“Healthy Young Children, Sixth Edition”

Though it’s a textbook for early learning professionals, “Healthy Young Children, Sixth Edition” ($62 in paperback from The National Association for the Education of Young Children, naeyc.org; also for Amazon Kindle) is a comprehensive guide of interest to parents as well.

Edited by Alicia Haupt, Brittany Massare, Jennifer Nizer, Manjula Paul, and Louis Valenti, the key first chapter, “Health and Safety for Children and Early Childhood Educators,” is co-written by Shaun-Adrián Choflá, Butte College Child Development instructor. 

Choflá, with expertise in empathy therapy, and co-author Julia Luckenbill, Adult Educator/Director of the Parent Nursery School in Davis, flesh out key safety standards for early learning programs.

These standards, write Choflá and Luckenbill, are more than just physical safety practices but also embody emotional safety. For instance, how should educators choose books and other items for their classrooms? “First, partner with families. Engage in relationship planning by asking about the families’ needs, values, and wishes for their children. … Ask also for a list of key words and phrases in the families’ home languages. Setting up the classroom so that the walls and shelving reflect the people walking in for the first time is a wonderful way to support feelings of belonging….”

In addition, educators should remember that “not all families have traditional structures, so your handouts should avoid assuming that families are headed by a mother and a father.”

The authors also discuss the disruption caused by COVID-19. “As early learning programs closed,” they write, “educators lost their jobs and children were left without the in-person support that early learning settings provided, creating trauma and impacting young children’s mental health.” 

The chapter is concerned not only with trauma-informed care of children, but also the well-being of educators themselves and what early learning programs can do to foster the health of their employees (such providing substitutes and regular breaks).

Real-word vignettes throughout the chapter illustrate ways trained professionals can interact with children, like washing their hands with Dee, who is two; or how to bring children out of danger without alarming them.

This is a good guide to the good work done by educators who care for some of the most vulnerable among us.

“Shadows Of Light & Shards Of Dark: Poems ReCollected 1978-2023”

Oroville teacher William (Bill) Jackson is also a professional magician, lover of theology, and now, a “reluctant poet.” 

“I never understood, nor enjoyed most poetry,” he writes. “So I never considered myself a poet … even while writing poems. However, I have always enjoyed words. I’m fascinated by how they can carry innumerable shades of meaning. … Each word is a seed containing a tree of human thought.” 

Those seeds blossom in “Shadows Of Light & Shards Of Dark: Poems ReCollected 1978-2023” ($15 in paperback, independently published). Over 45 years, beginning after high school, Jackson penned words that capture a moment but open up into larger vistas, illuminating “who we all are, where we have been, and where we may go.”

Loosely organized into four “seasons,” Spring considers words, love, and lust, Summer is for shadows of light and dark, Fall contains “Treasured Ash” in poems for Paradise, and Winter heralds a journey toward “good grief.” “Grief,” the poet claims, “is not a rest along the way./ You’re not meant to live in despair./ Grief’s never meant to be a place to stay./ Grief is about continuing to care.”

The Appendix is a children’s story, with Jackson’s own sketches, called Mark & Cathy and the Meaning of Life, a tale about misfits who fit. 

The poet knows something fitting: “Darkness falls./ Yet, the sun miraculously rises bright./ Heaviness calls./ Yet, one is not so easily made light./ A secret:/ Gratitude defies gravity.” The poet is grateful for “Table Mountain Wildflowers” which “Tuck themselves in to the tune/ Of songbirds in the evening hours/ Serenading a stoic moon.”

Some poems here evoke smiles, others reflect deep theology. “Fear is/ A certain kind of faith/ In dark uncertainty./ Love is/ The certain kind of faith/ In light risen from adversity.” And: “No matter how logical or critical/ Love is personal, not political.” 

“Only an unchanging God can truly say ‘I AM,’” Jackson writes me. We, on the other hand, continue to change: “I’m a question waiting to form./ I’m an aging man unborn./ I’m becoming but never will be./ It’s only a stepping stone/ In what you call me.”

“John Brown’s Family In Red Bluff, California 1864-1870”

In 1833, John Brown married Mary Ann Day, just seventeen. In the first two decades of their marriage, writes Wilbert Phay, “she bore him thirteen children…. Of these, seven died in early childhood. Four of the children were taken by disease of some nature in one year. Two of her children, Oliver and Watson, were killed during the Harper’s Ferry episode.” 

Brown, drawn by the abolitionist movement, was increasingly absent from their North Elba home near Lake Placid. His “attempted seizure of the United States Armory at Harper’s Ferry failed.” Found guilty of “treason, murder, and conspiracy” he was hanged December 2, 1859.

The family’s story is told in a 1969 Chico State master’s thesis by Wilbert L. Phay, who passed away in 2020, but not before giving permission to Chico-based ANCHR (Association for Northern California Historical Research) to republish his work and include historical photographs and additional essays from ANCHR members.

“John Brown’s Family In Red Bluff, California 1864-1870” ($19.95 in paperback from anchr.org and local book outlets) includes contributions from Josie Reifschneider-Smith, Ron Womack and Nancy Leek. 

In late 1864 Mary Brown “and her four surviving children arrived in Red Bluff” after an earlier encounter with a “rebel” wagon train on the Oregon Trail. But why Red Bluff, with its “Copperheads,” “its nucleus of pro-Southern sympathizers, the most ardent haters of her dead husband,” Phay writes, “and by association, herself, and her family”?

The book answers that question, and more. Others in Red Bluff built a small house for the family in 1865, so family life was complicated, made more so by the attacks of the Red Bluff Sentinel and defense by the Red Bluff Independent. Phay and the contributors create a compulsively readable narrative that makes the past live again. It’s essential reading.

The story continues to unfold. Reifschneider-Smith, ANCHR Publications Manager, has unearthed details about why the “rebel” wagon train was so hateful of Brown and his kin, some of whom are buried in the Paradise Cemetery; she will present her findings to the Paradise Genealogical Society, 1499 Wagstaff Road (530-762-7105) on Thursday, February 15, at 3:00 p.m.; the presentation is open to the public.

“The Queen And The Empress”

Red Bluff novelist William Wong Foey, who earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Chico State in 1973, mixes fact and fiction in his eighth novel. “The Queen And The Empress” ($14.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) traces the parallelism in the nineteenth century between two of the most powerful women in the world, Britain’s Queen Victoria and China’s Empress Dowager Cixi (“pronounced Tz’u-hsi”).

Both are cigarette-smoking, scotch-drinking, headstrong, power-hungry rulers, one seeking to extend the reign of the Union Jack to ancient China, the other seeking to protect 400 million Chinese from British control by means of devious plots to upend the conciliatory tendencies of the governing regents and wrest power from them. The women have a grudging admiration for each other even as Cixi survives attempted assassination.

The story imagines two key meetings, the first at Buckingham Palace when Cixi is a mere teenage concubine of the emperor yet willing to tell Victoria (whom she is wont to call “Vicky”) where to stuff it. As the queen muses years later, the dowager “was only sixteen and was addressed as the concubine Yi at that time. ‘That young Chinese tart was strong-willed even then,’ mouthed Victoria softly.”

The second comes in 1897, at the celebration of the Queen’s sixty-year reign, when, in her private room, Victoria and Cixi duel with swords. Cixi accuses the queen of extorting Chinese silver and addicting the population to opium. The Queen replies that “our true ambition for the heathen countries we acquire is to fill their hearts and souls with God, and to be good Christians so the dark races can join civilized society. Think of us as the nurturing parents….”

