Crossing California - by Sam McManis (Paperback)

About the Book

Journalist Sam McManis travels to every corner of California in this unusual guide, seeking the unusual and the eccentric. He finds there is more than one California, and each one is equally weird and wonderful.

Book Synopsis

Sacramento Bee journalist Sam McManis spent five years on the road trying to find the real California. He discovered that there is more than one California, but every different California is equally weird and wonderful. Worlds collide and commingle: the neo-hippies with the rednecked farmers; the urban sophisticates with the quirky desert dwellers; the Hollywood power brokers with the outsider artists. Brought together in a bouillabaisse of voices, Crossing California will make you see the state in an entirely new light.

From the briny scent of Fisherman's Wharf to the fragrant sage scrub of Imperial County; from the otherworldly starkness of Death Valley to the crashing waves and flexing muscles at Venice Beach, Crossing California gives readers a first-hand experience. McManis has stalked the tony aisles of the newly minted Broad Museum in gentrified downtown Los Angeles, and quick-footed it through the International Banana Museum along the desiccated shores of the moonscaped Salton Sea. He has inadvertently gotten his car stuck in a tree at a cheesy drive-thru giant Sequoia roadside attraction along the hemp highway between Mendocino and Humboldt, and witnessed, with both fascination and can't-look-away horror, grown men and women, sans children and sans inhibitions, belt out full-throated versions of "Let It Go" at a Disneyland sing-along. All told, Crossing California is a trip. (Color photographs),

Review Quotes

"Crossing California: A Cultural Topography of a State of Wonder and Weirdness captures the funky, strange and oddball characters and places in virtually all corners of the nation's most populous state."

"A thoroughly readable collection of craziness ... McManis seeks out the 'loose things' in the desert and hills and streets of California and explores them with a facile intelligence and general good humor. I liked this book!" -Richard Frisbie, TravelingBoy.com