Kevin Starr

author of series of book about California

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Starr

review of CaliforniaDreams: Granted, a version of the California Good Life can still be had--by those Starr calls the "fiercely competitive." That's just the heartbreak: most of us are merely ordinary. For nearly a century, California offered ordinary people better lives than they could lead perhaps anywhere else in the world. Today, reflecting our intensely stratified, increasingly mobile society, California affords the Good Life only to the most gifted and ambitious, regardless of their background.