M*A*S*H star and activist Mike Farrell slated for Chico visit Saturday

From a bit part in The Graduate, to eight years on M*A*S*H as B.J. Hunnicutt, five seasons of Providence, and a part in Desperate Housewives, shy Mike Farrell has realized a childhood dream of becoming an actor. As a kid growing in West Hollywood he delivered groceries to the likes of Groucho Marx, Jimmy Stewart, and Lucille Ball, but these days "the beef" is in his outspoken activism.

It's all detailed in the new paperback edition of "Just Call Me Mike: A Journey To Actor and Activist" ($16.95 from Akashic Books).

Farrell will be appearing in Chico for a book signing and free-wheeling question session this Saturday at 7:00 p.m. at the Trinity United Methodist Church, 285 East 5th St. Tickets for the free event are available from the co-sponsors, Chico Peace and Justice Center and Lyon Books.

Both George McGovern and Bill O'Reilly have praised Farrell for his honesty, and the book highlights Farrell's decades-long involvement with what he calls "people issues" ( including "equal rights for women and minorities, . . . the right of the disadvantaged to a social safety net, . . . and an end to the death penalty").

But Farrell writes that he is not a pacifist: "I believe in the right of self-defense, be it personal or national, but I also believe in finding peaceful resolutions to disputes and oppose war except in the face of the most dire national threat." One time, introduced to Nicaraguan Sandinista officials extolling the virtue of the socialist revolution, Farrell was sickened by the "triumphalism" and evasion when he ventured questions about how "people's lives were being improved." In effect he asked "where's the beef?" and found only the stuff one finds in a barnyard.

Married since 1984 to actress Shelly Fabares, Farrell believes 9/11 should have been treated as "a grotesque and inexcusable crime" rather than an act of war; "America's emotional tension found an outlet in the war in Afghanistan. And it played into the hands of media manipulators who transformed George W. Bush from an inept bungler to a war president."

Farrell's Hollywood stories are frequently funny, but the author never loses sight of his bottom line: "Everyone deserves what everyone wants--love, attention, and respect."

Chico novelist writes of the power of love

It begins with a softball game in Madison, Iowa in 1950; before the story ends a young man faces almost certain death far away in the Korean War. The story is a tribute to a young woman's love--as well as the survival teachings of one George Grey Eagle on the Blackhawk Indian Reservation. It's a romance built on the theme of acceptance of those who are culturally and religiously different than ourselves; after all, one character says, "If God can accept people in heaven from all faiths, then who are we to question whom God accepts?"

"Love's Journey" ($19.95 in paperback from Books by Mode, www.booksbymode.com) is by Chico CPA James (Jim) Rozendaal. Rozendaal will be signing copies at Lyon Books in Chico on Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 7:00 p.m.

The first-time novelist was raised on an Iowa farm and knows the importance of religious tradition in small-town life. And therein lies the rub. Tommy Van Haaften, just out of high school and working in construction, falls in love with Allison Jorgenson, a tall blond Swede completing nursing school at the University Hospital in Des Moines. But the Dutch ought not mix with the Swedes, at least according to family tradition. The two fathers are adamant that their children not marry "outside their faith."

The story is straightforward and the language (and the lovers) chaste and even polite. This is in part a tale of military heroism, but it's also the story of almost mystical intuition. Grey Eagle talks to Tommy about Allison: "Love is the driving force in the universe. Your connection to her will be your ticket back. So the stronger the connection, the more certain your ticket." To Allison, grieving over Tommy's distance, he says: "You need to find your own sense of knowing. And when you do, it will sustain you no matter what the external circumstances."

When Tommy is wounded, captured and beaten on the battle front, his mother feels similar pains. She remains confident of his return.

Along the way Allison is befriended by a newspaper publisher who takes an interest in Tommy's ability to withstand torture. Eventually his story is published and becomes a book entitled "Love's Journey." Those looking for a happy ending will find it.

Chico poet rests a spell, and remembers

An author's note says Chico poet Tom Fuszard is also "a corporate communications consultant, speechwriter, lecturer and speakers' coach," and his background shows in the clarity and directness of his work.

"Places To Sit and Other Poems" ($9.95 in paperback from Felicidad Press out of Chico) is a collection of remembrances. In "Regrets" the poet writes: "Not wise to dwell on the past, / they tell me, / but now I have the time." The time is spent thinking about "What I Learned When I Started to Listen": "That wars are fought / mostly by people / who had nothing to do / with starting them // That a lot of people / are afraid all the time // That much of the world / is in a mess / and a lot of it is because / nobody listens."

These simple words give the reader pause, especially on a day of national remembrance.

Many of the poems are personal, recalling boyhood memories. In "Bird," the poet writes: "I have no idea why / I took your life. // One thinks little / about things like that / as a boy of nine. // You were there / on your little branch / and I with my / puny air rifle / just shot and you fell / and bled in the leaves / and died. // It was not to test my aim, / of that I am sure. / I had killed hundreds / of bottlecaps, / executed dozens / of glass jars. // . . . I did not think about / eggs in a nest / waiting to be warmed / or fledglings waiting / to be fed / or another waiting / for your return / and never knowing / why you did not."

The opening poem, "Places To Sit," has something to say about a park bench, a barstool, a witness chair, and more. Including deep grass: "For people in love, mostly. / People who want to be / away from the crowd. / See, he's brought a little book of poems. / He will read some, and they will see / the depths of each other's eyes / for the first time."

This little book of poems remembers love.

Advocate of Hindu Vedanta to sign books in Chico

Anna Hourihan, publisher of Redding-based Vedantic Shores Press (www.VedanticShoresPress.com), has edited a series of lectures on the Hindu philosophical school of Vedanta which serve as a good introduction to the teachings of Hindu mysticism. Delivered by her late husband at the University of Guelph, School of Continuing Studies, in Ontario, Canada, the lectures are presented in "Children of Immortal Bliss: A New Perspective on Our True Identity Based on the Ancient Vedanta Philosophy of India" ($16.50 in paperback), by Paul Hourihan.

Anna Hourihan will be speaking and signing copies at Lyon Books in Chico, Wednesday, September 10 at 7:00 p.m.

The book begins with the claims of Vedanta, that "nothing exists except the Divine Being, or Brahman. . . . Truth is One; sages call it by different names. . . . The very nature of the Soul is divine: the Cosmic Self manifests as the individual Self or Atman. . . . The primary goal in life is to realize, through direct personal experience, the divine nature within our own self."

For the author, the ancient Hindu teachings of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita are "the most sophisticated of all religious writings" and "represent the seedbed of everything that is deep, universal and mystical in the world." Thus the mystical traditions of Islam (the Sufis), Christianity (especially Meister Eckhart), Buddhism (Zen), and Taoism are all "confirmations" of Vedanta teachings.

Though Vedanta accepts "all religions as valid," what Hourihan means is "not the truth in them but the truth in us"; that is, a religion is inspired to the extent that it helps convince the person that his or her Self is identical to Brahman. The path to such realization, the author says, is through meditation, the experience through which even ordinary persons gain "the awakening of our true self."

The ego-power of individuality, including a fascination with "occult techniques," must be eliminated; "we are not sinners seeking somehow to be saved but rather we are an unknown purity seeking to merge with the Unknown Purity."

Buddhists, Christians and Muslims may well be uneasy at Hourihan's reinterpretation of their doctrines, but read with discernment the book is a clear exposition of the claim that "The Self is all, and you are the Self."

Greg Mortenson climbs the "inner mountain"

The Karakoram Highway (KKH) in Northern Pakistan "is one of the most daunting engineering projects humans have ever attempted. Hewing principally to the rugged Indus River Gorge, the KKH has cost the life of one road worker for each if its four hundred kilometers."

Named after the nearby Karakoram Range (giving the letter designation to one of its mountains, K2, the second highest peak in the world), the highway project forms a starting contrast to a very small, very quiet, but in some ways equally daunting project undertaken by mountaineer Greg Mortenson: The construction of a school, for boys and especially for girls, in a little village in the Baltistan area of Northern Pakistan.

The true story is told in "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School At a Time" ($15 in paperback from Penguin) by Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Mortenson's co-author spent two years interviewing many who touched his life; he found a life that touched many others in its single-minded determination to make a quality education (and actual school rooms) available to village children living at the edge of existence.