Cixi wants nothing to do with the gwai los (“whites”) yet she has little choice as she schemes for power. The Empress Dowager works to modernize her country to push back the British threat, but as the twentieth-century dawns it becomes clear that monarchs around the world were becoming more like figureheads.

The two powerful women survived in a man’s world even as they mixed the personal and political at the cost of many lives. Foey’s fiction tells uncomfortable truths.

“Blind Curves: A Woman, A Motorcycle, And A Journey To Reinvent Herself”

An organizational change expert in the corporate world, Linda Crill (lindacrill.com) found herself, at age 57 and widowed, wondering “What now?”

When her husband was diagnosed with mesothelioma cancer, “in our last eleven months together,” she writes, “we grew closer, bonded by our deeply shared mission of his survival and finding ways to enjoy each day.”

She not only felt grief at his passing, but grief about losing her old self. She tried to patch a new self together: “I redecorated parts of my home—more modern, playful, and colorful—reflecting an expression I had modified when we married. Slowly, I developed new interests—knitting scarves, soul-stirring music, and adventure travel.  On the one-year anniversary of being alone, I was surprised to find myself more miserable than ever. The grief hadn’t subsided. Instead it had grown and was raw and unending.”

What was needed, she found, was not a patch but whole new way of approaching the world. And it turned out to involve a Harley, a group of three companions, and a road trip of 2500 miles from Vancouver to Mendocino and back. It’s all there in “Blind Curves: A Woman, A Motorcycle, And A Journey To Reinvent Herself” ($16.99 in paperback from Skyhorse Publishing; also in audiobook and Amazon Kindle formats).

Now a Chicoan and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute instructor, Crill’s adventures in learning to ride a Harley, and having one fall over on her, are told with humility and grace. Once she passes the DMV test the real test comes in learning to ride with her companions over rough roads and hairpin turns, always looking Fear in the face. Who knows what lies just past that blind curve?

As Crill becomes more skilled as a rider, clad in her leather gear, her chosen watchword is “VROOM!”; the trip, she writes, “changed something inside me as I processed my fears about surviving with the excitement of riding. A resilient ‘new’ Linda was reinvented by riding through the blind curves of this journey.”

Crill’s journey (including being a cancer survivor) is a beautifully-told travelogue of the outer and inner world, a delight and inspiration.

“Government Contracting: Ethical Promises And Perils In Public Procurement (3rd Edition)”

William Sims Curry, the “Principle Consultant” of WSC Consulting in Chico (wsc-consulting.com), found in his research that “95% of the 2021 research participants were using anomalous formulas to evaluate proposed pricing” of goods and services private companies wanted to sell to various government agencies.

So, in the third edition of “Government Contracting: Ethical Promises And Perils In Public Procurement” ($74.95 in hardcover from Routledge; also for Amazon Kindle), Curry proposes 48 best practices for avoiding corruption in the public procurement process, where public institutions spend tax dollars buying from private suppliers.

Curry guides those professionals in government responsible for procurement through each stage of the process, from surveying the field to see what’s available before any bids are requested, through evaluating proposals to awarding, managing, and closing out contracts. Without the proper controls and oversight things can go wrong ethically--and quickly; the book’s “public procurement corruption wall of shame” lists almost 50 issues, including “abuse of power,” “favoritism,” “suicide,” and “slovenly conduct.”

The book is full of bad examples; in 2017 the Justice Department reported that UK-based “manufacturer and distributor of aerospace, defense, marine, and energy power systems Rolls-Royce Plc, agreed to pay approximately $800 million in total to the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil for bribing officials in exchange for the award of government contracts.” This is more than a little oopsie.

Curry points to the use by the Department of Defense, in evaluating proposals, of “adjectival, confidence-assessment, and color-coded scoring” which makes the system ripe for gaming. Government officials can fiddle with their confidence-assessment, for instance, to ensure “a favored contractor wins the contract.”

Instead, Curry advocates for “total weighted scoring” in which proposals are scored numerically and there is “numeric weighting of proposed evaluation criteria.” That, he says, “leads to precise identification of the contractor offering the best value to the government and deters procurement corruption.”

The book also explores the ethical minefield of gratuities. Is it okay for contractors to provide government officials with coffee and pastries? Maybe, but not in government offices. 

Well, how about furniture? Uh, no. 

Escort services? You’ve got to be kidding.

“Red Skies (Aftermath)”

A mystery lies at the heart of the second book in the “Big Joe Carson” trilogy from longtime Chico resident David Dirks, now Brentwood-based. In the first, “Particle Beam (For Such A Time),” by Dirks with Dennis E. Jones, it’s the 1980s, and a tremendous explosion rocks the secret Hans M. Mark National Laboratory near Fort Wayne, Indiana. When the proverbial dust settles, it becomes clear the Department of Energy facility, and its super-secret particle beam weapon, are the victims of treason and espionage.

And so, in “Red Skies (Aftermath)” ($10.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) by David H. Dirks, an investigation results in “apprehending Department of Energy’s HMM Lab lead scientist Horatio Glen Knightsen and accomplice Castle Marks….  While directing one of the decade's most significant Star Wars projects, Knightsen sold the plans for the top-secret Tesla Particle Beam weapon to the Israelis for $15 million.”

Knightsen has cultivated some very powerful friends and while he and Marks remain free the lab itself is on the verge of closing without Congressional approval of a new project. The folks from Grumman, military sticklers who rankle the lab’s engineers with their insistence on weekly psychological tests, are put in charge during the reorganization. A new laser weapon program gets the go-ahead, but Senior Engineer Joe Carson comes to recognize more is going on with Knightsen than meets the eye.

His beautiful neighbors, twins Sunny and Bunny Valencia, undercover US Marshalls (whose father had run a Colombian drug cartel) “found the two traitors on a yacht in the Azores and successfully extradited them back to Fort Wayne to await trial.” Carson, on administrative leave, joins the twins, and private investigator Rick Stone (who is secretly recording Knightsen and Marks), to sail Big Catch, Knightsen’s ship, now US Treasury property, from the Azores to Florida.

Investigators had found $10M dollars in Knighten’s Credit Suisse account, meaning $5M is missing. The ship is attacked and later sunk. Would a rescue operation find the missing money? And, tragically, Stone is found dead—but did he really commit suicide?

While the novel hints at answers, it also sets the scene for more revelations in the final book.

“The Boy Who Earned His Magic”

Three schoolyard bullies hold Howell Evans, twelve (almost thirteen), upside down by his ankles. It’s just another day in the town of Mount Shasta, where Howell lives with his parents and sister. Tormented by Bully Harold Bully, Pug the Pyro, and Sloppy Jack, Howell hears them howling and chanting “Witch, witch, your mother is a witch. Hunt her down, tie her up, and toss her in a ditch.”

This particular day, however, Howell has a series of strange encounters, including a Latino boy who cannot see; a creole girl who cannot hear; a Navajo girl with a great wolf; and an unsettling man in black whose eye patch glows. Then comes news that Howell’s mother, Rhiannon, named after a Welsh princess, has been in a car crash in the Sierras driving home from New Mexico. 

Howell’s eccentric uncle Tal (who drives an old VW van) explains all the weird appearances mean “they” have his mother and Howell must ride with him to find her—and prepare for the mysterious “transfer.” Otherwise the evil Drygoni will win. 

The tale is told in “The Boy Who Earned His Magic” ($15.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) by Chicoan Lynn Elliott, playwright, novelist, Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Chico State. Originally published in 2020 as “The Crossingway,” the book has now also become a teleplay.

The script won monthly honors from the London Indie Film Festival in Best Family/Children’s Film, Best Feature Script, and Best Television/Pilot Program or Series categories. If Elliott “earns his magic” and the series is produced, it will make for a phantasmagorical ride.

