Now in its fourth edition, Rediscovering the Golden State: California Geography examines this unique state’s incredibly diverse landscapes, and how geography and geographic change influences everything from the state’s natural systems and cycles, to its agriculture and more advanced industries, to human migration, cultures, and urban planning. Exploring California through a geographic lens reveals how the field has evolved to cross traditional boundaries, connect local and global issues, and provide the insights that lead to practical solutions to problems new and old. Challenging the reader to look beyond stereotypes and assumptions, this book encourages active participation in planning the state’s dynamic future. And this project makes teaching and learning about the geography of California more convenient, exciting, and rewarding for instructors and students. Going beyond a scientific analysis of natural features and environmental processes, this book illustrates how social, political, and economic divides can be bridged through the study of geography and the connections it brings to light. From geology, weather and climate, biogeography, and hydrology, we cover the state’s physical geography. And from demography and migration, to cultures and economies, to rural and urban geography, we monitor the state’s human geography pulse and then make the vital connections. California continues to lead the nation in population, economics (5th largest in the world), agriculture, natural and cultural diversity, and a host of other categories. This powerful state has earned this powerful publication. This timely and versatile book will prove useful to Californians in business, education, government, and to concerned citizens and curious readers seeking to learn more about the Golden State.

God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake a gruelling hike along the world's longest continuous footpath—The Appalachian Trail. The 2,000-plus-mile trail winds through 14 states, stretching along the east coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas. With his offbeat sensibility, his eye for the absurd, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humour, Bryson recounts his confrontations with nature at its most uncompromising over his five-month journey. An instant classic, riotously funny, A Walk in the Woods will add a whole new audience to the legions of Bill Bryson fans.

Reflections on feeding body and spirit in a world of change Animal scientists have long considered domestic livestock to be too dumb to know how to eat right, but the lifetime research of animal behaviorist Fred Provenza and his colleagues has debunked this myth. Their work shows that when given a choice of natural foods, livestock have an astoundingly refined palate, nibbling through the day on as many as fifty kinds of grasses, forbs, and shrubs to meet their nutritional needs with remarkable precision. In Nourishment Provenza presents his thesis of the wisdom body, a wisdom that links flavor-feedback relationships at a cellular level with biochemically rich foods to meet the body's nutritional and medicinal needs. Provenza explores the fascinating complexity of these relationships as he raises and answers thought-provoking questions about what we can learn from animals about nutritional wisdom. What kinds of memories form the basis for how herbivores, and humans, recognize foods? Can a body develop nutritional and medicinal memories in utero and early in life? Do humans still possess the wisdom to select nourishing diets? Or, has that ability been hijacked by nutritional "authorities"? Consumers eager for a "quick fix" have empowered the multibillion-dollar-a-year supplement industry, but is taking supplements and enriching and fortifying foods helping us, or is it hurting us? On a broader scale Provenza explores the relationships among facets of complex, poorly understood, ever-changing ecological, social, and economic systems in light of an unpredictable future. To what degree do we lose contact with life-sustaining energies when the foods we eat come from anywhere but where we live? To what degree do we lose the mythological relationship that links us physically and spiritually with Mother Earth who nurtures our lives? Provenza's paradigm-changing exploration of these questions has implications that could vastly improve our health through a simple change in the way we view our relationships with the plants and animals we eat. Our health could be improved by eating biochemically rich foods and by creating cultures that know how to combine foods into meals that nourish and satiate. Provenza contends the voices of "authority" disconnect most people from a personal search to discover the inner wisdom that can nourish body and spirit. That journey means embracing wonder and uncertainty and avoiding illusions of stability and control as we dine on a planet in a universe bent on consuming itself.

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 A Boston Globe Best Fiction Book of 2011 The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves—a twenty-first century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions. Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household—one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing—unless you count Scott Torres, though you'd never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with central L.A. in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn't hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house—except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she's never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew . . . With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience—as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno—to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.

A wide-ranging exploration of the diverse historical connections between Chile and California This groundbreaking history explores the many unrecognized, enduring linkages between the state of California and the country of Chile. The book begins in 1786, when a French expedition brought the potato from Chile to California, and it concludes with Chilean president Michelle Bachelet's diplomatic visit to the Golden State in 2008. During the intervening centuries, new crops, foods, fertilizers, mining technologies, laborers, and ideas from Chile radically altered California's development. In turn, Californian systems of servitude, exotic species, educational programs, and capitalist development strategies dramatically shaped Chilean history. Edward Dallam Melillo develops a new set of historical perspectives--tracing eastward-moving trends in U.S. history, uncovering South American influences on North America's development, and reframing the Western Hemisphere from a Pacific vantage point. His innovative approach yields transnational insights and recovers long-forgotten connections between the peoples and ecosystems of Chile and California.

