California Historian, Louise Nelson Dyble, on the Golden Gate Bridge and TJ Kent: Oct 14th in Berkeley; Oct. 16 in Oakland

Past CSA President, Louise Nelson Dyble will be appearing at University Press Books in Berkeley to present on her recent book, Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge. She will also be presenting on seminal UC Berkeley and City of Berkeley planner, TJ Kent, at the Planning History Conference that weekend. See the University Press Books event here. See the SACRPH, Planning History Conference, program here.

The announcement from University Press Books:

Louise Nelson Dyble, author of

Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge

Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 5:30-7:00

The impact of the Golden Gate Bridge on the San Francisco Bay Area has been much more than visual—toll revenue has allowed the small group of appointees in charge of the structure to build a minor political empire, shaping the regional landscape and economy in the process.  Even though the agency responsible for the bridge was extremely unpopular and its officials were notorious for crooked dealings and mismanagement by the 1960s, they were able to defend its autonomy by actively opposing oversight, fighting investigations, and spurning reform.  Ultimately, they insured its survival beyond the retirement of construction bonds by expanding operations to include mass transportation—a guaranteed money-loser and perpetual reason to collect tolls. Paying the Toll traces the development and the influence of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District from its creation in the 1920s through its metamorphosis into a regional transportation authority in the 1970s.  Drawing upon previously unavailable sources, it provides an inside view of the high-stakes bureaucratic power politics carried out in the shadow of the bridge.

Louise Nelson Dyble is Assistant Professor of History at Michigan Technological University.

 

Book party at Vesuvio for A Bomb in Every Issue; Sept. 23

City Lights bookstore and Vesuvio Cafe, 255 Columbus @ Jack Kerouac Alley , San Fransciso, will present a book party open to the public celebrating Peter Richardson’s new book, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America, on Wednesday, September 23, 2009, at 7:00 p.m.

Author Peter Richardson will be joined by Ramparts Magazine Alumni.

From the City Lights listing:

A Bomb in Every Issue tells the largely untold story of the wild ride of this hugely influential magazine that achieved countless firsts: it published the first conspiracy theory about JFK’s assassination, it was the first to reveal that the CIA had backed the National Student Association during the Cold War, and its article about the use of napalm on Vietnamese children (another first) caused Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out against the war for the first time. For more info, click here.

 

Berkeley Arts and Letters lecture: Robert Scheer and Peter Richardson to discuss Ramparts Magazine; Sept. 24

Fabled journalist Robert Scheer, and Peter Richardson, author of the newly published, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America, will speak about Ramparts at a Berkeley Arts & Letters event, Thursday, September 24, 7:30 p.m., at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley. 800-838-3006. $15.

 

Author event at Book Passage in Marin; Peter Richardson on Ramparts Magazine; Sept. 25

Peter Richardson (Chair of the California Studies Association) will talk about his new book, A Bomb In Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. From the Book Passage listing:

This is the rollicking story of Ramparts—the San Francisco magazine that captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s, repeatedly scooping the N.Y. Times. Ramparts brought the new left into American living rooms, and it made an indelible imprint on American journalism.

Fri., Sept. 25, 7:00 pm

Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera, CA 94925, Phone: (415) 927-0960

 

Author event at Book Passage in Marin; Mike Miller talks about the Mission Coalition; Sept. 24

Mike Miller will talk about his new book, A Community Organizer’s Tale: People and Power in San Francisco. From the Book Passage listing:

This is the story of a Bay Area neighborhood and its long-term citizens. The Mission Coalition was a group of citizens who fought to keep the community intact in San Francisco’s predominantly Latino Mission District.

Thurs., Sept. 24, 7:00 pm

Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera, CA 94925, Phone: (415) 927-0960

 

Author event at Book Passage in San Francisco: John Buntin on the LAPD; Sept. 24

John Buntin will talk about his new book, L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City at Book Passage in San Francisco on Sept. 24.  From the Book Passage listing:

Buntin offers a fascinating examination of how the LAPD created a  dangerously unaccountable surveillance-intensive model of crime fighting that damaged Los Angeles’s social fabric and eerily prefigured today’s “war on terror.”

Thurs., Sept. 24, 6:00 pm, Book Passage, 1 Ferry Building, #42, San Francisco, CA 94111, Phone: (415) 835-1020

 

BOOK TOUR: Peter Richardson Speaks at the CSA Dinner Series, and Across California on Ramparts Magazine

Please come help us celebrate the release of California studies scholar and CSA chair, Peter Richardson. You can read more about his work at his blog here. Please also find information on Richardson’s book tour below and at his blog.

