Bøger af William Deverell

Arthur Beauchamp writes a memoir that he hopes will set the record straight about a spectacular murder case he fought as a young lawyer in 1966.

Is someone systematically killing the judges of the B.C. bar? At least one has been murdered and several have disappeared. Arthur Beauchamp returns from retirement to take on the case, this time defending his former nemesis, backwoods poet Cudworth Brown, and tracking down a mystery novel that Brown's unreliable former lawyer has been writing.

When an oddball group of ecology-minded people determine that a chemical factory is producing an agricultural pesticide that is also killing bees, they decide to sabotage its manufacture. Criminal lawyer Arthur Beauchamp is tasked with their defense in a tense, hang-by-the-fingernails trial.

Kathy Fiscus tells the story of the first live, breaking-news TV spectacle in American history. At dusk on a spring evening in 1949, a three-year old girl fell down an abandoned well shaft in the backyard of her family's home in Southern California. Across more than two full days of a fevered rescue attempt, the fate of Kathy Fiscus remained unknown. Thousands of concerned Southern Californians rushed to the scene. Jockeys hurried over from the nearby racetracks, offering to be sent down the well after Kathy. 20th Century Fox sent over the studio's klieg lights to illuminate the scene. Rescue workers-ditch diggers, miners, cesspool laborers, World War II veterans-dug and bored holes deep into the aquifer below, hoping to tunnel across to the old well shaft that the little girl had somehow tumbled down. The region, the nation, and the world watched and listened to every moment of the rescue attempt by way of radio, newsreel footage, and wire service reporting. They also watched live television. Because of the well's proximity to the radio towers on nearby Mount Wilson, the rescue attempt because the first breaking-news event to be broadcast live on television. The Kathy Fiscus event invented reality television and proved that real-time television news broadcasting could work and could transfix the public.

Los Angeles rose to significance in the first half of the twentieth century by way of its complex relationship to three rivers: the Los Angeles, the Owens, and the Colorado. Full of primary sources and original documents, this book is of interest to both students of Los Angeles and general readers interested in the origins of the city.

The aim of this collection of essays is to stress the cultural aspects of the Jewish experience of coming to, and living in, the Golden State. The contributors explore how the Jews who settled in California helped shape the state's culture and were, in turn, molded by cultural influences that were uniquely Californian.