Ebook Full List
Electronic Books from Boryanabooks available from Amazon.com and Scribd.com
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EdendalePhyl van Ammers Long serialized here on Boryanabooks, Phyl van Ammers generations-spanning tribute to the people of the near mythical Edendale in Los Angeles’s northern hills, better known today as Echo Park and Silverlake, is now available as an Amazon Kindle book. The characters in the made-up Edendale come from the Black Sea, from a shtetl in Ukraine, from slavery in the Southern States, from Japan, from the Polish enclave in Hopewell, Virginia, from Bulgaria, from the island of Curacao, and from Mexico. They fall in love, read Ina Coolbrith’s poetry, sing in a scratchy old voice, dry clean, press and sew clothes, sell rags, drink malted milk, swim in the Pacific Ocean, live homeless along the river, practice law, play the piano and the violin, teach school children, research in a library, take the train to Union Station, soldier in World War II, fly into the ocean, go mad, take acid and hallucinate, and are struck by a hit-and-run driver. Some of the characters die, and their survivors attend the funerals and say bad things about the departed. |
Disputing Rasputin, Despair & Other Matters That Try My SoulLionel Rolfe California Author and Journalist Lionel Rolfe says this latest summing up may be his last observations on the human condition. At the moment he feels they are. But Rolfe has published eight books, and he similarly felt this way after each one of them was published, he admits. Many of his books are focused on California, which he sees as a state of mind as much as the most significant state in the American union. He has worked as a staffer and a prolific freelancers for for some of the most prestigious newspapers in California–the Los Angeles Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He was for a decade the last editor of the B’nai Brith Messenger, the second oldest newspaper in Los Angeles until its death in the late ‘90s. |
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Literary L.A.: Expanded From the Original Classic and Featuring the Coffeehouse Scene Then and NowLionel Rolfe Beyond L.A.’s self-promotional glitter is a hotbed of writers, bohemians, mad poets, exiles and refugees from every form of oppression – and this book tells their stories. |
Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the UndergroundLionel Rolfe From Booklist In this volume’s 16 essays, he discusses Menuhin, Frank Zappa, the Communist Party, literary L.A., anti-Semitism, health care, animal welfare, the founder of the Emmy awards, the birds he and his ex-wife (a member of Zappa’s entourage) have cared for as pets, Israel and Zionism, and California, “home” for much of his life. |
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Presidents & Near President I Have KnownLionel Rolfe Personal encounters with Hubert Humphrey, Ronald Reagan, Eugene McCarthy and Gerald Ford, as well as a huge array of other wild characters. |
Outsider’s ReverieLeslie Evans Leslie Evans grew up in a home steeped in the lore of ghostly apparitions, spirit guides, star charts, and the astral plane. He was a figure in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later a web journalist and an editor for the World Health Organization and the World Bank. |
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The Menuhins: A Family OdyssyLionel Rolfe The story of a miraculous family of great musicians and religious leaders. It is told here for the first time by the nephew of Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist regarded as the greatest musical prodigy since Mozart. |
The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa CatherLionel Rolfe This is an extraordinary story of the friendship between Willa Cather and the author’s mother, piano prodigy Yaltah Menuhin (1920-2001), sister of violinist Yehudi Menuhin. |
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Reflections from ElsewhereLionel Rolfe REFLECTIONS FROM ELSEWHERE is author and journalist Lionel Rolfe’s paean and exposé, tribute to and critique of California’s unique place in the American public consciousness. A nearly lifelong resident of that fabled state, and having worked full-time since age twenty at some of its most prestigious newspapers (the Los Angeles Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle), ten-year editor of B’nai Brith’s Messenger (the second oldest newspaper in Los Angeles) and an editor for Psychology Today, as well as the author of the classic Literary L.A., he offers readers the unparalleled vantage point of the insider-outsider as well as a personal tour of California as it was—is—might have been—and will never be. |
The Misadventures of Ari Mendelsohn: A Mostly True Memoir of California JournalismLionel Rolfe “With bawdy wit, Lionel Rolfe holds a fun house mirror to L.A. through his concupiscent, picaresque, perpetually incorrect character, Ari Mendelsohn. Call it: Casanova-meets-Candide-under-the-Hollywood-sign. “Ari possesses a kind of innocence in his relentless horn-dogginess (Maybe that’s Bill Clinton’s charm. A few of Philip Roth’s characters also come to mind.) Ari Mendelsohn marches forward, dick-in-hand – ever hopeful like some Jewish Candide – into the perpetual, cultural earthquakes and mudslides of Los Angeles, slipping and sliding and getting blowjobs along the fault lines of L.A.’s money grubber and magnificent morons. He’s an accidental Casanova lost in a city of libertines. “Anyway, in that light, he is fun reading and worth the cover price.” — Umberto Tosi. Cover photo by Susan McRae Paperback from Amazon.com $11.95 6″ x 9″ 172 pages Kindle edition $9.00
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Shaggy Man’s RamblingsLeslie Evans Here from The Shaggy Man’s Place (www.shaggyman.com), regular Boryanabooks contributor Leslie Evans writes knowledgeably on everything from ecological crises and religious wars to Edwardian authors, the scandal plagued city of Vernon, early computer games, and local Los Angeles history. Amazon Kindle/iPhone Edition $9.50
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
