This second volume of Leslie Evans' Shaggy Man essays offers fifteen new selections. "On the Track of the Elusive Baron Long" offers the only extensive biographical sketch of one of Southern California's most fascinating characters, creator in the little industrial city of Vernon, California, what is reputed to have been the first real night club in America. Long later hired a nineteen-year-old high school dropout to design the most exquisite and expensive hotel and casino in the Western Hemisphere. Two pieces look at Peak Oil, challenging today's hype that fracked oil in North Dakota and...

Here from The Shaggy Man's Place (www.shaggyman.com), everything from ecological crises and religious wars to Edwardian authors, the scandal plagued city of Vernon, early computer games, and local Los Angeles history. International oil production has been frozen since 2005 while demand from our 7 billion and growing global population continues upward, forcing prices of oil, gasoline, and food ever higher. Our political leaders stake our future on a strategy of economic growth just as the planet is hitting its physical limits on nonrenewable resources, from oil to farmland to potable water....

A hair-raising number of historic haunts from sea captains who never returned home to servicemen who never left exist in the half square mile of Groton Bank. Ghostly soldiers of the Revolutionary War roam the Mother Bailey House and march through the basement of a nearby home, and former residents rouse sleepers at the Avery-Copp House. Fort Griswold was the site of a grisly 1781 battle, and phantom footsteps from an unknown entity echo on the first floor of the Ebenezer Avery House. Unseen inhabitants swing open doors at the Submarine Veterans Club, and long-dead guests add unexpected life...