Early Books
Northwest California
Raphael’s first books focused primarily on the history and regional issues of Northern California, where he has lived since the late 1960s. His Everyday History of Somewhere, an earthy treatment based on interviews with old-timers that intermingled natural with human history, won the California Commonwealth Club award for best book on California for 1774. In Edges: Human Ecology of the Backcountry; Tree Talk: The People and Politics of Timber (and its sequel, More Tree Talk: The People, Politics, and Economics of Timber); and Cash Crop: An American Dream?, he explored issues of contemporary local concern (development, timber, marijuana) in a unique journalistic style, interweaving Studs Terkel-style interviews with narrative history and analysis. In 2007, with Freeman House (author of Totem Salmon), Raphael wrote an in-depth exploration of white-Indian conflicts of the mid-19th century in Northwest California, titled Two Peoples, One Place.
Raphael has also written a book on male initiation rites in contemporary American culture (The Men from the Boys), a study of the careers of teachers (The Teachers’ Voice), and with his son Neil, a juvenile mystery (Comic Cops). His play on John and Jessie Freemont played to audiences across Northern California.
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“As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow.”
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