Kevin Starr (1940–2017)

I won this book from the Goodreads First Reads giveaway program, and I am very grateful that I did. My to-read list is so long that I will read only a fraction of the books on it, and winning this ensured that I read it, and I’m glad that I did.

I live a five minutes drive away from the Golden Gate Bridge, within hiking distance from it. I used to walk across it regularly; I occasionally drive across it, and at times in the past regularly did so. I’ve known 4 people who jumped off of it, show more 3 who died, 1 who survived; luckily, none were close friends. My mother lived here during its construction. One of my very favorite photographs is Ansel Adams’ The Golden Gate Before the Bridge. I have my memories of it from very early childhood to the present.

The writing style of this author is very poetic.

Each chapter reads like its own essay, and I read it chapter by chapter, slowly, in order to savor it.

This book is about the bridge and issues related to it: the culture, art, history, geology, geography, weather, engineering, architecture, personalities, etc.

There are some photographs, but I would have liked many more, including the Ansel Adams before the bridge photos; I found out there is a series of photos, not just the one photo I’ve seen and loved. It helped that while I read this book I read a book of photographs of San Francisco, old and new, that had many photos of the Golden Gate, before, during and after bridge construction. (San Francisco: Views of the Past & Present)

Contents:
1. Bridge
2. Icon
3. Site
4. Vision
5. Politics
6. Money
7. Design
8. Construction
9. City
10. Suicide
11. Art
Essay on Sources
Index

I did catch at least one irritating major error: the San Andreas fault is to the west of the Golden Gate Bridge, not to the east.

So, I learned quite a bit from this book. Recently a Goodreads friend of mine, who lives in another country and has never been to San Francisco, was surprised at the International Orange color of the Golden Gate Bridge; she’d expected it to be golden colored. I was able to explain to her that Golden Gate was the name of the place, the spot between San Francisco to the south and Marin country to the north where to the west of it is the Pacific Ocean and to the east of it is San Francisco Bay, that the bridge spanned the Golden Gate. But, I did not know that it was Frémont, in 1846, who named the site Chrysopylae, Golden Gate, was in reference to the Golden Horn of Constantinople.

I’m very disappointed that one of the books mentioned in the art chapter, a book published in 1978, The Golden Gate Bridge Troll by Jean Fitzgerald, is not in the Goodreads database, and that the only copy my library has is for library use only. I may see if they’ll let me read it on site, or I may try to purchase a used copy. There are so many other books (and other media) mentioned that I’m tempted to pile more onto my to-read shelf.

This is an erudite look at an object that fascinates me. Aside from not having enough photos, I can’t imagine it being done much better than it was done in this book. show less

Mid-century California is one of the one of the most important times and places in American history. This all the more so because it wasn't marked by war or economic crisis, but seemingly continuous growth and progress on a scale not only unprecedented but unrepeatable - over the 1950-1963 timeframe the book concentrates on, the state expanded by nearly two-thirds, which meant a net of an astonishing half-million people per year. I was originally drawn to this book because I live in Texas, show more and here there's an annoying narrative of Texas on the upswing contrasted with California's seeming decline, a partisan argument about governmental philosophies masked as impartial demographic statistics. Not knowing much about California other than that it's huge and that it's the inevitable comparison point for anything Texas does, I was curious what lessons, if any, could be drawn from California's own ascendancy to center stage of the national debate a few decades ago.

It turns out that there's quite a bit to learn. Starr has done a tremendous job synthesizing vast amounts of research on California's transformation into the most American part of America, a position it's never really relinquished. He talks about the booming of the major cities and the blossoming of the minor towns. He analyzes trends in music and its composers, movies and their stars, architecture and its designers, and literary movements and their authors. He notes the vast demographic trends and the ubiquitous cultural innovations. He chronicles the politics of water usage and the struggles over freeway construction. He connects the growth of the super-cities with the solitary wildernesses they encroached on. He profiles the civic leaders and the restive outcasts, the cops and the criminals, the ordinary citizens and the pioneering artists, the religious figures and the radical environmentalists, the trailblazing progressives and the reactionary conservatives. As the legendary lazy grade school book report has it, California emerges as "a land of many contrasts".

Those contrasts are inevitable in a state so large, which left plenty of room for misfits and outcasts. I found the sections discussing Brubeck and the jazz scene, or Robinson Jeffers and the loose assortment of poets scattered around Big Sur, or David Brower and the environmentalist movement riveting. Maybe there is no such thing as a true cultural consensus, or maybe any social process that generates a consensus will automatically generate a backlash. While millions were busy filling up the San Fernando Valley, a few found refuge far from development, or made their own accommodations with the often-messy process of settling down. Texas has its outposts of freethinkers and hippies, but it's difficult to say if we're located at similar points on our respective growth curves.

