California Memoir

Burnt is a book about finding your calling, even if it's an unexpected one. It's about finding your home, even if you aren't immediately welcomed. And it's about reaching the top and making a difference, even if you don't look like you fit in.

In 2006, Matthew Specktor moved into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment opposite the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the last moments of his life. Fitz had been Specktor's first literary idol, someone whose own passage through Hollywood had, allegedly, broken him. Freshly divorced, professionally flailing, and reeling from his mother's cancer diagnosis, Specktor was feeling unmoored. But rather than giving in or "cracking up", he embarked on an obsessive journey to make sense of the mythologies of "success" and "failure" that haunt the artist's life and the American imagination.

While the journey was long and brutal, Lavinia found time to keep a daily journal of the entire adventure. Later in life, upon the urging of her children and grandchildren, she wrote this book to share her overland journey in great detail with anyone who wanted to learn what it was like for those old pioneers. They risked everything for a new land and a new start, and many died on the way, but for many who made it, the risk was well worth the reward.

The narrative nonfiction, short story journalism, and photo-essays of Elihu Blotnick, between 1968 and 1980, in their full original versions, unseen or unavailable till now. Revisited by the author and newly edited, these 11 pieces tell of credit card crime, New Mexico, drug testing, the San Francisco streets, and of being walked to school by Woody Allen.

California Dreaming and Primal Screaming is a raw, riveting, and darkly humorous memoir chronicling a celebrated studio and touring musician’s relentless quest for mental clarity and emotional healing. Pulling back fame’s velvet curtain, it exposes the hidden struggles that fame often masks — where roaring applause and adoring fans can't silence the demons lurking in the shadows of the psyche. While many artists bask in success, too often they find it hollow, unable to fill the void within.

The year is 2008, and the green rush is taking root in Humboldt County, California. Born and raised in this "Emerald Triangle" famous for its natural beauty and perfect cannabis-growing conditions, Ty Kearns wants no part of it. He has seen too many friends and acquaintances lose or derail their lives for the green dream, always feeling the itch for more cash and more power. But as a college student with tuition to pay—and few options in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression—Ty is willing to try almost anything.

The Apostolic School That Wasn’t... narrates a gripping account of how a rugged and picturesque 240 acre property in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada slowly transformed into an accredited minor seminary, junior high, and high school for boys interested in the Catholic priesthood, then flourished, floundered, and finally shuttered. Situated between the action of God’s divine providence and human realities, the narration seeks to give witness to the faith and effort of the many persons involved in the project, while exploring the reasons that led to the school’s demise.

In the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded a train in Concord, Massachusetts, bound for a month-and-a-half-long tour of California—an interlude that became one of the highlights of his life. Based on original research employing newly discovered documents, The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson maps the public story of this trip onto the private story of Emerson's final years. Engaging and compelling, this travelogue makes it clear that Emerson was still capable of wonder, surprise, and friendship, debunking the presumed darkness of his last decade.

Hermosa Beach, California, in the mid-1960s. Sun, surf, and sand castles along The Strand to a soundtrack of “Fun, Fun, Fun.” But the hang-loose life of the locals was soon being drowned out—by a social storm able to turn even the most perfect wave into a brutal riptide. How do you go from planning vacations and evaluating investments to planning prison visits and evaluating defense pleas? How do you watch your surfer-champion sons turn into drug lords? Inmates? How do you watch your entire family die, one by one? Yet never stop fighting. It takes a rare and special person: Karl McMillen.

This audiobook covers famous and not-so-famous murderers, but the deaths they dealt to their victims were just as deadly, gruesome, and fatal. It didn’t matter to these soulless murderers whether death came to their anguished victims by knife, gun, bayonet, or bare hands. Listen and discover the stories behind the lingering silent sounds of those who no longer walk above ground in California - a state meant for its beauty, beaches, and bright sun.

Gruesome California is a collection of true-life stories, most of them rescued from old newspaper accounts that were published over 100 years ago. Only a few of the events in this book have ever made it into print, except maybe in musky-old county histories. Even then, many of them are lucky to rate a paragraph. Listen to them now, if you dare!

Laurie and her husband Brent got out of California at just the right time. And in Bullhead, she tells the story of how they did, and and why. Laurie is a free thinker, a singer songwriter who values liberty and self-expression. Her journey, often humorous, travels backwards and forwards through time, interspersed with essays on such topics as psychology, sociology, politics, religion, and the importance of critical thinking. Bullhead is a memoir, a self-help book, a love story, and a chronicle of one woman's experience in a pivotal time in our history.

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area during the golden age after World War II, the bold, often reckless Joe Fessio would suddenly enter the Society of Jesus at age twenty and, by divine providence, find himself studying under three of the greatest theological minds of the twentieth century—Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI).

Most familiar with the Wild West know Wyatt Earp, Virgil Earp, and Morgan Earp for the famous shootout on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona. But few know the later years of the close-knit Earp family, which revolved around patriarch Nicholas Earp, and their last push at a major monetary coup in Los Angeles.

"Golden State Killers" delves deep into the haunting chronicles of seven notorious serial killers who emerged from the sun-kissed expanses of California. While the Golden State is often celebrated for its shimmering beaches and Hollywood glamour, lurking in its underbelly is a darker tale that needs telling.

In 1891, a suffragist and social reformer named Alzire Chevaillier launched a moral crusade to destroy Fountaingrove, a utopian spiritualist community in northern California. Chevaillier accused the colony's leader, the poet and prophet Thomas Lake Harris, of perverting the teachings of the Bible to promote a “new sexology” that was “worse than Mormonism.” She insisted that Harris used magical powers of hypnosis to take sexual and financial advantage of his followers, turning them into a “spiritual harem” that practiced “free love” and other gross immoralities.

This rapidly aging bird flew the coop - via TWA! I left my tear-soaked, empty nest in the California dust, and joyously migrated to Paris, France! I took to the air with two bulging K-Mart wide-belly suitcases; one seriously emaciated bank account; an excess of self-confidence; and last, but not least, my little "hotdog" and main squeeze...Sport Dachshund!

The long pilgrimage of LeRoy Chatfield weaves its way through multiple collective projects designed to better the condition of the marginalized and forgotten. From the cloisters of the Christian Brothers and the halls of secondary education to the fields of Central California and the streets of Sacramento, Chatfield's story reveals a fierce commitment to those who were denied the promises of the American dream. Chatfield recounts his childhood, explains the social issues that have played a significant role in his life and work, and uncovers the lack of justice he saw too frequently.

Norco '80 tells the story of how five heavily armed young men - led by an apocalyptic born-again Christian - attempted a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent criminal events in US history, forever changing the face of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, Norco '80 transports the listener back to the Southern California of the 1970s, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches, and soaring crime rates, with the threat of nuclear obliteration looming over it all.