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    Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century
    Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century
    Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century
    Audiobook18 hours

    Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century

    Written by Michael Hiltzik

    Narrated by Norman Dietz

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    About this audiobook

    As breathtaking today as when it was completed, Hoover Dam ranks among America's greatest achievements. The story of its conception, design, and construction is the story of the United States at a unique moment in history: when facing both a global economic crisis and the implacable elements of nature, we prevailed.

    The United States after Hoover Dam was a different country from the one that began to build it, going from the glorification of individual effort to the value of shared enterprise and communal support. The dam became the physical embodiment of this change. A remote regional construction project transformed from a Republican afterthought into a New Deal symbol of national pride.

    Hoover Dam went on to shape not only the American West but the American century. Michael Hiltzik populates the epic tale of the dam's construction with larger-than-life characters, such as Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, William Mulholland, and the dam's egomaniacal architect, Frank Crowe. Shedding real light on a one-of-a-kind moment in twentieth-century American history, Hiltzik combines exhaustive research, trenchant observation, and a gift for unforgettable storytelling in a book that is bound to become a classic in its genre.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 7, 2010
    ISBN9781400186785
    Author

    Michael Hiltzik

    Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author who has covered business, technology, and public policy for the Los Angeles Times for more than 40 years. He currently serves as the Times’s business columnist and hosts its business blog, The Economy Hub. Hiltzik received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry. He lives in Southern California with his family.

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    Reviews for Colossus

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      As a Mechanical Engineer I can now fully appreciate the trials and tribulations of the Civil Engineering fraternity. An excellent Audio Book. Well done!

      D Lawrence
      Halifax, Canada
    • 4/5
      Hoover Dam (or Boulder Dam, whichever you prefer) is indeed an engineering marvel. To get a complete history of the structure, you need to know about machinery—the machinery built to construct the dam, the political machinery involved in getting it funded, and the internal machinery of the men and women who risked their lives at the site itself. Michael Hiltzik’s Colossus is an attempt to chronicle both the construction and the consequences of Hoover Dam.First off, if you’re going to write about engineering problems or tactics, it’s helpful to have diagrams or schematics for the reader to reference. The plates in the middle are paltry and mostly portraits, and for all the praise that Reclamation photographer Ben Glaha got early in the book, there is only a middling effort to show off his work at the site. I would have really liked more illustrations, particularly of the technical issues and their solutions.Aside from that, the book was thoroughly informative, if a little biased against corporate officers and President Hoover himself. From the first expeditions to the site to the last crisis of the dam, you get a sense of the history and grandeur involved. The amount of references and endnotes are worthy of a history of this magnitude. All in all, I found myself wanting to finish it faster than expected. At over 400 pages, this isn’t an afternoon read, but it is a good read.
    • 4/5
      In the late 1920s, as we were hurtling toward the Great Depression, and the early 1930s, as we were struggling through it, the United States embarked on one of the greatest engineering projects in history. Hiltzik follows the conception, design, and building of the Hoover Dam from the first Europeans to reach the Imperial Valley in what is now California, to Americans learning about the wild and powerful Colorado River, and the periodic destructive flooding of Imperial Valley and other potentially valuable agricultural territory.

      From there began the search for ways to control and harness the power of the river. The challenges were not merely technical and engineering problems. Harnessing the Colorado River meant deciding how to divide up the water among seven different states with competing interests, as well as deciding whether the project would be "merely" for flood control and irrigation, or for hydroelectric power generation as well.

      These were not small matters. Water rights was already a deeply fraught issue in the west, and water law as it had developed in the much more well-watered east didn't fit conditions in the arid west. New principles and new agreements had to be created.

      As for hydroelectric power, Edison and other power companies were deeply opposed to public power generation that would compete with them and would likely be significantly cheaper. Nor were the power companies alone in this opposition. Herbert Hoover, chairman of the compact commission that negotiated the deal among the seven affected states, was deeply, ideologically, opposed to anything being done by government that could be done by private industry, regardless of which course was "best" for the general public. Hoover, of course, later became President, and was President when construction on the dam began, and when the Crash of 1929 rang in the start of the Great Depression. There were other forces and other players at work also, though, and such figures as Rep. Phil Swing (R-CA), Sen. Hiram Johnson (R-CA), William Mulholland, Walker Young, Frank Crowe, and others played major roles in getting the hydroelectric power generation part of the project approved.

      All this, of course, prior to the physical and technical challenges of actually building the dam in Black Canyon, the largest public works project in US history to that point. Personality clashes, intense heat, lack of any amenities, incredibly dangerous work--it all makes for an exciting tale with many unexpected twists.

      At the start of the Hoover Dam project, America was a country with a strong value on individual achievement and personal independence. By the time it was completed, America had become a culture that had discovered the value and the possibilities of cooperation and mutual support. Begun under Hoover and completed under Franklin Roosevelt, transformed into a symbol of the New Deal, the Hoover Dam project played a significant role in that transformation.

      Highly recommended.

