A fun, fresh tribute to the Golden State, illustrated with gorgeous color photography, fascinating historical images, and cool memorabilia. Learn anew the legends, landmarks, and lore of historic sites, such as Bodie, Point Reyes, the Knights Ferry Bridge, Mission Santa Barbara, Carson Mansion in Old Town Eureka, Death Valley, Glacier Point, and Alcatraz. Delving into the people, places, and activities that have defined California through the years, this book explores all that makes California great: the Big Sur coast, the Monterey Jazz Festival, Napa Valley’s wine country, Hollywood, the redwood trees of Muir Woods, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite Valley, big game fishing, surfing, agriculture, politics, music, sports, and much, much more. Turn the pages for a visual feast of this extraordinary state!

The Salton Sea is a man-made catastrophe, redolent with the smell of algae and decomposing fish. Nevertheless, the lake's vast, placid expanses continue to attract birdwatchers, tourists and artists. In Greetings from the Salton Sea, photographer Kim Stringfellow explores the history of California's largest lake from its disastrous beginnings—the "sea" was formed when Colorado River levees broke and spilled into a depression 280 feet below sea level—to its heyday as a desert paradise in the 1950s and its current state as an environmental battleground. Like the 400-plus species of birds that use the lake as a halfway point in their annual migration, developers flocked to the water too: they planted palm trees, built golf courses, and hired showstoppers such as the Beach Boys to perform at area resorts. These days, politicians seek to redirect the lake's only source of replenishment—agricultural runoff from surrounding farms—to water golf courses and green lawns elsewhere. Greetings from the Salton Sea's photographs capture the war among policymakers, environmentalists, developers, and the individuals still living along the lake's shores. As Stringfellow aptly documents, it is a war for water and, ultimately, for existence.

In this engrossing, provocative, and intimate memoir, a young journalist reflects on her childhood in the heartland, growing up in an increasingly isolated meditation community in the 1980s and ’90s—a fascinating, disturbing look at a fringe culture and its true believers. When Claire Hoffman’s alcoholic father abandons his family, his desperate wife, Liz, tells five-year-old Claire and her seven-year-old brother, Stacey, that they are going to heaven—Iowa—to live in Maharishi’s national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. For Claire’s mother, Transcendental Meditation—the Maharishi’s method of meditation and his approach to living the fullest possible life—was a salvo that promised world peace and enlightenment just as their family fell apart. At first this secluded utopia offers warmth and support, and makes these outsiders feel calm, secure, and connected to the world. At the Maharishi School, Claire learns Maharishi’s philosophy for living and meditates with her class. With the promise of peace and enlightenment constantly on the horizon, every day is infused with magic and meaning. But as Claire and Stacey mature, their adolescent skepticism kicks in, drawing them away from the community and into delinquency and drugs. To save herself, Claire moves to California with her father and breaks from Maharishi completely. After a decade of working in journalism and academia, the challenges of adulthood propel her back to Iowa, where she reexamines her spiritual upbringing and tries to reconnect with the magic of her childhood. Greetings from Utopia Park takes us deep into this complex, unusual world, illuminating its joys and comforts, and its disturbing problems. While there is no utopia on earth, Hoffman reveals, there are noble goals worth striving for: believing in belief, inner peace, and a firm understanding that there is a larger fabric of the universe to which we all belong.

Describes fast-food restaurants, motels, and unique roadside attractions in each of the fifty states, and features color photos of artifacts and vintage images.

A detailed look at the state’s most terrifying and destructive disasters—photos included. Home to hundreds of faults, California leads the nation in frequency of earthquakes every year. And despite enduring their share of the natural disasters, residents still speculate over the inevitable “big one.” More than three thousand people lost their lives during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Long Beach’s 1933 earthquake caused nearly $50 million in damages. And the Northridge earthquake injured thousands and left a $550 million economic hit. In this book, historian Abraham Hoffman explores the personal accounts and aftermath of California’s most destructive tremors.