Book of the week: Colossus by Michael Hiltzik

last updated 8 January 2015

(Free Press, $30)

With a “runaway oil well fouling the Gulf of Mexico,” this book about the building of the Hoover Dam is a “welcome reminder of the engineering genius that built America,” said John Steele Gordon in The Wall Street Journal. Finished in 1936, the dam was twice as tall as any built previously, and designed to harness “the most unruly major river in North America.” It took decades of political wrangling to get the go-ahead from Congress and the seven states in the Colorado River watershed.

Hiltzik tackles the tale as “historian, investigative reporter, and social critic,” said Kevin Starr in The Washington Post. It turns out that the dam’s “rushed and relentless construction” took more than a hundred workers’ lives. It also, of course, made an “impressive profit” for the private firms that built it. But “would we choose to do it again, even if we could, given the dam’s deficiencies and our newfound humility before the power and fragility of the planet?”