Title: When government fails: the Orange County bankruptcy
Author: Baldassare, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Economics and Business | Politics | American Studies | Sociology | Law | California and the West
Publisher's Description: When Orange County, California, filed for Chapter 9 protection on December 6, 1994, it became the largest municipality in United States history to declare bankruptcy. In the first comprehensive analysis of this momentous fiscal crisis, Mark Baldassare uncovers the many twists and turns from the dark days in December 1994 to the financial recovery of June 1996. Utilizing a wealth of primary materials from the county government and Merrill Lynch, as well as interviews with key officials and players in this drama, Mark Baldassare untangles the causes of this $1.64 billion fiasco.He finds three factors critical to understanding the bankruptcy: one, the political fragmentation of the numerous local governments in the area; two, the fiscal conservatism underlying voters' feelings about their tax dollars; three, the financial austerity in state government and in meeting rising state expenditures. Baldassare finds that these forces help to explain how a county known for its affluence and conservative politics could have allowed its cities' school, water, transportation, and sanitation agencies to be held hostage to this failed investment pool. Meticulously examining the events that led up to the bankruptcy, the local officials' response to the fiscal emergency, and the road to fiscal recovery - as well as the governmental reforms engendered by the crisis - When Government Fails is a dramatic and instructive economic morality tale. Eminently readable, it underlines the dangers inherent in a freewheeling bull economy and the imperatives of local and state governments to protect fiscal assets. As Baldassare shows, Orange County need not - and should not - happen again.   [brief]
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Title: Postsuburban California: the transformation of Orange County since World War II
Author: Kling, Rob
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Sociology | United States History | American Studies | California and the West | Urban Studies | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: Neither a city nor a traditional suburb, Orange County, California represents a striking example of a new kind of social formation. This multidisciplinary volume offers a cogent case study of the "postsuburban" phenomenon.
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Title: Painting on the left: Diego Rivera, radical politics, and San Francisco's public murals
Author: Lee, Anthony W 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Art | Art History | Californian and Western History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: The boldly political mural projects of Diego Rivera and other leftist artists in San Francisco during the 1930s and early 1940s are the focus of Anthony W. Lee's fascinating book. Led by Rivera, these painters used murals as a vehicle to reject the economic and political status quo and to give visible form to labor and radical ideologies, including Communism.Several murals, and details of others, are reproduced here for the first time. Of special interest are works by Rivera that chart a progress from mural paintings commissioned for private spaces to those produced as a public act in a public space: Allegory of California, painted in 1930-31 at the Stock Exchange Lunch Club; Making a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City , done a few months later at the California School of Fine Arts; and Pan American Unity , painted in 1940 for the Golden Gate International Exposition.Labor itself became a focus of the new murals: Rivera painted a massive representation of a construction worker just as San Francisco's workers were themselves organizing; Victor Arnautoff, Bernard Zakheim, John Langley Howard , and Clifford Wight painted panels in Coit Tower that acknowledged the resolve of the dockworkers striking on the streets below. Radical in technique as well, these muralists used new compositional strategies of congestion, misdirection, and fragmentation, subverting the legible narratives and coherent allegories of traditional murals.Lee relates the development of wall painting to San Francisco's international expositions of 1915 and 1939, the new museums and art schools, corporate patronage, and the concerns of immigrants and ethnic groups. And he examines how mural painters struggled against those forces that threatened their practice: the growing acceptance of modernist easel painting, the vagaries of New Deal patronage, and a wartime nationalism hostile to radical politics.   [brief]
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Title: How the other half works: immigration and the social organization of labor
Author: Waldinger, Roger David
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Labor Studies | Immigration | Chicano Studies | Social Problems | Urban Studies | California and the West | California and the West
Publisher's Description: How the Other Half Works solves the riddle of America's contemporary immigration puzzle: why an increasingly high-tech society has use for so many immigrants who lack the basic skills that today's economy seems to demand. In clear and engaging style, Waldinger and Lichter isolate the key factors that explain the presence of unskilled immigrants in our midst. Focusing on Los Angeles, the capital of today's immigrant America, this hard-hitting book elucidates the other side of the new economy, showing that hiring is finding not so much "one's own kind" but rather the "right kind" to fit the demeaning, but indispensable, jobs many American workers disdain.   [brief]
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Title: Spectacular nature: corporate culture and the Sea World experience
