Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged California

Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke and Finding Home

I’m sharing this book with everyone I know. Caitlin Shetterly’s Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke and Finding Home is a strong memoir about a young couple going broke in the recession and it gives readers the satisfying feeling of walking around someone else’s shoes for 250 pages. We’re all connected by some basic humanity and a good memoir reinforces this connection as we don the cloak of another with ease.

No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts

Possibly some magnetic force field that beckons people to its promises of adventure, wealth, and sun blazed days, there is a pull toward California. Be it a fight for survival, a lost treasure, or ability to inspire, California and its sacred deserts are full of mysticism and brighter futures. On the other hand, California's offerings are in no way a given. The obstacles, being weather related or competitive in nature, are likely to break a person's soul.

Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood

When Melissa Hart was eight years old, her mother fell in love with Patricia, the woman who drove the school bus. Soon, Hart’s mother left her husband and moved in with Patricia, taking her children with her. Within months, however, Hart learned a heart-wrenching lesson when she discovered that the family courts of the 1970s didn’t regard a woman involved in a same-sex relationship as a fit mother.

Wherever There's a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California

On June 16th, 2008 Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin made headlines as the first same-sex couple legally married in the state of California. The couple, who first met in the ‘50s, spent the majority of their adult lives advocating for equal rights for homosexual couples and lived to see their goal realized. Although Californians have fought the battle for same-sex marriage most visibly in the past ten years, activists such as Lyon and Martin have been addressing the issue of discrimination against homosexuals in California for several decades.

El Reflejo

Long Beach is unlike any other city in Southern California; it is a place where both million dollar homes and low-income housing co-exist within mere miles of each other, it is suburban and urban, it’s an oppressive, concrete jungle that happens to be surrounded by picturesque beaches, but most compelling, perhaps, is the eclectic mix of people that call the city home.

Lonely Planet: Los Angeles & Southern California (2nd Edition)

Writing guide books for cities as widely visited as Los Angeles can be challenging. One is faced with the question: what’s left to write about? All the usual suspects make an appearance in the _Los Angeles & Southern California _entry of Lonely Planet’s guide series: Universal Studios, Disneyland, Rodeo Drive, the Ivy. For readers – most notably L.A.