New Releases by Mary Austin

A brother and sister spend the night in the mammal room of a museum and are transported into the past when the exhibits come alive.

Mary Austin''s 1917 novel illuminates one of the crucial issues in California history--the usurpation of water from the Owens Valley. Ranging from the eastern Sierra to the financial district in San Francisco, the plot portrays the frenzied speculation in land and resources, labor protests, and feminist organizing of the time, exemplified in the successful efforts of an independent young woman to buy back her family''s Owens Valley ranch.

From preface to first edition; by the author: "The greatest difficulty to be met in the writing of an Indian play is the extensive misinformation about Indians. Any real aboriginal of my acquaintance resembles his prototype in the public mind about as much as he does the high-nosed, wooden sign of a tobacco store, the fact being that, among the fifty-eight linguistic groups of American aboriginals, customs, traits, and beliefs differ as greatly as among Slavs and Sicilians. Their very speech appears not to be derived from any common stock. All that they really have of likeness is an average condition of primitiveness: they have traveled just so far toward an understanding of the world they live in, and no farther. It is this general limitation of knowledge which makes, in spite of the multiplication of tribal customs, a common attitude of mind which alone affords a basis of interpretation.".

High quality reprint of Love and the Soul Maker by Mary Hunter Austin.

Novel of modern daily life, and a young man who resolved to be rich while his vision of a ''Lovely Lady'' guided him until he found her--Babylon Revisited Rare Books.