Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles, by Les Standiford
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Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles, by Les Standiford
Best Ebook Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles, by Les Standiford
The author of Last Train to Paradise tells the story of the largest public water project ever created—William Mulholland’s Los Angeles aqueduct—a story of Gilded Age ambition, hubris, greed, and one determined man who's vision shaped the future and continues to impact us today.
In 1907, Irish immigrant William Mulholland conceived and built one of the greatest civil engineering feats in history: the aqueduct that carried water 223 miles from the Sierra Nevada mountains to Los Angeles—allowing this small, resource-challenged desert city to grow into a modern global metropolis. Drawing on new research, Les Standiford vividly captures the larger-then-life engineer and the breathtaking scope of his six-year, $23 million project that would transform a region, a state, and a nation at the dawn of its greatest century.
With energy and colorful detail, Water to the Angels brings to life the personalities, politics, and power—including bribery, deception, force, and bicoastal financial warfare—behind this dramatic event. At a time when the importance of water is being recognized as never before—considered by many experts to be the essential resource of the twenty-first century—Water to the Angels brings into focus the vigor of a fabled era, the might of a larger than life individual, and the scale of a priceless construction project, and sheds critical light on a past that offers insights for our future.
Water to the Angels includes 8 pages of photographs.
Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles, by Les Standiford- Amazon Sales Rank: #147583 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-03-31
- Released on: 2015-03-31
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review “In this incredibly timely book, Les Standiford chronicles William Mulholland’s heroic drive to bring water to Los Angeles and thus to create the city we know today. It’s a powerful-and beautifully told-story of hubris, ingenuity, and, ultimately, deepest tragedy.” (Erik Larson)
From the Back Cover
The story of William Mulholland's Los Angeles aqueduct, the largest public water project ever created—a tale of gilded age ambition, hubris, greed, and one determined man whose vision shaped the future
In 1907, Irish immigrant William Mulholland designed and began to build one of the greatest civil engineering feats in history: the aqueduct that carried water 233 miles from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Los Angeles—allowing this small, resource-challenged desert city to grow into a modern global metropolis. Drawing on new research, Les Standiford vividly captures the visionary engineer and the breathtaking scope of his six-year, $23 million project that would transform a region, a state, and a nation at the dawn of its greatest century.
At a time when the importance of water is being recognized as never before, Water to the Angels brings into focus the vigor of a fabled era, the might of a larger-than-life individual, and the scale of a priceless construction project, shedding critical light on a past that offers insights for our future.
About the Author
Les Standiford is the bestselling author of twenty books and novels, including the John Deal mystery series, and the works of narrative history The Man Who Invented Christmas (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) and Last Train to Paradise. He is the director of the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami, where he lives with his wife, Kimberly, a psychotherapist and artist. Visit his website at www.les-standiford.com.
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Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful. "Chinatown" Revealed By Mel McKinney Another non-fiction Home Run by Les Standiford.With the razor-edged skill of character development demonstrated in his famously successful "Deal" mysteries, Standiford brings to lifethe strengths and instincts of William Mulholland, whose vision and tenacity watered Los Angeles.Standiford's meticulous research and Mystery Writer's style make this history of the water umbilical to Los Angeles a true page turner.Paraphrasing from the final chapter of this book, History does indeed contain compelling drama. The drama integral to construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, its audacity, need, deprivations and tragedies, flows from this book with the power of the water it represents.If there were more stars to award, I would.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful. "Chinatown" was fiction. Here's the real story. By Mal Warwick It’s hard to imagine a more timely book than Water to the Angels, which appears in the midst of a drought in California of historic proportions. Framed as a biography of William Mulholland, who built and managed the Los Angeles Aqueduct that supplied L.A. with most of its water for decades, Water to the Angels can equally be seen as a history of the Aqueduct itself — the more than two-hundred-mile-long series of pipes and tunnels that drained the Owens Valley to feed the thirst of generations of Angelenos. It also enabled the city to begin producing all the electric power it needed, setting L.A. on a course of energy self-sufficiency to the present day.Though he was reviled in the Owens Valley and by the men who owned and ran the private companies that had been supplying power to L.A., Mulholland was lionized for much of his career, gaining a worldwide reputation as an engineering wizard. He brought in the aqueduct — deemed an impossible feat — on time and for far less money than private companies would have charged. For decades, he was “the highest-paid public official in California” because his work played a fundamental role in making it possible for Los Angeles to grow from a population of 50,000 in 1890 to more than thirteen million today.Unquestionably, Mulholland figures in the history of the state as a major actor, and he was an extraordinary man. An ill-educated immigrant from Ireland who arrived at the age of nineteen, he was a self-taught civil engineer who rose to employ legions of professionals. He had a prodigious memory who frequently overawed coworkers and politicians alike, and he proved to be endlessly innovative in finding new ways to get things done in a massive construction project “that ranked with the building of the Panama Canal in scope and challenge.” He was also able, almost single-handedly, to persuade the city’s voters to back the many bond issues that