What explains California? To a large extent, as Philip Fradkin's rich, exuberant portrait makes clear, it's the multiple landscapes and the different states of mind that best define America's most populous, diverse, and fabled state. Fradkin divides California into seven distinct ecological and cultural provincesfrom the hot deserts and high peaks to the rich agricultural Central Valley, the redwood forests of the north and sandy beaches of the south. Describing geographical regions based on their emblematic landscape features, Fradkin intertwines natural and social history."

Environmental historian Philip L. Fradkin offers a vivid history of earthquakes and an eloquent guide to the San Andreas Fault, the seismic scar that bisects the Golden State's spectacular scenery. The author includes dramatic stories of legendary earthquakes elsewhere: in New York, New England, the central Mississippi River Valley, Europe, and the Far East. Combining human and natural dramas, he places the reader at the epicenter of the most invisible, unpredictable, and feared of the earth's violent phenomena. On the eve of the millennium, as cyberspace crackles with apocalyptic visions,...

Twenty-five years ago Philip L. Fradkin read a book about a remote bay on the Gulf of Alaska coast. The noted environmental historian was attracted by the threads of violence woven through the natural and human histories of Lituya Bay. Could these histories be related, and if so, how? The attempt to define the power of this wild place was a tantalizing and, as it turned out, dangerous quest. This compelling and eerie memoir tells of Fradkin's odyssey through recorded human history and eventually to the bay itself, as he explores the dark and unyielding side of nature.
Natural forces have...

The first indication of the prolonged terror that followed the 1906 earthquake occurred when a ship steaming off San Francisco's Golden Gate "seemed to jump clear out of the water." This gripping account of the earthquake, the devastating firestorms that followed, and the city's subsequent reconstruction vividly shows how, after the shaking stopped, humans, not the forces of nature, nearly destroyed San Francisco in a remarkable display of simple ineptitude and power politics. Bolstered by previously unpublished eyewitness accounts and photographs, this definitive history of a fascinating...

"A finger smashed in a car door and a missed geology examination at the University of Utah led Wallace Stegner to a special assignment about Clarence E. Dutton, thence to John Wesley Powell, and finally in 1954 to publication of what is arguably the single best nonfiction book dealing with the American West. "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian" remains in print fifty-two years after its initial appearance. Not many books have survived that length of time and thrived, despite competing works on the same subject.
This combination of biography, history, and environmental primer written with the...

Renowned environmental historian Philip L. Fradkin reveals the Wallace Stegner behind the literary legacy--a generous teacher, conservationist, and man whose early landscapes shaped his life and character. Fradkin chronicles Stegner's formative years, from the raw, desolate plains of Saskatchewan and the canyonlands of Utah to California's Silicon Valley. A lifelong teacher and environmentalist, Stegner inspired countless writers and defended the wilderness against human desecration. In this biography of man, place, and century, Fradkin traces Stegner's life across its many landscapes, and...

Everett Ruess was twenty years old when he vanished into the canyonlands of southern Utah, spawning the myth of a romantic desert wanderer that survives to this day. It was 1934, and Ruess was in the fifth year of a quest to record wilderness beauty in works of art whose value was recognized by such contemporary artists as Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston. From his home in Los Angeles, Ruess walked, hitchhiked, and rode burros up the California coast, along the crest of the Sierra Nevada, and into the deserts of the Southwest. In the first probing biography of Everett Ruess,...