The Golden Gate

by Amy Chua

There’s a book you can check out for free on literally any topic. The experts don’t want you to know it, but anyone can become an expert at anything, if you’re willing to educate yourself.

There’s nothing better than driving over the Bay Bridge early on a Sunday morning. You’re all by yourself. It’s like flying over the water,

I loved seeing the metropolis rise up in front of me. It was a skyline of reinvention. No city more ruthlessly ripped away and replaced what came before than San Francisco.

The other was the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, with San Francisco the nearest port. Within a year, a thousand people were pouring through that port every week. By 1849, San Francisco’s population had grown to twenty-five thousand. By 1853, fifty thousand. By 1869, one hundred fifty thousand. There was nothing on the West Coast remotely like it. San Francisco in 1869 was twenty-five times the size of Los Angeles. Over the next decade, the West’s four greatest railroad tycoons—Stanford, Hopkins, Huntington, and Crocker—began erecting fabulous residences on top of the commanding California Hill, which from then on would be known as Nob Hill, “nob” being slang for a grandee, from the Hindi word nabob. Of these residences, the Hopkins mansion was the most famous, staggering in its dimensions; they say its gallery rivaled the greatest cathedrals of France.

Winds blow down from the mountaintops, hot and fierce, unique to California. In southern California, they call this the Santa Ana wind. In the San Francisco Bay, we call it the Diablo—or Devil—wind. The Diablo wind flows down from the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, rushes up the Berkeley Hills, and then pours down again, sometimes reaching hurricane speeds in the spring and fall, felling telephone poles, starting fires, then spreading those fires like a bellows. One of those fires burned down almost all of North Berkeley in 1923.

The great redwoods of northern California are not only the tallest trees in the world. They’re the tallest living things in the world.

Two million acres of redwood forest lined the California coastland when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. Serious logging began two years later. In the blink of an eye, only four percent of those old-growth sequoias were still standing.