Books published by Heyday Books

In the same lighthearted yet scientifically accurate style of Fylling's Illustrated Guide to Pacific Coast Tide Pools, this portable guidebook reveals the splendidly strange animals and plants just outside your door. Marni Fylling's full-color illustrations make species identification a snap, and concise descriptions include fascinating (and sometimes grotesque) factoids about frequently encountered plants, insects, arachnids, birds, and mammals. With Fylling's guidance, the everyday becomes extraordinary: Pigeons share nest-building and egg-sitting duties, and mate for life-with occasional dalliances; squirrel teeth grow about six inches per year; spiders owe their characteristic creep to their "hydraulic" legs; poison oak and poison ivy's itch-inducing oil is also found in pistachios, cashews, and mangoes; and much, much more.

From the Mark Twain Project comes a freshly informed look at Twain's controversial Civil War story "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed." Twenty years after Appomattox, Twain published a highly fictionalized account of his two-week stint in the Confederate Army. Ostensibly this told what he did (or, in his own words, why he "didn't do anything") in the war; but the article was criticized as disingenuous, and it did little to address a growing curiosity about the nature of his brief military service. The complex political situation in Missouri during the early months of the war and Twain's genius for transforming life into fiction have tended to obstruct historical understanding of "The Private History"; interpretations of Samuel Clemens's enthusiastic enlistment, sedulous avoidance of combat, and abandonment of the rebellion have ranged from condemnation to celebration. Aided by Twain's notes and correspondence- transcribed and published here for the first time-Benjamin Griffin of UC Berkeley's Mark Twain Project offers a new and cogent analysis, particularly of Clemens's multiple revisions of his own war experience. A necessity for any Twain bookshelf, Mark Twain's Civil War sheds light on a great writer's changeable and challenging position on the deadliest of American conflicts.

This is Bond's third Heyday book, following Running Wild and Living WildThe photos in the book are accompanied by text which tell what and where each photo was taken. The list of locations includes: Yellowstone National Park (WY), Saguaro National Park (AZ), Golden Gate Park (CA), and Pinnacles National Park (CA)Each page highlights a different color through gorgeous nature photography

It is a little-known fact that in California during World War II, Italian Americans were subjected to an 8:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. curfew, searches of their homes, seizure of their property, and exclusion from prohibited zones along the coast. In a collection of essays, Una Storia Segreta brings together the voices of the Italian American community and experts in the field, including personal stories by survivors and their children, letters from internment camps, news clips, photographs, and cartoons. A project of the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program.

Jumping frogs, high society, San Francisco's Emperor Norton and the stray dogs that followed on his heels-nothing escaped Mark Twain's scrutiny or his acerbic wit. Bernard Taper has gathered together a heady selection of newspaper articles, correspondence, poetry, and short stories that are humorous-sometimes exasperating and controversial-but always engaging. Edward Jump, a contemporary of Twain's, offers through his lively illustrations a visual drum roll to Twain's cantankerous prose. From earthquakes, scandals, and tantalizing bonanzas to elegant ladies blowing their noses in "exquisitely modulated tones," Mark Twain has left us a vision of San Francisco that is at once fascinating and hilariously familiar.

The best brief history of San Francisco. A bestseller in its original edition (Lexikos Books) now restored, after more than a decade OP, with a new afterword by the author.