Like the tentacles of an octopus, the tracks of the railroad reached out across California, as if to grasp everything of value in the state Based on an actual, bloody dispute between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1880, "The Octopus" is a stunning novel of the waning days of the [...]

The sixth volume in one of the great ongoing works of American cultural history-Kevin Starr's monumental Americans and the California Dream-Embattled Dreams is a peerless work of cultural history following California in the years surrounding World War II. During the 1940s California ascended to a ne[...]