Volume 29, Number 16 · October 21, 1982
Chinatowns
By John Gregory Dunne
Water and Power: The Conflict Over Los Angeles' Water Supply in the Owens Valley
by William L. Kahrl
University of California Press, 583 pp., $24.95
The California Water Atlas California)
edited by William L. Kahrl
State of California (distributed by William Kaufmann, Inc., Los Altos,, 118 pp., $39.00
In the summer of 1965, a resident of California less than a year, I had occasion to travel to the Owens Valley in Inyo County on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. The purpose of the trip was the trial, in the Inyo county seat of Independence, of a practical nurse accused by the state of California of practicing medicine without a license. That the nurse was guilty was beyond dispute; the Inyo district attorney, however, prosecuted her only under protest and was among the first to congratulate her when the jury returned an acquittal. What held my attention was less the case than the vision of a California trapped in time, an eddy uncontaminated not only by the 1960s but also by most of the twentieth century. It was as if the louche Pacific littoral where I lived and the only California familiar to most Americans was a foreign country.
Review, 3398 words
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