Calico presents a clever twist on time-travel plots, melding the Old West with present-day L.A. The writing is clear and engaging, the characters are well-developed, and the book is just plain funny over and over. Most interesting to me was the way the author gives a sense of what the Old West might really have been like—smelly, really smelly, with sewage in the streets, bad food, and a lack of simple things we take for granted, such as antibiotics and painkillers.
I love the way Franzen develops characters—they get introduced, you form impressions of them, and then you find out that those impressions are wrong, or at least just superficial looks into much deeper and messier lives.
The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Freedom and The Corrections
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads…
I’ve read several books about the Powell expedition down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon, and this is my favorite. Dolnick brings in the journal writings (mercifully without the poor spelling that they must contain) of other members of the expedition, and this gives a more nuanced account of the events than just reading Powell’s after-the-fact narrative from his own sparse notes. Lots of grumbling going on. A lot of these journal quotes sound like vintage Mark Twain, e.g., “We broke many oars and most of the Ten Commandments.” Dolnick’s discussions of the geology are good, and he doesn’t pad the book with extensive repetition of material from other sources.
Drawing on rarely examined diaries and journals, Down the Great Unknown is the first book to tell the full, dramatic story of the Powell expedition.
On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. The Grand Canyon, not explored before, was as mysterious as Atlantis—and as perilous. The ten men set out from Green River Station, Wyoming Territory down the Colorado in four wooden rowboats. Ninety-nine days later, six half-starved wretches came ashore near Callville, Arizona.
Eastern California is a land of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, flash floods, and spectacular, raw, geologic beauty. Written for non-geologists and geologists alike, this book takes you to sites where you can learn how these processes work and how geology creates the magnificent scenery of the region. This full-color, illustrated guide to 33 amazing geologic sites will teach you how stones slide across Racetrack playa, how faulting created living space for the Death Valley pupfish, the origin of several popular climbing areas, and how recent eruptions and earthquakes shaped the landscape.
