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To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back
When Ernie López was a boy selling newspapers in Depression-era Los Angeles, his father beat him when he failed to bring home the expected eighty to ninety cents a day. When the beatings became unbearable, he took to petty stealing to make up the difference. As his thefts succeeded, Ernie’s sense of necessity got tangled up with ambition and adventure. At thirteen, a joyride in a stolen car led to a sentence in California’s harshest juvenile reformatory. The system’s failure to show any mercy soon propelled López into a cycle of crime and incarceration that resulted in his spending decades in some of America’s most notorious prisons, including four and a half years on death row for a murder López insists he did not commit. To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back is the personal life story of a man who refused to be broken by either an abusive father or an equally abusive criminal justice system. While López freely admits that “I’ve been no angel,” his insider’s account of daily life in Alcatraz and San Quentin graphically reveals the violence, arbitrary infliction of excessive punishment, and unending monotony that give rise to gang cultures within the prisons and practically insure that parolees will commit far worse crimes when they return to the streets. Rafael Pérez-Torres discusses how Ernie López’s experiences typify the harsher treatment that ethnic and minority suspects often receive in the American criminal justice system, as well as how they reveal the indomitable resilience of Chicanos/as and their culture. As Pérez-Torres concludes, “López’s story presents us with the voice of one who—though subjected to a system meant to destroy his soul—not only endured but survived, and in surviving prevailed.”
eBook
If it's not one thing, it's your mother
While Julia Sweeney is known as a talented comedienne and writer/performer of her one-woman shows, she is also a talented essayist--and the past few years have provided her with some rich material. Julia adopted a Chinese girl named Mulan and then, a few years later, married and moved from Los Angeles to Chicago. She writes about deciding to adopt her child, strollers, nannies, knitting, being adopted by a dog, The Food Network, and meeting Mr. Right through an email from a complete stranger. Some of the essays reveal Julia's ability to find that essential thread of human connection, whether it's with her mother-in-law or with an anonymous customer service rep during a late-night phone call. But no matter what the topic, Julia always writes with elegant precision, pinning her jokes with razor-sharp observations while articulating feelings that we all share.--From publisher description.
Book
Backcountry Ghosts
California is an infamously tough place to be poor: home to about
half of the entire nation's homeless population, burdened by
staggering home prices and unsustainable rental rates, California
is a state in crisis. But it wasn't always that way, as
prize-winning historian Josh Sides reveals in Backcountry
Ghosts . In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead
Act, the most ambitious and sweeping social policy in the history
of the United States. In the Golden State more than a hundred
thousand people filed homesteading claims between 1863 and the late
1930s. More than sixty thousand Californians succeeded, claiming
about ten million acres. In Backcountry Ghosts Josh Sides
tells the histories of these Californian homesteaders, their toil
and enormous patience, successes and failures, doggedness in the
face of natural elements and disasters, and resolve to defend
hard-earned land for themselves and their children. While some of
these homesteaders were fulfilling the American Dream-that all
Americans should have the opportunity to own land regardless of
their background or station-others used the Homestead Act to add to
already vast landholdings or control water or mineral rights. Sides
recovers the fascinating stories of individual homesteaders in
California, both those who succeeded and those who did not, and the
ways they shaped the future of California and the American West.
Backcountry Ghosts reveals the dangers of American
dreaming in a state still reeling from the ambitions that led to
the Great Recession.
eBook
Confederate Veterans in Northern California
Drawing on six years of research, this book covers the military service and postwar lives of notable Confederate veterans who moved into Northern California at the end the Civil War. Biographies of hundreds of former rebels are provided, from the oldest brother of the Clanton Gang to the son of a President to plantation owners, dirt farmers, criminals and everything in between.
eBook
Crises and Compassion
Letiche, now in his nineties, provides an intriguing look at the changes that have occurred during his lifetime. Following his Kiev childhood and formative years in Depression-era Montreal, he completed a doctorate at the University of Chicago and took up a Rockefeller fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. As a technical advisor to the Economic Commission for Africa he conducted trade talks with both gifted and corrupt heads of state in sub-Saharan Africa, and later shared a working White House dinner with an infamous American president. His half-century-long teaching career at Berkeley included a front row seat for the Free Speech Movement and the most documented student revolt in popular history. Told with humour, insight, and humility, Crises and Compassion moves nimbly among weighty events and meaningful personal history, showing how \"civility in intellectual exchange\" came to be the guiding principle of a life of monumental experiences.
eBook
After the Fírst Full Moon ín Apríl
In this extraordinary book Josephine Peters, a respected northern California Indian elder and Native healer, shares her vast, lifelong cultural and plant knowledge. The book begins with Josephine's personal and tribal history and gathering ethics. Josephine then instructs the reader in medicinal and plant food preparations and offers an illustrated catalog of the uses and doses of over 160 plants. At a time of the commercialization of traditional ecological knowledge, Peters presents her rich tradition on her own terms, and according to her spiritual convictions about how her knowledge should be shared. This volume is essential for anyone working in ethnobotany, ethnomedicine, environmental anthropology, Native American studies, and Western and California culture and history.
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