Peter Richardson, Author

Mr. Richardson will speak on his new book on Ramparts Magazine and the culture and politics of the 60s

7 :00 p.m. – 10 :00 p.m.

Director’s Room, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, 2521 Channing St.(just above Telegraph Ave).

The dinner is buffet style. Dinners are free, but we ask for a small donation for those partaking of wine and beverages.

PLEASE RSVP by Friday, September 11, 2009 to Delores Dillard, Department of Geography, 507 McCone Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA  94720-4740

phone (510)  642-3903 or FAX (510) 642-3370, or e-mail:  deloresd@berkeley.edu

The Seminar is a project of the California Studies Center  at UC Berkeley (part of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment) and is supported by the California Studies Association, Department of Geography and Townsend Center for the Humanities.

To see the full  schedule go to:  http://geography.berkeley.edu/LecturesEvents/CalDinners/CalDinners.html

BOOK TOUR DATES:
The Ramparts book campaign is getting traction. I just heard Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone field a question from “CounterSpin” host Peter Hart, who referred to the history of Ramparts he was reading. Call me a reckless speculator, but I think that book might be A Bomb in Every Issue.

Related articles and coverage are starting to appear, too. A long excerpt appeared in California History, the sharp-looking journal of the California Historical Society. Truthdig posted a piece adapted from Chapter 5. Hunter S. Thompson Books also posted a short piece on HST’s links to Ramparts and a Q&A with me. And the stylish California magazine will run a essay on Ramparts and Berkeley in the September issue.

We’re expecting reviews and coverage in Slate, In These Times, Beyond Chron, and FrontPage. I’ve also been contacted by Andy Ross and Frances Dinkelspiel, who blog about books and publishing.

We’re booking radio and such now. In addition to the programs below, look for interviews with Gustavo Arellano (KPFK), Norm Stockwell (WORT in Madison), and Bob McChesney (WILL AM 580 in Illinois). It looks like there will also be an event at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in late October.

So here’s what’s confirmed on the calendar so far.

Bay Area:

Sept. 16, California Studies Dinner Seminar, Berkeley

Sept. 21, Peninsula Peace and Justice Center with Steve Keating, First Presbyterian Church, Palo Alto, noon and 7:30 p.m.

Sept. 23, City Lights book party with Warren Hinckle, Larry Bensky, and Reese Erlich, Vesuvio Cafe, San Francisco, 7 p.m.

Sept. 24, Berkeley Arts & Letters with Robert Scheer, introduction by Susan Griffin, First Congregational Church, 7:30 p.m.

Sept. 25, Book Passage with Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, Corte Madera, 7 p.m.

Sept. 29, Capitola Book Cafe, 7:30 p.m.

Los Angeles:

Oct. 5, Book Soup, Sunset Strip

Oct. 6, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, Huntington Library, San Marino.

Oct. 6, USC with Robert Scheer’s class

Oct. 7, USC with Robert Scheer’s class

Oct. 9, Village Books with Derek Shearer, Pacific Palisades, 7:30 p.m.

Media appearances:

July 29, “Politics with Norman Solomon,” KWMR 90.5 FM

Aug. 19, “This Is America” with Jon Elliott, San Diego 1700 AM, 4:30 p.m.

Aug. 23, “Sunday Sedition,” KPFA, 94.1, 9-11 a.m.

Sept. 15, “America Offline,” KWMR, 90.5 FM, 5:30-6:30.

Sept. 15, “The Pat Thurston Program” with John Rothmann, KGO AM 810, 11 p.m.

Oct. 7, “On the Radio” with Jon Wiener, KPFK, 90.7, 4-5 p.m.

 

Kevin Starr interviewed by Patt Morrison in the LA Times

The LA Times today features a charming interview of Kevin Starr by Patt Morrison as the historian’s latest and perhaps last book on California’s history, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963, reaches bookstores.

 

“Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963,” Kevin Starr’s latest, reviewed by Tim Rutten

The latest and concluding volume in Kevin Starr’s eight-volume series on the history of California, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963, has now been published.  Tim Rutten reviewed the book in today’s (July 8, 2009) Los Angeles Times.