Born in Wales, Elliott notes in a talk that when he emigrated to the US in his twenties he wanted to know more of the “magic” of indigenous cultures that seemed to emanate from New Mexico, “a land of desert landscapes, howling wind witches, a ghostly woman in white…. A land where people ... still live with their tales and stories of the battles between good and evil … in this mysterious land with its ancient cliff dwellings and deep, haunting canyons.”

Welcome, dear friends, to “the place between here and there.”

"Sierra Blue"

Though a longtime Reno resident, prolific writer Suzanne Morgan Williams (suzannemorganwilliams.com) has fond California memories of visiting her great aunt in Oroville, and of Redding, where her husband proposed.

In her latest novel (for ages 10-15) a ninth-grader tells her own story--wanting a new start, like a new year, only to realize she brings her “old self” along for the ride. Wanting to escape cruel words, she is fully capable of using cruel words herself.

So it is with fourteen-year-old Magic Kendall. She just wants to hide. At her school in Tillamook, Oregon word is out that Magic is psychic. She sees colorful auras around humans and other animals—from rats to horses—and is plagued with dreams of future events which have a habit of coming to pass. When an opportunity comes to help her great-aunt Leah recover from an accident in the High Sierra town of “Ibis Springs,” she figures time away will let the cruel jokes die down.

But all her psychic powers little prepare her for what lies ahead, and especially the deep connection with a thoroughbred filly named Mountain Rose whom Leah is preparing for the racetrack, and who Magic renames “Sierra Blue” ($15.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle).

Leah is training therapy horses now, and Magic learns to help with riders, each with some form of “differentness.” Then, one stormy day, a terrible vision engulfs Magic as she bicycles out to the highway to get cell service. She is thus on the scene when the horse trailer with Mountain Rose, being transported by sixteen-year-old T.J. and his dad, hits ice and careens off the road, severely injuring the horse.

Magic is able to call 911 and, after the vet arrives, crawls into the overturned trailer to comfort the horse and, sensing her aura, guides even the vet in Blue’s rehabilitation. “I could see that she was a blue roan with a dark mane and tail. And those amazing, blue tinged eyes.” When Blue is well enough to race in Los Angeles, another horrendous premonition means Magic must confront Blue’s uncertain future. 

Williams’ novel is a wonderfully immersive story of self-discovery, friendship--and new directions.

“Lassen & Shasta California Ski Atlas: A Photographic Guide To Skiing California’s Most Iconic Volcanoes”

Though I may get out over my skis pretty frequently, they are only metaphorical. Dexter (Dex) Burke, on the other hand, knows the real thing. According to a news release, “Burke was born and raised in Bend, Oregon where he fell in love with backcountry skiing in the Three Sisters Wilderness. That passion has led him to ski all over from California, Oregon, Washington and beyond.”

Burke, with help from SWS Mountain Guides, has just published a stunning full-color, 10x10-inch “Lassen & Shasta California Ski Atlas: A Photographic Guide To Skiing California’s Most Iconic Volcanoes” ($32 in paperback from alpenglowpublishingstudio.com). “The goal of this book,” Burke writes, “is to keep things simple and give you the quick 411 on skiing around Lassen Volcanic National Park and Mt. Shasta…. Consider this book the ‘Cliff Notes’ to skiing some of the area’s best descents.”

Most all of the full-page overhead images—did I say stunning?—were taken by Burke in the late spring of 2023 after the extraordinary snowfall. He cautions backcountry skiers that “most, if not all, the ski lines mentioned in this book are avalanche paths. The slopes can and will kill people.” Take avalanche classes, know how to use your equipment, go out “with someone who actually knows that they’re doing, not just an internet buddy. Seriously, don’t die; dying sucks.”

That said, the atlas provides 17 access points, verified to work with Google Maps, along with dozens of routes (and the page numbers where they’re shown). For example, in the Mt. Shasta region Konwakiton Chute is 2800 ft. downhill; it’s 5 miles and 7700 ft. uphill from Clear Creek trailhead at 6500 ft. And there, on three pages, lies the Chute in all its snowy glory.

Each image is labeled with key features; on one of the pages showing Konwakiton Chute there are labels for Mud Creek Bowl, Sargents Ridge, and the I-wouldn’t-go-near-that-if-I-were-you area called Avalanche Gulch. The images of Lassen Peak are especially breathtaking.

This book, and a companion volume, “Trinity Alps California Ski Atlas,” are a snow skier’s delight. And delightful for those of us more into sno-cones.

“Waiting On The Word: A Poem A Day For Advent, Christmas and Epiphany”

“We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,” writes poet and Anglican priest Malcolm Guite, “But he is with a million displaced people/ On the long road of weariness and want./ … His family is up and on that road,/ Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,/ … The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,/ And death squads spread their curse across the world./ But every Herod dies, and comes alone/ To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.”

This portion of Guite’s poem, “Refugee,” commemorating the Feast of the Holy Innocents on December 28, reminds readers of “what might be called ‘the shadow side’ of the Christian story, … a season that looks back at the people who waited in darkness for the coming light of Christ and yet forward to a fuller light still to come and illuminate our darkness.”

For Guite, who has performed in San Francisco and other US (and UK) venues, poetry can “help us restore that quietness, that inner peace, that willingness to wait unfulfilled in the dark, in the midst of a season that conspires to do nothing but fling bling and tinsel at us….”

“Waiting On The Word: A Poem A Day For Advent, Christmas and Epiphany” ($15.99 in paperback from Canterbury Press Norwich; also for Amazon Kindle) provides reflections on each poem so that the revelatory words of a John Donne lie clear before the reader. 

Contemporary poet Luci Shaw, in “Kenosis,” writes of the babe: “So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door,/ broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash,/ wept for the sad heart of the human race.”

Advent brings joy, too; Guite includes his sonnets “written in response to the seven Advent prayers known as the ‘O Antiphons’” addressing Christ “by the mysterious titles found in the Old Testament, particularly in Isaiah: ‘O Wisdom!’ ‘O Root!” ‘O Key!’ ‘O Light! ‘O Emmanuel!’” For December 19, Christ is the “root of Jesse,” but more: 

“For now is winter, now is withering/ Unless we let you root us deep within,/ Under the ground of being, graft us in.”

“Nothing Gone Missing”

Ridge-area novelist Brian T. Marshall takes the reader to London and Berlin as two unlikely friends track down “Nothing Gone Missing” ($12 in paperback from missppelled press; also for Amazon Kindle). Which turns out to be really Something.

First up is Errol Walker, a cop, “a DI for London Metro,” who is a little too free with his fists. Suspended, he introduces himself as “Error.” “Well,” he tells Trile Chandry, a Pakistani man who will become his buddy, “it was supposed to be Errol—Errol Flynn and all—but who wants a name like that? And then with the way I was always screwing things up, flunking out at maths, somebody came up with Error and it just seemed to stick.”

Now to Trile. “Actually, back home,” he explains to Error, “it is two syllables, not one. Tree-Lay. But once I moved here, I got tired of telling people they were saying it wrong. And so I decided, along with a new home, I would have a new name too.” So, yes, Trile and Error.

Trile works in Receiving at a mysterious firm called Tyler-Downs. What does Trile “receive”? “None of us really know.”  One day he happens to see something very strange changing hands. Shortly thereafter his boss is fired. Something isn’t right.

Meantime, Error quietly drops in at the station and finds a fellow cop going through the missing persons files. Error notices Christian Matterly is missing. Matterly, he’s told, is “some high mucky-muck over at the Tate. Apparently he’s some genius at fleecing the rich, getting them all to contribute.”

