PositiveThe New York TimesGary Krist chooses three...early-20th-century icons of Los Angeles art and commerce to tell his story in The Mirage Factory. They are William Mulholland from Ireland, the self-taught engineer who brought water to the semidesert city and enabled its explosive growth; D. W. Griffith, the Kentucky-born director who helped fashion a new vocabulary for movie storytelling; and Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelical preacher from Canada, whose congregation came to number in the tens of thousands because of her adroit mixture of media savvy and personal charisma ... As he moves back and forth among his subjects, Krist draws upon some of the best books about the era and its people, enriching them with a virtuoso deploying of detail gathered from deep dives into primary material. Some of these events and individuals are more familiar than others. Griffith’s career has been the subject of numerous studies and the saga of the Los Angeles water wars is, in a distorted form, familiar to anyone who has seen Chinatown Only McPherson’s story is more of a local phenomenon.
