Bound in the publisher's original green cloth over boards, spine and cover stamped in gilt. Profusely illustrated throughout in full color. Dust jacket is chipped and worn at the extremities.

Over California

Starr, Kevin

Morrison, Reg

Collins

First edition. Complex narrative creates a mythical history of San Francisco. Sebastian Collins, a winemaker and scholar of the Baroque, joins forces with others to create a center for the book and the arts. Information on libraries and characters such as Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson make an appearance. x , 854 pages. dust jacket.. cloth-backed boards.

Land's End

Literature & Fiction

McGraw=Hill

Documents California's early years, drawing from biographical and cultural records to reveal the dreams of the individuals who settled the state

Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915

History

Americas

Oxford University Press

This second volume in Kevin Starr's passionate and ambitious cultural history of the Golden State focuses on the turn-of-the-century years and the emergence of Southern California as a regional culture in its own right. "How hauntingly beautiful, how replete with lost possibilities, seems that Southern California of two and three generations ago, now that a dramatically diferent society has emerged in its place," writes Starr. As he recreates the "lost California," Starr examines the rich variety of elements that figured in the growth of the Southern California way of life: the Spanish/Mexican roots, the fertile land, the Mediterranean-like climate, the special styles in architecture, the rise of Hollywood. He ives us a broad array of engaging (and often eccentric) characters: from Harrision Gray Otis to Helen Hunt Jackson to Cecil B. DeMille. Whether discussing the growth of winemaking or the burgeoning of reform movements, Starr keeps his central theme in sharp focus: how Californians defined their identity to themselves and to the nation. "A delightful and extremely thorough chronicle of a state that is almost a mythical kingdom."--St. Louis Post-Dispatch "An excellent book...vividly written, thoroughly researched, rich in details and alive with interesting, and sometimes incredible people."--Los Angeles Times

Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (Americans & the California Dream)

In the late nineteenth century, California became "the cutting edge of the American dream, " the final frontier both geographically and in the minds of the many men and women who went there to pursue their destinies. In this fascinating volume Keven Starr examines California's formative years to discover the orgins of the California dreams and the social, psychological, and symbolic impact it has had not only on Californians but on the rest of the country.

United States

This second volume in Kevin Starr's passionate and ambitious cultural history of the Golden State focuses on the turn-of-the-century years and the emergence of Southern California as a regional culture in its own right. "How hauntingly beautiful, how replete with lost possibilities, seems that Southern California of two and three generations ago, now that a dramatically diferent society has emerged in its place," writes Starr. As he recreates the "lost California," Starr examines the rich variety of elements that figured in the growth of the Southern California way of life: the Spanish/Mexican roots, the fertile land, the Mediterranean-like climate, the special styles in architecture, the rise of Hollywood. He gives us a broad array of engaging (and often eccentric) characters: from Harrision Gray Otis to Helen Hunt Jackson to Cecil B. DeMille. Whether discussing the growth of winemaking or the burgeoning of reform movements, Starr keeps his central theme in sharp focus: how Californians defined their identity to themselves and to the nation.

Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (Americans and the California Dream)

Kevin Starr is the foremost chronicler of the California dream and indeed one of the finest narrative historians writing today on any subject. The first two installments of his monumental cultural history, "Americans and the California Dream," have been hailed as "mature, well-proportioned and marvelously diverse (and diverting)" (The New York Times Book Review) and "rich in details and alive with interesting, and sometimes incredible people" (Los Angeles Times). Now, in Material Dreams, Starr turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920s, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles. In a lively and eminently readable narrative, Starr reveals how Los Angeles arose almost defiantly on a site lacking many of the advantages required for urban development, creating itself out of sheer will, the Great Gatsby of American cities. He describes how William Ellsworth Smyth, the Peter the Hermit of the Irrigation Crusade, the self-educated, Irish engineer William Mulholland (who built the main aquaducts to Los Angeles), and George Chaffey (who diverted the Colorado River, transforming desert into the lush Imperial Valley) brought life-supporting water to the arid South. He examines the discovery of oil, the boosters and land developers, the evangelists (such as Bob Shuler, the Methodist Savanarola of Los Angeles, and Aimee Semple McPherson), and countless other colorful figures of the period. There are also fascinating sections on the city's architecture the impact of the automobile on city planning, the Hollywood film community, the L.A. literati, and much more. By the end of the decade, Los Angeles had tripled in population and become the fifth largest city in the nation. In Material Dreams, Starr captures this explosive growth in a narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose.

Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (Americans and the California Dream)

The Dream Endures: California Through the Great Depression (Americans and the California Dream)

What we now call "the good life" first appeared in California during the 1930s. Motels, home trailers, drive-ins, barbecues, beach life and surfing, sports from polo and tennis and golf to mountain climbing and skiing, "sportswear" (a word coined at the time), and sun suits were all a part of the good life--perhaps California's most distinctive influence of the 1930s. In The Dream Endures, Kevin Starr shows how the good life prospered in California--in pursuits such as film, fiction, leisure, and architecture--and helped to define American culture and society then and for years to come. Starr previously chronicled how Californians absorbed the thousand natural shocks of the Great Depression--unemployment, strikes, Communist agitation, reactionary conspiracies--in Endangered Dreams, the fourth volume of his classic history of California. In The Dream Endures, Starr reveals the other side of the picture, examining the newly important places where the good life flourished, like Los Angeles (where Hollywood lived), Palm Springs (where Hollywood vacationed), San Diego (where the Navy went), the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (where Einstein went and changed his view of the universe), and college towns like Berkeley. We read about the rich urban life of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in newly important communities like Carmel and San Simeon, the home of William Randolph Hearst, where, each Thursday afternoon, automobiles packed with Hollywood celebrities would arrive from Southern California for the long weekend at Hearst Castle. The 1930s were the heyday of the Hollywood studios, and Starr brilliantly captures Hollywood films and the society that surrounded the studios. Starr offers an astute discussion of the European refugees who arrived in Hollywood during the period: prominent European film actors and artists and the creative refugees who were drawn to Hollywood and Southern California in these years--Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Man Ray, Bertolt Brecht, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, and Franz Werfel. Starr gives a fascinating account of how many of them attempted to recreate their European world in California and how others, like Samuel Goldwyn, provided stories and dreams for their adopted nation. Starr reserves his greatest attention and most memorable writing for San Francisco. For Starr, despite the city's beauty and commercial importance, San Francisco's most important achievement was the sense of well-being it conferred on its citizens. It was a city that "magically belonged to everyone." Whether discussing photographers like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, "hard-boiled fiction" writers, or the new breed of female star--Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, and the improbable Mae West--The Dream Endures is a brilliant social and cultural history--in many ways the most far-reaching and important of Starr's California books.

The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s (Americans and the California Dream)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Starr, Kevin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Starr, Kevin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Starr, Kevin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Over California

Land's End

Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915

Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (Americans & the California Dream)

Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915

Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (Americans and the California Dream)

Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (Americans and the California Dream)

The Dream Endures: California Through the Great Depression (Americans and the California Dream)

Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (Americans and the California Dream)

The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s (Americans and the California Dream)