Somehow Tyler-Downs, Matterly, and the Tate gallery are all connected. Before it’s over Trile will find and hide the something that is Nothing (to gaze at it is to almost lose oneself in darkness) which will then go missing again, and Trile will be incarcerated (“Outside it is the day called Thursday. Inside it is just now. A day that is just like all the rest, so it doesn’t deserve a name”). Error must put the plot pieces together which turns out to be an art.

It's a delightful romp proving once again that he who has a Tate’s is lost.

“The Golden City: A Story Of Love, Loss And Triumph Spanning Generations”

Anthony (Tony) Colburn, who ran track and field under coach Larry Burleson at Chico State, graduated in 1974. Now living in North Carolina, Colburn has turned his love of the Bay Area, Lake Tahoe and the old goldfields of Nevada into a historical novel focusing at first on San Francisco around the start of the twentieth century.

But that’s not the end of the story. His characters, intertwined with real events, leave a legacy that is only realized very much later. “The Golden City: A Story Of Love, Loss And Triumph Spanning Generations” ($14.95 in paperback from Luminare Press; also for Amazon Kindle) refers not only to San Francisco but to a massive ferryboat. 

As Matthew and Julia discover in our own time, “There were a number of boats built right in the city along the water front south of where the Bay Bridge is now. The ‘Golden City’ was one of those vessels; a classic double ender with a coal fired steam engine, side paddle wheels, with a large ‘walking I beam’ transferring power to the wheels via a huge single piston.”

Our hero, Matthew Donohue, is born in Carson City, Nevada, in 1885, of an Irish immigrant father and a mother who is a housekeeper to a womanizing US Senator. Matthew has periodic visions of horrific scenes yet to come but, after working as a ferryman at Lake Tahoe, decides to make his fortune in San Francisco. There he meets Julia, the young daughter of parents who own a music store. 

The first part of the book seems sweetness and light, as Matthew is determined to impress Julia’s parents (who hold working-class Matthew, part of the Golden City’s crew, in low esteem) and ask for Julia’s hand in marriage, planned, it turns out, on the day of the big quake.

The novel turns dark in its description of the subsequent fires and the loss of life, and there’s a mystery about the fate of a gold bar Matthew possessed, with many more hidden aboard the ferry. Only a hundred years later is the truth revealed—by another Matthew and Julia. 

It’s 24-carat fun.

“Setting Sun Story, Book 1: Awash In Jealous Freedoms”

“I grew up here in Chico,” Doug Hufford writes me. “From a young age, I've been interested in storytelling.” What began as a short story writing project at Pleasant Valley High School is now a series of novels (published and planned) portraying a strange fantasy otherworld very different from our own, and yet perhaps not so different.

“Setting Sun Story, Book 1: Awash In Jealous Freedoms” ($18 in paperback from Douglas Hufford Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle) is more than a sword-and-sorcery tale full of dangerous visions and powerful magic. “As my ‘adolescent “whys”’ ended I was able to look back on my teenage, and later on, early adult mindsets with a critical lens…. I hope that this sort of post-modern, tragic, transcendentalist approach to such a story could act as an inspiring place for folks to get a fresh view of their own lives.”

Hufford imagines a great spired city, Baustas, ruled by powerful Deacons who are answerable to a mysterious figure called “the Savior,” that is a bulwark against the “Savages” outside. Baustas is “Place of Peace,” an “ark” to carry its inhabitants from the present world, bathed in the constant red glow from the sun and moon, into a future world of light.

For the Prophecy to be fulfilled, the Deacons must raise up a cadre of Chosen along with fighters called Patriots. Young Adam, as the story opens, may be one among the Chosen, but it is unclear whether that is his true mantle. Adam thinks those within the city, “blessed by a divine Savior,” are “refugees from reality.”

The Deacons say the “world outside is … a place forsaken,” and “the Baustians … should be able to cure the world of its disorientation. Cleanse the Chaos, and heal it all.” But only a few, the Deacons and the Chosen, “have ever left this place.” 

Elsewhere in the story, young Erin and Rain, brothers in arms, discover a mechanistic world underneath Baustas, and together with Jun, a young woman of mysterious origins, must face the implications of free will in a real world not controlled by the Savior. A cliffhanger ending awaits Book 2.

“Sunrise Gratitude: 365 Morning Meditations For Joyful Days All Year Long”

“You are amazing and your dreams matter,” says the entry for November 21. “You are here for a reason. There is purpose to your life. Even if it’s not clear what it is, your soul knows. What if you paid attention to your deepest desires and gave them room to breathe? Imagine if you took a step to make those dreams come true and the courage that would build by taking that jump into your destiny!”

That daily affirmation touches many of the themes in “Sunrise Gratitude: 365 Morning Meditations For Joyful Days All Year Long” ($19.99 in hardcover from Rock Point) by Emily Silva Hockstra. The author, a Chico State grad, left a corporate job to become a life coach (soulsadventures.com), “helping women harness their bravery to bring their gifts into the world.” 

Now living in San Diego with her husband, Silva explains that “I was not a morning person” until “something shifted, and I started to enjoy my mornings. I find the stillness before the day begins to be a time of contemplation, silence, and beauty.”

Each single-paragraph meditation, she writes, is meant to give readers “encouragement, inspiration, and something to think about each day.” Full-color seascapes appear throughout the book; Silva writes that in the morning, “seagulls are singing their morning songs and the air is crisp. I am pausing to offer my sunrise gratitude….”

Storms come, of course. “When a misunderstanding occurs, respond in love. Love heals. Communicate from the heart with loving intent” (January 12). “Let hope enter when doubt arrives. Even if you don’t know how things will work out, know that the universe hears your deepest desires” (March 10). “The things we wish weren’t happening are actually creating resilience and a new level of wisdom” (August 6).

Though my own theological commitments don’t align with Silva’s worldview, there is nevertheless in her book a spirit of thanksgiving for life itself that readers of many stripes can celebrate.

For Silva, “Gratitude is an antidote to stress…. The more you can find moments of gratitude, the easier it is for your mind to release fearful, anxious, and stressful thoughts” (December 15).

“Extraordinary Women With Cameras: 35 Photographers Who Changed How We See The World”

Darcy Reed, Petaluma-based author and Chico State Theatre Arts grad, wants to introduce kids ages 8-12 to some of the most creative women photographers in world history. Pairing with illustrator Venessa Perez, Reed accomplishes her goal with a quirky and colorful book, “Extraordinary Women With Cameras: 35 Photographers Who Changed How We See The World” ($16.95 in hardcover from rockynook.com; also for Amazon Kindle).

Unexpectedly, there are no photographs in the book; instead, each photographer receives a short biography (one or two paragraphs) along with a whimsical, full-page illustration of the photographer herself, with a key quote if available. The idea is to invite readers to find out more; to that end there’s a QR code and link to a page listing each photographer and an associated website (a Wikipedia page or artist’s site).

The book is not just about exploring, it’s about doing. As Reed says in the introduction: “We’ve included some fun photo ideas for you to try and new photography terms for you to learn. We hope this book inspires you to pick up your own camera and start snapping interesting photos. Who knows? Maybe your work will be featured in a museum or book one day!”

Among the 35 are some familiar names, such as Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) whose “photos of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression and prisoners in Japanese internment camps during World War II made sure Americans would never forget those tragedies.”  Vogue and Vanity Fair photographer Annie Leibovitz is here as is Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), LIFE magazine’s first woman photographer and the first “woman allowed in combat zones during World War II.”

