"Palo Alto's weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system. In Palo Alto, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. Palo Alto is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course"--Provided by publisher.

Hollow City surveys San Francisco's transformation - skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that are driving out artists, activists, nonprofit organizations and the poor; the homogenization of the city's architecture, industries and population; the decay of its public life; and the erasure of its sites of civic memory. California's Bay Area is home to nearly a third of the venture capital and internet businesses in the United States, generating a boom economy and a massive influx of well-paid workers that has transformed the face of San Francisco. Once the great anomaly among American cities, San Francisco is today only the most dramatically affected among the many urban centers experiencing cultural impoverishment as a result of new forms and distributions of wealth. A collaboration between writer-hiostorian Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg, Hollow City surveys San Francisco's transformation - skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that are driving out artists, activists, nonprofit organizations and the poor; the homogenization of the city's architecture, industries and population; the decay of its public life; and the erasure of its sites of civic memory. Written as a tour of the city's distinctive characters and locales, Solnit's text grounds the current evictions in earlier histories of urban renewal and the economic geography of artists, from Haussmann's impact on the Paris of Baudelaire, to the relationship between the Beats and San Francisco's African-American community during 'negro removal' of the 1950s. She investigates the ways wealth is now clear-cutting the cultural richness of American urban life, erasing space for idealism, dissent, memory and vulnerable populations. Schwartzenberg's photo-essays document the profusion of construction and demolition projects in the city, the imperial spaces of dot-com businesses, the proliferation of retail chains, and the rapid disappearance of areas in which artists can live and create. They feature works by more than a dozen San Francisco artists.

"The film Casablanca opens with the words, "With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas." Leslie Epstein's Hill of Beans is the story of how one nation, one industry, and in particular one man responded to that desperate hope. That man is Jack Warner. His impossible goal is to make world events--most importantly, the invasion of North Africa by British and American forces in 1942--coincide with the release of his new film about a group of refugees marooned in Morocco. Arrayed against him are Stalin and Hitler, as well as Josef Goebbels, Franklin Roosevelt, a powerful gossip columnist, and above all a beautiful young woman with a terrible secret. His only weapons are his hutzpah and his heroism as he struggles to bring cinema and city, conflict and conference together in an epic command performance. Hill of Beans is the novel that Leslie Epstein--the son and nephew of Philip and Julius Epstein, the screenwriters of Casablanca--was born to write"--

"Since pioneer filmmakers arrived on its shoreline in the early 20th century, the Santa Monica beach has been a popular location for the making of movies and television productions. Its enchanting beauty led studio moguls, producers, and celebrities to build beach houses there, creating what became known as "Hollywood's Playground." The sand and shore of the Santa Monica beach became a favored site for the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst, and Cary Grant. It was on this beach that the Academy Awards were conceived, the movie The Wizard of Oz sprang forth, and a young Pres. John F. Kennedy stunned beachgoers with a surprise ocean swim without the protection of Secret Service agents. In 1962, the beach became the center of the universe as the site of President Kennedy's "Western White House," where the visitors included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Marilyn Monroe, and--famously--"anyone who was anyone."--