California Fruits, Flakes & Nuts

Book excerpt: They call California the Granola State — a place where every inhabitant is a fruit, a flake, or a nut. They don’t get any fruitier, flakier, or nuttier than the deviants, crackpots, and losers profiled in “California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts.” A freewheeling catalog of misfits, eccentrics, creeps, criminals, and failed dreamers, “California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts” profiles 45 bizarre personalities who exemplify the Golden State’s well-deserved reputation for nonconformity. “California Fruits, Flakes and Nuts” tells the history that gets cleaned out of respectable history books. In these pages, Gold Rush pioneers are revealed as murderous madmen; Hollywood celebrities are shown to be drug-addled sex maniacs; early hippies are just 1950s weirdos; and even seemingly ordinary Californians have a talent for freakish, crazy, and criminal behavior. From frontier lunatic Grizzly Adams (whose head was one massive wound after multiple bear attacks) to “I Love Lucy” star William Frawley (a racist, misogynist, foul-mouthed drunk) to legendarily awful film director Ed Wood and many more nutjobs and oddballs , “California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts” is a side-splitting look at the people who made California the strangest place on earth.