The review concludes as follows:

The unspoken subtext of this book is the loss inherent — and unavoidable — in California’s greatest era of success. Population growth, suburban expansion and unprecedented economic development did despoil many places that held a kind of sanctity for generations. One can celebrate, for example, the creative, almost Alexandrine ferment that cultural diversity has given Southern California and still (as native Californians of a certain age will) regret that our own children never will sit on their grandparents’ porch and smell the perfume of orange groves blooming around them — or drive from Santa Barbara to San Diego passing quaint little beach towns strung like white stucco beads along strands of empty sand.

One feels the loss and yet knows, as Starr so clearly does, that, whatever it ultimately may mean, the dream of California will most surely die if it is denied to those who come after us. Aside from his official credentials, Starr also is deeply schooled in Catholic theology, with a long association with the Dominicans at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, and something of the outlook of tragic Christianity informs this final volume. In an interview about California some years ago, he invoked that viewpoint’s patron saint, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, who “called it the ‘tragic sense of life’ — when bounty and beauty no longer come as unearned increment.” California, Starr said, “is increasingly difficult, competitive, and aware of enormous challenges that are forcing its citizens and institutions to struggle mightily. The typical American dreamer can no longer merely say, as he once did: ‘The solution is that I have come to California.’ The ante has been upped.”

With “Golden Dreams,” Starr has completed a magnificent gift to the people of his native state. No other in the union possesses so intelligent, humane and comprehensive a synoptic account of its origins and development. That’s all of a piece with the author’s convincing notion of California’s singularity. He has given his contemporaries and generations to come a story filled with heroic examples and tragic caution. Most of all, it is a series of histories that — like any life worth dreaming of — is worthwhile from beginning to end.

The blog will link to more reviews of the book as they become available.

–Frank Gruber

 

CSA Steerers: Two New Books, Ramparts Magazine and the Golden Gate Bridge

With the flurry of activity around our April conference on the Silicon Valley, we have been tardy in reporting on two new books from our own ranks. Earlier this year, Louise Nelson Dyble’s book, Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge, came out. Dyble is chair, ex officio, of the CSA. Peter Richardson’s book on Ramparts Magazine, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America,  is due out in a couple short months. Richardson is the current chair of the CSA.

Check out Paying the Toll here, and Richardson’s report on Dyble’s book here, where he notes her appearance on Jonathan Rowe’s KWMR radio show.

Take a look at Dyble’s very interesting blog on issues around her work at http://www.payingthetoll.net/

Richardson’s blog is here, containing general information around California studies from Richardson’s “at large” activities,including updates on Ramparts goings-on.

 

UC Press Awarded Major Grant for California Studies Initative from Mellon Foundation

UC Press Awarded Major Grant for California Studies Initiative

via University of California Humanities Research Institute.

UC Press Awarded Major Grant for California Studies Initiative

April 2009

University of California Press (UC Press) is pleased to announce it has received a major contribution from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a strategic initiative in California Studies. The $722,000 grant will support the creation of a journal, working papers collection, and annual conference in this emerging field.

Creating a multi-campus research and teaching initiative in California Studies is among the University of California’s most important current priorities. “Support from the Mellon Foundation is critically important at a variety of levels,” states University of California (UC) Vice Provost Daniel Greenstein, “lending credibility to an evolving field of scholarly inquiry while at the same time enabling substantial innovation on the part of UC Press and the partners it has invited into this venture.”

The collaborative project will be led by UC Press in partnership with a number of organizations both within and outside UC, including the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), the UC California Studies Consortium (UCCSC), and the California Digital Library (CDL). The interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, which will be published in both print and digital editions, will draw on perspectives from numerous disciplines, including history, literature, anthropology, sociology, politics, ecology, and the visual arts. The journal will be supported by a collection of working papers, which will allow scholars in the field to post work in progress and invite comment. In addition, an annual conference will help guide the continuing development of the field.

UCHRI Director David Theo Goldberg states, “This project is crucial to the long-term viability, stability, and expanding capacity of UC’s California Studies Initiative to impact scholarship across a range of fields. Furthermore, it is instrumental to reaching citizens and policymakers outside of academia, as well as communities beyond state borders.”

Books on California and the West have formed a major part of UC Press’s editorial program for decades. In recent years California has become a vital topic of research, teaching, and policy debate. Recent trends suggest California has assumed a level of demographic and economic power that is reconfiguring the politics and economics of the United States, the Pacific region, and the world. The state’s increasingly global reach is evident in its immigrant population, which is among the most diverse anywhere.

