Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

Norris’s book endures as a touchstone, and his evocative description of the Southern Pacific—“the galloping terror of steam and steel, with its single eye, Cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon, symbol of a vast power, huge and terrible; the leviathan with tentacles of steel, to oppose which meant to be ground to instant destruction beneath the clashing wheels”—