California Birds

Former child actor Fiona St. James dropped out of the spotlight after a spectacularly public crash and burn. The tabloids called her crazy and self-destructive and said she’d lost her mind. Now in her late twenties, Fiona believes her humiliating past is firmly behind her. She’s finally regained a modicum of privacy, and she won’t let anything—or anyone—mess it up.

50 Things to Know About the Birds in California by author Jessica Dumas offers an elegant approach to finding the most beautiful and varied species of birds on the continent. Most books on birding tell you to travel to specific locations and hotspots for one or two prize species on your life list. Although there's nothing wrong with that, this book takes another approach. Here we present you with the regional view of the state and help you to locate the habitats and special locations near your travel destination.

John Janovy had two dreams: to see a live, wild whale and to explore the mythical place John Steinbeck wrote about in his Log from the Sea of Cortez. One day Janovy caught a plane to Baja California in pursuit of both dreams. There, in an unfamiliar and magical landscape, in the company of fellow biologists and their students, he recaptured the sense of innocent wonder that had led him to become a biologist in the first place. Far from the exploitive world of big science, he was able to see the living world with fresh eyes and to draw some remarkable conclusions about where humanity is ...

In this moving collection of short stories and essays, Gordon Lee Johnson (Cupeño/Cahuilla) cements his voice not only as a wry commentator on American Indian reservation life but also as a master of fiction writing. In Johnson’s stories, all of which are set on the fictional San Ignacio reservation in Southern California, we meet unforgettable characters like Plato Pena, the Stanford-bound geek who reads Kahlil Gibran during intertribal softball games; hardboiled investigator Roddy Foo; and Etta, whose motto is “early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise”.