“The relations between California and the larger world constitute subjects of compelling importance not only for scholars but for the public at large,” asserts Louis S. Warren, W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History at UC Davis and a member of the UCCSC steering committee. “To my mind, there could be no better home for the new journal than UC Press, one of the nation’s leading academic publishers and one of the few in the world that has the ability to bring scholarship to a broad public audience.”

The Mellon Foundation’s grant will enable UC Press and its partners to broaden the forum for scholarly communication in California Studies, provide an interdisciplinary venue for new research findings, foster interconnections among scholars, and serve as an incubator for more extensive research and publications.

“We are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for fostering scholarship in California Studies at this critical moment,” notes UC Press Director Lynne Withey. “We look forward to collaborating with our partners throughout the scholarly community to disseminate the results of the Foundation’s investment to a wide and diverse international audience.”

For more information, please visit www.ucpress.edu or contact UC Press Regional Publisher Kim Robinson at kim.robinson@ucpress.edu or 510-643-3741.

 

LaborFest Schedule Now Online: EVENTS July 2-July 31

LaborFest 2009
July 2 – July 31

LaborFest 2009 Schedule is up

This year is the 75th anniversary of the San Francisco General Strike and the West Coast maritime workers strike. The ‘34 strike and maritime strike was an important point in  strengthening organized labor and bringing hundreds of thousands of workers into our unions.  In commemoration of this significant historical anniversary for San Francisco and Northern California labor, LaborFest will be having many special events including an art exhibition, presentations, a labor jeopardy contest as well as a labor film festival that will include videos of the San Francisco general strike.

There are also plans for a commemoration march and concert in San Francisco and educational conference.

LaborFest this year will also be honoring the workers who made the strike, the role of the San Francisco Labor Council and the workers who have built the Bay Area including building the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge and the newly constructed Al Zampa Bridge which is the first major bridge named after an iron worker. Labor faces great challenges today as it did 75 years ago and the need to learn about our history, and how we won victories in the past is vital for today.

 

New Book on Prop. 13 from IGS at UC Berkeley + Companion Conference Online

Our colleague, Ethan Rarick, the director of the Center for Politics and Public Service at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, sends us information on IGS’s publication of this new book on Prop 13. Ever timely, revisiting Prop 13 is especially critical now with rumbles of a constitutional convention and new tax policies reverberating through the state. The book contains articles from several friends of the California Studies Association.

In addition to the book, take a look at IGS’s recent conference on Prop 13: the conference is available on several video sites linked from this site where  you can also view slide presentations. IGS has other publications here.

After the Tax Revolt: California’s

Proposition 13 Turns 30

Jack Citrin and Isaac William Martin, editors

A New Examination of the Legacy of a California Political Milestone

In 1978 California voters shocked the political world by approving Proposition 13, a strict limit on local property tax rates. No state had ever approved such a far-reaching constitutional limitation of the power to tax. And Californians did not just approve it; they embraced it, rejecting dire warnings of doomsday from the state’s political, business, and academic leaders. Voter turnout was the highest recorded for any off-year election in the history of California and the tax cut won in a landslide, with 65 percent of the vote. Thirty years later, Proposition 13 remains firmly entrenched in California’s constitution, but what has it meant for politics and public policy in the state?

On June 6, 2008, the thirtieth anniversary of the adoption of Proposition 13, a group of scholars, journalists and policy experts gathered to assess the legacy of this groundbreaking measure. Their mandate was a simple one: assess what we have learned about the political, economic, and fiscal consequences of Proposition 13 over the last 30 years.

After the Tax Revolt: California’s Proposition 13 Turns 30 is a result of that conference, and an attempt to summarize the state of our knowledge about the consequences of this critical event in the history of California and the United States. This collection of essays constitutes a cutting-edge and timely review of one of the most important reforms in California history, and will be crucial for anyone trying to gain a full understanding of politics and policy in the Golden State.

Order at igs.berkeley.edu/publications or by calling 510-642-1428

Contributors include:
Mark DiCamillo, Field Poll
David Doerr, California Taxpayers Association
William Fischel, Dartmouth
Joel Fox, Fox and Hounds Daily
John Fund, Wall Street Journal
David Gamage, UC-Berkeley
Jean Ross, California Budget Project
Terri Sexton, California State University, Sacramento
Steven Sheffrin, UC-Davis
Kirk Stark, UCLA

About the Editors:
Jack Citrin is Heller Professor of Political Science and the director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Isaac Martin is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego.

