Being an awkward attempt to elucidate California's Civil War years through the prism of small-to-medium Unitarian celebrity King. The book is well-researched and adequately written, but King's presence mandates digressions into uninteresting tangents such as the history of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism in New England, fundraising for military charity the U.S. Sanitary Commission, and sightseeing in the Yosemite country, to the point that King becomes a very unwelcome guest. Since the author declines any opportunities to tell a military story, brushing off the CSA expedition to conquer the state in a few paragraphs, that leaves her sections on ethnic and party politics in the state as the main point of interest in the book. ( )