California Fever

SoCal surfer Dolphin Smoote just wanted to earn quick dough for a date with the brown-eyed beauty ... what he got was G-men (and G-women), ghosts, and a Colt 45. John Jacobson’s California Fever is the compelling fusion of mystery, crime, and Southern California beach charm. Top surfer Dolphin Smoote gets more than he bargains for when he works up the nerve to ask out the brown-eyed beauty on a date. The search of quick coin without having to work will always lead a surfer to precarious places, and Dolphin is no exception. With the help of his lovable surfer crew who often have more to say about stylishness than anything else, Dolphin finds himself between conmen, ghosts, an impending storm from the coast of Mexico ... and still no money for a second date. Along the ride, Dolphin finds in himself capacity for storytelling that would make P. G. Wodehouse himself chortle with laughter. From the author of All the Cowboys Ain’t Gone comes this thrilling tale where a crime-novel writer becomes caught up in crimes, and an aspiring writer tries to outrun the crime in her bloodline—what could go wrong? Jacobson immerses the reader in the world of California’s casual-radical surf culture, where radical stunts executed with the most casual air is a practiced form of art. In this world, rival surf clans goad each other on, upping the ante on stunts until mayhem looms. It looks like the storm brewing off the coast of Southern California just might disturb the tranquility of the beach.

The author uses lighthearted illustrations and excerpts from letters, journals, and newspaper articles to relate the story of the California Gold Rush of 1848. Full color.

Traces the history of the California Gold Rush from 1849 through 1884 when a court decision forced the shut down of the hydraulic mining operations, bringing decades of careless freedom to an end.

"Books geographically focused on the midwestern and eastern states dominate the study of Mennonites in America. The intriguing history of Mennonites in the American West remains untold. In From Digging Gold to Saving Souls, Brian Froese introduces readers for the first time to the California Mennonite experience. Although a few Mennonites did dig for gold in the 1850s, the real story of Mennonites in California begins in the 1890s with westward migrations for fertile soil and healthy sunshine. By the mid-twentieth century, the Mennonite story in California had developed into an interesting tale of religious conservatives--traditional agrarians--finding their way in an increasingly urban and religiously pluralistic California. Some California Mennonites negotiated new identities by endorsing conservative evangelicalism; some found them in reclamations of sixteenth-century Anabaptists. Still other Mennonites found meaningful religious experience by engaging in social action and justice even when these actions appeared in "secular" forms. These emerging identities--Evangelical, Anabaptist, and secular--covered a broad spectrum, yet represented a selective retaining and discarding of Mennonite religious practices and expressions. From Digging Gold to Saving Souls touches on such topics as migration, pluralism, race, gender, pacifism, institutional construction, education, and labor conflict, all of which defined the experience of Mennonites of California. Brian Froese shows how this experience was a rich, complex, and deliberate move into modern society. In From Digging Gold to Saving Souls, he introduces readers to a dynamic people who did not simply become modern, but who chose to modernize on their own terms"--

Contains monthly column of the Sequoya League.

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“A wonderful nightmare of a book: tender and frightening, disturbing but compassionate. Fever Dream is a triumph of Schweblin’s outlandish imagination.” –Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling and Reputations A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.