Canyon Of Dreams

Traces the musical legacy of the California neighborhood, and the artists who lived there

The inspiration for the Netflix film Rez Ball—produced by Lebron James The moving story of a Navajo high school basketball team, its members struggling with the everyday challenges of high school, adolescence, and family, and the great and unique obstacles facing Native Americans living on reservations. Deep in the heart of northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5-million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is passion, passed from grandparent to parent to child. Rez Ball is a sport for winters where dark and cold descend fast and there is little else to do but roam mesa tops, work, and wonder what the future holds. The town has 4,500 residents and the high school arena seats 7,000. Fans drive thirty, fifty, even eighty miles to see the fast-paced and highly competitive matchups that are more than just games to players and fans. Celebrated Times journalist Michael Powell brings us a narrative of triumph and hardship, a moving story about a basketball team on a Navajo reservation that shows how important sports can be to youths in struggling communities, and the transcendent magic and painful realities that confront Native Americans living on reservations. This book details his season-long immersion in the team, town, and culture, in which there were exhilarating wins, crushing losses, and conversations on long bus rides across the desert about dreams of leaving home and the fear of the same.

The very strange but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a 1960s hippie utopia. Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. Members of bands like the Byrds, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Turtles, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, CSN, Three Dog Night and Love, along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor and Carole King, lived together and jammed together in the bucolic community nestled in the Hollywood Hills. But there was a dark side to that scene as well. Many didn’t make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day. Far more integrated into the scene than most would like to admit was a guy by the name of Charles Manson, along with his murderous entourage. Also floating about the periphery were various political operatives, up-and-coming politicians and intelligence personnel – the same sort of people who gave birth to many of the rock stars populating the canyon. And all the canyon’s colorful characters – rock stars, hippies, murderers and politicos – happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation.

Michael Walker’s Laurel Canyon presents the inside story of the once hottest rock and roll neighborhood in LA. In the late sixties and early seventies, an impromptu collection of musicians colonized a eucalyptus-scented canyon deep in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles and melded folk, rock, and savvy American pop into a sound that conquered the world as thoroughly as the songs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had before them. Thirty years later, the music made in Laurel Canyon continues to pour from radios, iPods, and concert stages around the world. During the canyon's golden era, the musicians who lived and worked there scored dozens of landmark hits, from "California Dreamin'" to "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" to "It's Too Late," selling tens of millions of records and resetting the thermostat of pop culture. In Laurel Canyon, veteran journalist Michael Walker tells the inside story of this unprecedented gathering of some of the baby boomer's leading musical lights—including Joni Mitchell; Jim Morrison; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; John Mayall; the Mamas and the Papas; Carole King; the Eagles; and Frank Zappa, to name just a few—who turned Los Angeles into the music capital of the world and forever changed the way popular music is recorded, marketed, and consumed.

An engaging storyteller brings to life true stories from Grand Canyon's human history

The inspiration for the upcoming Netflix film Rez Ball—produced by Lebron James The moving story of a Navajo high school basketball team, its members struggling with the everyday challenges of high school, adolescence, and family, and the great and unique obstacles facing Native Americans living on reservations. Deep in the heart of northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5-million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is passion, passed from grandparent to parent to child. Rez Ball is a sport for winters where dark and cold descend fast and there is little else to do but roam mesa tops, work, and wonder what the future holds. The town has 4,500 residents and the high school arena seats 7,000. Fans drive thirty, fifty, even eighty miles to see the fast-paced and highly competitive matchups that are more than just games to players and fans. Celebrated Times journalist Michael Powell brings us a narrative of triumph and hardship, a moving story about a basketball team on a Navajo reservation that shows how important sports can be to youths in struggling communities, and the transcendent magic and painful realities that confront Native Americans living on reservations. This book details his season-long immersion in the team, town, and culture, in which there were exhilarating wins, crushing losses, and conversations on long bus rides across the desert about dreams of leaving home and the fear of the same.

The Sierra Nevada are just bumps standing between Laurel Tanner and her dream. When artist Laurel Tanner is left broke and brokenhearted by her mother’s death and her ex’s desertion, her only chance to open her own studio and gallery depends on getting to Reno and snagging a fat commission. But a steep rocky mountain road, and a hot Forest Ranger, may have other plans for her in the first book in this new Small-Town Romantic Comedy Series from Bestselling Author JoMarie DeGioia. A city girl stranded on a rocky mountain road. The Forest Ranger who comes to her rescue. An unexpected encounter at 5000 feet... Should she chase a dream or find a new one? Two months after her mother’s death, Laurel leaves San Francisco broke and brokenhearted. She heads for Reno to get a commission, hoping to earn enough to open her own art studio and gallery. With no opportunities behind her, this is her best shot. When she nearly runs into a deer, she swerves and hits a rock wall. Can her day get any worse? The sound of a crash draws Forest Ranger Jack Butler from his off-duty hike, and he finds a gorgeous girl sitting by her crumpled convertible. He’s always been a sucker for a damsel in distress, and can’t ignore the attraction burning between them. They soon share a kiss hot enough to start a forest fire. While her car is being fixed, the quaint town of Cloud Canyon welcomes Laurel. She finds herself surrounded by warm, meddlesome, well-meaning Butlers, and she’s tempted to put her studio on hold if it means she can have a new life with Jack. And maybe a new family too. Jack, still stinging from his failed marriage, doubts he’ll be enough for her to stay. Will falling for Jack keep her from chasing her dream? Or will she find a new one in Cloud Canyon?

What do you do when life gives you a second chance at a dream? Josie Corbin came to Cloud Canyon a year ago, hoping to find a new life. She had no illusions of a new love, though. She gave up on that dream when the guy she fell for ghosted her three years earlier. Pete Kelly works with cars and has no problem getting his hands dirty. He moved his kid sister and brother to Cloud Canyon to start over when their parents died, but he’d had to leave the one woman he’d ever loved. Responsibility doused his dreams of forever and now he focuses on work and pretty much nothing else. What good is it to dream about a future that might never come? When Josie’s car breaks down, Pete comes to her rescue. She’s stunned, and a little bit pissed. He’s ashamed he’d taken what he considers the coward’s way out when he’d ended things. They can’t deny their attraction is still there and, though she says it won’t happen again, Pete insists that they aren’t over. He vows to make up for what he did all those years ago. Will Josie get past the hurt when she learns what Pete did for his family? Or is it too late to realize their wildest dreams?