Kevin Starr Bücher

"Over California is a unique and spectacular aerial portrait of America's "Golden State." Through dramatic images photographed high above the cities and mountains of California, this book provides unusual and beautiful perspectives of a place that is, according to author Kevin Starr, a state of mind as well as a state"--Book jacket

San Francisco reporter Jerry Flamm has compiled a treasure trove of facts and anecdotes about the colorful personalities who roamed San Francisco in the first third of this century. 'Hometown San Francisco' shows us the city as it was from 1906 to the middle of the century, during the Great Depression. History, biography, reminiscence and anecdote are here woven together to form a tapestry of San Francisco when it was a wide-open town, when anything could happen, and often did. The book features Mayor Sunny Rolph, who ruled the city with a smile and had a weakness of pretty girls. Other characters include a comical prizefighter named 'Phat Willie' Meehan who beat Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey twice, in the days of the Four Round Game. Before his fights he often sang a song or two to warm up the audience. There was also Policeman David Flamm who kept stability and order on his downtown beat, hobnobbed with gamblers, bookies, boxers, boorblacks, madams, millionaires and eccentrics. There was also the great female impersonator Walter Hart, star of Finocchio's show, who was sentenced to 30 days in jail for singing naughty songs. Finally, there was the officer who arrested Inez Burns, the abortion queen and found a fortune in cash hidden in her piano. She told him to keep it; he refused and used it as evidence instead.

In this second volume of acclaimed historian Kevin Starr's masterful work on Catholics in America, he picks up where he left off in his Continental Ambitions, which traced the stirrings of independence among the colonists of New England.Starr shows how Catholics participated in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States. He then traces the establishment of the first Catholic dioceses in the new republic. In his captivating style, Starr dramatizes the representative personalities in this formative period.

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.

"California has always been our Shangri-la - the promised land of countless pilgrims in search of the American Dream. Now the Golden State's premier historian, Kevin Starr, distills the entire sweep of California's history into one splendid volume. From the age of exploration to the age of Arnold, this is the story of a place at once quintessentially American and utterly unique. Arguing that America's most populous state has always been blessed with both spectacular natural beauty and astonishing human diversity, Starr unfolds a rapid-fire epic of discovery, innovation, catastrophe, and triumph. For generations, California's native peoples basked in the abundance of a climate and topography eminently suited to human habitation. By the time the Spanish arrived in the early sixteenth century, there were scores of autonomous tribes were thriving in the region.-