California Against the Sea: Visions for our Vanishing Coastline, by my former Los Angeles Times colleague Rosanna Xia, has won a number of awards since it was published in 2023, and would make an excellent gift for anyone seeking to understand our ever-changing coastline.

Xia speaks of the notion that “once we lay claim to a place, it becomes permanently ours to settle. It is this story of the coast that California has fashioned for itself for the past two centuries, and it is this unyielding line in the sand that so many are fighting to defend. The ocean became yet another force to control, a wave to conquer, a crest to overcome.”

California Against the Sea is in stock at Skylight Books and Vroman’s in Pasadena. And available from Amazon.

Xia more recently finished the award-winning Los Angeles Times documentary Out of Plain Sight,  about barrels of toxic waste in the ocean off the California coast.