Author: Davis, Susan G 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Popular Culture | American Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This is the story of Sea World, a theme park where the wonders of nature are performed, marketed, and sold. With its trademark star, Shamu the killer whale - as well as performing dolphins, pettable sting rays, and reproductions of pristine natural worlds - the park represents a careful coordination of shows, dioramas, rides, and concessions built around the theme of ocean life. Susan Davis analyzes the Sea World experience and the forces that produce it: the theme park industry; Southern California tourism; the privatization of urban space; and the increasing integration of advertising, entertainment, and education. The result is an engaging exploration of the role played by images of nature and animals in contemporary commercial culture, and a precise account of how Sea World and its parent corporation, Anheuser-Busch, succeed. Davis argues that Sea World builds its vision of nature around customers' worries and concerns about the environment, family relations, and education.While Davis shows the many ways that Sea World monitors its audience and manipulates animals and landscapes to manufacture pleasure, she also explains the contradictions facing the enterprise in its campaign for a positive public identity. Shifting popular attitudes, animal rights activists, and environmental laws all pose practical and public relations challenges to the theme park. Davis confronts the park's vast operations with impressive insight and originality, revealing Sea World as both an industrial product and a phenomenon typical of contemporary American culture. Spectacular Nature opens an intriguing field of inquiry: the role of commercial entertainment in shaping public understandings of the environment and environmental problems.   [brief]
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Title: Global climate change and California: potential impacts and responses 
Author: Knox, Joseph B
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Ecology | California and the West
Publisher's Description: California's extraordinary ecological and economic diversity has brought it prosperity, pollution, and overpopulation. These factors and the state's national and international ties make California an essential test case for the impact of global climate change - temperature increases, water shortages, more ultraviolet radiation. The scientists in this forward-looking volume give their best estimates of what the future holds.Beginning with an overview by Joseph Knox, the book discusses the greenhouse effect, the latest climate modeling capabilities, the implications of climate change for water resources, agriculture, biological ecosystems, human behavior, and energy.The warning inherent in a scenario of unchecked population growth and energy use in California applies to residents of the entire planet. The sobering conclusions related here include recommendations for research that will help us all prepare for potential climate change.   [brief]
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Title: A Ming society: Tài-ho County, Kiangsi, fourteenth to seventeenth centuries 
Author: Dardess, John W 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: John Dardess has selected a region of great political and intellectual importance, but one which local history has left almost untouched, for this detailed social history of T'ai-ho county during the Ming dynasty. Rather than making a sweeping, general survey of the region, he follows the careers of a large number of native sons and their relationship to Ming imperial politics. Using previously unexplored primary sources, Dardess details the rise and development of T'ai-ho village kinship, family lineage, landscape, agriculture, and economy. He follows its literati to positions of prominence in imperial government. This concentration on the history of one county over almost three centuries gives rise to an unusually sound and immediate understanding of how Ming society functioned and changed over time.   [brief]
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Title: The Bug Creek problem and the Cretaceous-Tertiary transition at McGuire Creek, Montana 
Author: Lofgren, Donald L 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Science | Paleontology
Publisher's Description: Bug Creek assemblages from Montana, transitional in composition between typical Cretaceous and Paleocene vertebrate faunas, are critical to K-T extinction debates because they have been used to support both gradual and catastrophic K-T extinction scenarios. Geological and palynological data from McGuire Creek indicate that Bug Creek assemblages are Paleocene and restricted to channel fills entrenched into older sediments, suggesting that the Cretaceous component of the assemblage was reworked. Thus, the author concludes, "Paleocene dinosaurs" are an illusion and the K-T survival rate of mammals is low because the presence of Cretaceous mammals in Bug Creek assemblages is also the result of reworking.   [brief]
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Title: William Faulkner and the tangible past: the architecture of Yoknapatawpha 
Author: Hines, Thomas S
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | Literature | American Literature | United States History
