The go-to guide to California’s natural history, now updated with fresh insights on stewardship for a changing climate and diverse naturalist perspectives.

The California Naturalist Handbook offers a fun, science-based introduction to California’s natural history, emphasizing observation, discovery, communication, and stewardship. This accessible guidebook explores geology, native plants and animals, freshwater resources, forest and rangeland resources, conservation biology, and the effects of pressing environmental issues. Aspiring naturalists will learn how to keep a nature journal, practice participatory science, and improve ecosystem resilience.

Used statewide for the California Naturalist Program, this updated edition includes:

• Updated overview of California’s unique ecosystems and plant and animal communities
• Expanded discussions of Indigenous knowledge and stewardship
• Contributions by diverse naturalist leaders including women, Indigenous peoples, and naturalists of color
• A deeper dive into southern California’s urban and desert ecologies
• Current climate change information, including fire and forest management, drought, flooding and groundwater issues, and recognition of climate grief
• Higher quality images showing a more diverse range of habitats

A radical reinterpretation of "Attica," the revolutionary 1970s uprising that galvanized abolitionist movements and transformed prisons.
 
Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls.

Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led the struggle. Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons—not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.

"No book from this past year better explains American popular music than professor Matthew Morrison’s Blacksound."—A Rolling Stone​ Best Music Book of 2024

A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry.

Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
 
Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake—for creators and audiences alike—in revisiting the long history of American popular music.

As climate disruption intensifies the world over, Californians are finding solutions across a diversity of communities and landscapes.
 
Though climate change is a global existential threat, we cannot wait for nation-states to solve the problem when there are actions we can take now to protect our own communities. In Climate Stewardship: Taking Collective Action to Protect California, readers are invited on a journey to discover that all life is interconnected and shaped by climate and to learn how communities can help tackle climate change. 
 
Climate Stewardship shares stories from everyday people and shows how their actions enhance the resilience of communities and ecosystems across ten distinct bioregions. Climate science that justifies these actions is woven throughout, making it easy to learn about Earth's complex systems. The authors interpret and communicate these stories in a way that is enjoyable, inspiring, and even amusing.
 
California is uniquely positioned to develop and implement novel solutions to widespread climate challenges, owing to the state's remarkable biogeographic diversity and robust public science programs. Produced in collaboration with the UC California Naturalist Program, Climate Stewardship focuses on regenerative approaches to energy, agriculture, and land and water use across forested, agricultural, and urban landscapes. The authors' hopeful and encouraging tone aims to help readers develop a sense that they, too, can act now to make meaningful change in their communities.

This short book demystifies how the two systems of technology and capitalism work together and equips readers with practical tools to dismantle them and build a better world, bit by bit.
 
Our society is constantly made to serve the needs of two systems: technology and capitalism. Neither exists outside humans, but both are treated as above and beyond us. The Mechanic and the Luddite offers the critical tools needed to deconstruct these systems—how they work, whom they work for, and what work they do in our lives. With signature style and energy, Jathan Sadowski presents a provocative one-stop shop for understanding the political economy of technology and capitalism.

Each chapter breaks down key features of technological capitalism, offering sharp, synthetic, and authoritative analysis of topics like innovation, labor, data, and risk. It's not enough to know how the machinery of capitalism is put together and how its parts operate; we must also know whom the machines serve and when they should be taken apart, to be rebuilt for new purposes or destroyed for good. The Mechanic and the Luddite provides the political guidance needed to make these crucial decisions.