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• THE VALLEYS LEGENDS & LEGACIES, VOL IV

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  Volume IV: Stories include Clovis, Madera, Sanger, Academy, Hanford, Fresno, Grangeville, Centerville, Fowler, Dos Palos

• California Fruits, Flakes & Nuts

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  They call California the Granola State — a place where everyone is a fruit, a flake or a nut. They don’t get any fruitier, flakier or nuttier than the deviants, crackpots and losers profiled in California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts. A freewheeling catalog of misfits, eccentrics, creeps, criminals and failed dreamers, California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts profiles 48 bizarre personalities who exemplify the Golden State’s well-deserved reputation for nonconformity. Unlike the sanitized heroics taught in school, California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts tells history from the viewpoint of the losers: murderers, lunatics, eccentrics and disgraced, washed-up celebrities. Presenting a wealth of historical information that had long been swept away and forgotten, California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts is a uniquely entertaining look at the dark and disreputable corners of California history. In these pages, Gold Rush pioneers are revealed as murderous madmen; Hollywood celebrities are shown to be drug-addled sex maniacs; early hippies are just 1950s weirdos; and even seemingly ordinary Californians have a talent for freakish, crazy and criminal behavior. California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts profiles such stellar Californians as frontier lunatic Grizzly Adams (whose head was one massive wound after multiple bear attacks); I Love Lucy star William Frawley (a racist, misogy- nist, foul-mouthed drunk); skirt-wearing, skirt-chasing legendarily awful film director Ed Wood; proto-hippie and “Nature Boy” singer eden ahbez; rocket scientist, black magician and L. Ron Hubbard mentor Marvel Par- sons; and many more nutjobs, oddballs and dangerously violent freaks. The perfect book for anyone who likes feeling superior to losers, California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts is a side-splitting, salacious and shocking salute to the people who made California the strangest place on earth.

• Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Ind

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  Even celebrities die — and he was the man who picked up the bodies! Allan Abbott ran the leading mortuary in Hollywood and got an unprecedented glimpse of how celebrities really live and die. The Forrest Gump of the funeral industry, Abbott was everywhere celebrities died, from helping to prepare Marilyn Monroe’s body to standing next to Christopher Walken at Natalie Wood’s funeral. Now in his new memoir Pardon My Hearse, Abbott tells the rags-to-shroud story of how he went from a young man with a hearse to the funeral director to the stars — a rollicking, unexpectedly hilarious story of glamorous funerals, mishaps with corpses and true-life glimpses of celebrities at their most revealing moments. When he wasn’t transporting celebrity corpses, Abbott used his funeral limos to transport living celebrities to Hollywood parties and rented his vast collection of cars and funeral props to movie and TV productions. Pardon My Hearse presents a dazzling A-List of celebrities, living and dead, whom Abbott encountered during his career, including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Joe DiMaggio, Robert Redford, Frank Sinatra and others. Pardon My Hearse takes readers behind the scenes to tell the secrets of Marilyn Monroe’s funeral (where Abbott acquired the most unlikely souvenir of Monroe’s falsies) and dishes the inside story of disgraced crematorium operator David Sconce, who ordered an attack on Abbott’s business partner Ron Hast to cover up Sconce’s criminal mishandling of bodies and remains. Abbott also shares gruesome details of removing corpses from the devastation of the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, reburying corpses dislodged from the 1978 mudslide that swept through the Verdugo Hills Cemetery and more. A treasure trove of insight and gossip you can’t get anywhere else, Pardon My Hearse is an eye-opening look at secret Hollywood from the man who literally knows where the bodies are buried.

• Behind San Quentin's Walls: The History of California’s Legendary Prison and Its

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  San Quentin is one of the most famous prisons in American history, featured in countless movies and novels, yet few know its colorful early history. In Behind San Quentin’s Walls, noted Old West historian William B. Secrest reveals the beginning of San Quentin, from its unlikely start as a real estate scheme to its essential role in taming the lawless California of the Gold Rush era. Featuring numerous citations from contemporary accounts, plus period photos, illustrations, newspaper clippings, and maps, Behind San Quentin’s Walls chronicles the political calculations that created San Quentin; the outsize egos of the men who built it; the mismanagement and frequent escapes that marred San Quentin’s early years; and the notorious ruffians and cutthroats who were housed there. Filled with exciting true stories of gunfights, brawls, prison riots, daring escapes, and intrepid manhunts, Behind San Quentin’s Walls is a rip-roaring Wild West tale of how men and women with immense talent for both good and evil tamed a new state and each other.

• MURDER IN THE GARDEN

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  As countless thousands poured into the fertile San Joaquin Valley of California in the decades following the Civil War, some brought visions of man's darker side to this new Eden. Murder in the Garden is the absorbing examination of fifteen notorious crimes from the not-too-distant past of Fresno, California.

• THE VALLEYS LEGENDS & LEGACIES, VOL V

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  In this, the fifth volume of her award-winning collection of vignettes, we are treated to cultural evenings at the Barton Opera House, damp Kings River revival meetings, exhilarating afternoons at the races, and family trips to the coast. Within these pages, you will meet bankers and bandits, physicians and postmasters, editors and evangelists...even a paperhanger who dazzles his audience at the elegant Pleasanton Hotel with his mind-reading shenanigans. It’s all part and parcel of our fruitful Valley’s legends and legacies.