Boy, I lucked out!

Now that I left university teaching for publishing, I feel quite lucky that my book has been reviewed well. Since it came out in October 2005, I have been busy, busy, busy with invitations to give talks to community organizations, historical societies, and historic presevation groups. Book signing and reading at an independent bookstore often brings surprises. When I did a reading at DG Wills Books in La Jolla, a woman who was over 80 years old showed up, and told this interesting story about going to the San Diego World's Fair of 1935. I like it when this happens, and if you don't take the time to speak publicly, you'd probably never hear these stories. I'll be consulting on an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's National Building Museum, called Designing the World of Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s set to open January 2009. I'll have an article about social housing and the FHA in the museum catalog. It was nice they even bothered to contact me out of the blue

I was pretty psyched that people I don't even know professionally liked the book, since it covers alot of topics like urban planning, California and Southwestern history, anthropology and American Indian history, among other topics. I thought every discipline would think it was aweful, not enough in one humanities area for scholars. I never received funding for this book, and received comments like, "I vacationed in San Diego in 1990, and I didn't see any social conflict or problems, everyone seemed happy." At the last moment the San Diego Historical Society supported the project with a generous indirect subsidy, from Gregg Hennessey, the former editor of the Journal of San Diego History to successive directors of the research archives like Rick Crawford and John Panter. As public history, I guess if worked out best this way. Now that it's done, I can think about writing a book about politics and culture proper.

Here's two, public domain reviews of the book.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=102871149692326

http://crmjournal.cr.nps.gov/07_rbook_sub.cfm?issue=Volume%203%20Number%202%20Summer%202006&seq=11