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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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