As much as the state's contrasts, though, I was interested in his portrayal of its consensuses, particularly California's invention of the American middle class and its accompanying postwar cultural and economic characteristics. While obviously Californians as a whole have never agreed on everything, and many individual items like the suburb or the automobile were invented elsewhere, it's not much of an oversimplification to observe that it was in that state that the "American way of life" reached its most complete definition: the decent house with a nice yard, good schools, family-friendly entertainment, the option to have a flashy car, and so on. Starr unearths all kinds of little details about that lifestyle that I'd never thought about before. One example is his discussion of bowling, which as a mass recreational activity was essentially invented in Southern California. That not only explains all the bowling in The Big Lebowski, a quintessentially Southern Californian film, but also sheds new light on pioneering works like Robert Putnam's treatise on social capital Bowling Alone. The tiki craze, for another example, which I vaguely remembered from South Pacific, was a lot more iconic than I had thought.

Of course, the question of what made California so good at embodying American-ness could come down to any one of its many upsides - the weather, the scenery, the variety - but it seems like the main key to its success was pretty simple: cheap land, leading to cheap houses, which not only let normal people raise their families comfortably and affordably, but also built demand for jobs. I reached the end of the book and I came back to my original comparison between California and Texas. To what extent are the denizens of 1950s California a good comparison group for 2010s Texans? Well, there are as many points of analogy as you want there to be - both states grew rapidly because they offered something attractive to people at the time. Texas even at its peak never boomed to the same extent that California did, but we live in different times. To paraphrase Goldwater, Texas offers "an echo, not a choice".

I will say that reading this book reinforced vague notions I'm still pondering about how many bitter contemporary arguments over tax structures and regulatory stances might be distant sideshows in terms of what makes a state successful or not. Make it easy enough to start a family and you're halfway there (counterexamples like nearly free Rust Belt houses notwithstanding), regardless of what other economic development policies a state government tinkers with. I do think that California's philosophy towards infrastructure, both physical like the epochal water and transportation projects, or human infrastructure like its world-class university system, is far more inspiring than Texas' desultory half-privatized muddles. Maybe someday we'll have our own shift in priorities - California's transformation from the homeland of Nixon and Reagan to a Democratic stronghold might come sooner in Texas than we think.

Until then, Starr's work is phenomenal in and of itself, and while I probably won't chase down all seven other volumes he's produced in this series, I've benefited tremendously from his work, just as the US has benefited from the success of its (still) most populous and most emblematic state. show less

Despite this being the highest rated book on California history, it is not a history of California. This is a history of California identity. In other words it is a history of how people thought of California.

Starr states this objective in the intro, but it took a couple if chapters for it to become clear what he meant.

You will not learn a lot about concrete California from this book, except maybe how identity shaped architecture. Starr assumes the reader knows California history and events show more are rarely discussed directly. For readers looking for a comprehensive history of this time period, I would definitely start elsewhere before circling back to this book. show less

I had to push myself to read on past the first philosophical paragraphs. I always have a great deal of disenchantment with writers or commentators who seem to need to report about or read some sort of mysticism into normal life. I cannot accept that there has to be some sort of metaphysical reason for the collective thought processes that give rise to progress. If we humans build something functional and make it beautiful as well, why do 'thinkers' and writers dream up a master plan for our show more psyches as a reason for its completion 'as built'? Perhaps my training and early working life as a steam engineer make me pragmatic and therefore suspicious of psychology. I believe that we don't really need psychological crutches. We can get along very nicely if we accept what is, build what we need, make it generally 'attractive' to the eye and enjoy it while we use it.
Then the book got interesting - Chapter 4: Vision. I got riveted and excited and really enjoyed the following parts of the story - until the waffling about 'art' at the end. In fact I found the shortage of pictorial enhancement of the construction phase discussion to be an unfortunate omission. So much so that I went out to my favorite "Used and Rare" bookshop and picked up a copy of "Spanning the Gate" by Stephen Cassady. Some of the photos in that book are superb and enlightening to both authors' writings about the bridge. I then spent a good part of a morning messing around on the internet exploring the information available. There is a lot of it but I'm somewhat disappointed that there is not a dedicated museum at the site.
In all, this book is OK. I was left wanting more and, if that is Mr. Starr's intent, he succeeds. I will soon be visiting the bridge for other-than-crossing-it reasons but I wont, however, be searching out any of his other books. show less