proved necessary to build the Aqueduct.Water to the Angels is not a dispassionate biography. For example, Standiford writes that it is “easy to argue that had William Mulholland not fought for and built the Los Angeles Aqueduct, Southern California as we now know it would not exist.” He also insists that “what he overcame to achieve a position of influence rivals any Horatio Alger-style narrative.” The author acknowledges the criticism of Mulholland by contemporaries and historians alike, but he dismisses most of it out of hand.Naturally, if you mention water and Los Angeles in the same sentence, you’re likely to conjure up memories of the film Chinatown, which paints a picture of Mulholland’s greatest creation as the product of unalloyed greed. In fact, Mulholland is quickly dismissed in the movie as a minor character named Hollis Mulwray, and the central device in the film — the discharge of millions of gallons of water into the Pacific to create a severe water shortage in the city — is pure fiction. Mulholland had, indeed, opened the pipes to drain water into the ocean, but only to avoid flooding the system. And the corruption ascribed to those who built the Aqueduct is equally fictitious: Mulholland was demonstrably incorruptible. However, the powers-that-were in Los Angeles did manage to emerge from the project richer by millions of dollars through their speculation in San Fernando Valley land.The story of William Mulholland and the Los Angeles Aqueduct can be viewed as a tragedy on a classical scale. Though the Aqueduct itself had to be viewed as an unqualified success, Mulholland made a catastrophic error a decade after the Aqueduct began delivering water to Los Angeles in 1915: he shrugged off signs that one of the big dams in the 233-mile-long system of waterworks was threatening to collapse. In fact, the dam did collapse, and “the dam’s failure took at least 450 lives [and destroyed thousands of homes], a disaster outdone in California history only by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.Most of Water to the Angels is reasonably well written. However, the first few chapters — before Standiford hits his stride — are rife with turgid syntax. For instance, the very first sentence in the book reads as follows: “Often a writer is queried as to the source of an idea.” Not exactly an auspicious beginning!There are other flaws in this book: Standiford reports numbers in mind-numbing detail as he discusses the construction of the Aqueduct. And he devotes an ordinate amount of space to dissecting the movie Chinatown. Still, the book is worth reading as an account of what may have been the most consequential event in the history of the nation’s second largest city.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful. The Problem of Water By Clif With California's drought in the news recently it's good to remember that Los Angeles was facing a similar problem 115 years ago. William Mulholland, superintendent of the Los Angeles Water Department at that time responded by designing a massive aqueduct plan to transport water over 200 miles from the Sierra Nevada mountain range to Los Angeles. The plan was constructed under his supervision and finished under budget in November 1913. Some of the technology developed under Molholland's direction was used in the building of the Panama Canal.It's a fact that Los Angeles would have remained a small desert town if it weren't for Mulholland's initiative. It could be argued that the aqueduct would have been constructed by others if it weren't for Mulholland, but it's hard to imagine that anyone else could have completed the job is such an efficient manner free of graft and corruption. He was always on the lookout for the best interests of his employer, the City of Los Angeles. He was the model civil servant.There are some people who consider Mulholland to be an evil person. Their enmity is misdirected because really what they are saying is that Los Angeles is an evil city. Mulholland was simply doing his job. The fact that he did his job well is held against him by these people. This anger is based on the fact that the city took (i.e. stole) water from the Owens Valley which as a consequence became a ghost of its former self. The defenders of the project counter that it's a situation where a water resource was used for the greater good.This book's portrayal of Mulholland is that of an engineer/public servant extraordinaire who worked his way up from ditch digger to being superintendent of the Water Department. Among the City's electorate he became one of the most trusted persons in the city. When he endorsed a proposed bond issue it almost always passed. He had a gift of attracting the loyalty of his subordinates he developed bonus payment systems that encouraged laborers to work extra hard on his projects.The book begins by telling of the incident that effectively ended Mulholland's career, the St. Francis Dam failure on March 12, 1928 which was the worst U.S. civil engineering disaster of the 20th century. The real death toll is uncertain but is estimated to be over 600. Mulholland is famous for the quotation, "Whether it is good or bad, don't blame anyone else, you just fasten it on me. If there was an error in human judgment, I was the human, I won't try to fasten it on anyone else."The book then proceeds on to tell the story of Mulholland's life. But the reader is left with the knowledge that in spite of all his amazing accomplishments, it's going to end with a terrible disaster.The failure of the dam was probably caused by the pressure from the 190 foot depth of water at the dam's face penetrating the porous layers of underlying and neighboring rock and the concrete of the dam itself. Some have questioned whether the knowledge base of dam engineering at that time had developed sufficiently for Mulholland to have avoided this dam failure. The incident demonstrated the importance of thorough geotechnical exploration of the foundation material and served as a learning experience for the whole field of dam engineering. Dams built since then are equipped with pressure relief drains to prevent this kind of pressure infiltration. However, in this particular case the foundation materials were so bad that no dam, and no concrete gravity arch dam in particular, should have been constructed at that location.Many people's understanding of this era is based on the 1974 movie Chinatown that starred Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston. This book has a final chapter that addresses this movie and explores whether there's any historical credibility contained in its plot. My conclusion is that there is much more fiction than fact in the movie's plot.
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