But the book is also replete with perhaps lesser-known photographers from around the world, including Dulce Pinzón, a contemporary artist that Forbes dubbed “one of the 50 most creative Mexicans in the world”; “her iconic … series featured several immigrant workers in New York City dressed as superheroes. Her goal was to highlight the invisible ‘superheroes’ people encounter in everyday life.”

Reed adds: “Take a photo of someone you think is an everyday superhero and share it with them!” Now, where’s my phone?

“Distant Finish”

Commander David D. Bruhn, U.S. Navy (Retired) is the consummate naval historian, publishing more than two dozen books on the topic. But the Chico resident, and Chico State grad, also has running in mind—as in “road racing,” road, trail, and relay racing.

He’s now completed a trilogy “devoted to competitive running in northern California in the 1970s.” “Toe The Mark” focuses on Chico’s high school running programs; “Stride Out” turns its attention to Chico State; and the final book in the series, “Distant Finish” ($29 in paperback from Heritage Books, Inc.) covers “road racing” from the Bay Area northward.

“Distant Finish” is co-authored by Jack Leydig, who not only served as the president of the West Valley Track Club but published 81 issues of the Northern California Running Review from November 1969 to Spring 1981; the story of running in the 1970s draws heavily on this “bible of the sport.” 

Each chapter presents stats and stories for a single year. There’s an appendix and index, and 176 historical photographs. The cover shows “Mad Dog” Bill Scobey of Humboldt State College, who in 1970 told a reporter he averaged running 125 miles a week on “dedicated” weeks;  and Luanne Park, “a 1978 Chico High graduate” who ran for Butte College in 1980, achieving a time of 2:11.07 in the 800 meters, “number one … on the college’s all-time Top 10 List.”

“Bob Darling was the San Francisco Olympic Club’s second runner in the 1969 Bay to Breakers with a 28th place finish…. In autumn 1969, Darling became Chico State College’s second-ever All-American in the sport of cross country with his 14th place finish at the national championships.” The book closes with how Darling got the bittersweet nickname “the Rocket.”

“Readers who ran road races in northern California in the 70s,” the authors note, “may well find their names in this book.” The decade began “just before the ‘running boom’ spurred by Frank Shorter winning the gold medal in the 1972 Olympic Marathon…. The so-called running fad that developed during this period never slowed down once it laced up its shoes.” As Darling writes in a foreword, these “distance runners blazed the trail for future generations!”

“Carl Sandburg: American Experience”

In 2019 Redding playwright-actor Max Walter created and performed “Spirit of Carl Sandburg: The People’s Poet in His Own Words.” It’s now been transformed into a selective anthology, with thoughtful commentary, of Sandburg’s work across some “six different fields of writing.”

“Carl Sandburg: American Experience” ($15.95 in paperback from Larado Publishing; also from the author at pprmkr1@gmail.com) presents Sandburg (1878-1967) as one who, “through his poems, songs, and the telling of Abraham Lincoln … helped Americans discover their national identity.”

Perhaps best known for his epic poetic cycle, “The People, Yes,” and the six volume biography of Lincoln, Sandburg also collected folk songs in “The American Songbag” and wrote “Rootabaga Stories” for children (where, in Rootabaga County, it’s “Over and Under country. Nobody gets out of the way of anybody else. They either go over or under”).

In 1950, in a preface to “Complete Poems,” Sandburg wrote that he still aspired to be a writer. “I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.”

Sandburg is plain spoken, especially in his poetry, seeking to walk in the footsteps of Walt Whitman, whom he called “The Poet of Democracy.” As is Sandburg: “One of my theses,” he writes, “hovers around the point that the masses of people have gone wrong in the past and will again in the future—but in the main their direction is right.”

As a Chicago-based reporter he covered the race riots there in 1919 and in 1965 was honored by the NAACP with a Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Sandburg defined poetry as “a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.” 

But the one who told us, sweetly, that “The fog comes/ on little cat feet” is also the one who writes, in a poem discovered in 2013: “Here is a revolver./ It has an amazing language all its own./ It delivers unmistakable ultimatums./ It is the last word./ … And nothing in human philosophy persists more strangely than the old belief that God is always on the side of those who have the most revolvers.”

“Dangle Him Purposely: An Autobiographical Novel”

“I admit I spent three decades practicing law,” Chicoan T.B. O’Neill says on his website (tboneill.com). “Trial work did allow me to fight the old battles of my youth (primarily against authority of any kind), and it provided a treasure trove of material that writers search for tirelessly.”

But he also finds treasure in the story of his early life. His poverty-stricken grade-school years, in the 1950s, with a dysfunctional family always on the move, are narrated in “Timmy: A Boy, An Era, A Family’s Desperate Journey,” part of the “A Mile Beyond” series.

The second in the series, “Dangle Him Purposely: An Autobiographical Novel” ($13.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle), brings Tim into the 1960s and the Vietnam War era as his family settles in Chico. Told in the third person, the story divides sharply in two; hijinks, fistfights, and sexual escapades fill Part I, “Vignettes of Adolescence.” 

Ah, Chico. “By 1959, the year Tim’s family arrived, a smug optimism pervaded the town. A big election filled the airwaves with Camelot approaching, Y.A. Tittle and John Brodie were throwing for the 49ers, and rock and roll rumbled over KPAY and KHSL.”

Part II, “War and Ruminations,” brings Tim to a strange battlefield; though he yearns for direct combat, his work with psyops means befriending local villagers and showing them cartoons and John Wayne movies. In this part the hijinks, fistfights, and sexual escapades are shrouded in Tim’s first-hand experience of the idiocy of the war. Friends die trying to make inconsequential gains. Locals plead with the Americans not to abandon them; Tim knows they will.

“Then came snapshots of recent memory—of the legless ARVN’s belly oozing, of dead American boys laid out like lumber, of ducking from crackling AKs, of . . . emotions at full throttle, colliding like atoms in a particle accelerator. His reaction was swift and uncaring.”

O’Neill cautions readers not to look for a happy ending, though toward Tim’s time of discharge he is reading the classics and mulling some kind of legal career. In elegant, riveting, sometimes graphic prose, O’Neill chronicles how he became himself, the result of all that dangling.

“The Broken Chain: The Ravenwood Hauntings Book 2”

It’s ten days before Halloween. For Tamika Little, 11, her dreams recall a horrific incident at the hands of an abuser. “A long, slimy tongue slithered out of its fang-infested mouth and slid across her face, leaving a trail of saliva in its wake.”

But though Tamika, in an unnamed city somewhere near “California State University,” awakens to a world like our own, it is a world where ghosts are a thing, and where Tamika, her soon-to-be older sister Serena Ravenwood, her boyfriend Luis Chavez (who can see ghosts), and, unexpectedly, the bully Butch Rodgers (who can see human auras) must band together to stop a string of murders.

Prolific Chico writer N.J. Hanson continues the horror, first told in “An Empty Swing,” with “The Broken Chain: The Ravenwood Hauntings Book 2” ($12.95 in paperback from Ink Drop Press; also for Amazon Kindle). As the events hurtle toward October 31, Hanson’s sure hand guides readers into the lives of the main characters and their interconnections.

On a dark roadway leading out of town, a Buick LaCrosse stops and Trisha Silverton, 18, tries to get away from the unnamed abuse from her three “friends,” Joey, Tony, and Samantha, but it’s too late. When Tony bashes her head repeatedly against the pavement, killing her, haughty Sam takes her opal necklace and purse to make it look like a robbery, and they all speed off.

