This past weekend I raced through a double biography by JoAnn Levy: Unsettling the West. I had read Kirby's mid-nineteenth-century Santa Cruz diary years ago, and read Farnham's "California Indoors and Out" (1855) a few years after that. I thought that I knew everything there was to know about these two amazing women, but I was quite wrong.
I always like hearing over and over again how Santa Cruz has always been the same and it has never really changed. This is what my local history research has showed me. To Santa Cruz have always come the reformers and the radicals and in Santa Cruz have always lived people who will adopt new religions, and hear lectures by paradigm pushers and philosphers of all kinds.
I have nothing interesting to say about this book. It simply must be read by anyone who loves women, Santa Cruz, or both.
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