In advance of Mortenson's April appearance in Chico, Chico State University (www.csuchico.edu/bic) and Butte College (www.butte.edu/bic) have designated "Three Cups of Tea" as the "Book in Common"; other community organizations are also starting discussion groups and the E-R will be archiving stories dedicated to Mortenson's work.

Tragedy and failure have haunted Mortenson's life. After his sister Christa died of a seizure on her twenty-third birthday Mortenson in 1993 wanted to place her necklace at the summit of K2, but he failed to reach the top. He got turned around in his descent and entered an unfamiliar village, Korphe, where he met Haji Ali, the village chief, who told him sharing the third cup of tea means "you join our family."

Mortenson promised to return and build a school, and the story (told in the third person) traces the circuitous route he took to keep that promise. Hounded by failure, then by success, Mortenson is complex: An infidel in a Muslim land who gained respect and love from religious authorities, whose vision of building schools continues today, and whose inner climb is the most inspiring of all.

Roger Aylworth on the wonderful world of widgets

"When we were first married," longtime E-R columnist Roger Aylworth writes, "Susan and I agreed on a division of labor. Susan hates to iron men's shirts, and I am no great fan of dishwashing, so I agreed to take care of my shirts, and my bride took over the sink duties. In the long run this has meant that the dishes almost always sparkle, and I wear a lot of wrinkled shirts."

Such is life at "Casa Aylworth," and now fans of Aylworth's family humor column can revisit the bouncing brood of seven kids and two parents, and new readers can become fans. "A Place in the Shower Schedule: 101 Favorite Columns" ($16.95 in paperback from Delphi Books, www.DelphiBooks.com) chronicles the sometimes goofy events surrounding a man still smitten with "the saintly Susan" (whom he married in 1970) and the veritable plethora of "widgets" and "grand-widgets" who have made their entrance along the way.

The author writes about his column that "what I wanted to do is produce 'feel good' humor, situations where people would laugh with and not at other people. . . . With six sons and a daughter I realized I had an enormous reservoir of material."

The columns are loosely arranged by category, such as "On Being Roger" (in which the author finds that wearing a tuxedo to work can add "woo-whoo to the world"--even at his advanced age); widget wars (including the never-enacted "bottom-otomies" of recalcitrant widgets); and "Getting Fit" (wherein Aylworth realizes that his "body warranty" has expired).

There are also tales of animals (what happens when Flashy the hamster gnaws through a water line feeding the dishwasher, for instance) and encomiums to "the coolest truck in the whole, entire world!"--a vehicle the author christens "MAH TRUCK!"

Parenting never really ends, Aylworth observes, but it's "the capacity to enforce parental edicts that fades. I discovered a long time back that true parental power begins to disappear very early in the kid-dad relationship: Real control peaks the day before the little guy grabs the spoon in his own tiny fist and begins to shovel the mashed peas into his own mouth without help."

Readers will want to shovel in the columns in this warm, wise and wascally book.

Teardrops on parade from local photographer/writer

Chico's Doug Keister has a thing for "classic recreational vehicles"; his previous books include "Ready to Roll," "Silver Palaces," and "Mobile Mansions," all dealing with one form or another of vacation trailer. Now, with "Teardrops and Tiny Trailers" ($19.99 in hardcover from Gibbs Smith), Keister surveys "compact motorhomes and trailers."

The result is a book chock full of colorful interior and exteriors of teardrops, "canned hams" ("so called because their ovoid shape resembles a can of ham"), and glittery Airstreams. The cover shows a teardrop trailer built by the Gypsy Caravan Company of Bell, California, in 1937. The author notes that "fastidious care by a mere three owners during its lifetime has left this trailer in unrestored mint condition."

Teardrops became popular in the 1930s as do-it-yourself projects. Some teardrops were built from kits and conveniently had room for two--if you happened to be raccoons. But what the trailers lacked in space they made up in style. Keister shows dozens of restored trailers hitched to vintage cars. "Tiny trailers," he writes, "are a decorator's dream: a tidy well-defined space that seems to accept just about any stylistic ethos." There are blue ones and shiny ones, trailers that recall the Sixties, aircraft design, or an Arts and Crafts touch.

Canned hams reflected the teardrop style (though later the little teardrop came into its own with its aft kitchen) and became immensely popular in the 1950s, with their external styles "heavily influenced by the era's flamboyant automotive designs." Remember two-tone paint jobs and wraparound windshields, anyone? The makers of canned hams tried to make them cool, too.

The boler trailer (small "b") was created by a Canadian fiberglass septic tank developer. You can see where this is going. In the Sixties the compact fiberglass trailers, which looked sort of like bowler hats, hit the market. Though never wildly popular they were durable; some are still on the road.

The Airstream aluminum trailers got their start in the 1930s but are still popular; smaller Airstreams these days are marketed under the Bambi name. Keister also adds a chapter on the European love affair with tiny trailers, and there are two pages of online resources.

It's a fun book, and clear that tiny trailers are nothing less than portable personalities.

The origin of Orland's "Farm Sanctuary"

In 1985 Gene Baur worked at Greenpeace in Chicago, became a vegetarian, and (with his then-wife Lorri) founded Farm Sanctuary.

The story is told in "Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food" ($25 in hardcover from Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster). The organization focused on "downers," animals "down on the ground, unable to move on their own because they were sick, injured, or dying." Rather than tend to such animals or humanely euthanize them, which would be expensive, factory farms and stockyards routinely put them in the "dead pile"; sometimes such animals wound up in the food chain.

Farm Sanctuary volunteers photographed the abuses and in some cases removed ailing animals and restored them to health.

Eventually Farm Sanctuary relocated to a farm in Watkins Glen, in upstate New York, where victims of the factory farm system were named and nursed. Later, "one of our supporters, a professor at California State University, found available land suitable for a sanctuary near Orland . . . and donated about a hundred acres to us." Baur writes that the "Orland shelter has a visitors' center with an outdoor pavilion. . . . We've built barns and shelters where the animals can come and go as they please."

Actress Kim Basinger filmed a public service announcement on behalf of Farm Sanctuary featuring Henry the Holstein, "a frail baby calf" Baur rescued from "a crate at a calf ranch." Henry is now "a happy resident of the Orland shelter" and "weighs in at over two thousand pounds. He gets plenty of fresh air and grass to graze on."

Ultimately, Baur writes, "the best way to promote health, compassion, and sustainability is to adopt a vegan lifestyle. . . . Animal foods, including meat, milk, and eggs, waste vast resources and are inherently violent." But, he says, "if you continue eating meat and dairy products and you are concerned about animal welfare, then I hope you'll avoid factory-farmed meat, milk, and eggs."

The book is written in a quiet, reasonable tone (underplaying the controversy that has attended the work of Farm Sanctuary over the years), inviting the reader to consider that each farm animal "has a distinct personality as well as his or her own needs, fears, and desire to live."

Grass Valley author remembers his days as an L.A. motorcycle officer

William W. "Bill" Wilhelm spent 20 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, 18 of them as a "motor officer." When he retired in 1973 he had logged more than a million miles "without a preventable accident." That's not to say he had an "easy street" job, though. He saw his share of bodies, criminal shenanigans, official bureaucracy , and bad cops; and he worked the Watts riot in the summer of 1965 and the Sylmar quake in the San Fernando Valley in 1971.

Wilhelm has collected his reminiscences in dozens of vignettes. Though there are no accompanying photographs (a personal camera was forbidden on the job), his sprightly prose and dry wit paint a vivid picture of life from the officer's perspective in "Code Two 'N' a Half" ($12.95 in paperback from Oak Tress Press, www.oaktreebooks.com).

"Many see the motorcycle officer only as the dreaded image in the rear view mirror. Surely this guy has no sense of humor. His talent must be limited to eating doughnuts, hiding behind billboards and looking as if he doesn't understand the problem." Wilhelm is out to dispel the stereotype.

One time, after stopping a speeding motorist, he recognized a man he had served with in the Marine Corps during World War II. But he didn't recognize Wilhelm. Just before writing a citation, the officer "tilted my head back and told him I was getting a message. Then I told him, 'You were a Marine in the war. . . . You had a friend named Bill. I can see you and him in a foxhole.' He looked at me as if I were a complete nut case. 'I'm not getting Bill's last name.'" "Wilhelm," said the driver, and then the officer removed his helmet and sunglasses; "I told him he'd better keep his speed down, because the police department was short on Marines who were with him in the war."

