bookshelf

THE WIZARD OF SUN CITY

Name: THE WIZARD OF SUN CITY
Author: Garry Jenkins
ISBN: 1-56025-675-3

THE STRANGE TRUE STORY OF CHARLES HATFIELD, THE RAINMAKER WHO DROWNED A CITY’S DREAMS

by Garry Jenkins ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2005

An entertaining study of a quirky historical episode.

bookshelf

Light social history about rainmaking in the arid American West.

Anyone who’s seen 110 Degrees in the Shade is already familiar with the story of Charles Hatfield. In the early 20th century, settlers west of the Mississippi were desperate for more water. Hatfield was the most famous of the dozens of scientists and charlatans who insisted they could create rain. He wasn’t, suggests Jenkins (Colonel Cody and the Flying Cathedral, 2000, etc.), a total fraud. His musing about rainmaking began in his mother’s kitchen, as he observed the interaction between steam and water vapor from a pot and a stove. Couldn’t he engineer some chemical version of steam, and bring down rain from the clouds? However unsound his science, Hatfield had early successes making rain in southern California in 1904. He gained fans (including not a few infatuated ladies) and financial backers, but he also earned enemies who thought his promises were hogwash; Willis More, head of the U.S. Weather Bureau, lambasted Hatfield at every opportunity. In 1915, San Diego, which badly needed rain, secured Hatfield’s services. After Hatfield’s machinations, the city definitely got rain—the worst storm in the history of the region, a storm that almost destroyed it. The “landscape,” writes Jenkins, who spends almost 100 pages detailing the inundation, was “liquidized.” (The author seems fond of alliteration: we also read about a “delta of debris” and a “fortnight of frustration.”) The storm simply made Hatfield more controversial and more famous. Newspapers ate him up with a spoon. But as dams came to the West, the demand for rainmakers, even legendary Charlie, declined. By the late 1930s, Hatfield was making his living selling sewing machines and real estate. Did he actually cause all that rain in San Diego? Maybe, and maybe not, says Jenkins: “We can never know.”

An entertaining study of a quirky historical episode.

Pub Date: July 1, 2005

ISBN: 1-56025-675-3

Page Count: 272

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLONEL CODY AND THE FLYING CATHEDRAL
by Garry Jenkins

- BOOK REVIEW
DANIEL DAY-LEWIS
by Garry Jenkins

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)