Contra Costa Times

Quicker Than the Eye By Ray Bradbury Avon, 261 pages, $22 The Truth Machine By James L. Halperin Del Rey, 321 pages, $24 Ray Bradbury is an established science fiction...

For 26 years, Charlie and Betty Peissner have welcomed friends and strangers into their Pleasant Hill, Calif., home for weekly prayer meetings. Now, the city of Pleasant Hill has told...

In many ways, Green Bay is the land that time forgot. Cynicism, which has become an epidemic in this country, has been slow to catch on here.Maybe it has something...

Rachel Robinson knows. She was there beside her husband (Jackie) throughout the ordeal of his first two seasons, when he promised Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey he would avoid confrontations...

What price paradise? High-paying jobs, a cosmopolitan ambience and a temperate climate make the Bay Area one of the most desirable places to live in the country. And the most...

The romances of King Arthur, the fairy tales of Andersen and Grimm continue to tempt writers to improve upon what the test of time suggests is near-perfection. Some of the...

`Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold." It's been a long time since I learned that at Girl Scout camp, but it's a...

Disillusioned with increasing competition and diminishing profits, Wells Fargo Bank disclosed that it will stop making loans to home buyers. Rather than turn its back completely on prospective homeowners, San...

High above a row of modest homes being built in the Hacienda Business Park in Pleasonton, Calif., looms a 5-story office complex. Such incongruencies are becoming more common in suburban...

A federal crackdown on mortgage fraud has tripped up a Danville, Calif., man who masterminded a scheme that extracted more than $5 million in bogus real estate loans. In an...