The LAPD uses Code 2 for "get there legally, but without delay," and Code 3 for "emergency." When another unit had Code 3, Wilhelm notes that sometimes, when backup units "were riding fast to get there, the inside joke was that were were rolling 'Code Two 'n' a Half.'" Readers will enjoy the trip.

Fire in California: What we need to know

David Carle was a California State Park ranger for almost three decades. He brings his experience to a timely book: "Introduction to Fire in California" ($18.95 in paper from University of California Press), scheduled for August publication, is one in a series of "California Natural History Guides."

The book contains 15 maps and some 90 photographs (including one of "Richard Nixon on his roof during the Bel Air fire of 1961" spraying water with a garden hose while smoke billows in the background); in five chapters it covers the nature of fire, vegetation types and fire across California, file policy, how to prepare for a wildfire, and a history of major fires in the state. That includes the Fountain fire in central Shasta County in 1992 which consumed 300 homes; and the Southern California fires in 2007, some set by arsonists and spurred on by the Santa Ana winds, that burned half a million acres and 2000 homes and killed seven.

Carle details how CAL FIRE responds to wildfires throughout the state. "Estimated flame lengths are one way to consider firefighting options. . . . So long as flame lengths stay below four feet, hand crews using shovels and axes can construct fire lines near the front of the fire.

"The heat and danger from rapidly spreading fire after flames are between four and eight feet high mean that fire lines must move back a considerably greater distance; only bulldozers or other heavy equipment can clear fire lines along the fire front. . . . A fire with flames between eight and 11 feet requires air tankers or helicopters to drop fire retardant. . . . Beyond 11-foot flames, direct fire suppression is simply no longer effective. No amount of water or retardant can make an effective dent in the energy being released."

The chapter on "Getting Ready: Life on the Edge" is worth the price admission. It diagrams creating a defensible space around your home and what to do during a fire evacuation ("bring combustible patio furniture indoors" and leave some lights on so firefighters can find your "house at night or in heavy smoke").

One way to thank the firefighters and volunteers is to become more informed about fire. This book will help.

Not fire, but ice: Paradise native's Donner poems

Perhaps it's ironic that I read Shana Youngdahl's chapbook, "Donner: A Passing" ($12 in paper from Finishing Line Press, www.finishinglinepress.com) on the third day of my evacuation from the area threatened by the Camp Fire. Though we were well cared for by friends, there was no mistaking the sense of displacement that must have gripped the group of nearly 90 people. My battle was with fire, theirs with ice, and the outcome was far different. The fire danger lessened, and we returned home. For the 81 trapped in the Sierra snows in the winter of 1846, one accounting says 36 died.

Youngdahl, a Paradise native who now teaches at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa, has written 25 short poems that retell the story of the Donner Party, from packing day in Springfield, Illinois, in April 1846, to the survival a year later of a man named Keseberg, one of the party. "It is rumored, he bragged: he ate their children, / even called them by name, claimed Tamsen / died of grief upon George's death. . . ."

The reader is advised first to read one of the narratives of the Donner Party which exist online, and then to take up quietly, carefully, Youngdahl's terse, searing words. Lansford Hastings had promised a shortcut to California, but what little guidance he offered proved fatal. First came the desert trek: "To moisten children's mouths, Tamsen gives each / a lump of sugar wet with mint. / Later: a bullet to chew."

Later comes the fateful climb into the mountains, the snowfall which stops the party dead in its tracks, and the unspeakable events that to this day are not perfectly understood. The cabins are inundated in snow. "Little movement, this, the felling / of trees. The dead / frozen-eyed storms. // The bible murmured aloud, a forsaken / mountain where few breathe. // Each day the same bones / boiled and chewed. // The known world: thinning."

"It had been Tamsen's plan," the poet writes, "to feed her children flesh / from frozen bodies. Perhaps / they did not know what the meat / was, and could only stare / at the fire. . . ."

Ice is like fire. It burns a hole in the heart.

Chico High School grad co-authors comprehensive look at Costa Rica

Scott Pentzer, recently inducted into the Chico High School alumni hall of fame (he graduated in 1984), has lived with his wife, Meg Tyler Mitchell, for almost four years in San José, Costa Rica. His parents, longtime Chico residents, wrote me recently that Scott "is director of Latin American programs for a consortium of colleges and universities located in the U.S. Midwest that offer a Latin American experience for their students. The couple received doctorates in Latin American Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans."

Now they've collaborated on "Costa Rica: A Global Studies Handbook" ($55 in hardcover from ABC-CLIO), part of a series devoted to selected Latin American countries. The handbook is not a travel guide but rather a highly readable and nuanced survey of Costa Rica's history, politics, culture and economy, useful not just to travelers but to students and business people as well.

The book is divided into two parts; the longer narrative section addresses everything from geography to health care, from political and social challenges to arts, literature, and soccer. The second, smaller, section is a reference guide which includes notes on language and etiquette.

The authors write that "Costa Rica is a very small country in an out-of-the-way corner of Latin America. Costa Ricans themselves have been heard to muse on how small their population is compared with some of the giants of the Americas, how many times the 4 million Costa Ricans could fit in Mexico City. . . . Perhaps these perspectives explain their habitual use of diminutive forms in their speech, giving them the self-imposed nickname 'ticos.'"

The handbook notes that "Costa Ricans are private people; family always comes first, before almost every other obligation"; sometimes "hospitality to strangers is a nice attitude to adopt, if it does not really have to be taken too seriously. Costa Ricans themselves joke that ticos love to invite people to their houses, but they never give out the address."

If a theme pervades the book, it's that of the troubled Costa Rican self-image. "The country is passing through a moment of institutional crisis and self-doubt" just when tourism is increasing and foreign investment is heating up. Mitchell and Pentzer provide a dose of reality behind the tourist brochures.

Undiscovered wine country: California's Central Coast

William Ausmus, a research scholar in the Communication Studies Department at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, writes that though there is a deserved "ocean of verbiage paying homage to the wine regions of Napa and Sonoma," the area from Monterrey to Santa Barbara has gotten short shrift. "In the vast archipelago of California wine," he says, "the Central Coast is very much an undiscovered country."

That changes with Ausmus' "Wines & Wineries of California's Central Coast" ($24.95 in paperback from University of California Press) which contains detailed profiles of almost 300 wineries visited by the author. Together with "Nancy A. Clark, my sweetheart and fellow wine aficionado," Ausmus, despite his self-described "European bias," "was astounded by what I saw and, perhaps more important, by what I tasted."

The first part of the book considers the region's geology, history, and "terroir," a French word "that describes the natural components necessary for growing premium-quality wine grapes" such as sunlight, climate, and "the lay of the land."

The second part is an encyclopedic guide to the wineries, many of which have tasting rooms, with interviews of winemakers (making the book delightful reading) and the author's own rating of their offerings based on a five-star system (ranging from "good, drinkable wines" to wines "comparable to other world-class wines"). As an entry into the offerings of each winery, Ausmus provides two selections, his own and the recommendation of the vintner.

In thousands of tastings, "I looked for the visual appeal of the wine--that is, the color, clarity, and depth of wine in the glass. I describe to the best of my ability the predominant flavor notes in its aromatics (also called the nose or the bouquet). I share with you the taste of the wine in the mouth, focusing on the balance and integration of all its elements."

Ausmus gives 5 starts to the 2002 Pinot Noir produced by Sea Smoke Cellars in Lompoc; the wine has "wonderful aromatics of cherries, cranberries, raspberry fruit preserves, cinnamon and cardamom spice, smoke, earth, violets, and crème de cassis."

"Taste responsibly," Ausmus reminds his readers, "have fun, and remember that wine is more than just a food or a beverage"; it's part of culture. He quotes Galileo: "Wine is sunlight, held together by water."

The story of Durham in historical photographs

Durham residents Adriana Farley and Jan Holman, drawing on their decades-long research into community history, have just published "Images of America: Durham" ($19.99 in paperback from Arcadia Publishing, www.arcadiapublishing.com). Replete with 237 photographs from special museum collections and dozens of individuals, the book is an engaging anecdotal history of "The Town Where Volunteers Make a Difference."

