Sacramento Bee journalist Sam McManis spent five years on the road
trying to find the real California. He discovered that there is more
than one California, but every different California is equally weird and
wonderful. Worlds collide and commingle: the neo-hippies with the
rednecked farmers; the urban sophisticates with the quirky desert
dwellers; the Hollywood power brokers with the outsider artists. Brought
together in a bouillabaisse of voices, Crossing California will make
you see the state in an entirely new light.
From the briny scent of Fisherman's Wharf to the fragrant sage scrub of
Imperial County; from the otherworldly starkness of Death Valley to the
crashing waves and flexing muscles at Venice Beach, Crossing
California gives readers a first-hand experience. McManis has stalked
the tony aisles of the newly minted Broad Museum in gentrified downtown
Los Angeles, and quick-footed it through the International Banana Museum
along the desiccated shores of the moonscaped Salton Sea. He has
inadvertently gotten his car stuck in a tree at a cheesy drive-thru
giant Sequoia roadside attraction along the hemp highway between
Mendocino and Humboldt, and witnessed, with both fascination and
can't-look-away horror, grown men and women, sans children and sans
inhibitions, belt out full-throated versions of "Let It Go" at a
Disneyland sing-along. All told, Crossing California is a trip. (Color
photographs),
