“A really good book. Goldsborough takes on important issues in this compelling and artful novel, and he does it with grace and a salutary dose of anger. Bravo.”
- BETH GUTCHEON, bestselling author of eleven novels, including More Than You Know, Still Missing, and Leeway Cottage

“Goldsborough brilliantly and lucidly captures the Zeitgeist of our troubled times, how the depravity of MAGA is poisoning not only public discourse but insidiously seeping into and wrecking old friendships and once solid families. With his polished pen, Goldsborough contrasts today’s horrors with happier times: the dreamy Santa Monica of earlier times and the glories and loves of his days in Paris as a newspaper reporter. Goldsborough writes with an honesty and passion that will stir your soul and rekindle your belief that a better world is still within our grasp.”
- RICHARD FEINBERG, former White House and State Department official, professor emeritus at UCSD, book reviewer for Foreign Affairs

Can fiction save us? Is there hope for America in the time of Trump, pandemics, election deniers, and the end of genuine political discourse? What better than this perfectly told novel to tell the story of so many of us, as we seek direction in uncertain times.

Andy McKnight had never seen anything like it nobody had. The presidency of this man was breaking up families across the nation wives and husbands, children and parents, lifelong friends, the fabric of American social life torn apart as it hadn’t been since the Civil War. The venom even seeped into his own formerly happy home. Then came the pandemic and its variants, two plagues at once even in the Bible they were one at a time. He tried escaping into the past, back to better times, but Max and Elly, an old man and a young girl he met on the streets of Santa Monica, jolted him back to reality. With others like them mad as hell and not going to take it anymore maybe it wouldn’t be too late after all.

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“Put Blood and Oranges on the L.A. shelf next to Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, a Raymond Chandler or two, and a DVD of Chinatown. For anyone old enough to remember oil wells pumping away on hills next to new housing developments, hearing tales of streetcars cross-crossing the city, and sensing the still rippling vibes from Aimee Semple McPherson’s deranged white-robed crusade, Goldsborough’s novel will ring true: Yeah, THAT’S how it was ... or must have been. For anyone younger, just dive in. And hold on.”
–Arthur Salm, former book editor of the San Diego Union Tribune.

“Unique brand of historical story-telling engorged with religion, sex, murder and indelible characters.”
–Lee Grant, former Arts editor and film critic, Los Angeles Times

“Dynamic tapestry of narratives in this unique work of historical fiction.”
–Sascha Rice, award-winning filmmaker, director of California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown

“Tells the story of a modern-day Cain and Abel, looking inside the industries of oil exploration, property development and large-scale religion.”
--David Farmer, former CNN and Fox News Bureau Chief, Los Angeles

“Great ride. So much strife in early Los Angeles.”
--Arthur  Bradley Fowler, author, “T.O. McCoye’s Playa del Rey”

Los Angeles, city of contrasts, bitter and sweet, blood and oranges, an orchard sprung from the dry land. The Mull brothers, Willie and Eddie, a preacher and his unscrupulous brother, arrive with the aqueduct from the Owens Valley. They rise with the city. .

From accomplished author James Oliver Goldsborough comes an action-packed historical novel of twentieth-century Los Angeles, a story that follows three generations of the Mull family, from the roaring twenties to the fiery nineties. With the aqueduct comes unimagined wealth, growth, crime, death and destruction; oil derricks on the beaches, highways covering the orchards, buses mysteriously replacing the world’s best trolley system, gilded church domes in place of brick and ivy, floating casinos in Santa Monica Bay. Hollywood. Murder in the hills; riots in the hoods.

Pride, vanity, and betrayal against an Edenic backdrop, a matchless place of mountains and seashores, orchards and wetlands, besieged by man’s hubris and nature’s retribution. It is a story of generations that reject each other, of a bitterly divided family whose selfish ambition threatens the place for which they were meant to be stewards. The children atone, but in turn face the rebellion of the grandchildren.

Publication date: May 2, 2021

Published by City Point Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster

A review of Blood and Oranges

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"Fast-paced . . . colorful"
-- Foreign Affairs

"Enjoyed immensely"
-- Jorge Dominguez, Harvard University

"A fascinating story very well written. All the genealogical connections are terrific. For those of us in the Kennedy Administration in 1961, the repetitions of attitude and predicament are haunting."
– Thomas L. Hughes, former director of State Department Intelligence and Research, former president of the Carnegie Endowment, author of "Anecdotage".

