Books, Arts & Manners: A Misunderstood Place

Californians By James D. Houston Knopf, 288 pp., $15

California has always been a most misunderstood place. Cortes first discovered the gulf bifurcating the northwest coast of Mexico and did not proceed far enough to realize the land to the west was a peninsula. Recalling a Spanish novel about an Amazon nation on a vast island ruled by a curious lady named California, he named the place after her. Almost until the end of the eighteenth century, California appeared on maps as a huge island, its upper reaches melting into obscurity. Such a mysterious place surely must be the way to the Northwest Passage, Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome, and other wish-fulfilling wonders.

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Lee Hopkins

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Californians By James D. Houston Knopf, 288 pp., $15

California has always been a most misunderstood place. Cortes first discovered the gulf bifurcating the northwest coast of Mexico and did not proceed far enough to realize the land to the west was a peninsula. Recalling a Spanish novel about an Amazon nation on a vast island ruled by a curious lady named California, he named the place after her. Almost until the end of the eighteenth century, California appeared on maps as a huge island, its upper reaches melting into obscurity. Such a mysterious place surely must be the way to the Northwest Passage, Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome, and other wish-fulfilling wonders.