--
Ethan Rarick
Director
Robert T. Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service
Institute of Governmental Studies
University of California, Berkeley
111 Moses MC 2370
Berkeley, CA  94720
510-642-5158
erarick@berkeley.edu

 

Listen: Christensen, Worster, White: A Passion for Nature: Exploring the Life of John Muir| Aurora Forum

John Christensen, with Richard White and others leads a great program called the Spatial History Project at Stanford. All historians of nature, take a listen to this conversation on KQED about Donal Worster’s new book on John Muir. Fantastic stuff.–ed.

A Passion for Nature: Exploring the Life of John Muir

Donald Worster and Richard White with Jon Christensen

Thursday, May 7, 2009 | 7:30–9:00pm | Kresge Auditorium

In Donald Worster’s new biography, John Muir’s “special self” is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. Rich in detail and personal anecdote, it traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir’s passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, a self-made man of wealth and political influence, and a man for whom mountaineering was “a pathway to revelation and worship.”

via A Passion for Nature: | Aurora Forum.

 

Kevin Bruce’s California’s Mural Towns

This post comes from the BoomerCafe blog.

California’s Mural Towns | BoomerCafé™ … it’s your place.

Amid all the diverse art and culture in California are its murals … large murals created over the last several decades, and located mostly in smaller towns. San Francisco-born art historian Kevin Bruce has traveled the state to write about its murals for a new book, “Large Art in Small Places: Discovering the California Mural Towns.”

California has always been in the cultural avant-garde. The state’s major metropolitan areas, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and San Diego, are hotbeds of mural creativity. Diverse cultural, political, economic, and sometimes purely artistic influences have helped create and nurture cutting-edge murals of all styles and persuasions.

 

Tom Killion at Kepler’s in Menlo Park May 28

Tom Killion will be appearing at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park to discuss his and Gary Snyder’s new book, Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints, on May 28 at 7:30 p.m.  From the Kepler’s announcement:

In a new collaboration by the authors of the bestselling The High Sierra of California, Tom Killion and Gary Snyder, readers are introduced to the unique mountain overlooking San Francisco Bay. A source of story and myth since time began, Mt. Tamalpais has inspired conservationists, trail builders, botanists, artists, and poets for more than a century. With freshness and sustained delight, Tamalpais Walking explores Mt. Tamalpais s natural, cultural, historic, and spiritual dimensions. It is a book shaped by two master craftsmen collaborating on an enterprise nurtured by long and passionate involvement.

Woodcut and letterpress artist Tom Killion grew up in Marin County, on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, where the rugged scenery inspired him from an early age to create landscape prints strongly influenced by traditional Japanese woodblock prints. Along with publishing fine art letterpress books, Killion holds a Ph.D. in African history from Stanford University and has taught history at several Bay Area universities.

Kepler’s Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park CA, 94025
(650) 324-4321 Store Hours

 

Louise Dyble on the Golden Gate Bridge

Don’t take this title literally. Louise isn’t on the Golden Gate Bridge, but she was on Jon Rowe’s KWMR show last night talking about Paying the Toll, her history of the bridge. And, more specifically, the special district created to manage it.

I was in Point Reyes Station last night and happened to hear a bit of the show. I also saw Jon, who mentioned some of the big stories Louise is sitting on. One is that the bridge district killed the extension of BART into Marin County. I’d always thought that anti-growth forces were responsible for that.

What’s ironic, of course, is that the bridge was constructed precisely to foster growth and development. That’s why Ansel Adams and other Sierra Clubbers opposed its construction.

 

Mark Arax at Kepler’s in Menlo Park May 13

Mark Arax will be appearing at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park to discuss his new book, West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State, on May 13 at 7:30 p.m.  From the Kepler’s announcement:

Teddy Roosevelt once exclaimed, “When I am in California, I am not in the West. I am west of the West,” and in this book, Mark Arax spends four years travelling up and down the Golden State to explore its singular place in the world. This is California beyond the clichés. This is California as only a native son, deep in the dust, could draw it.

Compelling, lyrical, and ominous, his new collection finds a different drama rising out of each confounding landscape. And, in the end, he provides a moving epilogue to the murder of his own father, a crime in the California heartland finally solved after thirty years.

