William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles Book

Being a longtime Los Angeleno I figured it was time to acquaint myself with the life of the man who brought the water here and, as much as any one individual, made this city possible. I deliberately chose the biography by his granddaughter, who claims to set straight a variety of "bad raps" suffered by Mulholland in his previous bios. There are many tales of dark conspiracy around the growth of L.A. and like most conspiracy theories, they are based in truth but are overly simplistic and sometimes just plain wrong (e.g. the public transit system was not simply bought up by cynical automobile magnates and trashed). The "Chinatown" paradigm of southern California's water acquisition might also hold some water (pun intended) but Mulholland's story as told here is much more complex and fascinating. Ms. Mulholland might gloss over some of the hanky-panky but she readily acknowledges many of the self-interested industry barons of the day who schemed for land and water, many of them allied with WIlliam and many arrayed against him. He emerges in this portrait as a strong-willed and principled man, a convinced free-enterpreneur but equally dedicated to a vision of an empowered benevolent municipal government rather than that of capitalism run rampant. His granddaughter obviously has a horse in this race but she remains reasonably even-handed and objective. The book makes the California of another age and its innumerable personalities come alive.