"Without Michale Rauner's gorgeous color photographs on nearly every page, it would be easy to think Erik Davis was making up or at least exaggerating some of this stuff about vintner cults and freewayside temples and druid libraries. This engaging, entertaining, thoroughly researched book is not an excyclopedia but an atlast of desires, devotions, traditions, and varations. The Visionary State is a vivid and wholly original way of surveying postmillennial religion and spirituality out here on the frontier of the American experiment."
-- Rebecca Solnit, author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost and River of Shadows

"From Native American times to the present, California has bespoken the sacred and the mystical. The Visionary State documents and celebrates this affinity in its many manifestations. Through image and word, we encounter a California linked to the great traditions--as well as to the new beginnings--born of mankind's immemorial quest for transcendence."
-- Kevin Starr, professor of history, University of Southern California, and author of the Americans and the California Dream series.