WEB
Here are a few choice discussions of The Visionary State online:
San Diego Union-Tribune: 'State' of Grace
San Francisco Chronicle: Finding My Religion
Metro Santa Cruz: Occulture Club
BLDGBLOG
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Helio
RADIO
The Visionary State has been getting tons of radio attention. Most shows just streamed live, but here are some downloadable interviews with Erik (and some with Michael as well) that you might enjoy.
The California Report, July 21, 2006
In These Days, KPBS, San Diego, July 25, 2006
Talk of the Bay, KUSP, Santa Cruz, July 31, 2006
The Alvin Jones Show, WCBQ-WHNC-AM, Oxford, North Carolina, August 9, 2006
Strategies for Living, Newsradio 710 KEEL, Shreveport, Louisiana, September 8, 2006
The RU Sirius Show, September 23, 2006
Erik and Michael also spoke about the book for this Chronicle Books podcast.
BUZZ
Without Michael Rauner's gorgeous color photographs on nearly every page, it would be easy to think Erik Davis was making up or at least exaggerating some of this stuff about vintner cults and freewayside temples and druid libraries. This engaging, enter-taining, thoroughly researched book is not an encyclopedia but an atlas of desires, devotions, traditions, and variations. The Visionary State is a vivid and wholly original way of surveying postmillennial religion and spirituality out here on the frontier of the American experiment.
-Rebecca Solnit, author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost and River of Shadows
From Native American times to the present, California has bespoken the sacred and the mystical. The Visionary State documents and celebrates this affinity in its many manifestations. Through image and word, we encounter a California linked to the great traditions-as well as to the new beginnings-born of mankind's immemorial quest for transcendence.
-Kevin Starr, professor of history, University of Southern California, and author of the Americans and the California Dream series.