that enrich our lives with extraordinary color, bizarre shapes, unusual textures, and unexpected aromas. A Californian's Guide to the Trees among Us features over 150 of California's most commonly grown trees. Whether native or cultivated, these are the trees that muffle noise, create wildlife habitats, mitigate pollution, conserve energy, and make urban living healthier and more peaceful. Used as a field guide or read with pleasure for the liveliness of the prose, this book will allow readers to learn the stories behind the trees that shade our parks, grace our yards, and line our streets. Rich in photographs and illustrations, overflowing with anecdote and information, A Californian's Guide to the Trees among Us opens our eyes to a world of beauty just outside our front doors.

In 1942, fourteen-year-old Hank Umemoto gazed out a barrack window at Manzanar Internment Camp, saw the silhouette of Mount Whitney against an indigo sky, and vowed that one day he would climb to the top. Fifty-seven years and a lifetime of stories later, at the age of seventy-one, he reached the summit. Part memoir and part hiker's diary, Manzanar to Mount Whitney gives an intimate, rollicking account of Japanese American life California before and after World War II. As he wanders through the mountains of California's Inland Empire, Umemoto recalls pieces of his childhood on a grape vineyard in the Sacramento Valley, his time at Manzanar, where beauty and hope were maintained despite the odds, and his later career as proprietor of a printing firm, all with grace, honesty, and unfailing humor. And all along, the peak of Mount Whitney casts its shadow, a symbol of freedom, beauty, and resilience.