Home to more than 10 million people, modern Los Angeles County bears little resemblance to the largely agricultural landscape, dotted with small towns, of just over a century ago. Los Angeles County has surged forward on a path of phenomenal growth and constant transformation. Over this course, much of what was both famous and familiar to Angelenos 100 or even 50 years ago has been lost in the name of progress. This collection of more than 200 vintage postcards explores a sampling of these vanishing sites, including the once ubiquitous orange groves, views from the early days of the countys towns, yesteryears famed attractions, landmarks, hotels, and restaurants, and scenes from the roadside era.

Home to more than 10 million people, modern Los Angeles County bears little resemblance to the largely agricultural landscape, dotted with small towns, of just over a century ago. Los Angeles County has surged forward on a path of phenomenal growth and constant transformation. Over this course, much of what was both famous and familiar to Angelenos 100 or even 50 years ago has been lost in the name of progress. This collection of more than 200 vintage postcards explores a sampling of these vanishing sites, including the once ubiquitous orange groves, views from the early days of the county's towns, yesteryear's famed attractions, landmarks, hotels, and restaurants, and scenes from the roadside era.

Orange County formally separated from Los Angeles County in 1889, and theres been no looking back. Wilderness gave way to rich farmlands, where oranges, lemons, avocados, and walnuts made agriculture the new countys most important industry; the region was actually named for the prevalence of its citrus groves. The 20th century brought with it plenty of entrepreneurs, including Walter Knott and later Walt Disney, along with the aerospace industry, oil drilling, beach culture, and more. But the more popular the O.C. became, the more the past began to be lost to development and sprawl. This evocative compendium of photographs revisits many of the places locals held near and dear, including the Golden Bear nightclub, Japanese Village Deer Park, Lion Country Safari, plus popular stores, restaurants, and, of course, the ever-shrinking farmlands. Many of these images are courtesy of the Orange County Archives, and others came from the authors private collection.

With the help of mirrors, trap doors, elevators, photographs, and film, women vanish and return in increasingly spectacular ways throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Karen Beckman tracks the proliferation of this elusive figure, the vanishing woman, from her genesis in Victorian stage magic through her development in conjunction with photography and film. Beckman reveals how these new visual technologies projected their anxieties about insubstantiality and reproducibility onto the female body, producing an image of "woman" as utterly unstable and constantly prone to disappearance. Drawing on cinema studies and psychoanalysis as well as the histories of magic, spiritualism, and photography, Beckman looks at particular instances of female vanishing at specific historical moments—in Victorian magic’s obsessive manipulation of female and colonized bodies, spiritualist photography’s search to capture traces of ghosts, the comings and goings of bodies in early cinema, and Bette Davis’s multiple roles as a fading female star. As Beckman places the vanishing woman in the context of feminism’s discussion of spectacle and subjectivity, she explores not only the problems, but also the political utility of this obstinate figure who hovers endlessly between visible and invisible worlds. Through her readings, Beckman argues that the visibly vanishing woman repeatedly signals the lurking presence of less immediately perceptible psychic and physical erasures, and she contends that this enigmatic figure, so ubiquitous in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, provides a new space through which to consider the relationships between visibility, gender, and agency.

As suburban sprawl conquer the country, the vestiges of a lost way of life are falling under the wrecking ball. Photographer Eastman has captured these quirky buildings on film before they vanish, in this book that delights in the idiosyncrasies of America's vernacular styles.

Joseph M. Forshaw, one of the world’s leading authorities on parrots, calls attention to the threats they face: they are one of the most endangered groups of birds, with a growing number of species nearing extinction. The main threats arise from habitat loss through deforestation and agricultural development and from the taking of birds for the international live-bird trade. Vanished and Vanishing Parrots brings together information on species that have become extinct in historical times with information on species that are in danger of becoming extinct to increase public awareness of the plight of these magnificent birds. Vivid colour plates by the wildlife artist Frank Knight draw attention to the spectacular species that we have lost or that could be lost. Forshaw’s work gives us fascinating insight into these endangered and extinct parrots. Vanished and Vanishing Parrots will be a valuable reference for scientific, ornithological and avicultural organisations, as well as individual lovers of birds and of illustrated natural history books.

Pynchon’s California is the first book to examine Thomas Pynchon’s use of California as a setting in his novels. Throughout his 50-year career, Pynchon has regularly returned to the Golden State in his fiction. With the publication in 2009 of his third novel set there, the significance of California in Pynchon’s evolving fictional project becomes increasingly worthy of study. Scott McClintock and John Miller have gathered essays from leading and up-and-coming Pynchon scholars who explore this topic from a variety of critical perspectives, reflecting the diversity and eclecticism of Pynchon’s fiction and of the state that has served as his recurring muse from The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) through Inherent Vice (2009). Contributors explore such topics as the relationship of the “California novels” to Pynchon’s more historical and encyclopedic works; the significance of California's beaches, deserts, forests, freeways, and “hieroglyphic” suburban sprawl; the California-inspired noir tradition; and the surprising connections to be uncovered between drug use and realism, melodrama and real estate, private detection and the sacred. The authors bring insights to bear from an array of critical, social, and historical discourses, offering new ways of looking not only at Pynchon’s California novels, but at his entire oeuvre. They explore both how the history, geography, and culture of California have informed Pynchon’s work and how Pynchon’s ever-skeptical critical eye has been turned on the state that has been, in many ways, the flagship for postmodern American culture. CONTRIBUTORS: Hanjo Berressem, Christopher Coffman, Stephen Hock, Margaret Lynd, Scott MacLeod, Scott McClintock, Bill Millard, John Miller, Henry Veggian