Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley

While the city of Berkeley, California, is widely known as the home of remarkable individuals - from cutting-edge entrepreneurs and Nobel Prize winners to visionary social critics and hippie clowns - the story of its iconoclastic culture begins for many with the historic social movements of the 1960s. In Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley, author Richard Schwartz reveals that legendary personalities have been at the center of Berkeley life since its founding. Focusing on the period from 1850 to 1925, Schwartz brings to life Berkeley's defining men and women - squatters and speculators; missionaries and mystics; vendors, inventors, and industrialists. The result is not only an authoritative history that gives meaning to the streets of Berkeley we walk today, but also a delightful storyteller's anthology, full of humor, drama, sadness, and hard-earned wisdom.

"All modesty aside, we common sort can be pretty fascinating....If you want proof of this simple truth, all you have to do is pick up Richard Schwartz's collection of stories on Berkeley....Schwartz touches all of the abstract themes that you will find in grand histories: class struggle, ethnic conflicts, economic greed, and political intrigue. To be sure, you will meet the full cast of outlandish characters that you would expect to find in Berkeley.... By the time Richard Schwartz is through with each portrait, we don't just know the story, we know the person.... The past, as Richard Schwartz tells it, comprises a lot of people who look, act, and sound a lot like us. For me, at least, that is comforting news."

- DAVID CROSSON, Executive Director, California Historical Society

"Combining the research skills of a careful historian with the flair of a yarn-spinner, Richard Schwartz brings early Berkeley alive with such vibrancy and immediacy that you might imagine he had witnessed it first-hand. What an informative, engaging, ultimately thought-provoking exploration of our Berkeley roots! In his many years of plowing the local soil, Schwartz brings forth a rich harvest of stories and memories that nourish a deeper sense of place."

- MALCOLM MARGOLIN, founder of Heyday Books

Richard Schwartz is a California historian and author of Earthquake Exodus, 1906: Berkeley Responds to the San Francisco Refugees; Berkeley 1900: Daily Life at the Turn of the Century; and The Circle of Stones: An Investigation of the Circle of Stones in Stampede Valley, Sierra County, California. He lives in Berkeley, California, where he also works as a building contractor.

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