California Politics

The city of Salinas, California, is the birthplace of John Steinbeck and the setting for his epic masterpiece East of Eden, but it is also the home of Nuestra Familia, one of the most violent gangs in the United States. Born in the prisons of California in the late 1960s, Nuestra Familia expanded to control drug trafficking and extortion operations throughout the northern half of the state and left a trail of bodies in its wake.

Since 1980, the number of people in US prisons has increased more than 450 percent. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world". Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces conjoined to produce the prison boom.

After three decades in counterintelligence, Brad Trasker is retired, disillusioned, and dealing with a tragic loss. Spy games are behind him until he attends the launch of a next-generation aircraft. When the project of innovative aerospace CEO Kylie Connor explodes on the tarmac—nearly killing her in the process—Trasker is pulled back into the line of fire. The mystery of the sabotage quickly deepens.

On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire was upon them, gobbling an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the residents trapped in their homes and cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead.

When The Case for Animal Rights was published in 1983, it rapidly became an acknowledged classic of moral philosophy, and its author, Tom Regan (1938–2017), was recognized as an intellectual leader within the animal rights movement. Twenty years later, Case was reissued with a new and fully considered preface, in which Regan responded to his critics and defended the book's revolutionary position. Now, forty years after its original publication, this foundational text is available as an audiobook.

Since its original publication in 1996, Holy Land has become an American classic. In "quick, translucent prose" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, D. J. Waldie recounts growing up in Lakewood, California, a prototypical post-World War II suburb. Laid out in 316 sections as carefully measured as a grid of tract houses, Holy Land is by turns touching, eerie, funny, and encyclopedic in its handling of what was gained and lost when thousands of blue-collar families were thrown together in the suburbs of the 1950s.

Humans have long sought to comprehend the enormities of cosmic space and time. Here, best selling science writer Timothy Ferris tells the story of that quest. He interweaves the majestic themes of astronomy, physics, religion, and philosophy with fresh and lasting portraits of the men and women who created what has been called our society's most precious treasure - its conception of the universe at large.

This novel, set in 1920s California, tells the tale of Linda Strong who shares her father’s love for the beauty of nature in California. When her parents suddenly pass away, she is left with her sister Eileen, a huge house, and much wealth. Eileen goes on a spending spree, dissipating the inheritance at an alarming pace. When Linda eventually finds out, she meets with their banker and finds a way to earn money in a manner that she enjoys. The narrative includes romance, murder, and delightful descriptions of the state’s fauna and flora.

Chronicling his embodiment of the American Dream, Total Recall covers Schwarzenegger's high-stakes journey to the United States, from creating the international bodybuilding industry out of the sands of Venice Beach to breathing life into cinema's most iconic characters and becoming one of the leading political figures of our time. Proud of his accomplishments and honest about his regrets, Schwarzenegger spares nothing in sharing his amazing story.

Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in US prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend 23 hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators' discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one "supermax", California's Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners.

'Earthquake country,' said the Professor. 'San Francisco is geologically and seismologically a city that waits to die. Los Angeles is ringed by earthquake centres – seven massive quakes so far. We have no idea where the next, the monster, will hit…' …until a criminal fanatic kidnaps a nuclear scientist and builds his own atomic bombs. If exploded on California's fault lines they could trigger off the mightiest earthquake of them all – killing half its population and dumping the entire city of San Francisco into the sea.

When someone disappears on Northern California’s lawless Murder Mountain, it isn’t news. The vast terrain for illegal marijuana harvests is also a notorious black hole for outsiders. But when that someone is the family friend of the persuasive and righteous Senator Steele, finding him becomes covert investigator Ryan Decker’s mission.

On April 10, 1966, a crowd of 10,000 farm workers and supporters gathered at the California state capitol to celebrate victory in one of the most significant strikes in American history - one that made Cesar Chavez famous as leader of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW). Marshall Ganz tells the story of the UFW's ground-breaking victory, drawing out larger lessons from this dramatic tale.

Shyima Hall was born in Egypt on September 29, 1989, the seventh child of desperately poor parents. When she was eight, her parents sold her into slavery. Shyima then moved two hours away to Egypt's capitol city of Cairo to live with a wealthy family and serve them eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. When she was ten, her captors moved to Orange County, California, and smuggled Shyima with them. Two years later, an anonymous call from a neighbor brought about the end of Shyima's servitude - but her journey to true freedom was far from over.

In Imperfect, Jim Abbot retraces his remarkable journey. Born without a right hand, Jim Abbott as a boy dreamed of being a great athlete. Raised in Flint, Michigan, by parents who saw in his condition not a disability but an extraordinary opportunity, Jim became a two-sport standout in high school, then an ace pitcher for the University of Michigan. But his journey was only beginning. By 21, he’d won the gold medal game at the 1988 Olympics and cracked the starting rotation of the California Angels....

Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide.

California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year - fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews. In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine.

“Go slow,” his political elders advised him, but Gavin Newsom has never known such a speed. For Newsom, the California Dream is what lured his father’s family from County Cork, Ireland, six generations ago. His great-great-grandfather, a cop, walked a beat in San Francisco, where almost 150 years later, Newsom would be elected as mayor, running on the values instilled in him by his family history: that California’s open arms must continue to extend to each new generation.

Christian Davis, a former big-firm lawyer turned social justice warrior, has just been assigned the case of his life by the State of California. Jamel Jackson, a sixteen-year-old black boy, has just been convicted for the brutal rape of a prominent movie star. Christian digs into the case with gusto, as he examines the trial court transcript for any hint that the trial court might have erred in Jamel's case. As he gets into the investigation of the case, he's shocked at what he has found. Corruption at the highest level is staring him in the face.

Quando noi italiani pensiamo alla nazione che vorremmo diventare, cosa ci viene in mente? Probabilmente vorremmo avere un'economia in grande crescita e la piena occupazione: un paese in cui chiunque voglia lavorare possa farlo. Vorremmo avere le migliori università del pianeta e bellezze naturali adeguatamente valorizzate, prodotti culturali dall'influenza globale e la possibilità di definire «made in Italy» non solo un paio di scarpe ma anche un'app capace di costruire il futuro e un'idea che sappia cambiare il mondo.