"Artful . . . thrilling history"
-- Beth Gutcheon, author of "More Than You Know"

"Should be read and reread,"
-- Alejandro Orfila, former Secretary General, Organization of American States

"If only President Kennedy could have read 'Uncle John"
-- Richard Feinberg, author of "Open for Business: Building the New Cuban Economy"

 

An irresistible, never-before-told historical adventure, Waiting for Uncle John tells the story of how a few regiments of soldiers, armed and supported by leading American politicians, set out to capture Cuba in 1851..

In the turbulent 1850s, American politicians, fluush with victory over Mexico and goaded on by a jingoistic press, set out on the next step to "Manifest Destiny." For the South, Cuba's wealth and quarter million slaves would close the gap with the North, making the two sides equal in the great civil war that loomed.

It is also a story of love, adventure, and divided families. Lucy Holcombe, the headstrong woman who would go on to become "Queen of the South" during the Civil War, is as enamored of the plot against Cuba as she is of the story's protagonist, Col. Will Crittenden, West Point graduate, friend of Ulysses Grant and decorated veteran of the Mexican War.

Will, whose uncle, John J. Crittenden, is U.S. attorney general, has his doubts about Cuba, as does his uncle. But are they strong enough to resist the charms of Miss Holcombe?

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A highly-praised novel about that historic newspaper.

"The world of this book is so completely absorbing and convincing that when you look up, you're amazed to discover you're not in Paris and it isn't 1968. That alone is an achievement and a treat, but for anyone who loves newspapers, this artful novel is a feast. I loved it." - Best-selling novelist Beth Gutcheon.

Famed author Ted Morgan calls it: "a captivating novel, authentic in its depiction of the French at home and Americans abroad."

New Yorker and New York Review of Books writer William Pfaff calls it: "wonderful. I stayed up three successive nights to finish it."

For Charles L. Robertson, author of "The International Herald Tribune," the book: "captures a time that no longer exists. It entertained me and stirred up a lot of memories."

"Greatly enjoyed it. Brings back some good old times in Paris." - Loren Jenkins, senior foreign editor for National Public Radio for 15 years.

"A witty, tender and evocative portrait of Americans in Paris that vividly brings to life the city they loved and made their own." - Ronald Steel, author of the National Book Award winning; "Walter Lippmann and the American Century."

Also available at Prospecta Press

Misfortunes of Wealth

"Wonderfully structured and written, a gripping work of social history. That it also has the narrative drive of a novel and is so psychologically acute is stunning. I was utterly absorbed while reading it and have been haunted by it since."

-Beth Gutcheon,
Author of Good-bye and Amen, and Leeway Cottage

"A beautifully written and moving work. Put in a generational and social context it sensitively portrays one family's experience and something revealing and moving about American society. It is really magnifcent. I truly couldn't put it down."

-Ronald Steel,
Author of Walter Lippmann and the American Century

Misfortunes of Wealth explores one of American society's endlessly fascinating scenarios, the one where inherited wealth and family intersect, not always to the good. Best of all, the story is true. James Goldsborough takes the reader on a journey beginning with Revolutionary War heroes down through succeeding generations of Civil War notables, industrial titans, an improbable love story with an eleven-year courtship, a couple besotted and befuddled by all that is given them, and finally, a son who not only survives but thrives.

The family tree is populated with such historical families as the Shields, the Crittendens, the Olivers, the Nevilles, and the Craigs; military, political, and industrial leaders of their time.

Published by The Local History Company,
112 NORTH Woodland Road, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15232-2849
Phone 412-362-2294 Fax 412-362-8192
[email protected]
For Orders Call Toll Free 866-362-0789

Rebel Europe: Living with a Changing Continent

Rebel Europe, published by Macmillan, was acclaimed by Sen. J.W. Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as "the most perceptive and profound analysis of the reasons why the influence and prestige of the United States have suffered such a decline during the last twenty years." Flora Lewis, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times wrote that, "anyone who wonders why Europe is arguing with the U.S. should read this book." Reviewed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Books editor Charles Champlin called it, "The most important book I have read in years."