Amazon Book of the Year"Floodpath attempts to rescue the disaster from obscurity . . . The author captures many heartbreaking stories of survivors . . . The effect is powerful." --The Wall Street JournalA visionary and controversial search for water made Los Angeles possible. But the failure of the St. Francis Dam remains an urgent lesson about our human limits, all but forgotten today.Just before ...

Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam, a twenty-story-high concrete structure just fifty miles north of Los Angeles, suddenly collapsed, releasing a devastating flood that roared fifty-four miles to the Pacific Ocean, destroying everything in its path. It was a horrific catastrophe, yet one which today is virtually forgotten.With research gathered over more than two decades, award-winning writer and filmmaker Jon Wilkman revisits the deluge that claimed nearly...

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in HistoryFinalist for the National Book Award in NonfictionFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award“Grandin tells a gripping story of high hopes and deep failure, a saga that in some ways is a morality tale for the American century.” —The Boston GlobeFrom Pulitzer Prize-winning author Greg Grandin comes the stunning,...

In Stephen Fry in America, the beloved British comic turns his celebrated wit and insight to unearthing the real U.S. as he travels across the continent.Stephen Fry has always loved America. In fact, he came very close to being born here. His fascination for the country and its people sees him embarking on an epic journey across America, visiting each of its fifty states to discover how such a huge diversity of people, cultures, languages, and beliefs creat...

**“I’ve been thinking a lot about Cadillac Desert in the past few weeks, as the rain fell and fell and kept falling over California, much of which, despite the pouring heavens, seems likely to remain in the grip of a severe drought. Reisner anticipated this moment. He worried that the West’s success with irrigation could be a mirage — that it took water for granted and didn’t appreciate the precariousness of our capacity to control it.” – Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times...

New Enhanced Digital EditionHenry Ford an American folk hero to many was a man with several faces. He was a genius who revolutionized the automobile industry irrevocably altered American culture and commerce developed mass production and helped the middle class emerge in America. He was also an anti-Semitic autocrat who hated Wall Street bankers and financiers with unmitigated passion. Ford paid the highest wages but was zealous in his opposition to unions. He was exceptionally hard on his on...

As breathtaking today as the day it was completed, Hoover Dam not only shaped the American West but helped launch the American century. In the depths of the Great Depression it became a symbol of American resilience and ingenuity in the face of crisis, putting thousands of men to work in a remote desert canyon and bringing unruly nature to heel.Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Michael Hiltzik uses the saga of the dam’s conception, design, and construction to tell the broader story of ...

California here we come! Uncle John is taking the plunge into the land of freeways, fun, cable cars, and movie stars.From Hollywood to the redwoods, from Death Valley to Napa Valley, this amazing book is your golden gate to the Golden State! You'll discover obscure history, learn fascinating facts, and meet the unique people who make California a place like no other on Earth! Read about…* The day Fullerton was invaded by Superballs* Vasquez Rocks and...

A riveting history of the Mount St. Helens eruption that will "long stand as a classic of descriptive narrative" (Simon Winchester).For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, sightseers, and nearby residents listened anxiously to rumblings in Mount St. Helens, part of the chain of western volcanoes fueled by the 700-mile-long Cascadia fault. Still, no one was prepared when an immense eruption took the top off of the mountain and laid waste to hundreds of sq...

The rise and fall of William Mulholland, and the story of L.A.'s disastrous dam collapse: " A dramatic saga of ambition, politics, money and betrayal" ( Los Angeles Daily News).Rivers in the Desert follows the remarkable career of William Mulholland, the visionary who engineered the rise of Los Angeles as the greatest American city west of the Mississippi. He sought to transform the sparse and barren desert into an inhabitable env...

A new form of strip mining has caused a state of emergency for the Appalachian wilderness and the communities that depend on it-a crisis compounded by issues of government neglect, corporate hubris, and class conflict. In this powerful call to arms, Erik Reece chronicles the year he spent witnessing the systematic decimation of a single mountain and offers a landmark defense of a national treasure threatened with extinction.

California, Wallace Stegner observed, is like the rest of the United States, only more so. Indeed, the Golden State has always seemed to be a place where the hopes and fears of the American dream have been played out in a bigger and bolder way. And no one has done more to capture this epic story than Kevin Starr, in his acclaimed series of gripping social and cultural histories. Now Starr carries his account into the 1930s, when the political extremes that threatened so much of the Depress...