"Every city can be regarded as an artificial construct, an audacious projection of human will, imagination, and vanity onto the natural landscape," begins this captivating history of Los Angeles, told through the lives of "Water Czar" William Mulholland, film director D.W. Griffith, and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Through them we come to understand that this unlikeliest of metropolises could never have been built without the American capacity for self-mythologizing.
— Natalie Beach
