As breathtaking today as the day it was completed, Hoover Dam not only shaped the American West but helped launch the American century. In the depths of the Great Depression it became a symbol of American resilience and ingenuity in the face of crisis, putting thousands of men to work in a remote desert canyon and bringing unruly nature to heel. Pulitzer Prizewinning writer Michael Hiltzik uses the saga of the dams conception, design, and construction to tell the broader story of Americas efforts to come to grips with titanic social, economic, and natural forces. For embodied in the dams striking machine-age form is the fundamental transformation the Depression wrought in the nations very culturethe shift from the concept of rugged individualism rooted in the frontier days of the nineteenth century to the principle of shared enterprise and communal support that would build the America we know today. In the process, the unprecedented effort to corral the raging Colorad...