Customer Reviews

Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905-2005 (Center for American Places - Center Books on American Places)

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The Salton Sea seems to be California's dirty little secret but with the help of Kim Stringfellow's excellent book and growing interest from environmentalists and others this fascinating water and desert area is slowly getting the corrective attention it deserves. In the past this eerie area has had plenty of attention, especially from land developers.

At the start of the photo section of the book there is promotional map from the Holly Corporation showing their early sixties Salton City development. A marina or two, schools, a main street and plenty of landscaped roads are shown, in fact if you look up the City on Google Earth you'll see every road has a name and even the single runway airstrip (naturally called Salton City Airport) is surrounded by curving roads with aeronautical names. You'll also see that very few dwellings were actually built and like so much development around the Sea they became victims of the various environmental and flooding problems not too mention the incredible salt content of the water.

A by-product of the failed commercial developments around the shore means that there is plenty of abandoned buildings and just plain man-made rubbish everywhere, this clearly acts as a magnet for landscape photographers it seems. I first found out about Salton from Troy Paiva's book Lost America: The Abandoned Roadside West which includes about twenty dramatic photos of the area, Kim Stringfellow visited some of the same sites. The forty-five photos in her book are more of a precise visual record of abandonment, either man-made or natural. In the first twenty-nine pages she writes a very succinct history of the Sea and I was pleased to see in the back a couple of very informative web sites listed.

As this is a photo book there is the usual nonsense of not having the captions with the photos, they are in the back with thumbnails of each image so readers have to constantly keep turning pages to find a simple bit of information. Needless to say the captions could have easily been included with photos if the book's designer was more professional.

Apart from the caption aspect (so four stars) I thought this was a fascinating book about a slightly known area of the Golden State and if you want to know (a lot) more check out the Salton Sea Atlas a beautifully produced book of maps and general background material.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.