California Press: 1495 books
When Abortion Was a Crime
Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973
Language: English
Release Date: January 30, 1997
As we approach the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, it's crucial to look back to the time when abortion was illegal. Leslie Reagan traces the practice and policing of abortion, which although illegal was nonetheless widely available, but always with threats for both doctor and patient. In a time when...
Surgeon General's Warning
How Politics Crippled the Nation's Doctor
Language: English
Release Date: June 26, 2014
What does it mean to be the nation's doctor? In this engaging narrative, journalist Mike Stobbe examines the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, emphasizing that it has always been unique within the federal government in its ability to influence public health. But now, in their efforts to provide...
How We Forgot the Cold War
A Historical Journey across America
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2012
Hours after the USSR collapsed in 1991, Congress began making plans to establish the official memory of the Cold War. Conservatives dominated the proceedings, spending millions to portray the conflict as a triumph of good over evil and a defeat of totalitarianism equal in significance to World War...
A Critical History of Early Rome
From Prehistory to the First Punic War
Language: English
Release Date: February 14, 2005
During the period from Rome's Stone Age beginnings on the Tiber River to its conquest of the Italian peninsula in 264 B.C., the Romans in large measure developed the social, political, and military structure that would be the foundation of their spectacular imperial success. In this comprehensive...
by Patrick Modiano
Language: English
Release Date: November 18, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: November 18, 2014
2014 Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Patrick Modiano opens Dora Bruder by telling how in 1988 he stumbled across an ad in the personal columns of the New Year's Eve 1941 edition of Paris Soir. Placed by the parents of a 15-year-old Jewish girl, Dora Bruder, who had run away from her...
Violette Nozière
A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris
Language: English
Release Date: May 31, 2011
On an August evening in 1933, in a quiet, working-class neighborhood in Paris, eighteen-year-old Violette Nozière gave her mother and father glasses of barbiturate-laced "medication," which she told them had been prescribed by the family doctor; one of her parents died, the other barely...
German Voices
Memories of Life during Hitler's Third Reich
Language: English
Release Date: May 11, 2011
What was it like to grow up German during Hitler’s Third Reich? In this extraordinary book, Frederic C. Tubach returns to the country of his roots to interview average Germans who, like him, came of age between 1933 and 1945. Tubach sets their recollections and his own memories into a broad historical...
by Daniel O'Neill
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2016
Edmund Burke, long considered modern conservatism’s founding father, is also widely believed to be an opponent of empire. However, Daniel O’Neill turns that latter belief on its head. This fresh and innovative book shows that Burke was a passionate supporter and staunch defender of the British...
The Snow Lion and the Dragon
China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama
Language: English
Release Date: November 3, 1997
Tensions over the "Tibet Question"—the political status of Tibet—are escalating every day. The Dalai Lama has gained broad international sympathy in his appeals for autonomy from China, yet the Chinese government maintains a hard-line position against it. What is the history of the conflict?...
A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 3
The Storm Clouds Descend, 1955–1957
Language: English
Release Date: December 7, 2013
It is not possible to fully understand contemporary politics between China and the Dalai Lama without understanding what happened in the 1950’s. The third volume in Melvyn Goldstein's History of Modern Tibet series, The Calm before the Storm, examines the critical years of 1955 through 1957. During...
by David Cook
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2015
First published in 2005, Understanding Jihad unravels the tangled historical, intellectual, and political meanings of jihad within the context of Islamic life. In this revised and expanded second edition, author David Cook has included new material in light of pivotal developments such as the extraordinary...
So How's the Family?
And Other Essays
Language: English
Release Date: September 30, 2013
In this new collection of thirteen essays, Arlie Russell Hochschild—author of the groundbreaking exploration of emotional labor, The Managed Heart and The Outsourced Self—focuses squarely on the impact of social forces on the emotional side of intimate life.
From the "work" it...
Silk, Slaves, and Stupas
Material Culture of the Silk Road
Language: English
Release Date: March 13, 2018
Following her bestselling Life Along the Silk Road, Susan Whitfield widens her exploration of the great cultural highway with a new captivating portrait focusing on material things. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas tells the stories of ten very different objects, considering their interaction with the peoples...
Savage Dreams
A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West
Language: English
Release Date: June 6, 2014
"A beautiful, absorbing, tragic book."—Larry McMurtry
In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants. A century later–in 1951–and a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U.S. government started setting...