nonfiction
Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge, by Kevin Starr, $23 Its towers are bigger, badder and bolder than the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty, and as far as Kevin Starr is concerned, the Golden Gate Bridge is America’s premier “triumph of engineering” and a “work of art.”
In his new book, “Golden Gate,” Starr eloquently retraces this industrial achievement from planning and construction to the present day with its $6-and-up tolls.
Completed in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge is now crossed by more than 40 million vehicles and 10 million pedestrians a year. The single-span suspension bridge extends 4,200 feet (the second longest, by a mere 60 feet, in the United States behind the Verrazano-Narrows bridge in New York); its towers climb 746 feet in the air (taller than two Lady Libertys); and its cables are wound with more than 80,000 miles of wire capable of enduring gale-force winds and even earthquakes.
But this book is about more than just statistics. He tells the story behind each of the bridge’s masterminds — the bankers, builders, egos and engineers — and devotes a chapter to a tragic side of the bridge’s history as a frequent site of Bay Area suicides.
Starr writes adoringly about the bridge and all its wonderment, including the distinctive paint scheme. “International Orange” started out as the tint of the anti-corroding primer that covered the steel to shield it from the salty Pacific breeze during construction; but the color was so compatible with the golden-gate motif that it was retained and is now an indispensable part of the bridge’s look.
nonfiction
Deadly Kingdom: The Book of Dangerous Animals, by Gordon Grice, $27 Gordon Grice writes about animals with a wit that relies on tone of voice, his ironically exact diction and instinct for analogy. Offhandedly he describes hyenas “dismantling” a wildebeest and refers to “the gelatinous otherness” of cephalopods (squid, octopus and their kin).
Vivid language never fails him. As a child, he chased and cornered a cottontail rabbit, to find that “its body pulsated like a heart.” He perfectly describes a newly emerged cicada: “Its body was tinged with green like the living subcutaneous layer of a sapling.”
With a scholar’s precision and a fourth-grader’s enthusiasm, Grice emphasizes that nature is red in tooth and claw and hoof and tentacle and proboscis.
The author of “The Red Hourglass” has limitless interest in the fierce side of nature. A description of how his son’s pet tarantula responded to a goldfish is as horrific as Dracula and has the unfortunate virtue of being real.
Even cuddly animals are dangerous. Never mind that rabbits can bite off a finger. In the Unites States alone, we are told, about 50 people each year die from touching or eating a rabbit that was infected with something called tularemia.
