by Gary Krist
First published 2019
Gary Krist tells the story of how Los Angeles emerged from barren coastal desert in just thirty years. The book focuses on three figures who shaped the impossible city between 1900 and 1930. William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant who worked his way up from ditch digger, engineered the massive aqueduct system that brought water to the arid region. D.W. Griffith transformed movies from carnival sideshows into America's dominant entertainment industry, establishing Hollywood as the global film capital. Aimee Semple McPherson built a new form of evangelical Christianity that drew millions of seekers to Southern California. Krist shows how each of these innovators created something like a mirage, conjuring visions of urban paradise in an unlikely location. Their ambitions came with steep costs as engineering disasters, financial scandals, and personal failures threatened to destroy what they had built. The book reveals how imagination and audacity can reshape geography itself, turning scrappy farmland into one of the world's great metropolises.
Genres: history, 20th-century, non-fiction, biography-memoir, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: ambition, innovation, urban-development
Setting: Los Angeles, Hollywood
Period: 1900-1930
432 pages · Paperback · Crown