"Durham" is available at various local outlets and the authors will be signing copies at the Durham Branch of the Butte County Library tomorrow night from 6:00 - 9:00 pm.

The book is divided into eight chapters, covering such areas as the founding families, farming, schools, and transportation. The authors write in an Introduction that "July 4, 1870, marked the turning point in the Sacramento Valley for transportation. . . . This was the day the California and Oregon Railroad tracks were completed into Chico from Sacramento and San Francisco. This track line marked the beginning of Durham and many other small towns."

More specifically, "the establishment of the Durham Post Office on February 27, 1871, and the completion of Durham's first flour mill in 1873 were the keys to the successful early growth" of the community. The town's economy depended on grain crops; but, "by the start of the 20th century, the first almond trees were being planted in the Durham area. Durham would become the heart of California's almond country. . . . The establishment of the Durham Land Colony by the state in 1918 had a marked effect on . . . introducing farming diversity and an irrigation system. . . . The agricultural base of Durham in 2008 includes thousands of acres of rice, almonds, and walnuts, with a few pecan orchards and field crops."

The photographs are fascinating, even more so if one has family ties to the area. There's a shot of "Hap's Beer Barrel," billed as the smallest restaurant in the world (three stools); the 1936 fire between Durham and Campbell streets, which destroyed the entire block; and Sitton's Groceteria store in the midst of the flood of 1937.

"Durham's identity," the authors write, "is not measured by . . . famous events. It is measured instead by its enviable quality of life, small-town atmosphere, volunteerism, work ethic, self-motivated youth and caring populace."

Seattle novelist has no known connection with Chico

Looking for a novel that will mess with your mind and have you wondering just who the crazy person really is? Looking for a science-fiction tale worthy of Philip K. Dick, but friendlier?

Then you might be looking for "Bad Monkeys" ($20 in paperback from HarperCollins) by Matt Ruff. (A smaller paperback version is due from Harper in August, but you really won't want to wait.)

When I wrote Ruff asking for some kind of Chico connection, he was kind enough to reply: "Sadly, I’ve never been to Chico, though I’ve probably flown over it at least once or twice. However, I do note that San Francisco is pretty close, and not only does Jane hail from there, but I’m sure she’d have been happy to come up your way and kill somebody if only the opportunity had presented itself."

"Jane" is Jane Charlotte and when we first meet her it is 2002 and "she is dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit," waiting. A man enters the white room Jane is in and introduces himself as "Dr. Vale." "Do you know where you are?" he asks.

She answers: "Unless they moved the room . . . . Las Vegas, Clark County Detention Center. The nut wing."

"And do you know why you're here?" "I'm in jail because I killed someone I wasn't supposed to."

But this is no straightforward crime novel. Dr. Vale notes that Jane claims to be part of a "secret crime-fighting organization called Bad Monkeys." Well, not quite. "We don't fight crime," Jane corrects Dr. Vale, "we fight evil. There's a difference. And Bad Monkeys is the name of my division. . . . The Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons."

As Ruff fills in Jane's back story, we learn of the NC Gun, which kills using "natural causes"; the convoluted history of her brother, Phil; Jane's tracking of an evil janitor; the Scary Clowns (who "consider Las Vegas to be their fiefdom"), another secret and rival organization; guys named Wise and True; and a mysterious coin bearing the slogan "Omnes Mundum Facimus," "we all make the world."

Indeed, as Churchill said of Russia, "Bad Monkeys" is a "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." You'll go ape.

Co-founder of PrayNorthState to sign books Saturday at Barnes & Noble

James Wilson, who with his wife Diana, founded PrayNorthState in 2001, tells about a Promise Keepers meeting in San Diego. A young man responded to the gospel message "of abundant life, not just hereafter but right here and right now, in Christ Jesus." Counseled by a volunteer, the older man asked about other needs to pray for. The young man explained that his very religious father-in-law, when he heard his daughter was going to marry an unbeliever, refused even to meet with him. And now the young man wanted prayer that God would reconcile the family.

"The older man standing before the younger man began to tremble," Wilson writes, "as he asked the young man for the name of his wife. When he named her, the older man began to weep as he gasped out the words, 'Young man, I am your father-in law. Can you ever forgive me?'"

Drawing on the Bible and recent events in Redding, Anderson, and other cities, Wilson concludes that "the commitment to be an ambassador of reconciliation is foundational to the paving of the highway in the desert that makes way for the Lord to bring His transforming Spirit to bear in our communities. . . . Transformation is an out-breaking miracle that cannot occur while the people of God are at war with one another."

"Living As Ambassadors of Relationships: Reconciling Individuals, Families, Genders, Denominations, Cultures, Liberals and Conservatives, Jews and Gentiles, and the Generations" ($16.99 in paperback from Destiny Image), while taking a strong stand on traditional values, calls for Christians from charismatic, liturgical, and evangelical traditions to unite in ministering to their communities.

Wilson will be presenting his vision, signing books and answering questions this Saturday from 1:00-3:00 p.m. at Barnes and Noble in Chico.

An Anglican priest, Wilson is convinced that the prophetic ministry of the Holy Spirit is alive today and that, properly employed, the weapons of spiritual warfare achieve powerful results. "I have personally witnessed traffic accidents and satanic ritual activity disappear from a community following the strategic application of indiscriminate blessing, unmerited forgiveness, and the celebration of the Lord's Supper."

There is no easy triumphalism in Wilson's controversial and challenging book. The ambassador is also in need of reconciliation.

Willows writer: Rekindling the awe, revisiting memories

Daniel Thomas and his wife live near Willows on land they call "The Ten." Those acres formed the center of the earlier "Essays from The Ten." Now, Thomas has essayed beyond "The Ten" to visit places within a hundred air miles of his home. Approaching seventy, and facing health issues that limit his sojourns, Thomas finds vast diversity right in his own backyard.

As he explains in "100 Miles" ($9.95 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing), "going west, I would travel across the Sacramento Valley floor over the Pacific Coast Range to the California coast. I would view fields of rice, rows of vineyards, mountain forests, and crashing waves. Turning north, I could visit majestic Shasta Dam, see the craggy peaks of the Trinity Alps. . . . Steering south, I could visit a refuge where a million geese and ducks winter. . . ." Yet the pieces in his new book are really about an inner journey to recapture the "sense of wonder" of a boyhood long past.

Thomas will be signing copies of his book at Lyon Books in Chico this Saturday at 3:00 pm.

What the author calls his "wanderitis" takes him to Fruto, "a small settlement hidden in the foothills some fifteen miles west of Willows" that no longer exists. His cousin David lived on a ranch seven miles away, and, back in the 1950s, after bicycling to the Fruto store, "the first thing he and I would do was to lean the bikes against the rough hewn posts supporting the slanted covering of an uneven wooden porch, stagger inside, hardly noticing the sounds of the squeaky pinewood floor, plop down dimes, and order a Nesbitt's Orange."

Near his property Thomas revisits the "Corning Domes," "the result of uplift on the eastern edge of a fault, called the 'Corning Fault,' located along Interstate 5 extending north to Red Bluff." The author and his son Marc recount paddling the Sacramento River from Redding, and it's clear Thomas is searching for "destinations that would restart my zest for life," the zest of that youth so long ago. He concludes that "I discovered once again that my reverence for the harmony and beauty of this particular part of California is well founded."

The awe has returned.

How Bucks Lake came to be

Plumas County native Scott J. Lawson edited several "Images of America" books on the region and has now produced "Saga of a Mountain Meadow: A History of Bucks Ranch and Bucks Lake" ($19.99 in paperback from Old Mountaineer Publishing). With over 180 historical black-and-white photographs and maps, Lawson traces the development of the Bucks Valley region west of Quincy and how the need for power led to the creation of Bucks Lake in the 1920s.

The author will be appearing at Lyon Books in Chico for a book signing on Wednesday, June 11th, at 7:00 pm.

Lawson writes that "soon after the first gold miners struck rich diggings" on the East Branch of the Feather River's North Fork "at Rich Bar in 1850, Horace Bucklin, Jesse Healy, and Francis Walker took up a land claim in Bucks Valley, about eight miles by steep and winding trail south of that fabulous find. Their mountain valley was the most practical stopping place and grazing area to be found near Rich Bar. Soon, though, Bucklin moved on to Nelson Creek and other diggings, leaving behind his nickname 'Buck' on the valley."