Award-winning author and journalist Mark Arax is a co-author of The King of California and author of In My Father’s Name. He is a contributing writer at Los Angeles magazine and a former senior writer at the Los Angeles Times. He teaches nonfiction writing at Claremont McKenna College.

Kepler’s Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park CA, 94025
(650) 324-4321 Store Hours

Monday through Thursday – 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Friday and Saturday – 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Sunday – 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

 

“West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State” Mark Arax at Book Passage in Marin, May 8

Mark Arax will talk about his new book, West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State, at the Book Passage bookstore in Marin on May 8.  From the Book Passage announcement:

In the tradition of Joan Didion, Arax combines journalism, essay, and memoir to capture social upheaval as well as the sense of being rooted in a community. Piece by piece, the stories become a whole, a panorama of California and America in a new century

Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94925
Phone: (415) 927-0960

May 8, 2009, 7:00 pm

 

More obits for Jim Houston

The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times also ran inciteful obituaries for Jim Houston.

 

Jim Houston, Past Recipient of the CSA Carey McWilliams Award, Dies

The CSA notes the passing of a friend and colleague, James Houston. The following article appeared in the SF Chronicle on Friday, April 24.

---

In one of Mr. Houston’s most lauded novels, 2001’s “Snow Mountain Passage,” he wrote poignantly of the Donner Party’s famous deadly journey through the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846-47, focusing particularly on one family’s survival to become California pioneers.

So it was only fitting that when Mr. Houston knew cancer was about to claim him, he asked that his final hours be spent in his Santa Cruz home – a home that, years before, had been the place where Patty Reed Lewis, a member of that same Donner Party family he wrote about, spent her final hours as well.

“Jim had a really strong link to that place, and it was very special that he made it back there for his passing,” said Santa Cruz writer Geoffrey Dunn, a longtime friend. “He got to die there surrounded by family and friends.”

And, most fittingly, history.

Mr. Houston died April 16 at age 75.

For the past 40 years, he has been considered one of the foremost chroniclers – in both fiction and nonfiction – of the heartbeat and zeitgeist of America west of the Rockies, and its link to Hawaii and the rest of the Pacific Rim.

“Farewell to Manzanar,” the book he wrote with wife Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston in 1973, has become a staple of school reading lists. It chronicles Wakatsuki Houston’s wrenching time in the Manzanar Japanese American internment camp east of the Sierra during World War II. The book earned the couple the Humanitas Prize and opened people’s eyes to a view of the camps that they had not known before.

“Californians: Searching for the Golden State,” Mr. Houston’s account of traveling the state to understand it, and “Continental Drift,” his novel about a family living above the San Andreas Fault, helped portray the mind-set of California as few other works have. Similar insights came in his explorations of the Pacific Rim in the nonfiction “In the Ring of Fire” as well as his documentary films about Hawaii including, “The Hawaiian Way.”

Among Mr. Houston’s many commendations were two American Book Awards and an Emmy nomination for the film version of “Manzanar.”

Born and reared in San Francisco, Mr. Houston met his wife while earning a bachelor’s degree in dramatic arts at San Jose State in 1956 – an interest he continued to develop all his life as he played guitar in local folk and bluegrass bands. After serving three years in the U.S. Air Force, he earned a master’s degree in American literature at Stanford University, where he studied with Western writer Wallace Stegner.

As a teacher over the past 40 years at many campuses, including Stanford, UC Santa Cruz and San Jose State, Mr. Houston also helped nurture generations of writers. He brought the same nurturing approach to raising his children, in a very Western way.

“My dad taught me so many things that in retrospect I see prepared me to go out into the world and be independent,” said his daughter, Corinne Houston of Santa Cruz. “He showed me how to fix a flat, how to set a gopher trap in an organic garden … that’s the way he was. Very hands-on. He wanted me to be self-sufficient.”

In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Houston is survived by a son and another daughter, Joshua Houston of Honolulu and Gabrielle Houston Neville of Santa Cruz.

Services will be Saturday at 12:30 p.m. at Chaminade Resort, Santa Cruz, 1 Chaminade Lane, Santa Cruz. Memorial contributions can be sent to: Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, P.O. Box 1416, Nevada City, CA 95959.

E-mail Kevin Fagan at kfagan@sfchronicle.com.

 

“Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints” – Tom Killion & Gary Snyder at Book Passage in Marin, April 28

Artist Tom Killion and poet Gary Snyder give a visual presentation and discuss Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints at Book Passage in Marin on April 28, at 7:00 p.m. The work explores Mt. Tamalpais’ natural, cultural, historic, and spiritual dimensions. “It is a book shaped by two master craftsmen collaborating on an enterprise nurtured by long and passionate involvement.” (from the Book Passage announcement).

Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94925
Phone: (415) 927-0960

April 28, 2009, 7:00 pm

 

Author event at Capitola Book Café: Eric Soderquist and Chris Burkard presnt their “California Surf Project” April 22

The Capitola Book Café will present the authors of The California Surf Project April 22, at 7:30 p.m.  From the book café’s listing:

Eric Soderquist is a professional surfer and artist who has participated as both in numerous contests, films and community events while traveling the world from Peru to Australia. Chris Burkard is a surf photographer who has worked for Surfer, Surfing, Transworld Surf, Surfline.com, Patagonia and Burton Snowboards; he is the winner of the Follow The Light Foundation grant (in memory of Larry Moore). Together they cajoled their Volkswagen bus along Highway 1 from the Oregon border to the Tijuana Sloughs. Their fully illustrated book is a love letter to the astounding California Coast and a testament to the passion for catching a perfect wave. This event includes a visual presentation.

CAPITOLA BOOK CAFE
1475 41st Avenue, Capitola, CA 95010
831-462-4415

 

Book Signing with Kauko Nakane at the National Japanese American Historical Society in San Francisco, May 2

The National Japanese American Historical Society will be hosting a book-signing with Kauko Nakane, author of Nothing Left in My Hands, a moving portrait of the lives of early Japanese immigrants in Pajaro Valley, California.

Saturday, May 2, 2009, 2 – 3:30pm
In the NJAHS Gallery, 1684 Post Street San Francisco, CA 94115 – (415) 921.5007
For more information, go to the NJAHS website.

 

Ramparts Piece in California History

I should be receiving page proofs soon for a piece that will run in California History. I was delighted to hear from editor Janet Fireman, who suggested I submit something from the Ramparts book, which is now in production. The essay is adapted from Chapter 3, “The Perilous Fight,” which covers the 1964-67 period. That’s when art director Dugald Stermer and Robert Scheer, who would eventually become editor-in-chief, signed on to the magazine.

Another boon: Shelly Kale, managing editor of California History, decided to feature the cover art from the July 1966 issue of Ramparts. It’s Edward Sorel’s “The Aviary [Hawkus Caucus Americanus],” which is really something. It looks like that will run on the cover of California History, too.  To see it, go to www.peterrichardson.blogspot.com.

 

“Mud, Blood & Gold: San Francisco in 1849″; author event at Book Passage in San Francisco, Apr. 8

From the Book Passage calendar:

Rand Richards talks about Mud, Blood & Gold: San Francisco in 1849. Richards vividly brings to life what S.F. was like during the landmark year of 1849. Based on eyewitness accounts and previously overlooked official records, Richards chronicles the explosive growth of a wide-open town rife with violence, gambling, and prostitution, all of it fueled by unbridled greed.

Wed, Apr 08, 2009, 6:00 PM

Book Passage Bookstore
in the San Francisco Ferry Building
1 Ferry Building, #42
San Francisco, CA 94111
(415) 835-1020

 

“Searching for Tamsen Donner” by Gabrielle Burton, reviewed in the L.A. Times by William Deverell

A new book about the Donner party, Searching for Tamsen Donner, by Gabrielle Burton, was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2009, by William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and professor of history at USC.

From the review:

“Searching for Tamsen Donner” is a kind of eulogy, one that recounts a trip Burton took in the late 1970s with her husband and five young daughters. An unusual variant of the “on the road” idea, the journey retraced the route the Donner Party took toward its fateful rendezvous with snow and death. Burton wanted to use the trip to research a work of fiction; those plans never came to pass. Instead, all these years hence, we have this odd, unlikely book. History lesson, memoir and intimate family portrait all at once, “Searching for Tamsen Donner” simultaneously re-creates the 1840s and the 1970s, east to west.

For the whole review, click here.

 

Wallace Stegner Centennial: NY Times Takes Notice

The New York Times commemorated the centennial of Wallace Stegner’s birth with an opinion piece by Timothy Egan which focused on the Times’ condescending treatment toward Stegner and other “western” writers.  Mr. Egan writes, in part:

Were Stegner around this week to blow out the 100 candles on his birthday cake, it’s likely he would still be mad at the East Coast Media Conspiracy, and by that he meant this newspaper.

“It was the New York Times that broke his heart,” said Nancy Packer, a retired professor of English at Stanford, who knew Stegner well in the time he nurtured writers from Ken Kesey to Larry McMurtry here on the Farm, as the university is known.

Stegner won the National Book Award for “The Spectator Bird,” which the Times never reviewed. He also won a Pulitzer for his best-loved novel, “Angle of Repose,” which the paper only noticed after the award, and then with a sniff.

Even in anointing him the dean of Western writers, the Times couldn’t get his name right, calling him “William” Stegner. He died in 1993 at the age of 84.

Living and writing in the West, Stegner wrote, left him with the feeling that “I gradually receded over the horizon and disappeared.”

The fact that a writer of Stegner’s stature felt ghettoized with the dreaded tag of “regional author” raises the question of whether our national literature is too tightly controlled by the so-called cultural elite – those people who talk to each other in some mythic Manhattan echo chamber.

–Frank Gruber

 

“The Utopian Impulse in California Culture” – Blog post by Peter Richardson

In his blog, Peter Richardson, who teaches California culture at San Francisco State University, writes, “Without really thinking about it, I started exploring a new aspect of the main theme in my San Francisco State class–the utopian impulse in California culture.”  He continues:

My exploration started with the film “Humboldt County,” which I finally saw on DVD a few weeks ago. It’s about an emotionally shut down medical student in Los Angeles who reconnects with the world after he stumbles upon an alternative (read: pot-growing) scene in Northern California. No need to rehearse the plot details here, but the people he meets are deeply ambivalent about the utopian–or is it dystopian?–community they’ve created.

More at the blog.

For me, I can’t hear the words “utopia” and “California” without thinking about William Alexander McClung’s book, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles, in which Prof. McClung describes how the conflict between utopian dreams and arcadian dreams has defined so much of the culture in L.A.; I suspect the mythologies also have currency in other parts of the state. –Frank Gruber

 

Selling Southern California to Anglos: an Article and a New Book

The topic of how, beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, southern California was marketed to Anglo immigrants has been treated in a recent article and a new book.

The article, “Not just a Golden State: Three Anglo ‘Rushes’ in the Making of Southern California, 1880-1920,” by Glen Gendzel, assistant professor of history at San José State University, appears in the current (Winter 2008-09, Vol. 90, No. 4) issue of Southern California Quarterly, published by the Historical Society of Southern California.

The book is Paradise Promoted: the Booster Campaign that Created Los Angeles, 1870-1930, by Tom Zimmerman, published by Angel City Press of Santa Monica (2008).

In his article, Prof. Gendzel makes the point that while the Gold Rush in northern California is typically viewed as California’s “foundational event,” southern California was settled by well-to-do Anglo immigrants who came in three “rushes” of their own: the “health rush,” the “land rush,” and the “orange rush.”  These booms were not only bigger than the Gold Rush, but they also resulted in the the south becoming the larger population center, with important impacts on culture and demographics as well.

Tom Zimmerman has based his lavishly illustrated book in large part on his own collection of ephemera from the era of boosterism, starting in 1870.  While the book, as its publishers say, may be a “must for every Southern California-lover’s coffee table,” Mr. Zimmerman has also written an extensive text (and helpfully explanatory captions for the illustrations) in which he describes not only the history of but also the techniques used in the various promotional campaigns that actualized the three “rushes” identified by Prof. Gendzel.  By extending the scope of his book through the 1920s, Mr. Zimmerman also identified a fourth rush, namely one focusing on industry, or, rather, “clean industry,” as promoted by the L.A. Chamber of Commerce.  Mr. Zimmerman also carries his narrative into the 1930s, when the Depression caused the local establishment to stop recruiting immigrants and led to the rise of labor and other social movements.

The only quibble I might raise about both the article and the book, is that neither mentions the impact of the oil industry in the region during the era studied.  Southern California was, after all, one of the world’s largest producers of oil in the early 20th century.  I suspect that the roughneck image of the oil industry does not jibe well with Prof. Gendzel’s argument about the impact of genteel, middle-class immigration, nor the promotion of clean industry that Mr. Zimmerman describes.

But having said that, both works are informative, and in the case of Mr. Zimmerman’s book, the pictures really are worth putting on a coffee table.

I also want to mention that I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Mr. Zimmerman on Sunday, Feb. 8, 2009, sponsored by the Santa Monica Conservancy.

–Frank Gruber