The Road To Los Angeles

I had a lot of jobs in Los Angeles Harbor because our family was poor and my father was dead. My first job was ditchdigging a short time after I graduated from high school. Every night I couldn’t sleep from the pain in my back. We were digging an excavation in an empty lot, there wasn’t any shade, the sun came straight from a cloudless sky, and I was down in that hole digging with two huskies who dug with a love for it, always laughing and telling jokes, laughing and smoking bitter tobacco.

A teenage girl treks across a dangerous, frozen nation to reunite with her family in this Philip K. Dick Award–winning apocalyptic thriller. Wylodine comes from a world of paranoia and poverty. Her family grows marijuana illegally in order to survive. But now she’s been left behind in Ohio to tend the crop alone. Then spring doesn’t return for the second year in a row, bringing unprecedented, extreme winter. With grow lights stashed in her truck and a pouch of precious seeds, Wil begins a journey to join her family in California. But the icy roads and strangers hidden in the hills are treacherous. Gathering a small group of exiles on her way, she becomes the target of a volatime cult leader. Because she has the most valuable skill in the climate chaos: she can make things grow. Road Out of Winter offers a glimpse into an all-too-possible near future, with a chosen family forged in the face of dystopian collapse. Alison Stine’s acclaimed debut “blends a rural thriller and speculative realism into what could be called dystopian noir” (Library Journal, starred review).

Trapped in a small, poverty-ridden town in 1933, under pressure from his father to go into the family business, seventeen-year-old Dominic Molise yearns to fulfill his own dreams.

Most accounts of California’s role in the Civil War focus on the northern part of the state, San Francisco in particular. In Los Angeles in Civil War Days, John W. Robinson looks to the southern half and offers an enlightening sketch of Los Angeles and its people, politics, and economic trends from 1860 to 1865. Drawing on contemporary reports in the Los AngelesStar,Southern News, and other sources, Robinson shows how the war came to Los Angeles and narrates the struggle between the pro-Southern faction and the Unionists. Los Angeles in the early 1860s was a developing town, lacking many of the refinements of civilization that San Francisco then enjoyed, and was much smaller than the bustling metropolis we know today. The book focuses on the effects of the war on Los Angeles, but Robinson also considers social and economic problems to provide a broader view of the community and its place in the nation. The Conscription Act and devalued greenbacks encited public unrest, and the cattle-killing drought of 1862–64, a smallpox epidemic, and recurrent vigilantism challenged Angelenos as well. California historians and those interested in the city’s historical record will find this book a fascinating addition to the body of California’s Civil War history.

A renowned historian and engineer explores the past, present, and future of America's crumbling infrastructure. Acclaimed engineer and historian Henry Petroski explores our core infrastructure from both historical and contemporary perspectives, explaining how essential their maintenance is to America's economic health. Petroski reveals the genesis of the many parts of America's highway system--our interstate numbering system, the centerline that divides roads, and such taken-for-granted objects as guardrails, stop signs, and traffic lights--all crucial to our national and local infrastructure. A compelling work of history, The Road Taken is also an urgent clarion call aimed at American citizens, politicians, and anyone with a vested interest in our economic well-being. Physical infrastructure in the United States is crumbling, and Petroski reveals the complex and challenging interplay between government and industry inherent in major infrastructure improvement. The road we take in the next decade toward rebuilding our aging infrastructure will in large part determine our future national prosperity.