Images show the "Oroville-Quincy stagecoach parked in front of the Bucks Ranch Hotel in 1896" and an advertisement for Bucks Ranch in 1900 offering "saddle horses and teams to let." It wasn't until 1908 that the first automobile chugged through the Valley. Bucks Ranch had numerous owners, including Wheatland cattleman David N. Jones.

"In 1925," Lawson notes, "Robert Storrie and Robert Muir purchased the Jones estate and other properties at Bucks and formed the Feather River Power Company. Their ambitious plan was to build a dam at the outlet of the valley to create a reservoir that would help supply California's ever-increasing demands for hydroelectric power. Despite the remote location and often primitive equipment of the time, in an amazing three short years their vision was realized. Connected with the Bucks Creek Powerhouse at Storrie in the Feather River Canyon, Bucks Lake entered the hydroelectric arena." Eventually P.G.&E. bought the powerhouse.

Lawson writes that Bucks Lake "took almost seven years to fill"; eventually recreation replaced logging and "in 1984 the Bucks Lake Wilderness was established."

"Saga" is an essential guide to the almost forgotten past of an unforgettable place.

Paradise novelist tells a romantic tale of young love

Though Linda Peelle-Haddeman of Paradise has been at sundry times an English teacher and an actress, her real love is libraries, and she's worked for the Butte County Library and now for the Bayliss Library in Glenn County. Her new novel, "Sylvia's Book" ($18.65 in hardcover from Stansbury Publishing in Chico) by Linda Kathleen Peelle, tells the romantic tale of 18-year-old Sylvia Hill who is also a lover of books (and opera).

Though written in the third person, the story makes it clear that this is Sylvia's work, and thus the reader can forgive the rather exuberant if naive optimism expressed by the main character and her tendency to find "the moral of the story" in every experience. After all, she tells us herself that she has been born "with an unusually philosophical nature."

The novel begins in London on Sylvia's eighteenth birthday, toward the very end of the nineteenth century. Her father Elbert, a businessman, is scheduled to sail to Manaus, Brazil, to examine the rubber plantation near the Amazon and to report back to a group of potential investors. But when Sylvia's mother suddenly dies, Elbert can take comfort only in Sylvia's presence. "His grief broke through and he cried, in great wrenching sobs that shook his whole body--this man who had not cried since he was a little boy. Sylvia cried with him, putting her arms around him, able to think of nothing except her loss."

Thus begins a new chapter in Sylvia's life and she accompanies her father on the trip. On board she meets a young missionary doctor named Richard ("like a big brother"). She also meets the manager of an opera house who is on his way to Manaus and then, after disembarking, she is charmed by the "young and very talented tenor, Angelo Rossini," and falls head-over-heels in love with a womanizer.

Eventually she says to herself, "I'm ready to take back my life. The man I loved was not real. He was just an image." After her father's investigation proves dangerous (he survives a gunshot) the two escape to America, symbol of opportunity and a fair reward for hard work. Sylvia at last finds true love based on real friendship. Just what the doctor ordered.

Chico author's life through the eyes of his favorite truck

Robert Woods and his wife Wanda make their home in north Chico now, but Woods, a retired science teacher and Naturalist/Interpreter for the U.S. Forest Service, loved to roam. Encouraged by the Writers Group of Chico Prime Timers, Woods has published an account of his travels that is gentle, good humored, and told in part by his truck.

Says the truck: "Although I was manufactured for sale in 1953, my first recollection is from the autumn of 1960 when Bob and Lea Woods purchased me for $450 in Yreka, California. They anticipated a move and needed a vehicle with some hauling capacity. Though I'm only rated as a half-ton pickup, I'm quite well built, and have overload springs and a Barden bumper with a very substantial trailer hitch. My paint job at that time was rather dashing, with most of me a bright International red, trimmed with ivory white."

Bob called his truck, made by International Harvester, "Cornbinder." In "Travels With Cornbinder" ($15 in paperback from Cornbinder Press) Woods and Cornbinder alternate in telling the tales of a family that included Lea (who passed away in the 1990s) and their four children. Wanderlust gripped Woods. From Idaho to Portland to Willow Ranch (in Modoc County) to Many Farms, Arizona (where he taught Navajo students), to Susanville (where he taught prisoners) and to Forest Ranch, Bob and Cornbinder tell the story of a teacher in love with the great outdoors.

One spring morning, after Woods had accepted a teaching job in a two-room school at Sawyers Bar ("a remote settlement on the Salmon River in the mountains of western Siskiyou County"), he and Lea were sitting on their porch sipping coffee when, as Cornbinder tells it, "a stranger suddenly appeared. A young black bear had entered their front yard through the open gate. . . . The scrawny appearance of the animal indicated that it needed food, so Lea hurried to the freezer. . . . She found a steelhead trout about two feet long, and offered it to the visitor who willingly accepted the treat." No one was harmed.

Cornbinder, now restored, has been in the family for 45 years. The truck is in it for the long haul, and so is Woods.

The plague of plagiarism

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. And lest you think me a little Dickens for stealing a famous line as my own, please know that judge Richard A. Posner thinks characterizing plagiarism as "literary theft" is just plain misguided.

Posner is a judge on the US Seventh Circuit Course of Appeals and a professor at the University of Chicago Law school. His meditation, "The Little Book of Plagiarism" ($10.95 in hardcover from Pantheon), reaches a pragmatic conclusion. Defining plagiarism as "literary theft," he writes, is "inaccurate; we'll see that there can be plagiarism without theft. And it is imprecise, because it is unclear what should count as 'theft' when one is not taking anything away from someone but simply making a copy. When you 'steal' a passage from a book, the author and his readers still have the book, unlike when you steal his car."

Wait a minute. Plagiarism without theft? Well, consider certain popular textbooks. In some cases the "authors" named on the cover aren't even alive; others have worked behind the scenes updating the book and consenting to having someone's else's name applied to their output. Who is harmed? Not the public, really, but other textbook authors who have to compete against "big names" long dead. But because we're all in on the game maybe this isn't plagiarism after all.

Posner says plagiarism shouldn't be "a crime or a tort" but "the kind of wrongdoing best left to informal, private sanctions" including "ostracism, ridicule, and cancellation of contracts." While it's easy to "copy and paste" from the Internet, services such as Turnitin.com also make it easier to detect plagiarism and so the incentive goes down. Those who plagiarize out of sheer audacity wouldn't be deterred by criminal sanctions anyway.

Posner opts to define plagiarism as "fraudulent copying" in which the notion of fraud is heavily dependent on what he calls "reliance." "By this I mean that the reader does something because he thinks the plagiarizing work original that he would not have done had he known the truth. . . . If he's a teacher he gives a bad student a good grade" and that may harm other students by altering the grading curve.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Novel mixes sex, radical politics and nanotechnology

Author Emory Menefee, now approaching 80, lives with his wife Josephine in Richmond, California. Though he received a doctorate in physical chemistry from MIT, and has published dozens of research papers, "The Cultivation of Weeds" ($11.95 in paperback from ExPress, available at www.emenefee.com) is his first novel. One of his children, longtime Chico resident Lisa Menefee Baker, wrote me about the book and noted that her parents were frequent Chico visitors.

A strange complacency came over me, probably because my orange juice was spiked with the drug misamine, and I agreed to do a review.

I'm kidding, actually, but such a chemical does play a significant role in this novel of the near future. Young Carl Grendil, social misfit, is drugged into the SOS, the super-secret "Soldiers of Sacrifice," a Division of Intelligence-sponsored "revolution in American soldiery" whose purpose "is to insinuate themselves closely enough to an undesirable opponent to introduce an armament of lethal and microscopic weapons." The miniature "neurobots" penetrate the victim, lodge in the brain, and produce a painful death seemingly from natural causes. Enemies of the US simply drop from the scene. The SOS operative is sworn to escape undetected or to commit suicide. Better this than a massive and unending war such as the US tried to fight in Iraq.

