"In this unputdownable story of nature, nurture, and coming to terms with one's true inheritance, the author, introducing her deeply dysfunctional yet fiercely loving family that is anything but "normal," reveals how a colorful cast of characters were thrown together by chance and DNA"--

Sheff writes candidly about stints at in-patient rehab facilities, devastating relapses, and hard-won realizations about what it means to be a young person living with addiction.

Chronicles the experiences of a Chinese-American family in California, beginning with the immigration of the author's great-great-grandfather in the late 1800s.

Highly gifted and imaginative as a child, Victor Villaseñor coped with an untreated learning disability and the frustration of growing up Latino in an English-only American school in the 1940s.

A memoir of paranoid schizophrenia by an accomplished professor recounts her first symptoms at the age of eight, her efforts to hide the severity of her condition, and the obstacles she has overcome in the course of her treatment and marriage.

"California, with its scores of native languages, contains a wealth of old-time stories -- a bedrock of the literature of North America. Jamie de Angulo's linguistic and ethnographic work, his writings, as well as the legends that cloak the Old Coyote himself, vividly reflect the particulars of the Pacific Coast. In each retelling, through each storyteller, stories are continually revivified, and that is precisely what Andrew Schelling has done in...

Reveals the untold story of Arnold Schwarzenegger, chronicling his journey from Mr. Universe bodybuilder to Hollywood hit-maker to governor of California.

A chronicle of the mid-nineteenth-century wagon train tragedy draws on the perspectives of one of its survivors, Sarah Graves, recounting how her new husband and she joined the Donner party on their California-bound journey and encountered violent perils, in an account that also offers insight into the scientific reasons that some died while others survived.