Publisher's Description: The world of William Faulkner is seen from a new perspective in Thomas Hines's imaginative and many-faceted study. Hines assesses the impact of the built environment on Faulkner's consciousness and shows how the architecture of the writer's fictional county of Yoknapatawpha reflects the actual architecture of Oxford, Mississippi, and neighboring areas. Over 110 distinctive photographs, in both color and black-and-white, beautifully complement the text, making this book both a reading and viewing pleasure.Much has been written on the role of nature in Faulkner's work, but architecture and the built environment - the opposite of nature - have been virtually ignored. Arguing that nature and architecture are of equal importance in Faulkner's cosmos, Hines examines the writer's use of architectural modes - primitive, classical, gothic, and modern - to demarcate caste and class, to convey mood and ambience, and to delineate character. Hines provides not only another way of understanding Faulkner's work but also a means of appreciating the power of architecture to reflect what Faulkner called "the comedy and tragedy of being alive."Hines's gifts as an architectural historian and photographer and his intimate knowledge of Faulkner country are evident throughout this handsome book. Combining cultural, intellectual, architectural, and literary history, William Faulkner and the Tangible Past will take Faulkner lovers, as well as lovers of architecture, on a fascinating tour of Yoknapatawpha County.   [brief]
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Title: Gimme some truth: the John Lennon FBI files
Author: Wiener, Jon
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: American Studies | Politics | Sociology | Social Problems | Music | Social Theory | Cultural Anthropology | Law
Publisher's Description: When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the Nixon White House in 1972 about the Bureau's surveillance of John Lennon, he began by explaining that Lennon was a "former member of the Beatles singing group." When a copy of this letter arrived in response to Jon Wiener's 1981 Freedom of Information request, the entire text was withheld - along with almost 200 other pages - on the grounds that releasing it would endanger national security. This book tells the story of the author's remarkable fourteen-year court battle to win release of the Lennon files under the Freedom of Information Act in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. With the publication of Gimme Some Truth , 100 key pages of the Lennon FBI file are available - complete and unexpurgated, fully annotated and presented in a "before and after" format.Lennon's file was compiled in 1972, when the war in Vietnam was at its peak, when Nixon was facing reelection, and when the "clever Beatle" was living in New York and joining up with the New Left and the anti-war movement. The Nixon administration's efforts to "neutralize" Lennon are the subject of Lennon's file. The documents are reproduced in facsimile so that readers can see all the classification stamps, marginal notes, blacked out passages and - in some cases - the initials of J. Edgar Hoover. The file includes lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges.Fascinating, engrossing, at points hilarious and absurd, Gimme Some Truth documents an era when rock music seemed to have real political force and when youth culture challenged the status quo in Washington. It also delineates the ways the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations fought to preserve government secrecy, and highlights the legal strategies adopted by those who have challenged it.   [brief]
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Title: Some trouble with cows: making sense of social conflict 
Author: Roy, Beth
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Sociology | South Asia | Politics | Hinduism
Publisher's Description: Fascinating in its combination of personal stories and analytical insights, Some Trouble with Cows will help students of conflict understand how a seemingly irrational and archaic riot becomes a means for renegotiating the distribution of power and rights in a small community.Using first-person accounts of Hindus and Muslims in a remote Bangladeshi village, Beth Roy evocatively describes and analyzes a large-scale riot that profoundly altered life in the area in the 1950s. She provides a rare glimpse into the hearts and minds of the participants and their families, while touching on a range of broader issues that are vital to the sociology of communities in conflict: the changing meaning of community ; the impact of the state on local society; the nature of memory ; and the force of neighborly enmity in reshaping power relationships during periods of change.Roy's findings illustrate important theoretical issues in psychology and sociology, and her conclusions will greatly interest students of ethnic/race relations, conflict resolution, the sociology of violence, agrarian society, and South Asia.   [brief]
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Title: Hazardous metropolis: flooding and urban ecology in Los Angeles
Author: Orsi, Jared 1970-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | California and the West | Urban Studies | Water | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Although better known for its sunny skies, Los Angeles suffers devastating flooding. This book explores a fascinating and little-known chapter in the city's history - the spectacular failures to control floods that occurred throughout the twentieth century. Despite the city's 114 debris dams, 5 flood control basins, and nearly 500 miles of paved river channels, Southern Californians have discovered that technologically engineered solutions to flooding are just as disaster-prone as natural waterways. Jared Orsi's lively history unravels the strange and often hazardous ways that engineering, politics, and nature have come together in Los Angeles to determine the flow of water. He advances a new paradigm - the urban ecosystem - for understanding the city's complex and unpredictable waterways and other issues that are sure to play a large role in future planning. As he traces the flow of water from sky to sea, Orsi brings together many disparate and intriguing pieces of the story, including local and national politics, the little-known San Gabriel Dam fiasco, the phenomenal growth of Los Angeles, and, finally, the influence of environmentalism. Orsi provocatively widens his vision toward other cities for which Los Angeles may offer a lesson - both of things gone wrong and a glimpse of how they might be improved.   [brief]