Carl's mother, Lyn, is strikingly beautiful and increasingly estranged from her husband Ed, a former physics professor made rich through his invention of the so-called "F-chip" which, implanted in computers sold to other countries, would undetectably "phone home" to US intelligence officials. Ed's partner in the development was the paranoid Robert Sikes, one of the founders of the SOS and its headquarters in a privately-owned "ring of mountains" in Northern California.

Ed is the likely presidential candidate of the popular "Reform Party," which called for "nearly all the government functions that had been privatized in recent years to be restored under a new kind of government control," namely the users of the services themselves. The entrenched powers in Washington called it "socialism." The current President of the US wants Sikes to use the SOS to eliminate Ed, and therein lies a tale of sex, violence, death, and the lesson Carl learns from weeds. Fun stuff. Would you like some orange juice?

A Wolfe in the fold: Chico State professor photographs his life

Byron Wolfe is not only an associate professor of photography at Chico State University, he is also a collaborator on two books, about the American West and Yosemite, that document the extraordinary project of shooting contemporary images from the exact vantage point, season, and time of day of classic phonographs half a century or a century old.

But even in these majestic works it's clear that Wolfe is also attracted to some of the flotsam and jetsam left along the trail: a candy wrapper or a piece of plastic from a child's toy. They are part of history as well, and that got him to thinking. He asked his students to take a daily picture of ordinary life. And he decided to do the same thing himself.

"Every day between my thirty-fifth and thirty-six birthdays," he writes, "I tried to make at least one complete new and compelling photograph. The idea was to create a narrative that was attentive to place, change, and the meandering pace and flow of life." Now, half a decade later, the pictures have been collected in "Everyday: A Yearlong Photo Diary" ($29.95 in hardcover from Chronicle Books). His two young sons appear often, but, "because the pictures were mostly about the world that my wife and I inhabited, we were rarely visible in them."

Many of the pictures, displayed chronologically, have short captions; others stand by themselves. A couple of times Wolfe's camera failed; at other times he gives us a small gallery to represent the day, such as images of five of his father's trees bending under the weight of the snow two days before Christmas. There are pictures of spilled milk, chicken eggs, children sleeping, burnt toast and blood. With small children in the house, and a dad who is not the best gardener, there's likely to be blood.

Some of the images are far from prosaic, like the world contained in a drop of water on Wolfe's Weeping Santa Rosa Plum tree. There's the image of a TV showing the President announcing the war with Iraq on March 19, 2003. The face of the president is blocked by the silhouette of a young boy gazing at the news.

"Everyday" is the stuff of life.

Yosemite as you've never seen it, through the lens of Chico State University's Byron Wolfe

"Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers" ($29.95 in large-size paperback from Trinity University Press) is the just-released softcover version of a book first published in 2005. It's an extraordinary "rephotography" tour, courtesy of Byron Wolfe, Associate Professor of Photography and Digital Imaging at Chico State University, and Mark Klett, Regents Professor of Art at Arizona State University in Tempe.

What is rephotography? According to Rebecca Solnit, a San Francisco-based writer who contributes three major essays to the volume, "by standing in the same place at the same time of day and year (which is necessary to get the angle of the light right) you return to the site of the photographer's choices--how he went onto the very lip of a cliff, what he chose to crop out and what he chose to show of the landscape. . . ." The photographers in this instance are Carlton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge, who photographed Yosemite in the 1860's and '70's; Edward Weston (1973), and Ansel Adams (mid-twentieth century).

Klett and Wolfe have taken their own stunning panoramas from the present day and overlaid them with precisely aligned images from the earlier photographers. The "Four Views from Four Times and One Shoreline" shows Lake Tenaya in 2002 with black and white photographs from Muybridge, Adams and Weston. The hills and mountains have changed little; the shoreline itself, once studded with boulders and trees, is smooth. It's as if little holes in time have opened up, and the reader can gaze in awe at what once was.

Solnit, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, writes that "truth is like rock. But meaning is like the pines." In her essay on the "politics of the place," Solnit notes John Muir's vision of the Sierra Nevada as forever "virgin wilderness . . . a place apart . . . a place hitched to everything else in the universe except other people. . . . But a century later Muir's vision needs radical revision." The book explores just what that new vision might be. Truth endures; meanings change.

The writing is superb, the photographs high art with just a touch of whimsy: Yosemite in all its glory.

A politically-incorrect memoir of undergrad days at Chico State University

In 1978 Mitch Cox left Cal State Northridge and headed to Chico State University. Little did he realize some of the best days of his life were just ahead. He was a self-described goof and all-around "fathead," and yet maybe not so dumb after all. He eventually he returned to the university to become Assistant Director of Athletics.

His story is told in "Fathead Goes to Chico" ($14.95 in paperback from iUniverse), a rude and crude account of hijinks and heartthrobs told in frat-boy style without the frat. Cox the writer slightly alters the names of real people and pays more attention to the humor of the situation than to the exact historical details. The reader is given a series of comic vignettes as "Poo" (short for the hated nickname "Mitchiepoo") transmogrifies into "Mitchell Shawn Cox" at his graduation.

Cox will be discussing his book at the Chico Barnes and Noble store this Saturday afternoon from 1:00 - 3:00 PM.

The author proves himself a thoughtful sort. One November, outside the dorms, "it was still sunny and nice so there were people everywhere throwing the Fris or just catching rays. I was . . . facing Lassen Hall, when I saw her coming. She was riding this beat up old bike down the walkway and as she passed, our eyes met. . . . Her hair fell over her left eye in an incredibly sexy fashion, she smiled, and that was that. Like a ghost . . . she disappeared inside Shasta." No one knew her, so Mitch figures she's visiting a mystery boyfriend, and that leads to "Mitch's Mystery Boyfriend Theory":

"If there exists a female that you're interested in, and if that female is not interested in you, and if you ask said female out, and if she says, 'No, I have a boyfriend,' then that boyfriend's name will be Cliff, Bret, Chuck, Rick or Kyle and not Herman, Myron, Fred, Harold or Irving." You'll never see this boyfriend, the theory says, "but since you can't prove he doesn't exist, you're hosed."

There are tales of roomies having sex while Cox is trying to sleep a few feet away, and practical jokes, and women, and good friends, and women. "Fathead" rules!

Chico area poets create their own buzz

In honor of Chico's California Nut Festival, held in February, Lyon Books of Chico sponsored a poetry contest. Owner-manager Heather Lyon writes that "participants were asked to submit poems that 'relate to nuts, other local crops, or bees or other pollinators.' Adult and child poets submitted poems." Lyon tells me she was so pleased with the submissions she decided to publish them all in "Sustenance: Poems By Chico Poets In Celebration of the California Nut Festival" ($7 in paperback from www.lyonbooks.com).

It's a lot of fun. The 31 submissions are divided into "thoughtful poems" and "humorous poems," with three entries by young people (Jane Hogan, Robbie Barber, and Madeline Chinchay). Lyon notes that "Jeanne E. Clark, creative writing faculty at Chico State University has four poems included in the volume. Judge Beth Spencer of Bear Star Press chose Clark’s poem 'Almonds' as a notable work." Previously published poets are represented, including Audrey C. Small, Joy Harold Helsing and Patricia Wellingham-Jones, but many of the submissions are from newly-published writers.

The poems can only be sampled with a few short excerpts. Clark, in "Almonds," writes of "Flatbed trucks stacked five high with white wooden boxes. These hives. // Sleepy bees, suspended in smoke, careen in the orchard." Judith Ellen Anderson has "Bees Under the Kitchen Window": "Next I called the honey people, making a lovely offer. / Lively swarm of bees: Free for the taking. / But no one answered - and no one took the free bees. // So now we've made our peace. . . . "

Helsing notes that the "Bees Are Disappearing": "I think / some bees found their way / into a different dimension, / a parallel universe / they like better, / and the buzz is spreading."

Reed McGuffy, another of the prize winners, tells the tale of "The Tree & Bee & What It Means for You & Me." The tree invites the bee; and the bee buzzes in reply: "Yer zzent iz juzz delizzuzz / An' yer blozomzz zo divine / I thinz I like yer offer, / I thinz I like't fine! // And so the two had Congress, / The Tree and tiny Bee, / And from that merry union / Come Nuts for you and me."

