Why Should We Give a Hoover?
New Book Asserts the Building of the Hoover Dam Built America

By Alexander Benson

When a journalist reports on the events from the not-so-recent past, he faces a different challenge from daily reporting. But meeting a new set of demands seemed to come naturally to Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and reporter Michael Hiltzik.

Hiltzik’s fourth book, “Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century,” is his first work of historical nonfiction. Building the Hoover Dam, which spawned from the Great Depression, was an unprecedented engineering feat that made it possible not only for Las Vegas to flourish, but for cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Phoenix and Denver to expand.

“They had to invent how to invent it,” said Hiltzik.

Numerous books and articles have been published on the Hoover Dam, but few venture as far back to the era of the Conquistadors, the ’49ers of the California Gold Rush and the Great Flood of 1905 which formed the Salton Sea. That element has always been missing in the history of the dam, Hiltzik said.

As he dug deeper into documents and archives, the content got richer. “That’s what you want,” Hiltzik said.
He found it challenging to find the human story not through interviews but in documents. From those, he had to find the personal stories.

Hiltzik’s other books are “A Death in Kenya: The Murder of Julie Ward” (1991), “Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age” (1999) and “The Plot Against Social Security: How the Bush Administration Is Endangering Our Financial Future” (2005).

He is also in the process of writing a fifth book, a history of the New Deal, which stems from the research he did on “Colossus.”

When Hiltzik was younger, he considered careers in law and journalism. He graduated from Colgate University and Columbia University and has written for the Los Angeles Times for roughly 30 years covering business, technology and public policy. He has also served as a financial and political writer, an investigative reporter and a foreign correspondent in Nairobi and Moscow. He won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing corruption in the music industry. He also received the 2004 Gerald Loeb Award for outstanding business commentary and the Silver Gavel from the American Bar Association for outstanding legal reporting. Hiltzik has two sons in college and a wife who is also a journalist.

Hiltzik got the idea of writing a book on the Colorado River and the Hoover Dam while covering water issues in Southern California.

Hiltzik decided to look deeper. But as typically happens when he starts a project, “I couldn’t find enough written to satisfy my curiosity,” Hiltzik said.

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