Customer Reviews

Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Although this book is relatively short at about 200 pages, the author manages to cover the history of the Golden Gate, as well as the Golden Gate Bridge and the people involved in the creation of the bridge.

The author begins with the geologic creation of the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate itself and progresses through the hunt to find the bay and the opening to the sea that the Spanish had sought for so many decades. He then moves into a brief discussion of the city and the need for a bridge from the city to the Marin Headlands.

Once in the twentieth century, the author inter weaves the story of the need and desire for the bridge with the story of it's development, design, and the political fighting that occurred to keep any bridge from being built. It is amazing how many different groups had an interest in keeping a bridge from being built. From the design stage, the author details the actual construction and financing of the bridge and explores how it was built with private money in a time when all such projects were public works projects. As contrast, the author compares it with the Oakland-Bay Bridge which was under construction at about the same time with federal and state monies.

The author ends the book with a little of the sociology of the bridge, including the inspiration it provides for artists and the use of the bridge by people wanting to commit suicide.

If you are looking for the detailed history of the bridge, then you will be disappointed with this book. If, however, you are interested in more than just the nuts and bolts of the construction of the bridge, you will love this book. It is well written, concise and very enjoyable. In addition, there are about 8 pages of spectacular color photographs includ

I had pretty high hopes for this book. And it is a wonderful overview of the social, political and economic conditions of the time. But for a book that also discusses the artistic contributions of the bridge, it is almost completely devoid of photographs. Indeed, there isn't even a picture of the classic view if the bridge. And for the detailed discussion of some of the construction challenges, there are essentially no photographs of those challenges.

The author clearly is an enjoyable and talented writer, and sufficient photographs would have made this a much better book.

I pre-ordered this book hoping Starr would capture some of the drama, some of the passion and the energy that went into the building of the Golden Gate bridge. Instead, what I got was something that more closely resembles a Masters Thesis or a Doctoral Dissertation. Based on the sources Starr cites at the end of the book, he did very little original research. Instead he appears to have taken hundreds or thousands of excerpts from the works of others, stacked them up in some order, and strung 'em together in some kind of narrative. It's very much a dry recitation of facts dating back to the discovery of the passage from the Pacific Ocean into what's now known as San Francisco Bay and not a very original work at that. There can't be but a handful of quotes from those who actually worked on the bridge and they all appear to have come from those other writers and historians. There are better books on this subject and thanks to Kevin Starr's bibliography I'll know where to look to find something better to read on the subject. Something far better.

Starr's book was well reviewed in the WSJ so I bought it, sight unseen on Amazon. Bad mistake. Sure there's some financial and sociological history, a few personality crumbs of those who pushed and tugged to get the bridge built or stopped. But the photos -- well, worse than looking through your grandmother's scrapbook of 2" x 3" shots -- and this on a subject that cries out for photo coverage!

The writing is worse than the photos. Try page 124: "Just as the towers, when standing alone, were possessed, if only momentarily, of their own coherent beauty and meaning, the sections of the roadway advancing toward each other across the strait -- like the two sections of railway advancing across the continent in the last century -- emanated a drama of their own, of technology in motion, struggling toward its final form, and the brave new future technology would create." Really. I wouldn't call it sophomoric; it's not that advanced. Where was the editor? Was this a vanity press edition?!

Finally, there's not much there. A short page count, made triply short by a small page size and widely spaced lines. I've seen longer Vanity Fair articles. And in view of the overall product, I was glad that there wasn't more of it.

Does Amazon have a refund policy?

This book disappointed me. The author spends too much time talking about the geological formation of the Bay Area or how many people have committed suicide off the Golden Gate. I was more interested in the political machinations trying to stop the bridge and how they were overcome.

The Golden Gate Bridge is on anyone's list of the most beautiful bridges, and is one of the most spectacular of engineering and artistic achievements. Kevin Starr is a historian who has concentrated on California history, and is the perfect author to write an appreciation of the bridge. _Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge_ (Bloomsbury Press) is not a formal history, although it takes in the history of the region and the development around the bay, the financial and political drives and pressures that formed the idea of the bridge and its physical construction, and the subsequent effect of the bridge on the people who use it or see it every day. The book could be a lot bigger, given its epic subject. It could also have a lot more pictures, since the bridge is inherently beautiful and has inspired plenty of photographers and filmmakers to focus on it. Starr's book is as far as you can get from a coffee-table volume. Nonetheless, it is gracefully written by an author that is passionate about history and who is not the only one who feels drawn to the bridge as "a testimony to the creativity of mankind."