But Trisha’s ghost is not pleased; the necklace is imbued with murderous energy to exact revenge, no matter who stands in its way. Tamika’s mother is taken over by the necklace to wreak the executions, and psychic Morgana tells the teenagers they must find the ghost behind the killings after four murders in three days.

“The pendant's fluorescent green, white, and blue opal stone glistened in the moonlight that fell through the window. The chain started to move. At first, it was just a small twitch, a few links of the chain, then it began to crawl. The necklace crept along the floor, slithering like a snake under the door and down the hall.” 

A string of murders, and murders by a string. Beware the jewelry box.

“Haunted San Jose”

Elizabeth Kile, Chico State grad, longtime San Jose resident, and lover of ghost stories, fields a passel of them in “Haunted San Jose” ($21.99 in paperback from The History Press; also for Amazon Kindle.)

“I am a believer in ghosts,” she writes, “but I also consider myself a skeptic, looking for rational explanations and relying on common sense. But there are things that can’t be simply explained away, and a couple of experiences have convinced me that there is something beyond our realm of normal understanding—the very definition of paranormal.”

Yet, she admits, “part of the pleasure of sharing ghost stories is in the telling, not necessarily in the believing. If a story is compelling and frightening enough, does it matter if it’s true? Probably not. We can continue to scare ourselves with stories we know are implausible, but out of respect for those who came before us, we should also acknowledge the historical record.”

That’s precisely what she does in telling the tales of local landmarks, including the “Winchester Mystery House,”  whose “stairs to nowhere” have a decidedly non-ghostly explanation. 

But there are schools, like Del Mar High, where “legend has it that … a boy was murdered by his best friend. Witnesses who have been on school grounds in the middle of the night say that if you listen carefully, at 3:15 a.m., the time the murder was supposed to have occurred, you can hear a boy screaming for help, his cries echoing across what are now the athletic fields.”

Readers will find stories about haunted hotels (like the Sainte Claire, with the sound of high heels clicking on—the carpeted floor), parks (like Alum Rock Park, haunted by cannibals), roads (where spectral figures visit drivers on Hicks Road), and private homes (like one where “a teenage girl with blonde hair” walks through closed doors; Kile suggests this is a “residual haunting … a spirit performing actions she carried out when she was alive”).

Kile debunks many of the stories as urban legends once she investigates the historical accounts (and there’s an extensive bibliography) but makes room for spiritual energies to manifest themselves in odd ways, all in creepy good fun.

“Religion And Public Health During The Time Of COVID-19”

“Our most basic contention,” write editors Joel Zimbelman and Andrew Flescher in a new collection of scholarly essays, “is that the pain of the pandemic in its first three years … was exacerbated by the disconnect between the public health, national political, and broad media discourse on the one hand, and the rich reflections and insights of various religious communities that span the globe, on the other.”

Zimbelman, from the Chico State Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities, and Flescher, a former Chico State colleague now Core Faculty in the Public Health Program at State University of New York at Stony Brook, have brought together ten essays (and their own introduction) all dealing with the role religious traditions played in the worldwide response to Covid.

“Religion And Public Health During The Time Of COVID-19” ($73.58 in hardcover from MDPI Books) is also available as a free open access PDF at mdpi.com/books/book/7780. Other Chico State contributors include Donald Heinz (“COVID-19 and Religion”), Daniel Veidlinger (co-author of “Exploring the Benefits of Yoga for Mental and Physical Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic”), both of the Comparative Religion Department, and Aaron Quinn, Department of Journalism and Public Relations (“The Arbitrariness of Faith-Based Medical Exemptions”).

The essays concern the humbling proposition of balancing religious freedom and individual liberty with public policy directives. Veidlinger asks whether the benefits of yoga outweigh risks of practicing in a tight-knit congregate setting, and Heinz, surveying the conservative evangelical resistance to mask mandates, wonders about the government’s “ability to bind the Christian conscience.”

“I was not immediately prepared,” he writes, “to interrogate these conservative oppositions to government further until I reflected on the unending calls for resistance and non-conformity in my own Christian leftism.”

Finally, Ellen Zhang, from the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Macau, in China, focuses on “COVID-19, State Intervention, and Confucian Paternalism.” The Confucian ideal is not government treating adults as children, but government earning the trust of people. That can allow vaccine mandates since people live in relation to one another and questions of harm transcend the individual.

Those interested in public health policy should grapple with these essays.

“Unfatally Dead: To Thaw Or Not To Thaw?”

Wayne Edmiston graduated from Chico State College in the 70s; now living on the Central Coast with his wife, Jacque, they teach Science of Mind principles as ordained New Thought ministers with Centers for Spiritual Living.

In an homage to his late wife, Sherry Plaster Edmiston (1944-1989), Wayne has crafted a tale mixing fact, fancy, and a heavenly bureaucracy, all centered on the fate of one Walter Elias Disney and his sidekicks Mark Twain and soul-in-training Eepia, who tells the others that “art, science, and religion are interrelated, part of the Universal triune.”

Disney died in 1966, but his body was cryogenically frozen. At the same time, “a place known to all who have passed into the wild blue yonder, Heaven’s Creative Department is headed up by Walt Disney himself.”

As the angel Gabriel makes clear, Walt has a choice. He can remain or return to his body to be resuscitated and, if all goes well, bring his creative spark to new generations. “Unfatally Dead: To Thaw Or Not To Thaw?” ($14.99 in paperback from WEDmiston Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle and audiobook formats), adapted from a 1986 screenplay, is indeed the question.

In order for Walt to decide, he, Sam Clemens, and Eepia are sent to various venues to see what has transpired after their deaths. Eepia in the beginning remains a shimmering presence, while Disney and wise-cracking Clemens take on their human forms and keep altering the timeline by interacting with others.

The trio flits from Haight-Ashbury in 1968, to Menlo Park in 1973 (where Clemens takes a bite out of an apple and hands it to a young man at a garage sale named Steve Jobs), to Disneyworld, to Hurricane Katrina—their presence mystifies (especially when they suddenly disappear)—and inspires. 

A girl named Sherry finds inspiration. “The gigantic screen zeroes in on the young cartoonist they had just been discussing. In the bottom left corner of the screen, a time stamp indicates the year, 1957, when the young girl was enrolled in a junior high school reading classroom in Chico, California.”

Walt’s decision? Readers will need to join the wild ride that rivals Mr. Toad’s.

“You Can’t Complete Me—But I Can!: A Self-Love Story”

Hayley Kaplan graduated from Chico State with a Masters in Social Work, became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, and is the process of recovering from a lifetime of codependency. She learned through a series of painful attachments to half a dozen men in her life that “to desire love is perfectly normal and healthy, but healthy and normal gets lost when we go searching for external love as our primary source of identity, worth, or purpose.”

She tells her story in a brutally candid memoir, a thoughtful, sometimes humorous and even hopeful account of her progress when, as a married woman, she began an affair with a married man. “You Can’t Complete Me—But I Can!: A Self-Love Story” ($12.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) is a journey of humbling self-discovery. (Kaplan has also published a workbook with the same title, drawing on her professional training and using significant quotations from her memoir.)

Too often, she writes, when we want to express our “authentic selves” we learn instead to “grin and bury it,” so “when you’re desperate for love, you behave in desperate ways, and that tends to attract one-sided relationships.”

When she met “Dax” online in her twenties, he was “peace incarnate” after compulsive gambler “Chuck.” Yet “our communication styles … contradicted each other…. Waiting for Dax to complete a sentence was like waiting for a scab to heal…. I was a neurotic, multi-tasker who wanted to do things lickety-split, and it would take Dax longer than a minute to count to sixty.” So they got married.

