The Dream Endures

"In this, more than any other of Starr's monumental California histories, we see the stirrings of uniqueness in the social and cultural evolution of California. Starr's theme is relevant to all of America and the national destiny."--Neil Morgan, Associate Editor, San Diego Union-Tribune, author of Westward Tilt
"Kevin Starr carries his enduring epic of California cultural history into the 1940s with the same eye for exact detail, the same passion for facts, and the same pungency of expression that have characterized his accounts of the preceding stages of California's evolution."--John T. Noonan, Jr. United States Circuit Judge
"A penetrating addition to an altogether splendid series, which (thanks to the broad appeal of its subject matter and period) could prove a breakout book."--Kirkus
"Twenty-four years after his first volume appeared, Starr's enthusiasm still bubbles from virtually every page. His command of hundreds of works of fiction, buildings, pieces of art, and scores of fascinating characters, the well-known and the obscure, and the intelligence and skill with which he handles this freight train worth of material is amazing. Starr's sections on various black, Asian and Mexican Communities are enormously sensitive and moving. Social and cultural history doesn't get any better."--San Francisco Chronicle
"There is so much to learn in this fascinating cultural and social history of pre-World War II California that the enthusiastic reader will want to spend hours poring over every informed page."--Booklist
"The author combines rigorous scholarship with colloquial literary expression to give a thorough but easily readable portrait."--Library Journal
"Kevin Starr gives Californians back their past--from science to art and from environmental awareness to an infatuation with the automobile--by remeinding them how the state evolved from a West Coast outback to the center of American civilization."--The San Diego Union-Tribune
"Stendhal described the novel as a mirror passing along the roadway, suggesting that the novelist's gift is limited by how he aims his reflecting glass. A great historian combines this relentless appetite for the world as he finds it with a plausible evaulation of its meaning. In his monumental continuing study of California, Kevin Starr belongs in the company of the best."--Herbert Gold, Los Angeles Times Book Review