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Title: The natural history of Big Sur
Author: Henson, Paul 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Environmental Studies | California and the West | Natural History | Ecology
Publisher's Description: Each year millions of people visit the area of rugged California coastline and wild mountains known as Big Sur. Finally here is a book that is both a natural history of this beautiful region and an excellent guide to its extensive public lands. The first section introduces the area's geology, climate, flora, fauna, and human history. The second section describes selected sites, trails, and features that are mentioned in Part One.Although Big Sur is world famous for awe-inspiring scenery, it is less known for its great ecological diversity and its significance as a haven for many species of terrestrial and marine wildlife. In no other part of the world do fog-loving coastal redwoods thrive on one slope of a canyon while arid-climate yuccas grow on the other. Similarly, sea otters and cormorants live near dry-climate creatures like canyon wrens and whiptail lizards. The area's staggering beauty and forbidding wilderness have inspired artists, poets, naturalists, and hikers - and also real estate developers.As increasing tourism, development pressure, and land-use decisions continue to affect Big Sur, this book will do much to heighten awareness of the region's biotic richness and fragility. Written in nontechnical language, with generous color photographs, drawings, maps, species lists, and a bibliography, it will attract both the casual and the serious naturalist, as well as anyone concerned about preserving California's natural heritage.   [brief]
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Title: Foundations of political economy: some early Tudor views on state and society
Author: Wood, Neal
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Political Theory | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Conventional wisdom claims that the seventeenth century gave birth to the material and ideological forces that culminated in the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. Not true, according to Neal Wood, who argues that much earlier reformers - Dudley, Starkey, Brinklow, Latimer, Crowley, Becon, Lever, and Thomas Smith, as well as the better-known More and Fortescue - laid the groundwork by fashioning an economic conception of the state in response to social, economic and political conditions of England. Wood's innovative study of these early Tudor thinkers, who upheld the status quo yet condemned widespread poverty and suffering, will interest historians, political scientists, and social and political theorists.   [brief]
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Title: The fruits of natural advantage: making the industrial countryside in California
Author: Stoll, Steven
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Environmental Studies | California and the West | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: The once arid valleys and isolated coastal plains of California are today the center of fruit production in the United States. Steven Stoll explains how a class of capitalist farmers made California the nation's leading producer of fruit and created the first industrial countryside in America. This brilliant portrayal of California from 1880 to 1930 traces the origins, evolution, and implications of the fruit industry while providing a window through which to view the entire history of California.Stoll shows how California growers assembled chemicals, corporations, and political influence to bring the most perishable products from the most distant state to the great urban markets of North America. But what began as a compromise between a beneficent environment and intensive cultivation ultimately became threatening to the soil and exploitative of the people who worked it.Invoking history, economics, sociology, agriculture, and environmental studies, Stoll traces the often tragic repercussions of fruit farming and shows how central this story is to the development of the industrial countryside in the twentieth century.   [brief]
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Title: Hitchcock on Hitchcock: selected writings and interviews
Author: Hitchcock, Alfred 1899-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film
Publisher's Description: Gathered here for the first time are Alfred Hitchcock's reflections on his own life and work. In this ample selection of largely unknown and formerly inaccessible interviews and essays, Hitchcock provides an enlivening commentary on a career that spanned decades and transformed the history of the cinema. Bringing the same exuberance and originality to his writing as he did to his films, he ranges from accounts of his own life and experiences to techniques of filmmaking and ideas about cinema in general. Wry, thoughtful, witty, and humorous - as well as brilliantly informative - this selection reveals another side of the most renowned filmmaker of our time.Sidney Gottlieb not only presents some of Hitchcock's most important pieces, but also places them in their historical context and in the context of Hitchcock's development as a director. He reflects on Hitchcock's complicated, often troubled, and continually evolving relationship toward women, both on and off the set. Some of the topics Hitchcock touches upon are the differences between English and American attitudes toward murder, the importance of comedy in film, and the uses and techniques of lighting. There are also many anecdotes of life among the stars, reminiscences from the sets of some of the most successful and innovative films of this century, and incisive insights into working method, film history, and the role of film in society.Unlike some of the complex critical commentary that has emerged on his life and work, the director's own writing style is refreshingly straightforward and accessible. Throughout the collection, Hitchcock reveals a delight and curiosity about his medium that bring all his subjects to life.   [brief]