Seven years later, after Kaplan had given Dax a back scratcher gag gift “for that seven year itch,” she and an acquaintance, “Leo,” became emotionally involved. Leo was married, and Kaplan was torn: “How do you hurt someone as kind and as loyal as Dax? You don’t. But then, how do you turn your back on a love as rare and true as my love for Leo? You don’t.”

There are painful but needful lessons ahead as what is buried is exposed, and what is exposed can, with help from others, bring some measure of completeness.

“Deborah’s Gift”

Deborah’s life is suffused with grief. Growing up in St. Louis, around the turn of the twentieth century, she faces what will be the first of many losses, the death of her parents.

She finds herself under the thumb of Charity Millais, her great aunt, Tante Charity (“the French form of address the old lady insists on”), harshly judgmental of Deborah’s wildness expressed in her boundary-breaking drawings and paintings. And so hangs a tale.

“Deborah’s Gift” ($21.99 in paperback from New Wind Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle) is a novel by Chico State grad Lois Ann Abraham who, before her retirement, taught literature and creative writing at American River College. Her story won the Gold Prize for fiction from the Northern California Publishers & Authors.

Deborah yearns to be free of “the dragon,” Tante Charity, who dies in 1902. Before that time, Deborah as a teenager had journeyed with her great aunt to Martinique, to her family’s estate in St. Pierre, “the little Paris of the Antilles,” historically rooted in white plantation owners “who continued to own, if not people, then certainly everything else on the island.”

A dalliance with the nephew of Villette, their Black servant, results in the birth of a baby boy, whisked away from Deborah as Deborah is whisked from the island to a respectable April-December marriage to a judge. She longs to find her son and live “where the color of his skin was not a scandal.”

In 1902, as Deborah once again approaches Martinique, Mt. Pelée explodes. “The ship was bombarded with burning stones that struck her face, and the passengers behind her screamed and pushed at her so that she lost her balance and tumbled the rest of the way down the stairs.” St. Pierre is obliterated, tens of thousands perish.

Deborah survives, though horribly burned, and paints what she witnessed. “With La Catastrophe, she had entered new territory, a place where she would challenge and implicate, grasp by the throat, and demand that her viewer not just look but feel, know, believe, experience, and respond. This, then, is what she had gained with the loss of everything.”

This, then, is the power of art, and Deborah’s gift.

"How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America"

Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, in Virginia, was not only his home but a plantation. A World Heritage site, it has also become a place to memorialize the 607 people Jefferson owned in his lifetime, enslaving even his own six children he had with Sally Hemings. As reporter/researcher Clint Smith notes, the person who wrote "all men are created equal" "believed that Black people, as a rule, were not capable of poetic expression. 'Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.'"

Himself a poet and staff writer at The Atlantic, Smith, a New Orleans native with a Harvard doctorate, visits "eight places in the United States as well as one abroad to understand how each reckons with its relationship to the history of American slavery." Smith calls on scholarly accounts, empathetic interviews with those attending the sites he visits, and oral histories--the way tenuous memories are passed down.

He visits "plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, historical landmarks, and cities," mostly in the South but also New York and Senegal, site of the "Door of No Return."

"How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America" ($18.99 in paperback from Little, Brown and Company; also for Amazon Kindle) is the 2023-2024 Book in Common for Butte College, Chico State (resources at csuchico.edu/bic) and other community organizations. (Smith is scheduled for a Laxson Auditorium presentation April 11, 2024.) It is a stunning book, rigorously fact-checked and yet deeply personal.

"Here I was, on a plantation that enslaved hundreds of people who had skin like mine, having a conversation with a white, conservative, Fox News–consuming woman from Texas, whose mother had conveyed to her throughout her life that people like me were—that perhaps I was—better off dead than alive. A woman with whom, surprisingly even to me, I was sharing photos of my fourteen-month-old son."

"The history of slavery," he concludes, "… is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories." There are big gaps in our collective memories, and this book succeeds in filling them in.

"In Old Hangtown"

Placerville used to be called Hangtown after an 1849 "incident," and that's the site of Chicoan Chuck Greenwood's sprightly and compelling novel "In Old Hangtown" ($15 in hardcover, independently published). 

It's the story of two Texas cowpokes, Ralph and Fred, who arrive in Hangtown and play a large part in its development. Though Greenwood knows the area well, the book is not a historical novel but a fictional memoir written by Ralph decades later, told in cowboy lingo.

Chapter by chapter, aided and abetted by colorful characters (like Dinwiddie and his drinking establishment and whorehouse), the reader sees Hangtown develop into a thriving community, complete with small-town squabbles that threaten the "one for all" spirit. Greenwood's magic trick is to show this change almost in the background while the reader is focused on the characters and their adventures.

In the beginning, Ralph writes, "Hangtown, when we rode in lookin’ aroun’, were obviously a minin’-camp, an’ not a town. You could tell this by the people which you seed, on ‘counta that nobody looked to be from there — everbody looked to be from somewherst else, an’ plannin’ to head out to a different somewherst-else jus’ as quick as they’d got rich. We seed ever’ size an’ shape an’ color of human bein’ which they is, scurryin’ aroun’ on that road — includin’ Chinese, which some people don’ feel is a human bein’ at all. But I do."

It's a world of strong coffee ("‘Courst my notion of coffee is that it’s coffee if’n a horseshoe-nail will float in it, but it’s dishwater if’n that nail sinks") and chance encounters ("A man name’ Bidwell rode up to see us, the nex’ summer. He were from a town maybe a hunderd an’ some mile north, an’ he wanted to start him a ranch up there").

The town's spirit should be what Mr. Chisholm once told Ralph: "‘We is all ridin’ for the brand, startin’ with me, an’ we all has got to ride together. So any man which takes away from the brand, like stealin’ or shirkin’ or suchlike, has got to put somethin’ back in, so’s we can ride together again.’”

Ride for the brand, dear reader.

"Remote For Life: How To Find A Flexible Job And Fast Forward To Freedom"

"Crazy as it seems to me now," self-described "digital nomad" Jordan Carroll writes, "I remember recruiting for IBM at my alma mater, Chico State, from 2013 to 2016. We would set up a booth at the job fair and talk to candidates in person." But if you want to work remotely—the subject of his book—you need to learn "to be 'good at the internet.' And it benefits you because interacting with companies online is far more scalable than anything you can do in person."

In "Remote For Life: How To Find A Flexible Job And Fast Forward To Freedom" ($17.99 in paperback from Lioncrest Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle), Carroll lays out a comprehensive strategy. Post-Covid, he notes, when many companies are modifying their work-at-home policies, it's important to distinguish between a job that allows for some remote work and a job that is fully remote all the time.

And it has to be satisfying work. At Chico State in 2013, before connecting with IBM, Carroll was a "remote telemarketer…. I would squeeze hour-long 'call blitzes' in between a full-time university course load and two other part-time jobs." Not fun. But "little did I know, the remote work movement would become the most impactful cultural phenomenon in my life….."

Since then, Carroll worked remotely for many companies and started his own business. A resident of Mexico, he's lived all over the world. "As I built a more fulfilling life I quit many of the substances that I previously used as numbing agents, including cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs (except natural psychedelics and, well, caffeine, of course)." His "greater purpose in life is helping those for whom remote work can be the biggest lifesaver: underprivileged populations, those with disabilities, and refugees."

The secret? Well, "to get hired the difficult way, apply online. To get hired the easy way, network." Develop a personal brand, use LinkedIn, do your research and learn how to give a good interview. The details and insider tips are all here. And network, network, network.

Do you have that remote look in your eye? Then this book is for you.