In Many Are Called, Dr. Scott Hahn, one of the most celebrated scholars and influential Catholic writers living today, enthusiastically encourages Catholics around the world to renew their focus on the sacred role of the Catholic priest. Using his unique ability to present deep spiritual and theological ideas in the language of everyday life, Dr. Hahn examines the biblical and historical roots of the priesthood to explain the centrality of the priest in the life of the Church. He brings reinvigorated attention to the many roles of the priest—provider, mediator, protector, teacher, judge, and more—all of which are united in the priest's place as spiritual father to God's people, and ultimately he shows that it is through the priest, empowered by God, that the continuing presence of Jesus Christ makes itself known to our world. Lively, insightful, and engaging, Many Are Called will serve as an inspiration to students and seminarians considering a vocation, to clergy renewing their call, to Catholic readers looking to deepen their faith, and to seekers curious about one of Catholicism's defining but least understood elements. With a foreword by the Most Reverend Timothy M. Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, this is a truly special book, one that speaks to the restless heart of humanity and reveals that our pleas for a spiritual father have already been answered.

The fifth and thoroughly revised edition of Regional Geography of the United States and Canada provides a rich and comprehensive overview of both the physical and human geography of these two countries, and in the true spirit of geography, the interactions and interrelations of the physical and human. Following long traditions of the discipline of geography, this text incorporates words, maps, drawings, photographs, and numerical data to present its information in an engaging way. After covering beneficial precursor topics—such as the basics of physical and human geography—the text explores fifteen regions of the US and Canada. The authors observe and describe our planet’s geography in thorough and accessible detail, while laying out the spatial basics of the location, shape, and size of the different regions, and summarizes their most distinctive thematic qualities. Physical topics covered include the region’s topography and landforms, soils, climate, hydrography, vegetation, and wildlife. The human topics include the region’s population; the ethnicities and settlement history of its people; economic activities, including agriculture, forestry, mining, fishing, manufacturing, and service industries; cities; and transportation. In-depth essays expand on specific topics of interest and importance, while outlook sections prognosticate about the near future of the regions. Each chapter concludes with a bibliography of books, articles, and reports that provide further sources for the interested reader.

California is at a crossroads. For decades a global leader, inspiring the hopes and dreams of millions, the state has recently faced double-digit unemployment, multi-billion dollar budget deficits and the loss of trillions in home values. This atlas brings together the latest research and statistics in a graphic form that gives shape and meaning to these numbers. It shows a new California in the making, as it maps the economic, social, and political trends of a state struggling to maintain its leadership and to continue to offer its citizens the promise of prosperity. Among the world’s largest economies, California is the nation’s agricultural powerhouse, high tech crucible and leader in renewable energy. The state is the most populous and most diverse state in the continental U.S. Yet its infrastructure is coming under increasing pressure. Water supply systems are strained, the legendary highways are over capacity, and the celebrated system of public schooling is unable to offer affordable quality education at all levels. Health and welfare services, particularly for the poor, needy, disabled, and seniors, are at great risk. This indispensable resource gives readers the tools they need to understand the transformation as California attempts to forge a new identity in the midst of unprecedented challenges.

This long-anticipated reference and sourcebook for California’s remarkable ecological abundance provides an integrated assessment of each major ecosystem type—its distribution, structure, function, and management. A comprehensive synthesis of our knowledge about this biologically diverse state, Ecosystems of California covers the state from oceans to mountaintops using multiple lenses: past and present, flora and fauna, aquatic and terrestrial, natural and managed. Each chapter evaluates natural processes for a specific ecosystem, describes drivers of change, and discusses how that ecosystem may be altered in the future. This book also explores the drivers of California’s ecological patterns and the history of the state’s various ecosystems, outlining how the challenges of climate change and invasive species and opportunities for regulation and stewardship could potentially affect the state’s ecosystems. The text explicitly incorporates both human impacts and conservation and restoration efforts and shows how ecosystems support human well-being. Edited by two esteemed ecosystem ecologists and with overviews by leading experts on each ecosystem, this definitive work will be indispensable for natural resource management and conservation professionals as well as for undergraduate or graduate students of California’s environment and curious naturalists.