Just for kids: Local writer brings trains to life

Chico's Bonnie Worthington dedicates her first children's book to her son, Cole, "my angel and my inspiration." A note about the author on her Web site says that "her son became enthralled with trains and remains a devoted enthusiast today. His first train ride was on the little steam engine number 12 of the Orland, Newville and Pacific Railway in Glenn County. By the time he was three, Bonnie was taking her son on trips to the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento and going on tourist train trips all over North America. One thing they noticed was that there was a shortage of train story books for children, so Bonnie created the Engine Ed series of books for all little train enthusiasts and the adults who get to read to them."

The first in the series is "Engine Ed's Colorful Train" ($16.95 in hardcover from Bear Hug Books, available at www.engineed.com) with full-color illustrations by Laurie Faust. It's bedtime, and a little boy named Cole asks his mom to read his favorite story, the one about "Engine Ed." Cole drifts, but "when he opened his eyes, Cole was standing at the edge of an old walnut orchard and saw a big black steam engine on the tracks in front of him! It looked like it was smiling. 'Ding, ding, ding, ding,' rang the engine's big brass bell. . . ."

Cole finds himself "dressed in blue striped overalls, an engineer's cap, and there was a big red bandana around his neck." Engine Ed invites him on board. "'Well, wouldn't you know,' the big engine laughed, 'I've got Cole here in front of me and coal in my tender too and I can't get started without either one of them. Hurry up and climb aboard. I can't be late and I can't get going without an engineer!' puffed Ed impatiently."

On the ride Cole is introduced to a tank car, a boxcar, a flatcar, and an old fashioned caboose, and surprises Engine Ed with his knowledge of FRED. That, Cole explains, "stands for 'Flashing Red End-Device.' That's what trains use now instead of a caboose."

Youngsters will appreciate learning about trains through the simple yet engaging story, the stuff that dreams are made of.

Writer of rollicking, hilarious, endearing Western novel to appear tonight in Chico

Start with the Nebraska plain in the year 1871. Add 17-year-old elite-born Edward Turrentine Bayard III, just off the train from Connecticut, sent by his doctor to a lung-clearing sanatorium that proves pretty much nonexistent. Season with a large dollop of Dickensian characters and Three Stooges spice, and one has the makings of a Western novel that more than just “hops along.” “Turpentine” ($14 in paperback from Black Cat) by Spring Warren is an imaginative delight from the Davis-based first-time novelist (there’s more at www.springwarren.com).

Spring Warren will be appearing at Lyon Books in Chico at 7:00 PM tonight for a public reading and book signing. Married to historian Louis Warren, the author spent her growing up days on a Wyoming Ranch, and writes in publicity material that “my great uncle, Roy Montgomery, ran a bar and bordello in Gillette, Wyoming, called the ‘Buffalo Hump.’ He was the Democratic favorite for the governorship of Wyoming when the Republican faction levied charges against him for violating the White Slave Traffic Act. He spent a year in Leavenworth and no time as Governor.”

Some of that sensibility finds its way into “Turpentine,” which is the moniker Edward (“Ned”) receives early on in Nebraska. Ned is naïve but thoughtful, and falls head over heels for Lill Martine, but a marriage is not to be. Later, on his way back to Connecticut to unravel family mysteries, he meets up with his old tutor, Brill, who asks Ned, “Forgive my lachrymose thoughts. . . . How are Avelina and Tilfert, the love of your life, Lill, and the scoundrel horse, Chin?” “Dead, drowned, lost, and abandoned. Lachrymose indeed.” And that’s not even the halfway point of the book.

Back East, Ned teams up with a teenage coal miner named Curley and a cigar roller named Phaegin, a woman who loves dancing and who eventually loves Ned. Their adventures are by turns laugh-out-loud funny and mordantly grim. Along the way there are more identity shifts than in a Shakespeare comedy. Much later there will be time for reflection on just who one is and recognition that “the end and the beginning are much the same. Eventually no one owns identity.”

“Turpentine” is a rambunctious debut, captivatingly written.

Looking toward Easter and the hope of the Resurrection

N. T. Wright is Bishop of Durham in the Church of England, but he’s also a prolific scholar and popular author of “Simply Christian.” His newest book is “Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church” ($24.95 in hardcover from HarperOne). It’s a bracing call for readers to understand how the early Christian hope, which was based on what Wright calls “the strange story of Easter,” gives guidance to the church today as it confronts a world of death, injustice, hopelessness.

Along the way Wright takes up two false hopes, the materialist “myth of progress” and a kind of modern Gnosticism that seeks to escape the material world into some ultimate disembodied existence. But the first cannot deal with real evil, and the second undermines human stewardship of God’s good creation.

By contrast, the Christian hope is far different. “The early Christian future hope centered firmly on resurrection. The first Christians did not simply believe in life after death; they virtually never spoke simply of going to heaven when they died. (As I have often said . . . heaven is important but it’s not the end of the world.) When they did speak of heaven as a postmortem destination, they seemed to regard this heavenly life as a temporary stage on the way to the eventual resurrection of the body.”

Easter is a “strange story,” Wright says, because the earliest Christian accounts of the bodily resurrection of Jesus conclude not with a hope of “going to heaven,” but rather with “a very this-worldly, present-age meaning: Jesus is raised, so God’s new creation has begun—and we, his followers, have a job to do!”

The resurrection is “life after life after death,” and so “the presently embodied life before death can at least be seen . . . not simply as a ‘vale of tears and soul-making’ through which we have to pass to a blessed and disembodied final state, but as the essential, vital time, place, and matter into which God’s future purposes have already broken in the resurrection of Jesus and in which those future purposes are now to be further anticipated through the mission of the church.”

Wright considers judgment, heaven and hell, the ascension of Jesus, and more. He offers corrective words for the church as he looks at implications of the resurrection for justice, beauty, evangelism, baptism, prayer, scripture reading holiness and love, and the promised future redemption of space, time, and matter. The hope that Easter offers may take the reader by surprise.

National Geographic writer to speak Tuesday on Charles Darwin at Chico State University

In March of 1837, some 171 years ago, Charles Darwin became an evolutionist. But, writes David Quammen in a new biography, Darwin “didn’t announce his apostasy” from the prevailing Anglican view that God had created each separate species as “natural kinds.” Darwin suffered most of his life with “chronic bad health,” but his distress was not the only reason he refrained from publishing his findings, in which he marshaled evidence of what he called the “transmutation of species” (only years later would he use the word “evolution”).

The story is told in “The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution” ($14.95 in paperback from W. W. Norton) by David Quammen. The author has succeeded in his purpose of creating “a concise treatment, part narrative and part essay, accurate but pleasantly readable, of this huge and deeply complicated subject” and what he calls Darwin’s “difficult, scary materialism.”

Quammen is a National Geographic contributing writer, has won the National Magazine Award three times and has published 11 books, fact and fiction. He holds the Wallace Stegner Chair in Western American Studies at Montana State University. He will be appearing in a free public presentation next Tuesday, March 11 at Chico State University’s Laxson Auditorium as part of the On the Creek Lecture Series. Sponsored by Chico Performances (www.chicoperformances.com), the College of Natural Sciences and the Natural History Museum, Quammen’s lecture on Darwin begins at 7:30 p.m.; a book signing is scheduled afterward.

Though the lecture is free, tickets are required for admission. They are available at the University Box Office at 2nd and Normal Streets in Chico (898-6333).

Quammen writes that “Darwin was a complicated man . . . selfish and ruthless . . . in some ways, but selfish and ruthless mainly in service to his work. He was also sweet-spirited and dutiful, with a strong sense of personal morality grounded only in his materialistic notions of how human social behavior had evolved.” But for the threat of another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, usurping his work, Darwin might not have published “On the Origin of Species” in 1859.

By then Darwin had identified the mechanism of species change—natural selection—and his idea altered the face of biology forever and spurred intense debate about its religious implications. Quammen writes, “The existence of God . . . is not what Darwin’s evolutionary theory challenges. What it challenges is the supposed godliness of Man. . . .” The discussion continues, 171 years later.

A history of Orland told in vintage photographs

The picture on the book’s cover, taken in 1947, shows Orland volunteers collecting clothing for overseas relief. It’s one of 220 “classic Orland photographs” contained in “The Land of Orland” ($19.99 in paperback from Arcadia Publishing, www.arcadiapublishing.com) by Gene H. Russell for the Orland Historical and Cultural Society (which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2007).

