Volume 40, Number 17 · October 21, 1993
The Golden Land
By Joan Didion
BOOKS AND REPORTS DRAWN ON FOR THIS ESSAY
The California Water Atlas
edited by William L. Kahrl
State of California (out of print)
Battling the Inland Sea: American Political Culture, Public Policy, and the Sacramento Valley, 1850–1986
by Robert Kelley
University of California Press, 395 pp., $40.00
Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands
by Charles Nordhoff
(out of print)
A Companion to California
by James D. Hart
Oxford University Press (out of print)
The Great Central Valley: California's Heartland
by Stephen Johnson, by Robert Dawson, text by Gerald Haslam
University of California Press/California Academy of Sciences, 253 pp., $30.00 (paper)
Papers in Honor of Josiah Royce on His Sixtieth Birthday
Longmans, Green and Co. (out of print)
California, From the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study in American Character
by Josiah Royce
AMS Press, 513 pp., $49.50
Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard (1992)
by Robert V. Hine
University of Oklahoma Press, 218 pp., $24.95
Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915
by Kevin Starr
Oxford University Press, 494 pp., $16.95 (paper)
California: The Great Exception
by Carey McWilliams
Peregrine Smith (out of print)
The Octopus
by Frank Norris
Penguin, 656 pp., $9.95 (paper)
The Ranch Papers: A California Memoir
by Jane Hollister Wheelwright
Lapis Press, 152 pp., $20.00
Politics of Land: Ralph Nader's Study Group Report on Land Use in California
Center for Study of Responsive Law, 715 pp., $5.95 (paper)
Up & Down California, 1860–1864: The Journal of William H. Brewer
edited by Francis P. Farquhar
University of California Press, 583 pp., $17.00 (paper)
The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness
by G. William Domhoff
Harper and Row (out of print)
The Greatest Men's Party on Earth: Inside the Bohemian Grove
by John van der Zee
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (out of print)
Impact of Defense Cuts on California
prepared by the Commission on State Finance
State of California, 60 pp., free (paper)
A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up. The Sacramento River, the main source of surface water in a state where distrust of centralized governmental authority has historically passed for an ethic, has its headwaters in the far northern ranges of Siskiyou Country. It picks up the waters of the McCloud and the Pit rivers above Redding, of the Feather and the Yuba and the Bear below Knight's Landing, of the American at Sacramento, of the San Joaquin below Steamboat Slough, and empties through San Francisco Bay into the Pacific, draining the deep snow-packs of the southern Cascades and the northern Sierra Nevada. 'The river here is about 400 yards wide,' one of my great-grandfathers wrote in the journal of his arrival in Sacramento in August of 1850.
Review, 11669 words
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