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Title: Acts of implication: suggestion and covert meaning in the works of Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Austen 
Author: Ehrenpreis, Irvin 1920-
Published: University of California Press,  1981
Subjects: Literature
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Title: Legacies: the story of the immigrant second generation
Author: Portes, Alejandro 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Sociology | Ethnic Studies | Anthropology | Asian American Studies | Chicano Studies | Postcolonial Studies | Politics | Latino Studies | Social Problems | Immigration
Publisher's Description: One out of five Americans, more than 55 million people, are first-or second-generation immigrants. This landmark study, the most comprehensive to date, probes all aspects of the new immigrant second generation's lives, exploring their immense potential to transform American society for better or worse. Whether this new generation reinvigorates the nation or deepens its social problems depends on the social and economic trajectories of this still young population. In Legacies, Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut - two of the leading figures in the field - provide a close look at this rising second generation, including their patterns of acculturation, family and school life, language, identity, experiences of discrimination, self-esteem, ambition, and achievement. Based on the largest research study of its kind, Legacies combines vivid vignettes with a wealth of survey and school data. Accessible, engaging, and indispensable for any consideration of the changing face of American society, this book presents a wide range of real-life stories of immigrant families - from Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, the Philippines, China, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam - now living in Miami and San Diego, two of the areas most heavily affected by the new immigration. The authors explore the world of second-generation youth, looking at patterns of parent-child conflict and cohesion within immigrant families, the role of peer groups and school subcultures, the factors that affect the children's academic achievement, and much more. A companion volume to Legacies, entitled Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America, was published by California in Fall 2001. Edited by the authors of Legacies, this book will bring together some of the country's leading scholars of immigration and ethnicity to provide a close look at this rising second generation. A Copublication with the Russell Sage Foundation   [brief]
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Title: Home bound: Filipino lives across cultures, communities, and countries
Author: Espiritu, Yen Le 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | American Studies | Sociology | Cultural Anthropology | Asian American Studies | Gender Studies | United States History | Postcolonial Studies | Immigration
Publisher's Description: Filipino Americans, who experience life in the United States as immigrants, colonized nationals, and racial minorities, have been little studied, though they are one of our largest immigrant groups. Based on her in-depth interviews with more than one hundred Filipinos in San Diego, California, Yen Le Espiritu investigates how Filipino women and men are transformed through the experience of migration, and how they in turn remake the social world around them. Her sensitive analysis reveals that Filipino Americans confront U.S. domestic racism and global power structures by living transnational lives that are shaped as much by literal and symbolic ties to the Philippines as they are by social, economic, and political realities in the United States. Espiritu deftly weaves vivid first-person narratives with larger social and historical contexts as she discovers the meaning of home, community, gender, and intergenerational relations among Filipinos. Among other topics, she explores the ways that female sexuality is defined in contradistinction to American mores and shows how this process becomes a way of opposing racial subjugation in this country. She also examines how Filipinos have integrated themselves into the American workplace and looks closely at the effects of colonialism.   [brief]
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Title: Space in the tropics: from convicts to rockets in French Guiana 
Author: Redfield, Peter 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Geography | French Studies | European Studies | Technology
Publisher's Description: Rockets roar into space - bearing roughly half the world's commercial satellites - from the same South American coastal rainforest where convicts once did time on infamous Devil's Island. What makes Space in the Tropics enthralling is anthropologist Peter Redfield's ability to draw from these two disparate European projects in French Guiana a gleaming web of ideas about the intersections of nature and culture. In comparing the Franco-European Ariane rocket program with the earlier penal experiment, Redfield connects the myth of Robinson Crusoe, nineteenth-century prison reform, the Dreyfus Affair, tropical medicine, postwar exploration of outer space, satellite technology, development, and ecotourism with a focus on place, and the incorporation of this particular place into greater extended systems. Examining the wider context of the Ariane program, he argues that technology and nature must be understood within a greater ecology of displacement and makes a case for the importance of margins in understanding the trajectories of modern life.   [brief]
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