Kevin Starr's California

In the same issue of The Atlantic where Sandra Tsing Loh finishes off her marriage, the editor's choice book is Kevin Starr's eighth in his series on Golden State history: "Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963." It sounds terrific, as Starr's thick tomes are, and literary and national editor Benjamin Schwarz approves:

The state’s public schools—the new, modernist elementary schools with their flat roofs, gleaming clerestory windows, and outdoor lockers; the grand comprehensive high schools (Sacramento, Lowell in San Francisco, and Hollywood and Fairfax in Los Angeles)—were the envy of the nation. Berkeley, the flagship campus in the UC system, emerged as the best university in the country, probably the world. It was a sweet, vivacious time: California’s children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller, and—thanks to that brilliantly clean sunshine—were blonder and more tan than kids in the rest of the country. For better and mostly for worse, it’s a time irretrievably lost....

Starr is a lumper, not a splitter, and in this 500-plus-page history of 14 years, he lovingly and exhaustively chronicles such topics as the byzantine political, fund-raising, and public-relations effort to build Los Angeles’s Music Center (and in the process illuminates the central place choral music occupied in Los Angeles’s Protestant culture, as well as the tension—once intense, now faint but unmistakable—between the Jewish Westside and the ever-declining WASP establishment of downtown, Hancock Park, and Pasadena); the evolution of the surfing, rock-climbing, and hot-rod subcultures; Zen Buddhism’s pervasive influence on California art and design; the California Water Plan of 1957 (the template for the 700-mile network of reservoirs, pumping stations, canals, pipes, and aqueducts that carries almost 2 billion gallons of water daily from Northern California to the south and remains the largest water project in world history); and, in deadly detail, the career of Dave Brubeck.

But neither this installment nor the series as a whole succumbs to muddle, because Starr consistently returns to his leitmotif: the California dream.

Essential California reading.