Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown - Hardcover

Finalist for the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award With the skill of a master storyteller, Marc Weingarten narrates one of the great and quintessential California origin stories. This is saga of civic ambition and can-do determination. It is also one of greed, environmental shortsightedness, class and cultural appropriation. So it turns out that it's not just a California story at all but the story of America. --Marisa Silver, New York Times Bestselling author of Mary Coin and Little Nothing

Thirsty is the history of Los Angeles and its fraught relationship with water. As a city on the make since the early twentieth century, Los Angeles' resources fought hard to keep up with its unchecked growth. The city's water chief William Mulholland built an aqueduct to grab water over 200 miles away in Owens Valley, but it wasn't enough. Thirsty is the gripping tale of Los Angeles' epic battles for water, the larger-than-life characters that shaped a city's destiny, and the man-made tragedy that killed 400 and forever changed the way water would be harnessed and allocated.