Water to the Angels - by Les Standiford (Paperback)

About the Book

Documents the story of William Mulholland's Los Angeles aqueduct, the largest public water project ever built, describing how it transformed a small desert city into a modern metropolis.

Book Synopsis

"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, bestselling author of Dead Wake and In the Garden of Beasts

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.

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.

Review Quotes

"A riveting account of the collapse of the St. Francis dam in 1928. . . . Standiford makes a convincing argument that [the aqueduct] deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with other engineering marvels of the same era, such as the Panama Canal." - Wall Street Journal
"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
"Water for the Angels is not simply a masterful and riveting story about the political chicanery and engineering miracles that combined to bring life-giving water to Los Angeles County, but it's a triumphant tale of a simple, blue-collar man, William Mulholland, who with hard-headed practicality and relentless focus and a natural genius for understatement overcame impossible odds to accomplish an impossible task that almost single-handedly gave birth to a great American city." - James W. Hall, author of Hit Lit and The Big Finish
"The portrait that emerges is of a determined public servant who was in the right place at the right time, demonized by later generations for his role in removing water from other parts of California in order to shape a metropolis. The added value of Standiford's book largely comes in its closing pages, in which he examines the now-canonical script for Chinatown and separates fact from fiction." - Kirkus Reviews
"A mark of excellence in biography is that the reader comes away with more than the story of one person's life, but the life of an entire place. Los Angeles now has its panoramic story told through the shady and glorious journey of the one-time ditch-digger William Mulholland. If you want to learn why L.A. looks and feels like it does, read Les Standiford's magnificent account in which myths are debunked, pseudo-heroes are exposed and hydraulic engineering is made more exciting than any war. Forget Chinatown. This is the straight story." - Tom Zoellner, author of Train: Riding the Rails that Created the Modern World