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(More customer reviews)History can be exciting, especially when the high points are rendered with such immediacy and clarity. California is both a microcosm and macrocaosm of American History. Richard Rice makes this connection resonant from the original Sutter's Mill gold rush to the current Silicon Valley "gold rush". The themes that define California are U.S. history writ large. Rice lets the reader appreciate California from a variety of personal perspectives: Henry Dana's in "Two Years Before The Mast", Leland Stanford and the other "robber barrons", Hiram Johnson and the reformers, into world war two and the Nisei internees, down through Reagan and the Brown family, and into current times. The history of water rights, which was the basis of the movie Chinatown, becomes a compelling and more accurate story here. The lucid prose is admirably supported by evocative photography. Discover California as it really was and is.
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The Elusive Eden charts the historical development of California, beginning with the evolution of the landscape and climate and the arrival of the first inhabitants, the Indians, through social, political, and environmental controversies of the present and the future. The book portrays a land of remarkable richness and complexity, settled by waves of people from diverse cultures. The text is organized chronologically into 10 parts, each developing a major theme or issue for a particular period in California's history. The first chapter of each part is a narrative that spotlights and dramatizes the personal responses of significant individuals at critical moments of historical change. The authors stress issues of current importance such as: ethnic groups, women, environmental history and social and cultural history.
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