From the Indians who inhabited the land before the first Europeans saw it through the warfare that would finally leave the province in American hands, this book, by the author of "Legends and Lies", traces the history of California.

Poetry. BEAR FLAG REPUBLIC features poems from ninety poets, including Killarney Clary, Wanda Coleman, Peter Everwine, Richard Garcia, Amy Gerstler, Robert Hass, Eloise Klein Healy, Jane Hirshfield, Garrett Hongo, Mark Jarman, Dorianne Laux, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Morton Marcus, Czeslaw Milosz, Luis Omar Salinas, David St. John, Joseph Stroud, Amy Uyematsu, Diane Wakoski, Charles Wright, and Al Young, among many others. This great anthology also includes twenty-two essays from poets, including Robert Bly, Maxine Chernoff, Mark Jarman, Diane Wakoski, Charles Harper Webb, and more. "Speaking is natural; writing is not. Prose and poetry will forever combine and recombine to express what utterly needs to be told"--Al Young. "A prose poem has the shape of water; it spreads out. Some poems are that expansive, that open and fluid, and their shape needs to reflect their nature..."--Marsha de la O.

Thoroughly researched and finely crafted, After the Grizzly traces the history of endangered species and habitat in California, from the time of the Gold Rush to the present. Peter S. Alagona shows how scientists and conservationists came to view the fates of endangered species as inextricable from ecological conditions and human activities in the places where those species lived. Focusing on the stories of four high-profile endangered species—the California condor, desert tortoise, Delta smelt, and San Joaquin kit fox—Alagona offers an absorbing account of how Americans developed a political system capable of producing and sustaining debates in which imperiled species serve as proxies for broader conflicts about the politics of place. The challenge for conservationists in the twenty-first century, this book claims, will be to redefine habitat conservation beyond protected wildlands to build more diverse and sustainable landscapes.

The Bear Book brings together an impressive range of bear--usually big, hairy men who favor full-face beards and prefer to wear jeans and flannel shirts--viewpoints to explore this unique social and cultural phenomenon that stretches from America to western Europe to Australia! On the personal level, you learn what beardom means to different people in their daily lives, and on a broader level, its cultural implications for not only the gay community, but also society as a whole. As this book moves across the wide spectrum of bear identities, you learn about the defining forces of identity, the significance of differences among masculinities, and the shapings of the bear movement from different viewpoints. The Bear Book is the first compilation of sociological and cultural analytical investigations of the contemporary gay bear phenomenon. To this end, Editor Les Wright brings together both objective and subjective viewpoints to create a forum where bears can speak for themselves. Through their voices, you’ll learn about: bears and sexual identity gay male iconography socializing on the Internet sexual politics (gender, class, “looks-ism,” and body image) gay mass media, the single most powerful force in the current construction of ”bears” bears, power, and glamor bear-as-image vs. bear-as-attitude Gays, lesbians, lesbigay scholars, bears, and social scientists are sure to find The Bear Book thought-provoking and insightful as it broaches questions such as: Are bears caught up in a utopian-romantic impulse to reinvent themselves? What was radical lesbianism’s impact on the bear movement? To what extent are bears only another group of exploited consumers in a fragmented market system? And, is it possible to establish social liberation through enslavement to your sexual passions? For both your pleasure and your education, The Bear Book examines nearly every corner of beardom, including bear history, identity, social spaces, iconography, and its constituency abroad.