A bridge on that site was first imagined in the 1850s. Ferries did well enough before the automobile came along. Starr rightly spends many pages on a vital but undramatic part of the bridge's story, its financing. Even a bridge that everyone knew would be helpful was a tough sell at the start of the depression. The economy was too precarious for such a venture, said the Taxpayers' Committee Against the Golden Gate Bridge. The ferry companies joined in and started up years of legal maneuvering to try to prevent actions like the sale of bonds for the bridge. The chief planner for the bridge was Joseph Strauss, whose first design for the bridge was a failure, "an upside down rat trap" someone called it, a structure that would have been the sort of eyesore the Sierra Club and others had warned would pollute a magical site. Strauss, as befits any man with big plans, had a powerful ego, but he was wise enough to accept criticisms of his design and come up with something new by admitting contributions from a team of designers, engineers, and architects. With their help, the bridge took on its distinctive look with accentuation of the stepped-back arches, chevron decoration on the horizontal cross bracings, and decorative wing-like brackets below the bracings. It is hard to imagine the bridge any color than its current red (actually, it is called "International Orange"), but that wasn't the original choice. There were actually many choices; the bridge might have been all gray, or all black. The Navy thought that ships could best see a bridge that had yellow and black striping, while the Army Air Corps thought that red and white stripes would be more visible from the air. While the choices were being mulled over, primer was put on the bridge's metal elements to protect it, orange primer that as people got used to it seemed like just the color to give warning contrast without any need for striping and the resultant fragmentation.

The bridge is an engineering wonder, an artistic inspiration, and a triumph of civic planning and finance. It is also a handy tool for suicide, a subject covered in one of the later chapters here. Something close to thirty people a year use the bridge to end their lives, and it's an efficient method. The very few who have survived report that on the way down, they felt regret that they had jumped; surely many others who succeeded had the same last thoughts. There have been proposals to erect suicide barriers, which in other structures have sometimes eliminated jumping completely; this bumps against the aesthetics of the bridge, whose fans say it just wouldn't look the same. It's a nice reminder of how seriously people take the appearance of a bridge that they consider in many ways "their" bridge, a structure that has been taken to heart in ways other architectural markers have not. Starr's volume, showing how he and others appreciate the bridge in its multiple roles in engineering, transport, and artistry, is a loving tribute.

Listing the dimensions (in inches) of the book in the product description would have lowered my expectations of a coffee-table sized tome filled with interesting photos. This turned out to be paperback size with a mere handful of uninteresting paintings and photos. A bridge this great deserves better.

Many of us know Kevin Starr as the author of a series of long books about various elements of California history. In this work, he plays against type and delivers a very short book, but one that is quite worth reading. If you're looking for a really detailed history of the bridge, this isn't the best book for you. However, if you want a recitation that captures the key elements of the struggle to get the project started, how to build such a challenging project, and the effect it had on the Bay Area, you can't do much better.

The photos and drawings were very good, although there certainly could have been more of them included. There's a great (and new to me) story about a disaster that almost happened on the 50th anniversary of the bridge's opening. I was amazed that this story had not received more circulation. That story alone is worth the price of the book.

I'd encourage anyone who enjoys this book to dig into Starr's multi-book history of California. Kevin Starr is a national treasure, a great writer, and a gentleman of civility and charm. I wish him many more years of great writing.

Interesting book which was ordered as a Christmas gift. The recipient is looking forward to reading it, and enjoyed thumbing through it. It was well-reviewed in the WSJ, but as it was a gift, I did not actually read it myself. Item was new and arrived quickly from the sender, in plenty of time for Christmas.

Kevin Starr's Golden Gate: The Life And Times Of America's Greatest Bridge (Golden Gate) is a competently constructed, perfunctory examination of the Golden Gate Bridge's history and cultural impact. Starr distills a number of sources to create an adequate overview of the bridge's engineering and construction, as well as the political machinations behind its creation. Starr also utilizes these sources to comment on the bridge's aesthetic nature, and its impact on the San Francisco Bay Area's lifestyle.

However, a history of the Golden Gate Bridge is ripe with drama. As just one example, to construct the bridge's south tower, workers had to cordon off a football field-sized section of the ocean, drain about 300 feet of water from the cordoned area until the bedrock was exposed, build the support tower in the temporarily drained area while the ocean raged just outside the barriers, and then flood the area once the support tower was finished. To a non-engineer like me, those actions seem almost super-human in their execution. I wanted to find out every detail of that amazing engineering feat. But, Starr depicts the entire event in just a couple of paragraphs. Other aspects of the bridge's history are similarly short-changed. Thus, what could be seared into the reader's mind by focusing on the drama inherent in the subject is instead rendered into a trivia point.

Starr clearly feels the drama that the Golden Gate Bridge engenders, as is evidenced by the numerous sections where he waxes poetically about the bridge. But, Starr's ability to convey that drama in his writing is, at best, limited. Because of that limitation, Golden Gate is simply adequate when it could, and should, be memorable.