      I borrowed this book from the library.
    • 4/5
      Excellent book, excellent narrator. I didn't think a book on building a dam could keep interesting for so many hours (audiobook) but this book did it. Includes history of prior dams, and dam breaks, in the US that led up to the engineering designs of Hoover dam - that part was quite interesting, as I had no idea that there were quite so many dam breaks around the country and the loss of life/property was pretty darn staggering. The pre-construction and construction sections of the dam include lots of behind the scenes descriptions of deals made, politics practiced, and lots and lots of misdeeds by The 6 Companies. And a bonus is that the book goes over the "where are they now?" of the main players for the 1950s, 60s, and in several cases beyond. Highly recommend for any history buffs.
    • 4/5
      Interesting telling of the building of Hoover Dam. Required reading before you visit this landmark!
    • 5/5
      This is a very interesting history, informative and well written. In telling the story of the desire for, the fight and planning for and the construction of this engineering marvel, Hitzik is telling many interlocking stories. Most prominent is the recounting of the history of water rights in the American southwest, and the fighting between the states of that region for use of the waters of the Colorado River. Hitzik tells of the early attempts to control the river and make use of the river through irrigation and engineering, including canals and aqueducts. He describes how the ability to use the river for irrigation has transformed that formerly desert region and allowed Las Vegas and, especially, Los Angeles to explode into mega-cities. The politics of the fight to create the dam as a public rather than a private enterprise is very interesting and has resonance in today's political battles, as well. The detailing of the engineering itself, and the ways in which new procedures and technologies had to be designed to build this mammoth dam, is quite riveting. The ways in which the contractors made sure to squeeze every possible nickel of profit out of the project, sometimes fraudulently and very, very frequently at the expense of the safety and the lives of the thousands of construction workers involved in the project make depressing but hardly surprising reading. At least two full chapters are devoted to describing the ways in which the very real danger to the workers, danger that came in all sorts, was purposefully ignored by the construction company in order that they might rush the job and therefore maximize their profits. workers' attempts to organize in order to improve their lots (in addition to the danger, pay rates could be lowered at any time and often were) were crushed ruthlessly. And after all, this was all going on in the middle of the Great Depression. Where were these men and their families going to go? The whole thing gives us America in a nutshell, particularly at that point in history: the whole range from dynamic designers, builders and innovators to insatiable greed mongers and ruthless exploiters.
    • 4/5
      The Hoover Dam--what an achievement! This well researched and competently written history covers all aspects of its creation, political, personal, labor, engineering, environment.
    • 4/5
      I’m a big fan of history, and especially enjoy reading histories of some of the biggest projects and/or events of American history. Stephen Ambrose and David McCollough are two of my favorite authors in this genre. Ambrose’s accounts of the Lewis and Clarke expedition and the building of the transcontinental railroad, and McCollough’s books detailing the Panama Canal and Brooklyn Bridge construction are among the best I’ve read. Therefore, when I saw this work on the history and construction of the Hoover Dam, one of the greatest feats of engineering in history, I was more than excited to order and read it.This is a good book. It more than competently covers the details and the personalities behind the Dam, the region and the historical era. When compared with the works cited above, it falls short however. One issue is the paucity of photographs and diagrams contained in the book. In the presence of highly detailed descriptions, simple diagrams or descriptive photographs would have been extremely helpful.The second problem I encountered was the blatantly obvious political bias held by the author. If Hoover was the smarmy, autocratic, hypocritical blowhard that the author clearly paints him to be, a simple recitation of the facts could allow the reader to come to that conclusion. Instead, the author frequently peppers the facts with “helpful” little adverbs and descriptive phrases to help the reader along.The Hoover Dam is rightly held up as one of the greatest public works ever undertaken by the U. S. government, at a time when such projects were very difficult to accomplish due to the financing and political restrictions in place before the New Deal and Great Society programs made such mega projects de rigueur. Nevertheless, recognition of the role of government in this case is used by the author as a sledgehammer to denigrate and ridicule the idea that private enterprise can or should have a major role in our society. Time and again, individuals and capitalists of the era are painted as greedy slave drivers, interested only in printing money, to the detriment of quality workmanship or the safety and well being of their workers. The few that were seemingly decent human beings were hopelessly incompetent.Again, this is not a bad book. It is however, not what it could have been in the hands of Ambrose or McCollough.
    • 3/5
      Completed 3/22/11, 408 pages. In a nutshell, good book but expected much better. I was disappointed there were virtually no maps, and no drawings of the dam. The book had many sections with considerable detail about design and construction which could have been better understood with the inclusion of both. There were several photos, but mostly a ho-hum collection of the usual portraits and Dam photos, but not nearly enough to show the evolution of the dam through its many phases of construction. And finally, while the book seemed well-researched, I thought the writing was so-so and many lengthy passages were very dull and slow going. If there is one question most asked by visitors to the dam and people reading this book, I am sure it would be "how many people died as a consequence of this project?" There are many anecdotal accidents described but the basic question is never answered. Yet there are tons of statistics about this on the web. The one thing the author had going for him though is this monster of a dam, and the soap opera surrounding its creation. The author did a good job in identifying the critical elements (e.g. Commerce Secy Hoover's sessions with the 7 states' reps, treatment of the workers, cement research, collapse of the St Francis Dam, FDR's visit, building Boulder City, why electric trucks were not used). And generally these subjects were so fascinating that some of the faults mentioned above would be temporarily forgotten. I have been to Hoover Dam three times but have never gone to the Visitor Center - but I plan to this summer. I think I'd be a bit more excited about it had "Colossus" been a better book.
    • 5/5
      This a great story of one of the most significant engineering and human achievements in American history. While this story has been told before Mr. Hiltzik brings a new perspective that makes the story fresh for anyone familiar with the history of the dam. For those unfamiliar with the story of Hoover Dam this is a must read history. For me the book was a reminder of the great things we can do as a nation with clear goals and strong leadership. A current reminder of that is the new bridge spanning the gorge just below the dam. It is as breathtaking as the dam itself. I recommend this book highly.