Because its entries are so short, it’s also a book you can dive into for 30 seconds and come out satisfied, enlightened.Īs previously, it is in the form of excerpts and diary entries and letters for every day of the year, chronologically - from the 1700s to today.
From his hangout at the Huntington Library he spent the last four years compiling a follow-up volume to his fantastic “Dear Los Angeles” with his huge new “Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters” (Stanford University Press), and it’s precisely what that history buff in your family, which is perhaps yourself, wants to read in bed each night during these shortest days of the year. Centuries after European cartographers first imagined it as an island, California stays a place unto itself, unlike anywhere else.Īnd historian and Libros Schmibros founder David Kipen continues to mine the writing of our properly mythic state like nobody else.
