Going Sane in San Francisco


Book Description

Going Sane in San Francisco is based on a true story about two brothers from a San Francisco entertainment family. One brother, Steve Silver, was a gay man who married a woman months before dying of AIDS to bury the truth about his sexuality and became fabulously wealthy by creating Beach Blanket Babylon, the longest running stage show in America. His brother Roger, who grew up despised by their social-climbing mother, was eventually disowned by his brother. The book explores the inner workings of greed, manipulation, deceit, control, the music and theater businesses, drugs and drug smuggling, the Grand Jury, family betrayal, San Francisco society, the city of San Francisco, the blackest of black widows, fame, death, a murder in Mexico, love, sex, emotional survival, and redemption.




San Fransicko


Book Description

National bestselling author of APOCALYPSE NEVER skewers progressives for the mishandling of America’s faltering cities. Progressives claimed they knew how to solve homelessness, inequality, and crime. But in cities they control, progressives made those problems worse. Michael Shellenberger has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for thirty years. During that time, he advocated for the decriminalization of drugs, affordable housing, and alternatives to jail and prison. But as homeless encampments spread, and overdose deaths skyrocketed, Shellenberger decided to take a closer look at the problem. What he discovered shocked him. The problems had grown worse not despite but because of progressive policies. San Francisco and other West Coast cities — Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland — had gone beyond merely tolerating homelessness, drug dealing, and crime to actively enabling them. San Fransicko reveals that the underlying problem isn’t a lack of housing or money for social programs. The real problem is an ideology that designates some people, by identity or experience, as victims entitled to destructive behaviors. The result is an undermining of the values that make cities, and civilization itself, possible.




Beach Blanket Babylon


Book Description

The creator of the musical, Steve Silver, died of AIDS in 1995.




Conservative Survival Guide to San Francisco


Book Description

For the English poet Rudyard Kipling, the city of San Francisco has only one drawback – ‘tis hard to leave. Author Thomas Moyer, a conservative by choice, couldn’t agree more as he calls The City by the Bay his home yet finds it quite different from the city he imagined it to be over a decade ago. In Conservative Survival Guide to San Francisco, he takes readers into the dual facets of the Paris of the West --- the city with lush greenery, panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean on one side and its band of hippies, drug addicts and liberals on one end. More than just a literary piece tackling the division of the world into being conservative or being liberal, this highly insightful work of Moyer is part travel guide, part personal memoir, and part political commentary. Like Group Captain Lionel Mandrake in Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War dark comedy, “Dr. Strangelove”, Moyer stays true to his ideals of doing the best he can under less-than-ideal condtions while most of the people around him are a bit crazy, weak willed, or downright odd. “To be clear then, just as Mandrake loved the world of Strangelove, I love this city. It’s my home here, now and forever. But I have some serious misgivings about San Francisco’s politics,” Moyer wrote in the introduction. “My intention in writing this book is to bring to light the good, the bad, and the wacky aspects of San Francisco. If you’re a conservative of any shade or degree who’s planning on visiting or moving to the city, or even the Bay Area, more generally, I’m going to be your tour guide on your trip down into the rabbit hole of San Francisco. And I’m going to show you how to manage to keep your conservative morals intact when surrounded on all sides by the exotic lunacy of this Strangelove-like world.” Moyer provides a conservative insider’s perspective into San Francisco in Conservative Survival Guide to San Francisco —its people, culture, politics, and what it’s really like to be a “Mandrake” inside the most liberal city in America. More importantly, he shows conservative readers how he learned to stop worrying and love the city. Conservative Survival Guide to San Francisco is more than just a looking glass into the bipolarities of the cool grey city of love. It also takes into account the author’s experiences in the most liberal city in America and is meant to show a snapshot into the life of a conservative. At turns striking and original, this eruditely crafted piece is the ultimate guide to the rabbit hole that is San Francisco.




Enough is Plenty


Book Description

Enough is an ancient 'master concept', which today finds renewed expression in a variety of proposals for a transition to a better world. Each one of us has an innate sense of enough; everybody can play a part in the movement of enough and at the same time improve daily well being. The book is a unique blend of ideas, practice and resources, integrating philosophy, morality, ecology, spirituality, self-help, citizenship, leadership, economics and politics.







Current Catalog


Book Description

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.




San Francisco's Queen of Vice


Book Description

"San Francisco's Queen of Vice uncovers the story of one of the most skilled, high-priced, and corrupt abortion entrepreneurs in America. Even as Prohibition was the driving force behind organized crime, abortions became the third-largest illegal enterprise as state and federal statutes combined with changing social mores to drive abortionists into hiding. Inez Brown Burns, a notorious socialite and abortionist in San Francisco, made a fortune providing her services to desperate women throughout California. Beginning in the 1920s, Burns oversaw some 150,000 abortions until her trial and conviction brought her downfall. In San Francisco's Queen of Vice, Lisa Riggin tells the story of the rise and fall of San Francisco's "abortion queen" and explores the rivalry between Burns and the city's newly elected district attorney, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown (father of the present governor of California). Pledging to clean up the graft-ridden city, Brown exposed the hidden yet not-so-secret life of backroom deals, political payoffs, and corrupt city cops. Through the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of Burns, Brown used his success as a stepping-stone for his political rise to California's governor's mansion. Featuring an array of larger-than-life characters, Riggin shows how Cold War domestic ideology and the national quest to return to a more traditional America quickly developed into a battle against internal decay. Based on a combination of newspaper accounts, court records, and personal interviews, San Francisco's Queen of Vice reveals how the drama played out in the life and trial of one of the wealthiest women in California history"--