Take a journey with me, back to California's golden days. As the sun rises over the ghost town of Bodie, if you really listen, you can still hear the clink clank of the breakfast dishes barely audible amid the ever present pounding from the mighty Standard Mill, crushing the precious quartz. The search for gold is never sleeping. Get to know the people from our own past while reading "Bodie: The Golden Years." The book is a fictional portrayal of the pioneer women and children of the 1860-1900 era. What did they wear? Where did they go to school? Who were these early hardy folk? Like a stage ride through the western days you will get introduced to several real life characters--Elizabeth and Helen Anne Kernohan, Margaret and Alice Beck, Suzy Bill, Delilah and Jessie (Doll) Cain. To add dimension I have added a fictionalized Chinese resident, Pearl Chung.

To succeed in higher education today, college students need to develop the all-important skill of critical thinking. In this innovative new volume Judy Daniel lays out a blueprint for success in the college classroom. This is an interactive book to be used throughout a single semester. The journal format allows students to assess daily their intellectual progress in several areas of critical thinking. Students answer questions, record their thoughts, and compare their ideas to those of many successful thinkers throughout history. This format also allows teachers to provide to students their own reading prompts from newspapers, magazines, or even scholarly journals from a variety of disciplines. The book is divided into twelve sections - corresponding to a like number of weeks - with each one addressing a different critical thinking skill. Daniel asks students to analyze their own motivations and preparations in learning. She then offers various strategies for different learning situations. The heart of the book is the five sections, or weeks, devoted to critical thinking about scholarly writing. These chapters take the students through an intellectual process dubbed by Daniel as the "TASKS" system. This acronym stands for Thesis, Audience/Approach, Subtopics, Knowledge, and Summary. Each week, students can explore questions that help them analyze what they read with these concepts in mind. This book is ideal as a supplement in any first-semester college class, or as a main text in a Freshman Experience program. Teachers of advanced high school classes also will find this book of great benefit for preparing their students for higher education.