A comprehensive account of a mostly forgotten era, casting new light on Mulholland's legendary achievements for the city of...
The remarkable life of the self-taught, Irish-born civil engineer who led the long, extraordinary effort to bring water to early Los Angeles.
Catherine Mulholland (The Owensmouth Baby, not reviewed), William's granddaughter, researched her highly detailed biography from office files, vintage newspapers, city archives, and interviews covering the early history and rise of a great city. William Mulholland's story began with the discovery of a rich water source in Owens Valley. The transportation of this liquid gold to distant Los Angeles was made possible by the massive engineering feat of the Owens Valley Aqueduct—a project that took over a decade to build amid disheartening problems involving financing, hostile landowners and politicians, a biased media, and some radical sabotage. The author describes an unflappable man of iron character, construction expertise, and courage. Mulholland was an avid reader and yet a man of action—a dam builder, a solver of problems who planned and directed the application of the hardest and most dangerous physical labor in planting pipelines through wild deserts and the blasting miles of tunnels through mountainous countryside to finally bring precious water and hydroelectric power to the fast-growing city. In 18 years, Mulholland rose from obscurity to become a leading citizen. His later years were saddened by the mysterious collapse of one of his dams, a tragedy that took 400 lives. Part of the author's intent in creating this biography was to correct what she claims are misleading and distorted themes in the 1979 movie Chinatown.
A comprehensive account of a mostly forgotten era, casting new light on Mulholland's legendary achievements for the city of Los Angeles—as well as an enlightening addition to the history of the American West.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-520-21724-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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