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 provinces—from 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.

Philip Fradkin is the author of six highly acclaimed books on the American West, including the newly updated A River No More (California, 1996). A former environmental writer for the Los Angeles Times, he also served as Assistant Secretary of the California Resources Agency, as Western editor for Audubon magazine, and has taught nonfiction writing at Stanford and UC Berkeley. He shared in a Pulitzer prize awarded to the Los Angeles Times for coverage of the 1965 Watts racial conflict.

"A superb, warts-and-all introduction to the nation's most populous, polyglot and physically varied state—'a land and people,' says Fradkin, 'that are still in constant motion.'"—Frederic Golden, San Francisco Chronicle Review

"Contains a delightful array of anecdotes, mini-biographies and local histories . . . [and] makes great reading. . . . While many of us bumble along in the bubbles of our local espresso cart and occasional car stereo theft, Fradkin experiences our worst public events as the very stuff of life. This lends his writing a stirring urgency."—Dan Duane, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"In this ambitious and highly readable attempt to explain California, Fradkin (An American Nuclear Tragedy) reveals how the state's landscape has helped shape its destiny."—Publishers Weekly

"For three years, journalist Fradkin drove 200,000 miles in an old Volkswagen camper and swam, skied, sailed, hiked, biked, and climbed through the California landscape. The result is a tough, heartfelt book that succeeds both as history and as a personal odyssey."—James Hamilton, Westways

"With the light, revealing touch of a master reporter, Fradkin (Wanderings of an Environmental Journalist, 1993, etc.) takes the Golden State's measure, top to bottom."—Kirkus Reviews

"Philip Fradkin's work is full of foresight, good sense, and an understanding of the ties between social and environmental dilemmas. Taking Fradkin's writing seriously is an important step in figuring out the American West today."—Patricia Nelson Limerick

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