NCW Libraries

In Lydia Kiesling's razor-sharp debut novel, The Golden State, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her toddler, Honey. Bucking under the weight of being a single parent--her Turkish husband is unable to return to the United States because of a "processing error"--Daphne takes refuge in a mobile home left to her by her grandparents...

In the San Francisco Bay Area, a ragtag group of young rockers rejects MTV's popularized rock music scene and the theatricality of Hollywood's hair bands of the 1980s. Beginning by exchanging tapes in an underground music scene and infiltrating clubs and record stores with their sound, the headbangers worked to establish a more intense vein of metal music referred to as thrash metal. First-person accounts reveal the significance of the movement's...

"Although Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) famously disliked cities, he had a genuine affinity for San Francisco. Paul V. Turner's unprecendented book looks at the architect's complex and evolving relationship with the city, surveying the full body of Wright's work in the Bay Area-- roughly thirty projects, a third of which were built. Spanning from 1900 to 1959, they include houses, a gift shop, a civic center, a skyscraper, a church, and industrial...

"Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, a first-generation Taiwanese American who has a 'zine and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become...

In this breathtaking cultural history filled with exclusive, never-before-revealed details, celebrated rock journalist Joel Selvin tells the definitive story of the Rolling Stones' infamous Altamont concert in San Francisco, the disastrous historic event that marked the end of the idealistic 1960s. The product of 20 years of research and dozens of interviews with many key players, including medical staff, Hells Angels members, the stage crew, and...

A middle-grade history of the "other Ellis Island" traces how Angel Island served as an entry point for one million Asian immigrants to the United States in the early 20th century, drawing on memoirs, diaries, letters and "wall poems" discovered at the facility long after it closed to describe the center's screening process, immigration policies and eventual renaissance as a historic site.