Part of the publisher’s “Images of America” series, the book tells Orland’s story through photographs from the Alta Schmidt House Museum and other local collections, carefully annotated by Russell, who also provides a historical introduction. The back cover tells readers that “the Land of Orland dates from the pre-Gold rush 1840s when Granville Perry Swift selected the area for the adobe headquarters of his vast cattle operation. The naming of the town took place in 1875 when three men—who could not agree on a name—put their choices on slips of paper and the name ‘Orland’ was drawn from the hat.”

In his introduction, Russell notes that “much of the Old West had vanished from view and was lost before the first cameras came to capture pictures of the Orland area. The earliest photographs in this book . . . date from the 1880s and 1890s.” Orland’s best years were yet to come. The key word was water. “In February 1906, the Orland Unit Water Users’ Association was formed, and by that July, a survey party was busy at work in the western foothills on Little Stony and Big Stony Creeks. Four months later, the East Park Dam site 60 miles southwest of Orland had been selected for the first federally funded irrigation project in the West. Boom times were just around the corner.”

Orland’s population “increased from 600 in 1910 to 2000 in 1912. The farm population increased almost 250 percent as land values (and land speculators) increased dramatically.”

The book is divided into 8 chapters (including Early Years, Orland Irrigation Project, Business Enterprises, Schools, Churches, Entertainment), each introduced with a line drawing of a prominent citizen, such as Prof. Jerome B. Patch, “founder and president of Orland College (1882-1891). . . . Patch’s famous standoff incident with Constable Gifford took place in the college in January 1884, and he was relieved of his teaching duties. When he died . . . he was remembered for his unreasonable stubbornness and erratic, impulsive, and obstinate behavior.” He was also a good organizer and a man of zeal, “Orland’s most enigmatic character.”

“The Land of Orland” is a delightful trip to earlier days, Russell’s tribute to a land he loves.

Paradise author tells the story of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s great-great-grandmother

“O, those were the halcyon days, those days of youth!” the poet wrote. “That sun-bright, dewy morning of my life, / When all around wore the bright garb of truth; / Before I knew that earth with woe was rife.” Woe was to come in great measure to this 19th-century writer, whose life is now chronicled with great intensity by longtime Durham school teacher Linda Sundquist-Nassie of Paradise.

“The Poetess of Song: The Life of Mary Shindler 1810-1883” ($14.95 in paperback from WingSpan Press) weaves together the author’s research among family records with Shindler’s own poetry, much of which was designed to be sung as hymns.

Eventually the research took the author to Texas. “In reading her original poems, stories and articles,” she writes, “many of which have never been previously published, I discovered that here was a soul bolstered and preserved only by an incredible personal faith and strength of character . . . who had found purpose out of tragedy and resolve in the face of complete isolation.”

Mary’s minister father, who began the first Sunday School in South Carolina, was loving but doctrinally demanding. In 1832 she married Charles Dana from Vermont (a cousin, Richard, wrote “Two Years Before the Mast”). Tragedy struck in 1839 with the death of Mary’s brother and then, within two days, of her husband and son. Two years later Mary published “The Southern Harp,” 43 poems and songs “to cheer the heart.” It sold 20,000 copies.

But her “inner turmoil continued.” At the age of 36, “widowed, childless, and uncertain about what to do” her father’s faith had seemed to fail her, and she converted to Unitarianism. In 1848 she married Robert Doyne Shindler, trained in ancient languages, and became an Episcopalian. But he is restless and can’t hold a job. He dies, perhaps from self-inflicted wounds, in 1874.

Earlier, Mary had become intrigued by spiritualism and, facing immense loss with the death of so many loved ones, composed “Mrs. Shindler’s Spirit Band,” a list of those now departed who Mary believed were “watching over her, guiding and guarding her.”

She spent the last years of her life in Nacogdoches, Texas, where Robert had been rector of Christ Church. Her tombstone bears words from her own writing: “Cease from your sorrow and crying / Jesus will wipe every tear!” As Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison writes in her foreword, “Mary lived through plagues, heartbreak and financial difficulties—but left a legacy depicting the indomitable spirit of the women in early America and early Texas.”

The story of Not in Our Town Glenn County by a former “drug dummy”

As Willows resident James C. Bettencourt tells it, he was oblivious to the rampant abuse of alcohol and methamphetamine among young teenagers. Then it happened.

“The horrific nightmare exploded as I entered the emergency room. This was the first saturation of illegal drug reality into my drug-dummy brain. I witnessed my then-15-year-old son having a grand mal seizure induced by an illegal drug, his underweight, frail body rigid, shaking violently and eyes rolled back in his head. It was only at this point I truly understood what was at stake; it was at this point I really understood my son could die. As the EMT’s desperately tried to control my son’s body, I told the ER doctor that we needed life flight to Chico, a larger, better-staffed hospital, right now.”

So began one parent’s drug education, the hard way. The story is told in “America’s Choice, America’s Shame: The Reality of America’s War On Drugs: ‘Your Children, Your Family, Your Nation’” ($19.95 in paperback from AuthorHouse). A picture of Bettencourt’s son, Joe, appears on the cover. Inside, in the rough-hewn prose of a concerned citizen, Bettencourt lays out not only his son’s use of meth and its insidious pull, but the larger social issues that seem to give young people tacit consent for abuse.

“In our family,” the author writes, “our house did have hard liquor in the cabinet and a beer in the refrigerator. This was just as good as promoting alcohol. I saw marijuana as something for adults. I thought it harmless, but my personal use had been reduced to very seldom. . . . I might as well have waved banners urging our kids to use illegal drugs and alcohol.” (The second half of the book presents, verbatim, a lengthy report on alcohol use and abuse from the US Department of Health and Human Services.)

With deep parental support Joe eventually recovered and made plans for entering Chico State University. Many other kids have not been as fortunate, and that led Bettencourt to set up the “Not In Our Town Glenn County” coalition which focuses on drug abuse prevention. But his efforts, he writes, were not universally welcomed. “Drug education takes a back seat to special interest groups. . . . If you take into consideration many agencies and businesses are profiting annually, sharing $650 billion to deal with the devastating aftermath of drugs and alcohol, it is understandable why the solution of effective substance abuse prevention is not promoted.”

That, he says, is “America’s shame.”

How tweet it is: An anthology of ornithology from a Chico State University Professor

Roger Lederer, Emeritus Professor of Biological Sciences at Chico State University, and the school’s first Jack Rawlins Professor of Environmental Literacy, has just published a full-color compendium of bird lore that’s a must-have for kids and adults. “Amazing Birds: A Treasury of Facts and Trivia About the Avian World” ($18.99 in paperback from Barron’s) will kindle wonder in any budding bird-lover. (More information is available at Lederer’s incredible www.ornithology.com site.)

On just one two-page spread the reader learns the following: that the 3-pound raven is the largest perching bird; that “although birds do occasionally drift or get blown off course by the wind, studies of radio-tagged Canada Geese demonstrated that they are able to maintain a constant ground speed as well as a straight track over the ground by compensating for changes in the wind direction and speed”; that “in the last century, over 60 million birds were banded in North America”; that among birds with penises, the longest (over 16 inches) is on the Argentine Lake Duck (“nearly as long as its body”); and that the term “stool pigeon” “derives from the French estale or estal, referring to a pigeon used to lure a hawk into a net.”

Lederer explains in an introduction that he wrote his book because, though “everyone is familiar with birds, . . . not many of us really know birds. We recognize birds because they are the most uniform of all animal groups—all have feathers and lay eggs, many sing, and most fly. . . . But as homogeneous as they appear to be, they and their habits have diversified in amazing ways, from penguins that incubate their eggs on top of their feet to brush turkeys that do not sit on their eggs at all. . . .”

He adds that “this book answers puzzles like why some birds defecate on their legs, why they fluff their feathers, why baby birds fall out of their nests, and how to attract birds to your feeder and keep them from flying into your windows.”

On another page Lederer takes up the controversy about whether the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is still alive. “There have been several claimed sightings in Florida and other U.S. states over the past half century, even recently, but scientists do not agree as to whether the species still exists.” Accompanying the text is a beautiful full-page painting of several Ivory-bills—and it’s clear to this observer at least that whether they are still around is, uh, a matter of a pinion.