"War Bound From Stockton"

The cover of the book, an image painted by maritime artist Richard DeRosset, shows USS PCS-1404 "in action against Japanese forces ashore on Aguijan Island in World War II." The little Patrol Craft Sweeper came from Colberg Boat Works out of Stockton. In fact, some 32 "small, wooden-hulled Navy ships" including salvage vessels, "rescue tugs, minesweepers, patrol craft sweepers, and net laying ships" all came to the war effort from Stockton.

Chico Naval historian and retired U.S. Navy Commander David D. Bruhn brings to life the unheralded story of Stockton's contribution to the war effort in "War Bound From Stockton" ($34 in paperback from HeritageBooks.com). The Port of Stockton exists thanks to its deepwater channel; it "opened in 1933 as the first inland seaport in California." No fewer than ten shipyards built the boats.

There are eighteen chapters, 159 photographs, maps and diagrams, and appendices listing each vessel and its awards: "Twenty-three Stockton ships collectively earned thirty-eight battle stars, and one, a Presidential Unit Citation." That was yard minesweeper YMS-95, the award "the highest a unit may receive for heroism, and the equivalent of the Silver Star Medal for an individual."

"Unfortunately," Stockton Maritime Museum President David Rajkovich writes in the foreword, "Stockton played a big role in FDR's Executive Order #9066 when a temporary relocation center was established on the county fairgrounds. At its peak, over 4200 American citizens of Japanese ancestry from Stockton and San Joaquin County were detained until more permanent camps were built in Rowher, Arkansas." But, he adds, many internees, when they turned 18, joined the Army.

Because official records and naval diaries are missing or incomplete, Bruhn played detective to piece together the stories of the ships and their crews. He is well aware throughout of the devastation of war in the Pacific. The capture of Eniwetok Atoll cost 339 Americans killed or missing and the lives of 2677 Japanese. "Finally we killed them all," came the words of Lt. Cord Meyer, USMC. "There was not much jubilation. We just sat and stared at the sand."

Bruhn has rescued Stockton's story from "the dustbin of history" with his stunningly comprehensive research and careful and thoughtful war narrative.

"Into The Shadow Realms: Book 1"

For seven-year-old Aislinn nightmares are not just kid stuff; she and brother Alex, 11, are Travelers, able in their all-too-real dreams or daydreams to visit the strangest of worlds and their colorful (especially purple) inhabitants--and to see the terrifying end to one of those worlds.

Chico novelist Hope Hill introduces readers to Aislinn, Alex, their parents and their Traveler cousins in "Into The Shadow Realms: Book 1" ($10.99 in paperback from Ink Drop Press; also for Amazon Kindle). The dreamlike story intertwines excursions into the Shadow Realms with the quotidian dailyness of kidhood.

Will the adults at the family gathering understand Aislinn's night terrors are caused by something real? "How could she tell her family that she Traveled to other worlds in her dreams and the things she’d seen terrified her?"

Terrified her so much her parents at times can hardly rouse her, as if she were in a coma. Alex explains to one of his cousins: "'She found an interactive globe showing a planet called Theopolis. When she asked what the place looked like now it showed a desolate, hostile environment.'" 

There is more: "'She asked what happened and saw the death of the planet as its atmosphere became unbreathable. She saw the people there fleeing, but not all could escape, and some chose to stay in the hopes of fixing the planet’s atmosphere. Their best and brightest minds were killed and she saw it happen.'"

With the aid of a shapeshifter named Merrick the trio and cousins find supposedly wise Observers and certain sinister Travelers want to use Aislinn in some frighteningly mysterious plan as the long-promised Prophecy Child who will save Theopolis. Is Aislinn really the Chosen One? Even if not, she has a vital part to play in the struggle yet ahead as the book comes to a close.

Alex is desperately protective of his sister. He remembers that "when he was scared as a little child and worried things would continue to get worse his father told him something he never forgot. 'Happy endings take hard work. If you don’t like how your story’s turning out work to make a happy ending.'" We shall see.

"Daddy, I'm Scared"

Chico State Communication Design major Narcippa ("Sipp") Teague played two seasons of basketball at the university (after nine years in the Navy) and now, a couple decades later, finds himself the author of a children's book. The story recalls a time when daughters Lisa and Lizette were young and plagued by nightmares. Liz, the younger, has the nightmares but her screams keep waking her sister.

Night after night they rush into their parents' bedroom and Liz would cry out the refrain that gives the book its title: "Daddy, I'm Scared" ($27.95 in hardcover from Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.; also for Amazon Kindle).

With colorful illustrations throughout, the book brings a calming presence to the reader as Liz explains her fear of "the boogieman." "'The boogieman, I thought I defeated him years ago,' Dad said with a serious look upon his face. Mom grinned at the statement and held her laugh in; she didn't want to blow Dad's cover."

"'Describe your boogieman, and let's see if it's the same vermin that I defeated,' Dad said with confidence." Liz: "'He has red stringy hair with huge eyeballs on the top of his head, and it's just so scary!'" "'How'd you do it, Dad?' Lisa questioned. Dad explained, as he takes a deep breath and poses with his hands on his hips and sticks his chest out, 'Well, girls, to make a long story short, I became a superhero!'"

It's your dream, so why not dream you're a superhero? When the monster climbs into the boy's window, the boogieman is surprised when the superhero picks him up and tosses him again and again—until the boogieman promises not to scare little kids again.

"After that, many nights and dreams have passed, and every so often the boogieman would break his promise…, but these were no longer nightmares but adventures!" "'Next time, I'll be Hawk Girl,' Liz said heroically…." From then on, the girls sleep soundly, smiles on their faces.

Teague (@iamsipp45 on Instagram) includes key workbook questions at the end, asking kids to draw their own boogieman—and then to "draw a picture of yourself as a superhero." Adults might want to get out their own pencils.

“Timmy: A Boy, An Era, A Family’s Desperate Journey”

“As for Mike and me,” T.B. O’Neill writes of himself and his brother as 1960 approached, “we thought we landed in paradise. The town accepted us and we accepted Chico as our home.” Just thirteen, Tim and older brother Mike had endured abject poverty, family dysfunction, and more moves than a U-Hall rental.

The story of the 1950s is told in “Timmy: A Boy, An Era, A Family’s Desperate Journey” ($16 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). Intended for his own children, the book has wider resonance as O’Neill (tboneill.com) chronicles the loneliness of one who doesn’t fit in. Timmy is reckless, a failure academically, frequently ill.

“I’ll tell you our story as I remember it,” he says in the preface. “Rather than speaking in my own voice, I chose to look upon my childhood as a better angel might––calling up a third-person narrator to chronicle the foibles of our family as we stumbled through the 1950s.”

And stumble they did. “’Timmy’ does not end in victory.” 

The memoir begins in 1950 on the outskirts of Newark, California with parents Carl (“Curly”) and Naomi and life in a two-room house (no indoor plumbing) accommodating the four of them. Carl is an alcoholic and physically abusive, hitting Naomi when he can no longer handle her sharp tongue. 

As Carl’s drinking worsens, the family moves again and again and again, trying to escape themselves and find suitable work. Naomi leaves with the kids over and over, yet always returns to Carl (until a man calling himself “Ed” enters her life). The story is heartbreaking, not least in how Tim is affected.

“When he was younger,” the narrator says, “he yearned for kind words or a touch from his parents. But he came to notice that it was time itself that cured his longing. He gradually acquired the ability to detach, to expect much less from others, to ignore rejection from those who found him inconsequential. He would place his faith instead upon the man he would become, a man who needed no one.”

Will Chico change that trajectory? The sequel, “Dangle Him Purposely,” may have the answer.