California Water

Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth. The Dreamt Land weaves reportage, history and memoir to confront the "Golden State" myth in riveting fashion.

Celebrating its 75th anniversary, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men remains one of America's most widely read and beloved novels. Here is Steinbeck’s dramatic adaptation of his novel-as-play, which received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play in 1937-1938 and has featured a number of actors who have played the iconic roles of George and Lennie on stage and film, including James Earl Jones, John Malkovich and Gary Sinise.

Take one massive, futuristic oil rig off the coast of San Clemente, California. Mix in eco-terrorists who see it as an abomination against nature. Add enough C-4 to blow up a small city. Throw in some heroic scientists, nefarious politicians, and a ticking time bomb. And what do you get? The year’s most explosive thriller. Click BUY NOW or READ FOR FREE!

California has always been a trendsetter. Today more than ever, California’s cultural power combines with its extraordinary natural beauty to make it a unique society with influence felt around the world. California, despite its many challenges, is still a land of dreamers and innovators. The problems in California are not caused by lack of good intentions. They are the result of good intentions that have been based on false premises and inaccurate assumptions. They are the result as well of good intentions that have been hijacked by special interests. But California’s innate power, the...

California needs more water. Periodic droughts, worsening in duration and severity, make that plain. But the failure of California’s policymakers to invest in water supply infrastructure, at the same time as they enact escalating restrictions on how much water can be withdrawn from rivers or extracted from the ground, have made a manageable situation intolerable. The conventional wisdom is both biased and narrow. Lawns are “Eurocentric,” so instead of just limiting how much pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer gets dumped onto them, they must be eliminated entirely despite their ...

From one of the most courageous and visionary leaders of our time comes Troubling the Water, an immersive book about the violence and injustice that threaten to drown us all. Ben McBride recounts how he first waded into the water: from the Kill Zone in Oakland, where he moved with his young family, to the uprising in Ferguson, to the moral impoverishment of the white evangelical church. In the truth-telling tradition of Bryan Stevenson and Bishop William Barber, McBride leads us right into the fury and fragmentation of our moment, and then steadies us once we're there.

A wondrous, uproarious, and surprisingly informative account of a year spend surfing, Caught Inside marks the arrival of an exuberant new voice of the outdoors. This remarkable narrative of Daniel Duane’s life on the water is enhanced by good-humored explanations of the physics of wave dynamics, the intricate art of surfboard design, and lyrical, sharp-eyed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Pacific wilderness.

Tired of California's glitzy lifestyle, greed, and urban sprawl, Captain Skip Rowland sells everything to drift and blend in the drop dead beauty of the South Pacific. But before casting-off, his yacht is stolen and set ablaze on a desolate Mexican shore. Skip, recently in the USMC, captures the thieves, sailing later in a new yacht with his son and nurse girlfriend. They accidentally sail into an active military coup d'état, are chased by a vagabond freighter, make love on picture-perfect uninhabited islands, and cross the Tasman Sea to Australia in the worst weather in 100 years.

The challenges facing Americans today will be overcome, as they always have. America’s best days are in the future. The planet is not experiencing an unmanageable climate crisis, and whatever ravages of extreme weather we experience are just the latest expressions of timeless phenomena to which we will adapt and continue to thrive. As we move further into the 21st century, liberty and prosperity are enjoyed by more people in more places than ever before. By every metric of human achievement and quality of life, the world has never been better. This fact, that almost anyone presented with ...

In this extraordinarily intimate portrait of her mother - and herself - Fanny Singer, daughter of food icon and activist Alice Waters, chronicles a unique world of food, wine and travel; a world filled with colourful characters, mouth-watering traditions and sumptuous feasts. Across dozens of vignettes with accompanying recipes, she shares the story of her own culinary coming of age and reveals a side of her legendary mother that has never been seen before.