What I Saw In California

Edwin Bryant (1805-1869) gives his account of his overland journey from Independence, Missouri to San Francisco and his further explorations of the West in 1846-47. He traveled through the Rocky Mountains, across the desert, and throughout California. He often helped the people in the wagon trains with medical needs. This book provided valuable travel tips with extremely detailed descriptions of everything he saw for the 49ers traveling by way of the California Trail.

"The phrase ’seeing the elephant’ symbolized for ’49 gold rushers the exotic, the mythical, the once-in-a-lifetime adventure, unequaled anywhere else but in the journey to the promised land of fortune: California. Most western myths . . . generally depict an exclusively male gold rush. Levy’s book debunks that myth. Here a variety of women travel, work, and write their way across the pages of western migrant history."-Choice "One of the best and most comprehensive accounts of gold rush life to date"ˆ–San Francisco Chronicle

Widely recognized as the godfather of modern American cooking and a mentor to such rising celebrity chefs as Mario Batali, Jeremiah Tower is one of the most influential cooks of the last thirty years. Now, the former chef and partner at Chez Panisse and the genius behind Stars San Francisco tells the story of his lifelong love affair with food -- an affair that helped to spark an international culinary revolution. Tower shares with wit and honesty the real dish on cooking, chefs, celebrities, and what really goes on in the kitchen. Above all, Tower rhapsodizes about food -- the meals choreographed like great ballets, the menus scored like concertos. No other book reveals more about the seeds sown in the seventies, the excesses of the eighties, and the self-congratulations of the nineties. No other chef/restaurateur who was there at the very beginning is better positioned than Jeremiah Tower to tell the story of the American culinary revolution.

“Olmsted finds in Depression-era California the crucible for strong-arm policies against farm workers that bolstered the conservative movement” (Kirkus Reviews). At a time when a resurgent immigrant labor movement is making urgent demands on twenty-first-century America—and when a new and virulent strain of right-wing anti-immigrant populism is roiling the political waters—Right Out of California is a fresh and profoundly relevant touchstone for anyone seeking to understand the roots of our current predicament. This major reassessment of modern conservatism reexamines the explosive labor disputes in the agricultural fields of Depression-era California, the cauldron that inspired a generation of artists and writers and that triggered the intervention of FDR’s New Deal. Noted historian Kathryn S. Olmsted tells how this brief moment of upheaval terrified business leaders into rethinking their relationship to American politics—a narrative that pits a ruthless generation of growers against a passionate cast of reformers, writers, and revolutionaries. “Olmstead’s vivid, accomplished narrative really belongs to the historiography of the left . . . As her strong research shows, race and gender prejudice informed, or deformed, almost the whole of American social and cultural life in the 1930s and was as common on the left as on the right.” —The New York Times Book Review “An accessible work that aids in contextualizing the rise of future conservative leaders such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.” —Publishers Weekly “A major reworking of the Republican right’s origins, this is also a compelling read for anyone interested in California’s outsize importance in America’s recent past.” —Darren Dochuk, author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt